Karl Marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour has vanished, after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want — only then can society inscribe on its banner: from each according to his ability, to...

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. This is not a slogan I invented for posters. It is the description of a fully developed communist society — one that does not yet exist and may take centuries to build, if it is built at all. I was writing a historical analysis, not an instruction manual.

The famous photograph — white hair, white beard, the look of a man who has been arguing for fifty years and is prepared to argue for fifty more. It was taken in 1875. The International had collapsed. The Paris Commune had been crushed. Capital, Volume I had been out for eight years and sold, by then, perhaps a thousand copies.

I was not discouraged....

The 'invisible hand' that Smith describes guides free exchange to produce outcomes beneficial to all. But Smith does not ask: who labours to produce the goods that the hand distributes? And at what price, under what conditions, with what portion of the value retained by the labourer? The hand is invisible because we are not meant to look at the wrist.

Franklin says that time is money. He means this as practical advice to industrious tradesmen. I take it as the most precise formulation of the capitalist principle ever stated. Labour-time is the substance of value. The worker sells his time — not a product, but the capacity to labour — and receives a wage. But the value the worker produces in that time...

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. I am not the first to notice this relationship. I am the first to analyse it with sufficient rigour that it cannot be dismissed as sentiment.

I published the first volume of Capital in 1867. I had been working on it for twenty years. Engels supported me during most of this time; without his subsidies from his family's Manchester textile business, Capital would not exist. I was aware of the irony.

The argument, stated plainly: the capitalist buys labour-power for a day. The worker in a day...

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and...

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles — freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman — each pair stands in constant opposition, carrying on an uninterrupted fight that ends either in revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways — the point, however, is to change it. Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. I wrote this as the eleventh of my theses on Feuerbach in 1845. It is the most quoted thing I ever wrote, and the most misunderstood. I was not dismissing theory. I was saying theory is incomplete without practice.