Karl Marx Quotes
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. International Publishers, 1963, p. 111.
This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.
The Chinese laborers were slaves by most definitions of the word as they had been brought to South Africa on a system of indentured servitude. Slavery was illegal so the term had all kinds of political and legal significance. His statement was a masterpiece of admitting that it was almost slavery but leaving some wiggle room so as not to have classified it as such. Some use this as an example of Churchill’s capacity for hypocrisy.
John Sutter was an immigrant to California from Switzerland where he became a Mexican citizen. Slavery was outlawed in Mexico and its territories, yet Sutter and others maintained Indians as slaves. The Roman Catholic Missions of California also kept Indian slaves. This quotation is historically important because many people never realized that slavery was prevalent in California.
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
