Daily Marx

Quotes from economist, historian and philosopher Karl Marx. @DailyMarx on Twitter

[dailymarx]

The British Constitution cannot exist without the monarchy. Remove the Crown and the entire artificial structure collapses.  And the less significant the monarchic element has become in reality, the more significance it has acquired for the Englishman. Nowhere is this non-ruling personification worshipped more than in England. The English journals surpass the German by far in slavish servility. This disgusting cult of the king as such, the worship of a completely emasculated and meaningless notion, not even a notion, but the mere word “king”, is the consummation of monarchy

Engels 1844

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…the landlord in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right, but, in view of the competition, also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can.  In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution…

Engels - The Housing Question 1872

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History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations

Marx - The German Ideology 1845

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circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

Karl Marx The German Ideology 1845

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The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury.

Marx Capital Vol 1 Ch 31 1867

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the philanthropy of the rich is a rain-drop in the ocean, lost in the moment of falling

Engels - Competition 1845

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The aim of this whole society is the hereditary masters. This world belongs to them.

Marx - Letter to Ruge 1843

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it is obvious to anybody who has common sense that labour itself produces its own wages.

Marx - Economic Manuscripts 1863

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It appears paradoxical to assert that uncaught fish, for instance, are a means of production in the fishing industry. But hitherto no one has discovered the art of catching fish in waters that contain none.

Karl Marx - Capital Vol 1 1867

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Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.

Marx - Grundrisse 1857

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The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.

Engels - The Housing Question 1872

[dailymarx]

The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop a part of its capital into the ocean.

Marx - Grundrisse 1857

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There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Karl Marx - New York Tribune 1859

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as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

Marx and Engels - Communist Manifesto 1848

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Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

Marx and Engels - Communist Manifesto 1848

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Everything that the proletarian can do to improve his position is but a drop in the ocean compared with the floods of varying chances to which he is exposed, over which he has not the slightest control. He is the passive subject of all possible combinations of circumstances, and must count himself fortunate when he has saved his life even for a short time; and his character and way of living are naturally shaped by these conditions.

Engels - Condition of the Working Class 1845

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everything has a double meaning, one real and one bureaucratic

Marx - Notes of a Critique of Hegel 1843