In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.
The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.
Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.
Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.
The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.
As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.
...the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
Music is the mirror of reality.
Misery motivates, not utopia.
In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.
All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
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. (Preface to the French edition).
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.
All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.
When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.
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.
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.
All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
Ideas do not exist separately from language.
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
The circulation of capital realizes value , while living labour creates value .
Philosophy is to science as masturbation is to sex.
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.
Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.
The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, posses however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
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.
Labor produces marvels for the rich but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labor, and it turns the remainder into machines.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
Keep people from their history, and they are easily controlled.
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.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
There are no bigger donkeys than these workers.... Look at our 'craftsmen'; Sad that world history should be be made with such people.
If one wants to be an ox one can easily turn one's back on hum suffering and look after one's own skin.
The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole - besides being an homme d'action [man of action] - that I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the struggle of nationalities and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality.... His aim now is to raise a German legion in London.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
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.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones.
Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
The weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
