Antisemites

"there is a link, it seems to me, between the internalization of the era of Karl Marx and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the global economy is far more complicated than Marx may have ever attempted to imagine. But at the same time his analyses, it seems to me, are equally resonant today. Capital begins with a look at commodity. The capitalist commodity has penetrated people's lives in ways that are unprecedented. The commodity has entered ... capitalism in general has entered structures of feeling, the intimate spaces of people's lives."

"Capitalism is still with us, and Marx developed the most compelling analysis of capitalism. I never saw Marx as a philosopher who informed us about what the revolution was going to be like or what would come after capitalism. He provided a way to understand the world we inhabit and the extent to which political economies insinuate themselves into all aspects of our lives. That was true fifty years ago when I first encountered Marx, but today, with the impact of global capitalism, it's even more true. I could never have imagined the degree to which capitalism would develop."

"Marxism does not have, and does not even pretend to have, any mechanism to explain the internal development of the social system it describes as "Asiatic." In these areas of traditionalist despotism, under which the larger part of the world's population lived for thousands of years, Marx quite explicitly and admittedly found no class conflict, in the absence of opposing groups categorized as economic classes. (Change only came, as he puts in, when Western culture bursts in on them: an unconscious illustration of Marx's Eurocentrism)."

"In the NKVD as it was now [in 1936], Stalin had a powerful and experienced instrument. At its head stood Yagoda. His deputy in security matters was Stalin's crony Agranov, who had finished his special operations at Leningrad and handed over that city to the dreadful Sakovsky, who is said to have boasted that if he had Karl Marx to interrogate he would soon make him confess that he was agent of Bismark."

"Marx was not the first person to point out that wealthy people controlling everything was bullshit, you know? He was better at understanding and critiquing the system than any of his contemporaries. That's what defines him -- not the fact that he was the first to arrive at those fundamental prescriptive conclusions, because he wasn't!"

"Across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country; that Russia had been too far backward to make those wonderful ideas work."

"That is not to say that the ‘Communism’ which held sway in so many countries bore much resemblance to anything Marx had envisaged. There was a wide gulf between the original theory and the subsequent practice of Communist rule. Karl Marx sincerely believed that under communism – the future society of his imagination which he saw as an inevitable, and ultimate, stage of human development – people would live more freely than ever before. Yet ‘his vision of the universal liberation of humankind’ did not include any safeguards for individual liberty. Marx would have hated to be described as a moralist, since he saw himself as a Communist who was elaborating a theory of scientific socialism. Yet many of his formulations were nothing like as ‘scientific’ as he made out. One of his most rigorous critics on that account, Karl Popper, pays tribute to the moral basis of much of Marx’s indictment of nineteenth-century capitalism. As Popper observes, under the slogan of ‘equal and free competition for all’, child labour in conditions of immense suffering had been ‘tolerated, and sometimes even defended, not only by professional economists but also by churchmen’. Accordingly, ‘Marx’s burning protest against these crimes’, says Popper, ‘will secure him forever a place among the liberators of mankind.’ Those who took power in the twentieth century, both using and misusing Marx’s ideas, turned out, however, to be anything but liberators. Marxist theory, as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently refashioned by Josif Stalin in Russia and by Mao Zedong in China, became a rationalization for ruthless single-party dictatorship."

"Marx was a pioneer in the study of principal-agent relationships, though of course he did not use the term. Principal-agent models now form the microeconomic foundation for the study of relationships among classes (though economists do not use that term) in capitalist and other economies, for example the standard treatments of the exchanges between employer and employee, or between lender and borrower. These models are essential to current analysis of workaday economic problems such as the cyclical patterns in wage-setting and productivity, and the quantity constraints that borrowers face in credit markets. Both of these problems have substantial microeconomic importance, but are also important foundations of macroeconomics. Marx was a visionary precursor of modern microeconomics, and modern microeconomics has repaid him the favour by clarifying the limits of some of his most important ideas. Among them the labour theory of value as a representation of a general system of exchange (Morishima 1973, 1974), and his “theory of the tendency of the profit rate to fall” (Bowles 1981, Okishio 1961). As Michio Morishima (1974) pointed out, Marx did not resolve the outstanding theoretical problems of his day, but rather anticipated problems that would later be addressed mathematically. Modern public economics, mechanism design and public choice theory has also challenged the notion – common among many latter-day Marxists, though not originating with Marx himself – that economic governance without private property and markets could be a viable system of economic governance."

"Of all socialistic writers Karl Marx — not perhaps without an unjust depreciation of others, and especially of Rodbertus, whose scientific rank was high — had gained the greatest influence over his partisans. His work represented, so to speak* the official doctrine of contemporary socialism. It therefore occupied the centre of attack and defence. The polemical literature of the time became a literature on Marx. The circumstances also were of unusual interest. Marx had died before he had brought his work on capital to an end. The unfinished parts were found in manuscript among his belongings in an almost complete form. These were expected to furnish the explanation of a problem which had been the chief cause of the attack against the exploitation theory and which, according to the expectations of both the contending parties, would furnish the deciding test of the tenableness or untenableness of the Marxian system, the problem, namely, of harmonizing and connecting the rate of profits, which experience shows tends toward equality in all forms of investment, with the law of value and the theory of exploitation which Marx had developed in his first volume. The publication of the third volume, in which this theme was treated, was delayed until 1894, 11 years after the death of Marx. The interest in the question regarding what Marx himself might have had to say on this most delicate point of his theory showed itself in a sort of prophetic literature that had for its object the development of Marx's probable opinion on the subject of the average rate of profit from the premises given in his first volume. This prophetic literature fills the decade from 1885–1894, and presents a stately array of more or less extensive publications.2 The second act and at the same time the climax of the dramatic development was reached in 1894 by Engels's publication of the posthumous third volume. And then follows as a third act an exceedingly animated literary discussion on the critical estimate of this third volume, its relation to the point of departure taken by Marx in the systematic development of his theories, and the future prospects of Marxism, a discussion that is not likely soon to reach a conclusion. I can content myself here with a mere registration of these events, because in an earlier part of this work I have described their scientific content and subjected them to a critical analysis. Nor have I withheld my opinion that the great test has been decidedly against Marx and his theories of value and surplus value, and that for these the beginning of the end seems to be at hand."

"As there was a Socialism before Marx, so there will be one after him."

"Marx has not deduced from facts the fundamental principles of his system, either by means of a sound empiricism or a solid economico-psychological analysis; he founds it on no firmer ground than a formal dialectic. This is the great radical fault of the Marxian system at its birth; from it all the rest necessarily springs. The system runs in one direction, facts go in another; and they cross the course of the system sometimes here, sometimes there, and on each occasion the original fault begets a new fault. The conflict of system and facts must be kept from view, so that the matter is shrouded either in darkness or vagueness, or it is turned and twisted with the same tricks of dialectic as at the outset; or where none of this avails we have a contradiction. Such is the character of the tenth chapter of Marx's third volume. It brings the long-deferred bad harvest, which grew by necessity out of the bad seed."

"That Marx was truly and honestly convinced of the truth of his thesis I do not doubt. But the grounds of his conviction are not those which he gives in his system. They were in reality opinions rather than thoughtout conclusions. Above all they were opinions derived from authority. Smith and Ricardo, the great authorities, as was then at least believed, had taught the same doctrine. They had not proved it any more than Marx. They had only postulated it from certain general confused impressions. But they explicitly contradicted it when they examined things more closely and in quarters where a closer examination could not be avoided."

"I cannot help myself; I see here no explanation and reconciliation of a contradiction, but the bare contradiction itself. Marx's third volume contradicts the first. The theory of the average rate of profit and of the prices of production cannot be reconciled with the theory of value. This is the impression which must, I believe, be received by every logical thinker. And it seems to have been very generally accepted."

"The intellectual contribution made by Marx to the development of socialism was and remains absolutely unique. But Marx was much more than a philosopher. His influence in moving people all over the world to social action ranks him with the founders of the world's greatest faiths. And, like the founders of other faiths, what Marx and others inspired has given millions of people hope, as well as the courage to face persecution and imprisonment."

"Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet."

"The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations."

"Marx not only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized—which should, of course, have been unnecessary. His silence on this matter follows logically from his chosen approach. His error lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment."

"Karl Marx took up the rallying call [of 19th Century progress], and applied his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards salvation—towards what Kant had described as the "Kingdom of God". Once the truth of the hereafter had been rejected, it would then be a question of establishing the truth of the here and now. The critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change."

"The power of Marx's diagnosis of modern times is not equalled by his prognosis. Marx shows a fundamental weakness in his attraction to populism, the image of two fundamental working classes, especially early. He installs the proletariat as the motor of history, an imputation which the proletariat never quite understands correctly. His sense of the permanent revolution of capital spills over into the telos of guaranteed socialism, which it never is. He was a powerful critic of capitalism as modernity, who understood the centrality of capital as a relation and as a self-naturalizing illusion. He was a dreamer. His intellectual origins were before modernity, but the scope of his vision was beyond it. His legacy is best imagined as what Ernst Bloch called the warm stream of marxism. Was he an original? Yes, and no. The power of Marx's work lies in the brilliant synthesis that he generated from the work of others, working within on the critical horizons of both the streams we conventionally separate as Enlightenment and Romanticism. Perhaps, in our own times, the fate of his thought is to return to the cultures from which it was initially created, as avant-garde returns, finally, to the mainstream."

"The strength of Marx is precisely that he shared the feelings of the downtrodden, that the prejudice of equality was in his very fiber, joined to the ambition and jealousy of power, which made him ready to destroy the present moral order in the name of a higher which he saw."

"Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired."

"I looked up to these Russians who could discuss by the hour the theories of Marx and Bakunin, who had participated in demonstrations and other revolutionary activity."

"As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations… He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right."

"In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues."

"It can be maintained that Smith was a creator of general equilibrium theory, although the coherence and consistency of his work can be questioned. A fortiori, later systematic expositors of the classical system, such as Ricardo, J. S. Mill, and Marx, in whose work some of Smith’s logical gaps were filled, can all be regarded as early expositors of general equilibrium theory. Marx, in his scheme of simple reproduction, read in combination with his development of relative price theory in volumes 1 and 3 of Das Kapital, has indeed come in some ways closer in form to modern theory than any other classical economist, though of course everything is confused by his attempt to maintain simultaneously a pure labor theory of value and an equalization of rates of return on capital."

"One cannot discuss a socialism which has built an enormous industry by reducing the standard of living of the masses and a capitalism which has raised the standard of living, reduced working hours, and permitted the consolidation of labor unions, as if there were the same realities that Marx considered a century ago or that he anticipated according to a system which has since been refuted by events."

"Labor-power is a commodity sold by the worker in exchange for a "living wage." The worker, Marx insisted, "must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, as his own commodity, and this he can do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily: for a definite period of time. By this means alone, can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.""

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"Be careful to trust a person who does not like wine."

"Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."

"Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you're in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through."

"If we were to hang the last capitalist, another would appear to sell us the rope."

"We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us."

"Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."

"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."

"The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs."

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament."

"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

"Democracy is the road to socialism."

"In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition."

"Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves."

"In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions."

"Long hours of labour seem to be the secret of the rational and healthful processes, which are to raise the condition of the labourer by an improvement of his mental and moral powers and to make a rational consumer out of him."

"The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally."

"These numerous points at which money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated in numerous individual hoards or potential money-capitals appears as so many obstacles to circulation, because they immobilise the money and deprive it of its capacity to circulate for a certain time."

"Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce."

"As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone."

"Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy."

"The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it."

"It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis."