All Quotes

"It is in this sense that Franklin says, "war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.""

"And his money he cannot eat."

"The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all."

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."

"— man's heart is a wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse —"

"Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."

"In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety."

"In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

"If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day."

"A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity."

"Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too."

"As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital."

"An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery."

"The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine."

"In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation."

"But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?"

"Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete."

"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer."

"In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time."

"Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin."

"If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction."

"In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital."

"Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!"

"But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price."

"Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration."

"In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals."

"Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated."

"The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage."

"Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman."

"Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

"The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy."

"A great deal of capital, which appears to-day in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children."

"One capitalist always kills many."

"The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

"But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation."

"Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational."

"So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer."

"The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism."

"In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return."

"Denn der Kapitalismus ist schon in der Grundlage aufgehoben durch die Voraussetzung, daß der Genuß als treibendes Motiv wirkt, nicht die Bereicherung selbst."

"A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation."

"As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either."

"So far as living instruments of labour are concerned, for instance horses, their reproduction is timed by nature itself. Their average lifetime as instruments of labour is determined by the laws of nature. As soon as this term has expired they must be replaced by new ones. A horse cannot be replaced piecemeal; it must be replaced by another horse."

"It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself."

"Volume II, Ch. VIII, p. 176-177."

"What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith."

"We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market,it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin."

"Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not."

"Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market."

"The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material."