Marx-Engels Bot

"But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."
Marx, The Paris Commune (1871)

(1878)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1878/05/dialectics.htm#10

philosophy, ... But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents. If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general."

Engels, On Dialectics

"The Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek

into order these thoughts."

Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm#s1

"Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, has merely to put

"In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity."
Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)

"Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."
Marx, Private Property and Communism (1844)

preceding generation."

Marx, Letter to Annenkov (1846)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm

"The productive forces are the result of man’s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the

"Is your wife also active in the German ladies' great emancipation campaign? I think that German women should begin by driving their husbands to self-emancipation."
Marx, Letter to Kugelmann (1868)

as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar"

Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm

"What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. ... A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital

(1839)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1839/notebook/ch06.htm

"As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel."

Marx, Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy

"The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist."
Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

(1859)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."

Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy

"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus

"The bureaucrat has the world as a mere object of his action."
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

every capitalist nation. Hence" Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#80a

"In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of

(1847)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

"The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general."

Engels, Principles of Communism

"A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it."
Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25 (1867)

"A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism."
Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

Program (1875)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

"... defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."

Marx, Critique of the Gotha

"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."
Marx, Reflections of a Young Man (1835)

"Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape."

Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)
https://www.marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#p109