Karl Marx Quotes

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.

Capitalism robs you and makes a wage slave of you. The law upholds and protects that robbery. The government fools you into believing that you are independent and free. In this way you are fooled and duped every day of your life.

The world no longer permits the stronger to kill the weaker, but it allows the wealthy to oppress the poor. Money is holier than man. Human life is less sacred than property. To save a dollar is regarded as a more necessary virtue than to save a human heart. Society cares more for fortune than for truth.

Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage underthat name and pretext of commonwealth.

You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people saying the same thing in the same way. "If we have to pay you more, it will be bad for you." And that's because saying that is a much more polite way of saying, "I'm rich, you're poor, and I would prefer to keep it that way."

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against "religion".

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

Whenever people with money have power over people with less money, you have the potential for exploitation.

Anyone here own 4 suits? Three suits? Even 2 suits? Well J. P. Morgan has over 100 suits, each one stolen off the back of a working man.

The strongest bulwark of the capitalistic system is the ignorance of its victims.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

Capital is dead labor, that vampire like, only lives by sucking living labor.

“Capital” is a sort of cabalistic word, like “Church” or “State,” or any other of those general terms which are invented by those who fleece the rest of mankind to conceal the hand that shears them.

The problem is capitalism. The only solution, as difficult as this may be to contemplate at the present time, is socialism.

When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late …. The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

... the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the laborer.

... idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy in which man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.