Das Kapital Quotes

“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.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life; and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Moments are the elements of profit”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“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, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“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.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: Volumes One and Two

“The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”
― Karl marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. ”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Pengabstrakan kerja dalam bentuk uang mengandaikan dialektika di antara perkerjaan/kerja yang secara sosial dibutuhkan untuk membuat barang dagangan/komoditi/jasa, dengan proses produksi kapitalisme yang justru meniadakan kerja manusia itu sendiri. Sehingga proses produksi kapitalisme dalam kelanjutannya hanya menempatkan manusia sebagai bagian dari proses akumulasi modal.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“إن البشر يصنعون تاريخهم , لكنهم لا يصنعونه على هواهم , لا يصنعونه فى ظروف يختارونها بأنفسهم بل فى ظروف يواجهونها مباشرة .. تكون متعينة و موروثة من الماضى”
― Karl Marx, رأس المال لكارل ماركس

“In its rational form [dialectic] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees in every new country annexed, only a new boundary.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

“Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.

[Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry; Footnote 4]”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“أن البلد الأكثر تطورا ، يبين للبلدان الأقل تطورا شكل مستقبلها”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“إن حقيقة أن الرأسمالي رقم (1) يملك النقود وأنه يشتري وسائل الإنتاج من الرأسمالي رقم (2) الذي يملكها، في حين أن العامل يشتري وسائل عيشه من الرأسمالي رقم (3) بالنقود التي حصل عليها من الرأسمالي رقم (2) لا يغير في شيء من الوضع الجوهري المتمثل في أن الرأسماليين (1) و(2) و(3)، هم، معًا، مالكون حصريون للنقود ووسائل الإنتاج والعيش. إن الإنسان لا يستطيع أن يعيش إلا بأن ينتج وسائل عيشه الخاصة، ولا يمكن له أن ينتجها إلا إذا كان يمتلك وسائل الإنتاج؛ الشروط الشيئية للعمل. ومن الجلي منذ البداية أن العامل المجرد من وسائل الإنتاج هو محروم من وسائل العيش أصلًا، مثلما أن الإنسان المحروم، على العكس، من وسائل العيش، ليس في وضع يؤهله لخلق وسائل إنتاج. وهكذا، حتى في العملية الأولى، فإن ما يسم النقود والسلع بميسم رأسمال، منذ البداية، حتى قبل أن يتم تحويلها فعليًا إلى رأسمال، ليس طبيعتها النقدية ولا طبيعتها السلعية، ولا القيمة الاستعمالية، المادية، لهذه السلع كوسائل إنتاج أو وسائل عيش، بل الظرف الذي يجعل هذه النقود وهذه السلع، وسائل الإنتاج هذه ووسائل العيش هذه، تواجه قدرة العمل، المحرومة من كل ثروة مادية، كقوى ذاتية مستقلة، مجسدة كأشخاص في إهاب مالكيها. إن الشروط الشيئية الضرورية لتحقيق العمل مغَّربة عن العامل، وتتجلى كأصنام حُبيت بإرادة وروح من عندها. وباختصار تظهر السلع كشارٍ للأشخاص. فشاري قدرة العمل ليس سوى تجسيد في صورة شخص للعمل المتشيئ الذي يكرس جزءً من نفسه إلى العامل في شكل وسائل عيش كما يٌلحق قدرة العمل الحي لصالح الجزء المتبقي منه، ويُبقي نفسه سليمًا بل حتى أن ينمو متجاوزًا حجمه الأصلي بفضل هذا الإلحاق. ليس العامل هو من يشتري وسائل الإنتاج والعيش، بل وسائل العيش هي من يشتري العامل بغية دمجه في وسائل الإنتاج.”
― كارل ماركس, Das Kapital

“Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital

“As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

“The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital - Capital