Das Kapital Quotes

“In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”
― Karl marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“إن البشر يصنعون تاريخهم , لكنهم لا يصنعونه على هواهم , لا يصنعونه فى ظروف يختارونها بأنفسهم بل فى ظروف يواجهونها مباشرة .. تكون متعينة و موروثة من الماضى”
― Karl Marx, رأس المال لكارل ماركس

“The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees in every new country annexed, only a new boundary.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

“Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Pengabstrakan kerja dalam bentuk uang mengandaikan dialektika di antara perkerjaan/kerja yang secara sosial dibutuhkan untuk membuat barang dagangan/komoditi/jasa, dengan proses produksi kapitalisme yang justru meniadakan kerja manusia itu sendiri. Sehingga proses produksi kapitalisme dalam kelanjutannya hanya menempatkan manusia sebagai bagian dari proses akumulasi modal.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“In its rational form [dialectic] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“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.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“أن البلد الأكثر تطورا ، يبين للبلدان الأقل تطورا شكل مستقبلها”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Tantae molis erat to unleash the 'eternal natural laws' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free 'labouring poor', that artificial product of modern history. If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“إن حقيقة أن الرأسمالي رقم (1) يملك النقود وأنه يشتري وسائل الإنتاج من الرأسمالي رقم (2) الذي يملكها، في حين أن العامل يشتري وسائل عيشه من الرأسمالي رقم (3) بالنقود التي حصل عليها من الرأسمالي رقم (2) لا يغير في شيء من الوضع الجوهري المتمثل في أن الرأسماليين (1) و(2) و(3)، هم، معًا، مالكون حصريون للنقود ووسائل الإنتاج والعيش. إن الإنسان لا يستطيع أن يعيش إلا بأن ينتج وسائل عيشه الخاصة، ولا يمكن له أن ينتجها إلا إذا كان يمتلك وسائل الإنتاج؛ الشروط الشيئية للعمل. ومن الجلي منذ البداية أن العامل المجرد من وسائل الإنتاج هو محروم من وسائل العيش أصلًا، مثلما أن الإنسان المحروم، على العكس، من وسائل العيش، ليس في وضع يؤهله لخلق وسائل إنتاج. وهكذا، حتى في العملية الأولى، فإن ما يسم النقود والسلع بميسم رأسمال، منذ البداية، حتى قبل أن يتم تحويلها فعليًا إلى رأسمال، ليس طبيعتها النقدية ولا طبيعتها السلعية، ولا القيمة الاستعمالية، المادية، لهذه السلع كوسائل إنتاج أو وسائل عيش، بل الظرف الذي يجعل هذه النقود وهذه السلع، وسائل الإنتاج هذه ووسائل العيش هذه، تواجه قدرة العمل، المحرومة من كل ثروة مادية، كقوى ذاتية مستقلة، مجسدة كأشخاص في إهاب مالكيها. إن الشروط الشيئية الضرورية لتحقيق العمل مغَّربة عن العامل، وتتجلى كأصنام حُبيت بإرادة وروح من عندها. وباختصار تظهر السلع كشارٍ للأشخاص. فشاري قدرة العمل ليس سوى تجسيد في صورة شخص للعمل المتشيئ الذي يكرس جزءً من نفسه إلى العامل في شكل وسائل عيش كما يٌلحق قدرة العمل الحي لصالح الجزء المتبقي منه، ويُبقي نفسه سليمًا بل حتى أن ينمو متجاوزًا حجمه الأصلي بفضل هذا الإلحاق. ليس العامل هو من يشتري وسائل الإنتاج والعيش، بل وسائل العيش هي من يشتري العامل بغية دمجه في وسائل الإنتاج.”
― كارل ماركس, Das Kapital

“As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Diligence in some compels idleness in others.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital