Karl Marx (1818–83,) fully Karl Heinrich Marx, was the German political philosopher and economist who founded modern communism. He was one of the most significant political theorists of modern times.
Born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany,) Marx studied law at the University of Bonn and history and philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was a gifted student who made friends with many of the leading German-speaking philosophers of the time. By his late 20s, he was expressing himself as a communist and frequently engaged in heated debates with fellow scholars. Marx traveled around France, Belgium, and Germany during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and eventually settled in London starting 1849.
Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels became his closest intellectual collaborator and the source of much of the money with which Marx lived. They teamed up to write the epoch-making Communist Manifesto (1848) and elaborated their political principles in the three-volume Das Kapital. They published the first volume in 1867; Engels completed and published the remainder after Marx’s death (1885, 1894.)
The intellectual father of twentieth-century socialism, Marx’s ideas of indifference for the individual, denial of human nature, and rejection of the basic economics principles inspired some of the world’s murderous regimes—those of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro. In Marx’s name, millions of people were divested of their freedom, subjected to imprisonment and torture, sent to labor camps, or executed by firing squads.
Marx’s influence persists—his diagnosis of many of capitalism’s most significant flaws is still prescient. Many affluent countries have progressive income taxes, universal public education, and other principles that Marx espoused in Communist Manifesto. He continues to motivate liberals who emphasize the deprivation of capitalism as a class struggle in which the ruling-class minority takes advantage of the working-class majority while sharing little of the proceeds of wealth.
Marx is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Only 11 people came to his funeral. His monument now gets daily visitors, including followers of Marxist theory, who have made the tomb a place of pilgrimage. The pedestal is inscribed with quotes from Marx’s works—the front features the final words of Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands unite.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Karl Marx
Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
—Karl Marx
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Capitalism
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Shopping
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its “great intellects.”
—Karl Marx
Topics: Intelligence
All I know is I’m not a Marxist.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism
Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Opportunity
All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Money
In a higher phase of communist society… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism, Ability
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Work, Unemployment
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
—Karl Marx
Topics: World
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Writers
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Medicine, Science
Nothing has changed in Russias policy. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole starworld dominationis immutable.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Nationalism, Nations, Nationality, Nation
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Industry
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Necessity
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
—Karl Marx
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, Science
In every stock-jobbing swindle, everyone knows that the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold.
—Karl Marx
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science
As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Absence
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, Science
Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Religion
Constant revolutionizing of production distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices 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.
—Karl Marx
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!
—Karl Marx
Topics: Revolutions, Revolution, Unity
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