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
The product of mental labor—science—always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
—Karl Marx
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society
—Karl Marx
Topics: Health
Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
—Karl Marx
We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Time
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: Communism, Ability, Socialism
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Culture
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
—Karl Marx
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
The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.
—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: Unity, Revolution, Revolutions
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Nature
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand
—Karl Marx
Topics: Religion
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
—Karl Marx
Topics: World
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
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
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: Politics, Politicians
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Wealth, Riches
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
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
—Karl Marx
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Necessity
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Money, Misery, Capitalism
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Value, Values
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Capitalism
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough already.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Speaking
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
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