Quotes from Capital

Karl Marx ·  490 pages

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“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“إن البشر يصنعون تاريخهم , لكنهم لا يصنعونه على هواهم , لا يصنعونه فى ظروف يختارونها بأنفسهم بل فى ظروف يواجهونها مباشرة .. تكون متعينة و موروثة من الماضى”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Pengabstrakan kerja dalam bentuk uang mengandaikan dialektika di antara perkerjaan/kerja yang secara sosial dibutuhkan untuk membuat barang dagangan/komoditi/jasa, dengan proses produksi kapitalisme yang justru meniadakan kerja manusia itu sendiri. Sehingga proses produksi kapitalisme dalam kelanjutannya hanya menempatkan manusia sebagai bagian dari proses akumulasi modal.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



“Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“أن البلد الأكثر تطورا ، يبين للبلدان الأقل تطورا شكل مستقبلها”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



“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.10”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“إن حقيقة أن الرأسمالي رقم (1) يملك النقود وأنه يشتري وسائل الإنتاج من الرأسمالي رقم (2) الذي يملكها، في حين أن العامل يشتري وسائل عيشه من الرأسمالي رقم (3) بالنقود التي حصل عليها من الرأسمالي رقم (2) لا يغير في شيء من الوضع الجوهري المتمثل في أن الرأسماليين (1) و(2) و(3)، هم، معًا، مالكون حصريون للنقود ووسائل الإنتاج والعيش. إن الإنسان لا يستطيع أن يعيش إلا بأن ينتج وسائل عيشه الخاصة، ولا يمكن له أن ينتجها إلا إذا كان يمتلك وسائل الإنتاج؛ الشروط الشيئية للعمل. ومن الجلي منذ البداية أن العامل المجرد من وسائل الإنتاج هو محروم من وسائل العيش أصلًا، مثلما أن الإنسان المحروم، على العكس، من وسائل العيش، ليس في وضع يؤهله لخلق وسائل إنتاج. وهكذا، حتى في العملية الأولى، فإن ما يسم النقود والسلع بميسم رأسمال، منذ البداية، حتى قبل أن يتم تحويلها فعليًا إلى رأسمال، ليس طبيعتها النقدية ولا طبيعتها السلعية، ولا القيمة الاستعمالية، المادية، لهذه السلع كوسائل إنتاج أو وسائل عيش، بل الظرف الذي يجعل هذه النقود وهذه السلع، وسائل الإنتاج هذه ووسائل العيش هذه، تواجه قدرة العمل، المحرومة من كل ثروة مادية، كقوى ذاتية مستقلة، مجسدة كأشخاص في إهاب مالكيها. إن الشروط الشيئية الضرورية لتحقيق العمل مغَّربة عن العامل، وتتجلى كأصنام حُبيت بإرادة وروح من عندها. وباختصار تظهر السلع كشارٍ للأشخاص. فشاري قدرة العمل ليس سوى تجسيد في صورة شخص للعمل المتشيئ الذي يكرس جزءً من نفسه إلى العامل في شكل وسائل عيش كما يٌلحق قدرة العمل الحي لصالح الجزء المتبقي منه، ويُبقي نفسه سليمًا بل حتى أن ينمو متجاوزًا حجمه الأصلي بفضل هذا الإلحاق. ليس العامل هو من يشتري وسائل الإنتاج والعيش، بل وسائل العيش هي من يشتري العامل بغية دمجه في وسائل الإنتاج.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“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.24”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“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.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



“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. [6]”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“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.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“El proceso acaba siempre sustrayendo a la circulación más dinero del que a ella se lanzó. El algodón comprado por 100 libras esterlinas se vende, por ejemplo, por 100 + 10, o sea por 110 libras esterlinas. La fórmula completa de este proceso es por tanto: D – M – D’, donde D’ = D + D D, o lo que es lo mismo igual a la suma de dinero primeramente desembolsada más un incremento. Este incremento o excedente que queda después de cubrir el valor primitivo es lo que yo llamo plusvalía (surplus value). Por tanto, el valor primeramente desembolsado no sólo se conserva en la circulación, sino que su magnitud de valor experimenta, dentro de ella, un cambio, se incrementa con una plusvalía, se valoriza. Y este proceso es el que lo convierte en capital.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value form.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



“Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



“If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: “that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction, is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist,[181] but also by a series of more enduring consequences.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“Por eso el dinero constituye el punto de arranque y el punto final de todo proceso de valorización.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital


“When gold replaced silver as a measure of value, the same name was applied according to the ratio between the values of silver and gold, to perhaps 1-15th of a pound of gold. The word pound, as a money-name, thus becomes differentiated from the same word as a weight-name.[70] (3) The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and princes to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but the names.[71]”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital



About the author

Karl Marx
Born place: in Trier, Germany
Born date May 5, 1818
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