Karl Marx - Capitalist Quotes

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While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Karl Marx
In fact of course, this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk.

Karl Marx
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.

Karl Marx
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
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Karl Marx
The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.

Karl Marx
He who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other hesitant, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but a hiding.

Karl Marx
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

Karl Marx
Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

Karl Marx
The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

Karl Marx
We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market, it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.

Karl Marx
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

Karl Marx
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

Karl Marx
But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.

Karl Marx
Centralization of the means of production, and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Karl Marx
In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.

Karl Marx
What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

Karl Marx
Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

Karl Marx
The capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

Karl Marx
So long as the product is sold, everything is taking its regular course from the standpoint of the capitalist producer.

Karl Marx
The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

Karl Marx
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.

Karl Marx
The worker's existence is thus brought under the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a buyer, And the demand on which the life of the worker depends, depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists.

Karl Marx
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.

Karl Marx
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Karl Marx
It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.

Karl Marx
But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

Karl Marx
In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

Karl Marx
In capitalist society however where social reason always asserts itself only post festum great disturbances may and must constantly occur.

Karl Marx
The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

Karl Marx