Capital Quotes

“Money is the universal equivalent form of all commodities, which already show in their prices that they ideally represent a specific sum of money, expect to be transformed into money, and only receive the form in which they can be converted into use-values for their possessor by changing places with money.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“We can thus understand why bourgeois political economy held instinctively to Adam Smith’s confusion of the categories ‘fixed and circulating capital’ with the categories ‘constant and variable capital’, and uncritically echoed it from one generation down to the next for a whole century. It no longer distinguished at all between the portion of capital laid out on wages and the portion of capital laid out on raw material, and only formally distinguished the former from constant capital in terms of whether it was circulated bit by bit or all at once through the product. The basis for understanding the real movement of capitalist production, and thus of capitalist exploitation, was thus submerged at one blow. All that was involved, on this view, was the reappearance of values advanced.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The formula itself expresses that the money is not spent here as money, but is only advanced, and is thus simply the money form of capital, money capital. It further expresses the fact that it is the exchange-value, not the use-value, that is the decisive inherent purpose of the movement.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognize any forms of consumer other than those who can pay, if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers. The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e. no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption).”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“With a given volume of capital advanced, the scale of production grows, and hence, with a given rate of surplus-value, the absolute mass of the surplus-value produced in one turnover period also grows, and there occurs, simultaneously with this, a rise in the annual rate of surplus-value caused by the reduction in the reproduction period.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“M–L is the characteristic moment of the transformation of money capital into productive capital, for it is the essential condition without which the value advanced in the money form cannot really be transformed into capital, into value-producing surplus-value. M–mp is necessary only in order to realize the mass of labour bought by way of M–L.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“By contrast, under conditions of simple reproduction, there would be no surplus-value and no profit whatsoever, since all surplus-value would be unproductively consumed without entering into the reproduction process.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“working day of this kind, which is formed by the succession of more or less numerous interrelated working days, I call a working period. If we speak of the working day, then we mean the length of time for which the worker must daily expend his labour-power, must work. If we speak of the working period, on the other hand, this means the number of inter-related working days that are required, in a”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“For the capitalist who has others to work for him, buying and selling is a major function. Since he appropriates the product of many people, on a larger social scale, so he has also to sell on such a scale, and later to transform money back again into the elements of production. Now, as before, the time taken up with buying and selling creates no value.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The irrationality consists in the fact that labour as the value-forming element cannot itself possess any value, and so a certain quantity of labour cannot have a value that is expressed in its price, in its equivalence with a certain definite quantity of money.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The interpenetration of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production, imposed upon colonies and semi-colonies by the power of capital on the world market and the violence of foreign political and military domination, has been an extremely important factor in the historical development of these twin sources of money capital accumulation.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“It also follows that even if the social working day (i.e. the labour spent by the entire working class over a whole year), just like each individual working day, can be simply broken down into two parts, i.e. into necessary labour plus surplus labour, and even though the value produced by this working day can therefore be similarly broken down into two parts, i.e. the portion of value with which the worker buys his own means of reproduction, and the surplus-value that the capitalist can spend for his individual consumption – yet, from the social standpoint, one part of the social working day is spent exclusively on the production of fresh constant capital, i.e. of products that are exclusively destined to function in the labour process as means of production, and therefore as constant capital in the accompanying process of valorization.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“Since elements of productive capital are constantly being withdrawn from the market and all that is put into the market is an equivalent in money, the effective demand rises, without this in itself providing any element of supply.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“Conversely, from the standpoint of the circulation process, the distinction between fixed and circulating capital, it is just as immaterial in what proportion a given value of circulating capital is divided between material of labour and wages. From the one standpoint, the material of labour is ranked in the same category as the means of labour, as opposed to the capital value laid out on labour-power. From the other standpoint, the part of capital laid out on labour-power is ranked together with that laid out on material of labour, as opposed to the part of capital laid out on means of labour.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“When the commodity owners are not capitalists, but rather independent direct producers, the time they spend on buying and selling is a deduction from their labour time, and they therefore always seek (in antiquity, as also in the Middle Ages: F.E.) to defer such operations to feast days.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“In this circuit, the stage of production, the function of P, forms an interruption in the circulation process M–C…C′–M′, whose two phases are in turn only a mediation of simple circulation M–C–M′. The production process here appears formally and explicitly, in the actual form of the circuit itself, for what it actually is in the capitalist mode of production, a mere means for the valorization of the value advanced; i.e. enrichment as such appears as the inherent purpose of production.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“It firstly makes commodity production universal, and then gradually transforms all commodity production into capitalist production.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“the existence of a class of wage-labourers, encourages the transition of all commodity production to capitalist commodity production.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The purchase and sale of slaves is also in its form a purchase and sale of commodities. Without the existence of slaves, however, money cannot fulfil this function. If there is slavery, then money can be spent on the acquisition of slaves. But money in the hand of the buyer is in no way a sufficient condition for the existence of slavery.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“What is characteristic is not that the commodity labour-power can be bought, but the fact that labour-power appears as a commodity.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“because in the form of wages labour is bought with money, and this is taken as the characteristic feature of a ‘money economy’.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The disappearance of this non-capitalist (pre-capitalist) environment thus marks the absolute limit of capitalist development.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The additional purchasing power which has to be sucked into the process of capitalist circulation can only come from outside capitalist relations of production properly called, through forcing non-capitalist social classes (essentially peasants and pre-capitalist landowners) ruinously to spend their revenue on capitalist commodities.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“It is easy to imagine a society which, having reached a certain level of consumption, consciously decides to give absolute priority to a single goal: reduction of the work load.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“after the abolition of capitalism, there will be ‘constant relative over-production’ of equipment, raw materials and foodstuffs. ‘Over-production of this kind’, he says, ‘is equivalent to control by the society over the objective means of its own reproduction.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2

“The very nature of expanded reproduction – capitalist reproduction – under capitalism implies that production takes place not only on a broader scale, but also under changed technological conditions.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2