The more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. Karl Marx, Wage, Labour and Capital
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. Karl Marx, attributed
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
The unity is brought about by force. Karl Marx
The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
This revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. Karl Marx, The German Ideology 1845
What I did was to prove … that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Karl Marx
When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes. Karl Marx, letter to W Blos 10 November 1877
A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto preamble, 1848
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ibid. section 1 paragraph 1 lines 1-2
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. ibid. section 1 paragraph 14
A class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increase capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. ibid. section 1 paragraph 30
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. ibid.
The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. ibid. section 11 paragraph 13
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation. ibid.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. ibid.
They [communists] openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. ibid.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! ibid. section 4 paragraph 11
For Marx was, before all else, a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat. Friedrich Engels
What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism 1847
Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. Friedrich Engels
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now colonies under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
In making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionised from top to bottom, and in particular the former division of labour must disappear. Its place must be taken by an organisation of production in which, on the one hand, no individual can throw on the shoulders of others his share in productive labour, this natural condition of human existence; and in which, on the other hand, productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full – in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden. Friedrich Engels
Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion and art; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development ... form the foundation upon which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved ... instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case. Frederick Engels, graveside tribute to Karl Marx
‘A teaching that explains how society develops.’ Portrait of a Great Man, USSR conference, 1969
How did this man’s life affect the fate of mankind? ibid.
For 20 years Marx and Engels resided in different towns. Marx lived in London and Engels in Manchester. At certain periods they exchanged letters almost daily. ibid.
Marx gave 40 years of his life to the story of the origin and development of the capitalism system of production, and proved scientifically that is was doomed to perish. ibid.