Works By Karl Marx

"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."

"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."

"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.]"

"Value is labour."

"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."