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
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
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
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society
—Karl Marx
Topics: Health
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
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
—Karl Marx
Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Philosophy, One liners
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
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism
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
All I know is I’m not a Marxist.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism, Communism
The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Politics
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
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them
—Karl Marx
Topics: Government
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
—Karl Marx
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
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
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
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
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand
—Karl Marx
Topics: Religion
From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Socialism
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list—the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Taxation, Taxes
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
Religion is the opium of the masses.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Religion
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
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
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Unemployment, Work
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
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
Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.
—Karl Marx
The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.
—Karl Marx
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
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Riches, Wealth
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Science, Philosophy
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Communism, Socialism
It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
—Karl Marx
Topics: History
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
—Karl Marx
Topics: Medicine, Science
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
—Karl Marx
Topics: World
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
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