107 quotes found
"The capitalist does not produce a commodity for its own sake, nor for the sake of its use value, or his personal consumption. The product in which the capitalist is really interested is not the palpable product itself, but the excess value of the product over the value of the capital consumed by it."
"The capitalist's profit is derived from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has paid nothing."
"One is conscious that capital generates this new value by its movement in the processes of production and circulation. But the way which this occurs is cloaked in mystery and appears to originate from hidden qualities inherent in capital itself."
"The rate of profit, therefore, depends on two main factors - the rate of surplus-value and the value-composition of capital."
"The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller the idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same."
"The chief means of reducing the time of production is higher labour productivity, which is commonly called industrial progress."
"The chief means of reducing the time of circulation is improved communications."
"The amount of variable capital invested in his business is something the capitalist himself does not know in most cases."
"Indeed, it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained in the epoch of history immediately preceding the conscious reorganisation of society."
"Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilisation is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they find no better use for the excretion of four million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense."
"Universal labour is all scientific labour, all discovery and all invention."
"It follows furthermore that foreign trade influences the rate of profit, regardless of its influence on wages through the cheapening of the necessities of life."
"Violent price fluctuations therefore cause interruptions, great collisions, even catastrophes, in the process of reproduction."
"Taking equal amounts of capital, the rates of profit differ because, owing to the different masses of living labour set in motion, the masses of surplus-value, and thus of profit, differ, although the rates of surplus value are the same."
"So far as profits are concerned, the various capitalists are just so many stockholders in a stock company in which the shares of profit are uniformly divided per 100, so that profits differ in the case of the individual individual capitalists only on accordance with the amount of capital invested by each in the aggregate enterprise, i.e., according to his investment in social production as a whole, according to the number of his shares."
"Disguised as profit, surplus value actually denies its origin, losses its character, and becomes unrecognisable."
"The transformation of values into prices of production serves to obscure the basis for determining value itself."
"To what extent this profit is due to the aggregate exploitation of labour on the par of the total social capital, i.e., by all his capitalist colleagues-this interrelation is a complete mystery to the individual capitalist; all the more so, since no bourgeois theorists, the political economists, have so far revealed it."
"The real difficulty in formulating the general definition of supply and demand is that it seems to take on the appearance of a tautology."
"In reality, supply and demand never coincide, or, if they do, it is by mere accident, hence scientifically = 0, and to be regarded as not having occurred."
"Three individuals are enough for the complete metamorphosis of a commodity, and therefore for the process of sale and purchase taken as a whole."
"Here, then, we have a mathematically precise proof why capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class, while there is little love lost between them in competition among themselves."
"A general increase of wages, all else remaining the same, is tantamount to a reduction in the rate of surplus value."
"As the process of production and accumulation advances therefore, the mass of available and appropriated surplus-labour, and hence the absolute mass of profit appropriated by the social capital must grow."
"Crude as these ideas are, they arise necessarily out of the inverted aspect which the immanent laws of capitalist production represent in competition."
"In commercial practice, the turnover is generally calculated inaccurately."
"The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive, but because it becomes more productive."
"The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself."
"Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms."
"No capitalist ever voluntarily introduces a new method of production, no matter how much more productive it may be, and how much it may increase the rate of surplus-value, so long as it reduces the rate of profit."
"It does not take more time to deal with large figures than with small ones."
"The conceptions of the merchant, stockbroker, and banker, are necessarily quite distorted."
"Small profits and quick returns appear to the shopkeeper to be the principal which he follows out of sheer principle."
"It is in the circulation process that money develops into capital."
"Slavery on the basis of capitalist production is unjust; likewise fraud in the quality of commodities."
"Capital exists as capital in actual movement, not in the process of circulation, but only in the process of production, in the process by which labour power is exploited."
"If all capital were in the hands of the industrial capitalists there would be no such thing as interest and rate of interest."
"The labour of exploiting is just as much labour as exploited labour."
"Stock companies in general - developed with the credit system - have an increasing tendency to separate this work of management as a function from the ownership of capital, be it self owned or borrowed."
"On the basis of capitalist production a new swindle develops in stock enterprises with respect to wages of management, in that boards of numerous managers or directors are placed above the actual director, for whom supervision and management serve only as a pretext to plunder the stockholders and amass wealth."
"Capital is now a thing, but as a thing it is capital. Money is now pregnant."
"A bank-note is nothing but a draft upon a banker, payable at any time to the bearer, and given by the banker in place of private drafts."
"All great fluctuations of interest, great either in their duration or in the extent of the fluctuation, may be distinctly traced to alterations in the value of capital."
"The idiocy of the present-day bourgeois world cannot be better described than by the respect, which the "logic" of the millionaire-the dunghill aristocrat-inspired in all England."
"credit accelerates the velocity of the metamorphoses of commodities and thereby the velocity of money circulation."
"It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction - crises - and thereby the elements of the old mode of production."
"The maximum of credit is here identical with the fullest employment of industrial capital, that is, the utmost exertion of its reproductive power without regard to the limits of consumption."
"Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign is in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place."
"Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis."
"It is after all much better that the corn producers and speculators lose a portion of their profit for the good of their own country than their capital for the good of England."
"The rural depositor fancies that he deposits only with his banker, and fancies furthermore that when his banker lends to others, it is done to private persons whom he knows. He has not the slightest suspicion that his banker places his deposit at the disposal of some London bill broker, over whose operations neither of them have the slightest control."
"the banker, who receives the money as a loan from one group of the reproductive capitalists, lends it to another group of reproductive capitalists, so that the banker appears in the role of supreme benefactor; and at the same time, the control over this capital falls completely into the hands of the banker in his capacity as middleman."
"Furthermore, in regard to Asia, all capitalist nations are usually simultaneously - directly or indirectly - its debtors."
"Talk about centralisation! The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and users surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, which gives to the class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrail capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner-and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it. The Acts of 1844 and 1845 are proof of the growing power of these bandits, who are augmented by financiers and stock-jobbers."
"Low money-prices for commodities and a low interest rate do not necessarily go together. Otherwise, the interest rate would be lowest in the poorest countries, where money-prices for produce are lowest, and highest in the richest countries, where money-prices for agricultural products are highest."
"Most of the banks in Australia, the West Indies, and Canada, have been founded with English capital, and the dividends are payable in England."
"The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution, the credit system essentially Protestant. "The Scotch hate gold." In the form of paper the monetary existence of commodities is only a social one. It is Faith that brings salvation. Faith in money-value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self expanding capital. But the credit system does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from the foundations of Catholicism."
"...the wage slave, it is true, can become a creditor's slave in his capacity as consumer."
"...the tool becomes a machine."
"Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between the worlds."
"The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule."
"By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle."
"Without the ban on interest churches and cloisters would never have become so affluent."
"But a waterfall cannot be created by capital out of itself."
"The landlord is always ready to draw a rent,i.e., to receive something for nothing. But capital requires certain conditions to fulfil his wish."
"From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition."
"Value is labour."
"Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations."
"the profit made in selling depends on cheating, deceit, inside knowledge, skill and a thousand favorable market opportunities;"
"The conversion of surplus-value into profit, as we have seen, is determined as much by the process of circulation as by the process of production."
"It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things."
"Nevertheless even the best spokesman of classical economy remain more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism had dissolved,as cannot be otherwise from a bourgeois standpoint, and thus they all fall more or less into inconsistencies, half-truths and unsolved contradictions."
"It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conceptions of the actual agents of production, and which arranges them in a certain rational order, should see precisely in this trinity, which is devoid of all inner connection, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness."
"But what is money? Money is not a thing, but a definite form of value, hence, value is again presupposed."
"[Here the manuscript breaks off.]"
"A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies..."
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." Paragraph 14, lines 1-5."
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. Paragraph 18, lines 6-9."
"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Paragraph 18, lines 12-14."
"A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increase capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Paragraph 30, lines 3-8."
"He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. Paragraph 31, lines 3-8."
"No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc. Paragraph 34."
"But every class struggle is a political struggle. Paragraph 39, lines 8-9."
"Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. Paragraph 44, lines 1-2."
"Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. Paragraph 47, lines 7-9."
"What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. Paragraph 53, lines 11-13."
"Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Paragraph 18"
"All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it. Paragraph 20, lines 9-13."
"In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. Paragraph 22."
"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. Paragraph 25."
"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation. Paragraph 30."
"Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. Paragraph 34-35"
"The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got."
"When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence. Paragraph 58."
"The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. Paragraph 64."
"In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Paragraph 72 (last paragraph)."
"In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite the high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beet-root sugar, and potato spirits."
"The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution."
"In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
"In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."
"Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries."
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
"Workers of the world, unite!"
"With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new world-conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat—the creator of a new, communist society."
"[W]hile there is no doubt that Marx at this time shared the usual townsman's contempt for, as well as ignorance of, the peasant milieu, the actual and analytically more interesting German phrase ("dem Idiotismus des Landlebens entrissen") referred not to "stupidity" but to "the narrow horizons", or "the isolation from the wider society" in which people in the countryside lived. It echoed the original meaning of the Greek term idiotes from which the current meaning of "idiot" or "idiocy" is derived, namely "a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not with those of the wider community". In the course of the decades since the 1840s, and in movements whose members, unlike Marx, were not classically educated, the original sense was lost and was misread."
"In fact, Marx and Engels were right when they observed in that other manifesto, the communist one of 1848, that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined and, with infinitely improved communications and accessible goods, free markets had torn down feudal structures and national narrow-mindedness. Marx and Engels realized much better than socialists today that the free market is a formidable progressive force. (Unfortunately, they were not sufficiently dialectically minded to understand that communism was a reactionary counterforce that would bring societies back to a kind of electrified feudalism.)"