Karl Marx

“ Once the class struggle is fully seen in the broad light of history, once its inexorable and irrepressible character fully comprehended, class compromise logically becomes an obvious impossibility, which it were utopian or criminal according to motive, and inevitably most harmful, to attempt or to commend as a proletarian policy. There can be no end to the class struggle, and no relief from its horrors, until the battle shall have been fought out to a finish; that is, until the working class, the only class fit to survive, the only class, in fact, that cannot die, shall have won it. ”

“ Our hoarder appears as a martyr of exchange value, a holy ascetic crowning the metal pillar. He cares for wealth only in its social form and therefore he buries it away from society. He wants to have the commodity in the form in which it is always capable of entering circulation and therefore he withdraws it from circulation. He dreams of exchange value and therefore does not exchange. The fluid form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and the stone of wisdom madly haunt each other in alchemic fashion. ”

“ Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. ”

“ It is the same press that for twenty years deified Louis Bonaparte as the providence of Europe, that frantically cheered on the slaveholders' rebellion. Now, as then, it drudges for the slaveholder.
Let the sections of the International Working-Men's Association in every country stir the working classes to action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital. ”

“ Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value.
In manufacture, the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labour-power, in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labour. ”

“ And thus, whatever the power of the means of production employed, competition does its best to rob capital of the golden fruit which it produces by reducing the price of commodities to their cost of production,—and, as fast as their production is cheapened, compelling, as if by a despotic law, a continually larger supply of cheaper products to be offered at lower prices. Thus the capitalist will have nothing for his exertions beyond the obligation to produce during the same time an amount larger than before, and an enhancement of the difficulty of employing his capital to advantage. ”

“ Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class-property which makes the labour of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour.—But this is Communism, "impossible" Communism! ”

“ What was it which maintained production in just proportion, or nearly so? It was the demand which governed the supply which preceded it. Production followed consumption step by step. The great industry, forced by the very instruments of which it disposed to produce on an ever-increasing scale, could not wait for the demand. Production preceded consumption, the supply forced the demand.
In existing society, in the industry based on individual exchanges, the anarchy of production, which is the source of so much misery, is at the same time the source of all progress. ”

“ Human life is the real community of men. Just as the isolation from this body is more complete, more painful, more to be feared, more contradictory than is isolation from the political community, so too the removal of this isolation, and even a partial reaction, a revolt against the same, are tasks all the more infinite as man is more infinite than the citizen, and human life than political life. However partial the industrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself a universal soul: political revolt may be never so universal but it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the most colossal form. ”

“ A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation. ”

“ And this bourgeoisie, that had rebelled against even the Parliamentary and literary contest for the supremacy of its own class, that had betrayed its leaders in this contest, it now has the effrontery to blame the proletariat for not having risen in its defence in a bloody struggle, in a struggle for life! Those bourgeois, who at every turn sacrificed their common class interests to narrow and dirty private interests, and who demanded a similar sacrifice from their own Representatives, now whine that the proletariat has sacrificed their idea-political to its own material interests! ”

“ To deprive them of the power of offense, you must deprive them of the means of defense. You must not only garrote, but murder. If ever conqueror took "material guarantees" for breaking the sinews of a nation, the First Napoleon did so by the Tilsit treaty, and the way he executed it against Prussia and the rest of Germany. Yet, a few years later, his gigantic power split like a rotten reed upon the German people. What are the "material guarantees" Prussia, in her wildest dreams, can, or dare impose upon France, compared to the "material guarantees" the first Napoleon had wrenched from herself? ”

“ The serene working men's Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into a pandemonium by the bloodhounds of "order." And what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois mind of all countries? Why, that the Commune has conspired against civilization! The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequalled in any battle known to history. What does that prove? Why, that the Commune was not the people's own government, but the usurpation of a handful of criminals! The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution. ”

“ The law of the supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence;” on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-labourer as wage-labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? The wage-worker of to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. ”

“ The lower middle-class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are, therefore, not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so, only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. ”

“ This was not a mere form of speech, a fashion, nor yet party tactics. The bourgeoisie perceives correctly that all the weapons, which it forged against feudalism, turn their edges against itself; that all the means of education, which it brought forth, rebel against its own civilization; that all the gods, which it made, have fallen away from it. It understands that all its so-called citizens’ rights and progressive organs assail and menace its class rule, both in its social foundation and its political superstructure—consequently, have become “socialistic.” ”

“ Read the manifesto.
The class war has only begun. Between the classes the chasm now is as wide and as deep as the infinite. Jump into it, ye compromisers!
Bleeding and prostrated, the French proletariat must be given time to recover its breath. It is the turn of Germany to struggle; Germany, no longer a dust of petty States, but a great nation, imperialized and united right in the face of that cowardly bourgeoisie that paid Bismarck five round milliards of labor-created wealth for the right to slaughter its own wage-slaves. ”

“ As the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and have nothing at all to do with their natural qualities, we must first ask, What is the common social substance of all commodities? It is Labour. To produce a commodity a certain amount of labour must be bestowed upon it, or worked up in it. And I say not only Labour, but Social Labour. A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product, but not a commodity. As a self-sustaining producer he has nothing to do with society. ”

“ Long before the cloth is sold, perhaps long before it is fully woven, the weaver has received his wages. The capitalist, then, does not pay his wages out of the money which he will obtain from the cloth, but out of money already on hand. Just as little as loom and yarn are the product of the weaver to whom they are supplied by the employer, just so little are the commodities which he receives in exchange for his commodity—labor-power— his product. ”

“ Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. ”

“ If the labourer wants all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his race, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of productiveness in his labour, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous time, no surplus-labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors. ”