Karl Marx

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity.

I'm not competent to judge. But no doubt he was a great man.

In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone.

In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone 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.

[T]he great test [of history] has been decidedly against Marx and his theories of value and surplus value.

Marx, when he was thirty, had “worked out his philosophical, sociological and political views so clearly that, right to the end of his life, there was never anything he had to retract”, according to Pollock.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.

Marx saw the coming of communism (in his sense) as the result of a long series of struggles, transforming conditions and men. The kind of society he envisioned required, as Lenin observed, “a person not like the present man on the street.” Marx saw this new sort of person emerging as a natural result of the sobering process of a social struggle lasting perhaps a half-century. The educational role of adversity and setbacks for the proletariat was a recurrent theme in the writings of Marx and Engles. Lenin, on the other hand, believed that the proletariat would never automatically the necessary class outlook and purposeful unity: “Class political consciousness can be brought to the working class only from without.” Whatever the relative merits, in terms of realism, of the Marxist verses the Leninist conceptions of the working class, this crucial shift of assumptions necessitated a fundamental change, however covert, in the line of march towards communism, both before and after the seizure of power [by Lenin and the Bolsheviks].

In the sense used by Marx and Engels, the concept of ideology was intended to mean forms of social consciousness which prevent people from realising that their thinking about the world is determined by some conditions which do not depend on them and which are not themselves ingredients of consciousness. In ideological thinking, people imagine that the logic of thinking itself rules their consciousness and they are organically incapable of being aware of the social situations and of the interests which mould their mental work. This concept of ideology as false consciousness or as thinking that cannot be aware of its own sources may indeed be useful […] The defect of the concept, however, is that we never have criteria for stating that a certain theory or doctrine does not fall under the concept, even as far as natural science is concerned; nor may we ever be certain that a criticism of ideology is not itself ideological. No conceivable means are available for stating that Capital is not an ideology in this sense. Certainly, Marx maintained (not only in his famous letter to Ruge, but in The Poverty of Philosophy as well […]) that his own theoretical work was to express the real historical movement, i.e. that he was aware of the social sources of his own thinking and that he was in this sense himself free from ideology; however, there is no way of finding out beyond doubt that Marx or that anybody who conceives his own thinking as an "expression" of a certain historical process is not deluding himself about the meaning of his own self-consciousness.

It had to be admitted in the end that Marx had made mistakes on many points of importance.

Against anarchists Marx and Engles were in the position of defending the “authority of the majority over the minority.” Marxian passages defending the use of state power against individuals in this connection were later avidly quoted by Lenin in defense of an autocratic power which Marx had not contemplated.

Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

[M]odern capitalism has managed to avert, without changing its fundamental characteristics, practically all the consequences which Marx predicted would result from the basic contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. […] Marx predicted an increasing frequency and gravity of "realization" crises, a spectacular decline of the rate of profit, rising unemployment, Verelendung [impoverishment] of the working class, etc., culminating in an increasingly bitter class struggle that would eventually lead to the overthrow of the entire system by a proletarian revolution. These developments would demonstrate, according to Marx, that production for private gain is inherently contradictory rather than merely the cause of some, in principle resolvable, conflicts and problems. Now, none of these predictions (except perhaps a certain amount of economic concentration) has actually occurred […] there is no independent evidence, apart from Marx's word, to support the claim that capitalism remains contradiction ridden.

Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

Engels was always sending Marx money; when he finally retired from the family firm, he made Marx an annuity of ?350—several times more than the average family lived on but not enough for Marx, who always adjusted his spending to a level above what his benefactors supplied.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.