The charges against communism made from a religious, philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few.
A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.
The use-value of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just as little to its seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who has sold it.
Hence the enigmatical character of the equivalent form which escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed, confronts him in the shape of money.
For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.
Legislation, whether political or civil, never does more than proclaim, express in words, the will of economic relations.
The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.
The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value.4 But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself, for instance iron, corn, a diamond, which is the use-value or useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
One thing, however, is clear – Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.
A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.
Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.
Economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class.
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
You preach to me constantly the gospel of ‘saving’ and ‘abstinence’. Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it.
The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.
With a given volume of capital advanced, the scale of production grows, and hence, with a given rate of surplus-value, the absolute mass of the surplus-value produced in one turnover period also grows, and there occurs, simultaneously with this, a rise in the annual rate of surplus-value caused by the reduction in the reproduction period.
Since elements of productive capital are constantly being withdrawn from the market and all that is put into the market is an equivalent in money, the effective demand rises, without this in itself providing any element of supply.