Marxism Quotes

I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world.

~ Warren Ellis

In a society not characterised by class exploitation, the relationship between the processes of surplus-production and reproduction of labour-power is qualitatively distinct from that characterising societies in which exploitation dominates...surplus-labour is identified by the nature of its contribution to social reproduction, not by the fact that it is provately appropriated.

~ Lise Vogel

The secret of wealth is that workers are systematically underpaid.

~ Julie Rivkin

The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society.

~ Karl Marx

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.

~ Francis Spufford

The right to make revolution is unconditional, for it alone establishes right.

~ Stathis Kouvelakis

...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.

~ Karl Marx

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

~ Murray Kempton

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

~ Terry Eagleton

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.

~ Karl Marx

What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

~ Karl Marx

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.

~ Eric Hobsbawm

The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl.

~ Irving Berlin

During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, Shoot! A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration.

~ Rosa Luxemburg

Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. Worst and probably intractable was the fact that people who had spent their lives securing power and individual leverage were expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively...

~ Masha Gessen

No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But epicurean sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.

~ Friedrich Engels

With them the individual counted for nothing. No one was irreplaceable, because they drew no distinction between one man and another... In this community there was harmony, but no love.

~ Michael Ende

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

~ Jung Chang

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

~ Karl Marx

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it

~ Karl Marx

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it

~ Karl Marx

After Jacob had worked for Laban for seven years, do you know what happened? Laban fooled him and gave him his ugly daughter Leah. So to marry Rachel, Jacob was forced to work another seven years.So, you see, children, the Bible clearly teaches us you can never trust an employer.

~ Joseph Stein

Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.

~ David Mitchell

Perhaps the breaking of the human spirit into submissive, thoughtless robots is the most terrible feature of Stalin’s Russia. Humanity is bowed down. Every one cringes before his superiors, and those who abase themselves seek outlets in bullying and terrifying the unfortunates beneath them. Integrity, courage and charity disappear in the stifling atmosphere of cant, falsehood and terror.

~ Freda Utley

He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it’s obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire.

~ Francine Prose

Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide prosperity. Although man can travel faster than sound and potentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work.

~ W. Cleon Skousen

Socialism is a monster, which will die.

~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.

~ Paul Johnson

‎The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

~ Leon Trotsky

There is nothing illogical in the desire of the have-nots to appropriate the wealth of the haves; in fact, it is part and parcel of the law of animal life. The bear robs the hive and the wolf the fold, and when nature red in tooth and claw is stretched into its human dimension, there is nothing irrational in Marx's theory that, granted the power, one social class should devour another. But what is irrational is, to assume that by robbing the hive the bear will assume the industry of the bee, or by robbing the fold the wolf will become as pacific as the sheep. It is astonishing that a man of Marx's high intelligence could have believed in ritualistic cannibalism on the social plane; that by wresting the forces of production from the bourgeoisie and centralizing them in the hands of the proletariat, the proletariat would automatically aacquire the skills of the ruling class. And it is equally astonishing that a man of Lenin's mental calibre could have attempted to put this magic into practice.

~ J.f.c. Fuller

Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.

~ A.e. Samaan

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

~ Mikhail Bakunin

An excessive knowledge of Marxism is a sign of a misspent youth.

~ John Mccarthy