Karl Marx Quotes on Nature
Karl Marx's materialism made nature a basic category of his thought, and the quotes gathered here show how he used it. The starting point of history, for Marx, is wholly natural: the existence of living human individuals and their bodily relation to the rest of nature, from which all production and society develop. Marx drew analogies between social and natural processes, comparing economic consumption to the way in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. He also invoked the idea of natural law rhetorically, arguing that capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. At the same time he exposed how capitalism degrades human beings to mere instruments. These passages show nature as both the ground of human life and a figure for historical necessity.
Quotes
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“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. -
“But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 32, p. 837. -
“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”
The German Ideology(1845-1846) | Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism ". -
“But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.”
Grundrisse(1857-1858) | Introduction, p. 25. -
“Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(e), pg. 742. -
“The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.”
Das Kapital(Buch II)(1893) | Vol. II, Ch. III, p. 95.