Karl Marx Quotes on Justice
Karl Marx was a 19th-century German philosopher, economist, historian, and revolutionary socialist whose work founded the tradition of thought that bears his name. This page collects quotes attributed to Karl Marx on the topic of justice, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-ope -
“If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”
1860s | The Abolition of Landed Property Letter to Robert Applegarth (3 December 1869) -
“Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”
Grundrisse(1857-1858) | Introduction, p. 10. -
“As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.”
1850s | Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852–55 (2010), p. 32 -
“I have just noticed in the 2nd edition of The Times that the Prussian Second Chamber has finally done something worthwhile. We shall soon have revolution.”
1860s | Letter to Friedrich Engels (21 February 1863), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860–64 (2010), p. 461 -
“Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. Paragraph 47, lines 7-9.”
Section IBourgeoisieandProletariat -
“The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 7, pg. 213.