Capitalism Quotes

All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.

The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.

These numerous points at which money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated in numerous individual hoards or potential money - capitals appears as so many obstacles to circulation, because they immobilise the money and deprive it of its capacity to circulate for a certain time.

The better shaped his product, the more misshapen the worker.

All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value.

In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

Be aware that the reward for labour, and quantity of labour, are quite disparate things.

Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

The burgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations into civilization.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire.