They don’t know it, but they are doing it.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
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.
The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.
Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.
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.
It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.
There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.