17 Quotes by Karl Marx about capitalism


  • Author Karl Marx
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    Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    In every stock jobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Apres moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really, so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    El "trabajo" es por esencia la actividad carente de libertad, inhumana y asocial, cuya condición y cuyo resultado es la propiedad privada. La superación de la propiedad privada, por tanto, solo será realidad cuando se la conciba como superación del "trabajo".

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