Karl Marx Quotes on Time
Karl Marx's reflections on time are largely reflections on history, and the quotes gathered here show why the two were inseparable in his thought. History, for Marx, is the history of class struggles, driven by human action, for men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, constrained by inherited conditions. Several passages capture his sense of capitalist modernity as an era of relentless acceleration, in which all that is solid melts into air. Marx also treats time as something unequally distributed: in capitalist society, he argues in Capital, the free time of one class is purchased by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time. Time, in his analysis, is both the medium of historical change and a contested economic resource.
Quotes
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Attributed to Karl Marx:
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
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“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.”
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“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
The Communist Manifesto, 1848 -
“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 17, Section IV, pg. 581. -
“History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”
1840s | The Holy Family , Ch. VI (1845). -
“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 -
“Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market , and broad as much as possible by differential duties.”
The German Ideology(1845-1846) | ibid, pp. 183 -
“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 ". -
“The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.”
Grundrisse(1857-1858) | Introduction, p. 14. -
“The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Author's prefaces to the First Edition. -
“"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune , 08 August 1853”
1850s