 |
| MARX |
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
Karl Marx
"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."
"There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary."
"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor."
"By reducing the worker's needs to the paltriest minimum necessary to maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement…the political economist declares that man has no other needs, either in the sphere of activity or in that of consumption…He turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turns the worker's activity into a pure abstraction from all activity."
"The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people."
"Capital is money, capital is commodities. . . . By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs."
"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."
"When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need- a need for society- and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures."
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
"History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. . . . It is not 'history' which uses men as a means of achieving- as if it were an individual person- its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends."
"It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves."
"The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison."
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
|
|
 |
|
