Persons [ ] Education / Labour / Management / Commerce | Karl Marx, 1867
“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. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its
social basis one that is common to all historical periods.”
“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the
condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
“As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in
capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
“Diligence in some compels idleness in others.”
“The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors
and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced
by slaves. In the middle ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors, who lost
their political power together with the economic basis on which it was established. ”
“Franklin says, “war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.” If the transformation of
merchants’ money into capital is to be explained otherwise than by the producers being
simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present,
when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely
wanting.”
“To make the society” [which of course consists of non-workers] “happy and people easier
under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be
ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the
fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.”
“On the basis of capitalist production, a new swindle with the wages of management
develops in connection with joint-stock companies, in that, over and above the actual
managing director, a number of governing and supervisory boards arise, for which
management and supervision are in fact a mere pretext for the robbery of shareholders
and their own enrichment.”
“In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly
assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in
magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus value from itself; the original
value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of
which it adds surplus value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic
expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add
value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.”
“The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between,
for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies
only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the
actual producer, the labourer.”
“This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised
colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak
and constantly hunted down.”
Karl Marx, Das Kapital / Capital, 1867
