Karl Marx Quotes on Politics
Marx's political philosophy is inseparable from his critique of political economy. The German Ideology and Capital develop the historical-materialist framework: the relations of production characteristic of a given mode of production (slave, feudal, capitalist) determine the corresponding political and ideological superstructure, and historical change is driven by class struggle generated by contradictions internal to those relations. The early Communist Manifesto and the late mature works converge on the diagnosis of capitalism as a system whose internal dynamics tend toward crisis and toward the formation of the proletariat as the agent of its supersession.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
-
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
-
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretirt; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern. -
“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 -
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
-
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2 -
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”
-
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
-
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.”
Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 1, p. 257. -
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848 -
“The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
As quoted in the Communist Manifesto (1848) p. 7 -
“It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.”
Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843), after the Prussian government dissolved the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung , of which Marx was the editor. -
“Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 19, pg. 594. -
“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. -
“This much is certain, the ERA OF REVOLUTION has now FAIRLY OPENED IN EUROPE once more. And the general state of affairs is good.”
1860s | Letter to Friedrich Engels (13 February 1863), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 41. Letters 1860–64 (2010), p. 453 -
“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 -
“Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.”
Grundrisse(1857-1858) | Notebook I, The Chapter on Money, p. 85. -
“"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune , 08 August 1853”
1850s