01c. 1850 ADMen [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.(Marx, 1963)Karl Marx / quote ↗
02c. 1850 ADThe bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.Karl Marx / quote ↗
03c. 1850 ADHistory is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.Karl Marx / quote ↗
04c. 1850 ADCommunism 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 labor of others by means of such appropriation.It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.Karl Marx / quote ↗
05c. 1850 ADIn proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.Karl Marx / quote ↗
06c. 1850 ADCapital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.Karl Marx / quote ↗
07c. 1850 ADA spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.Karl Marx / quote ↗
08c. 1850 ADA specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact.I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.Karl Marx / quote ↗
10c. 1850 ADAnd here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.Karl Marx / quote ↗
11c. 1850 ADSociety does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.Karl Marx / quote ↗
12c. 1850 ADSociety as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile campsKarl Marx / quote ↗
13c. 1850 AD[representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,Karl Marx / quote ↗
14c. 1850 ADOr how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?Karl Marx / quote ↗
15c. 1850 ADLanguage is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.Karl Marx / quote ↗
18c. 1850 ADHe freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.Karl Marx / quote ↗
19c. 1850 ADWhat exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.Karl Marx / quote ↗
20c. 1850 ADAs exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.Karl Marx / quote ↗
21c. 1850 ADA use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.Karl Marx / quote ↗
22c. 1850 ADA use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.Karl Marx / quote ↗
23c. 1850 ADThe increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.Karl Marx / quote ↗
24c. 1850 ADEconomists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.Karl Marx / quote ↗
