Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.
Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.
In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation – the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially – hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern.
In a political struggle of class against class, organization of trade unions is the most important weapon.
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.
Life is the mode of action of proteins.
How do you think the transition from the present situation to community of Property is to be effected? The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.
Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.
The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged.
If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.
All that is real in human history becomes irrational in the process of time.
The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late ’seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
And what is impossible to science?
The British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes that are looked upon, not as an expedient, and not as a means of propaganda, but as an ultimate aim.
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.
The state is not abolished, it withers away.
It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.