Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The Holy Family, 1845
“Proletariat & wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property.”
Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.”
German Ideology, 1845
“…the first premise of all human existence &, therefore, of all history, [is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else, eating & drinking, housing, clothing & various other things.”
“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, & for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a mass movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of the muck of ages & become fitted to found society anew”
“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. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.”
The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
Wage Labour and Capital, 1847
Communist Manifesto 1848
“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production & consumption in every country…it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life & death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands & climes. In place of the old local & national seclusion & self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852
“Men make their own history, but they do not do it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”
Grundrisse, 1857
“The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange & consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.”
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
“At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of the development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.”
Theories of Surplus Value, 1862
Das Kapital, Volume I, 1867
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
“Science would be superfluous if the outward appearance & the essence of things directly coincided”
“Society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, & constantly engaged in a process of change”
“One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly a result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man & nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, & controls the metabolism between himself & nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, his legs, head & hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature & changes it, & in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”
“The centralisation of the means of production & the socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
The Civil War in France, 1871
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible, and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally workers, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive, and legislative at the same time. This form of popular government, featuring revocable election of councilors and maximal public participation in governance, resembles contemporary direct democracy”