Karl Marx - Grundrisse

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Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.

Karl Marx
The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.

Karl Marx
Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

Karl Marx
The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.

Karl Marx
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.

Karl Marx
What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

Karl Marx
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.

Karl Marx
Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

Karl Marx
Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; the increase of the one [is] exactly measured by the diminution of necessary labour.

Karl Marx
Exchange value forms the substance of money, and exchange value is wealth.

Karl Marx
The object before us, to begin with, material production.

Karl Marx
It is impossible to persue this nonsense any further.

Karl Marx
The object of art — like every other product — creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

Karl Marx
An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.

Karl Marx
Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.

Karl Marx
Something that is merely negative creates nothing.

Karl Marx
The devil take this wrong arithmetic. But never mind.

Karl Marx
Capitals accumulate faster than the population; thus wages; thus population; thus grain prices; thus the difficulty of production and hence the exchange values.

Karl Marx
The circulation of capital realizes value, while living labour creates value.

Karl Marx
Money appears as measure (in Homer, e. g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange, because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

Karl Marx
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Karl Marx
But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

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
The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production.

Karl Marx
Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

Karl Marx