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.

— Karl Marx

Karl Marx Quotes

It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

— Karl Marx

By contrast, under conditions of simple reproduction, there would be no surplus-value and no profit whatsoever, since all surplus-value would be unproductively consumed without entering into the reproduction process.

— Karl Marx

For the capitalist who has others to work for him, buying and selling is a major function. Since he appropriates the product of many people, on a larger social scale, so he has also to sell on such a scale, and later to transform money back again into the elements of production. Now, as before, the time taken up with buying and selling creates no value.

— Karl Marx

The interpenetration of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, imposed upon colonies and semi-colonies by the power of capital on the world market and the violence of foreign political and military domination, has been an extremely important factor in the historical development of these twin sources of money capital accumulation.

— Karl Marx

The formula itself expresses that the money is not spent here as money, but is only advanced, and is thus simply the money form of capital, money capital. It further expresses the fact that it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement.

— Karl Marx

By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.

— Karl Marx

M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.

— Karl Marx

The irrationality consists in the fact that labour as the value-forming element cannot itself possess any value, and so a certain quantity of labour cannot have a value that is expressed in its price, in its equivalence with a certain definite quantity of money.

— Karl Marx

Money is the universal equivalent form of all commodities, which already show in their prices that they ideally represent a specific sum of money, expect to be transformed into money, and only receive the form in which they can be converted into use-values for their possessor by changing places with money.

— Karl Marx

What is characteristic is not that the commodity labour-power can be bought, but the fact that labour-power appears as a commodity.

— Karl Marx

The very nature of expanded reproduction – capitalist reproduction – under capitalism implies that production takes place not only on a broader scale, but also under changed technological conditions.

— Karl Marx

It is easy to imagine a society which, having reached a certain level of consumption, consciously decides to give absolute priority to a single goal: reduction of the work load.

— Karl Marx

Volume 2 of Capital has indeed been not only a ‘sealed book’, but also a forgotten one. To a large extent, it remains so to this very day.

— Karl Marx

The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

— Karl Marx

They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling-classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.

— Karl Marx

It firstly makes commodity production universal, and then gradually transforms all commodity production into capitalist production.

— Karl Marx

The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.

— Karl Marx

Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.

— Karl Marx

Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it.

— Karl Marx

Society behaves just as exclusively as the state, only in a more polite form: it does not throw you out, but it makes it so uncomfortable for you that you go out of your own will.

— Karl Marx
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