Das Kapital Quotes

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state

As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.10

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.

The Mayor about the fable of the Prodigal Son: 'But he came home.' 'Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. Das Kapital had not yet been written, so he was unable to situate himself in the class struggle. Is it any wonder that he wavered for a time, poor boy?

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.

Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.

أن البلد الأكثر تطورا ، يبين للبلدان الأقل تطورا شكل مستقبلها

Nature. He disliked its prickly stems, its bramble and bush, the obstinate precision of its cycles, its preconfigured calendar, the coded tapestry of its hills, standing stubbornly in the way of human progress.

Pengabstrakan kerja dalam bentuk uang mengandaikan dialektika di antara perkerjaan/kerja yang secara sosial dibutuhkan untuk membuat barang dagangan/komoditi/jasa, dengan proses produksi kapitalisme yang justru meniadakan kerja manusia itu sendiri. Sehingga proses produksi kapitalisme dalam kelanjutannya hanya menempatkan manusia sebagai bagian dari proses akumulasi modal.

Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods.

Pekerja tidak selalu mendapatkan apa yang dihasilkan oleh kapitalis, tetapi suah pasi akan turut jatuh ketika kapitalis mrngalami kerugian. Sehingga pekerja tidak mendapatkan apapun ketika kapitalis menjaga harga barang di atas harga alaminya baik itu melalui jasa perdagangan atau produksi rahasia, ataupun melalui monopoli

This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24

Sepanjang sejarah manusia yang ditulis—sebutlah sejarah modern, mulai dari era Renaisance pertama atau Revolusi Sosial di Inggris abad ke-16—yang disebut kiri itu ialah orang atau sekelompok orang yang tidak betah pada keadaan yang mapan dan berlangsung. Itulah kiri. Bukan karena membaca buku Karl Marx, Das Kapital, membaca Manifesto Communist, lantas membaca Bismarck tentang nasionalisme atau apapun lainnya, tidak. Kiri itu ialah orang-orang atau sekelompok orang yang tidak betah pada keadaan yang sedang berlangsung dan mapan. Itulah kiri.

My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose … How could either of these books carry fire and sword round half the world? It beats me. [writing to George Bernard Shaw]

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value;

Socialism, which was very up to date a hundred years ago, failed to keep up with the new technology. [...] If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few relating disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

Rumors. They are there to be denied, or if the market is open, to be traded on.

The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.

Diligence in some compels idleness in others.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital.

Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.

Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The similarity does not end there. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx’s Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat.

Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death).

Socialism, which was very up to date a hundred years ago, failed to keep up with the new technology. [...] If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.

But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

On the basis of capitalist production, a new swindle with the wages of management develops in connection with joint-stock companies, in that, over and above the actual managing director, a number of governing and supervisory boards arise, for which management and supervision are in fact a mere pretext for the robbery of shareholders and their own enrichment.

Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.

Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.

In Bibliotheken fühlt man sich wie in Gegenwart eines großen Kapitals, das geräuschlos unberechenbare Zinsen spendet.

Proletaryanın, zincirlerinden başka kaybedecek bir şeyi yoktur. Ama kazanacakları bir dünya vardır.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.

To make the society" [which of course consists of non-workers] "happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied." [3] What Mandeville,

Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[46]

The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.

In Ogunquit,” she said, “he was the most insufferable kid you could imagine. A lot of it was compensation for his family situation, I guess… to them it must have seemed like he had hatched from a cowbird egg or something… but after the flu, he seemed to change. At least to me, he did. He seemed to be trying to be, well… a man. Then he changed again. Like all at once. He started to smile all the time. You couldn’t really talk to him anymore. He was… in himself. The way people get when they convert to religion or read—” She stopped suddenly, and her eyes took on a momentary startled look that seemed very like fear. “Read what?” Stu asked. “Something that changes their lives,” she said. “Das Kapital. Mein Kampf. Or maybe just intercepted love letters.

Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.

How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained “poor,” only “less poor” in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class “an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” then it has remained relatively just as poor.

The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

The very same bourgeois mentality which extols the manufacturing division of labour, the life-long annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and the unconditional subordination of the detail worker to capital, extols them as an organisation of labour which increases productivity - denounces just as loudly every kind of deliberate social control and regulation of the social process of production, denounces it as an invasion of the inviolable property rights, liberty and self-determining genius of the individual capitalist. It is characteristic that the inspired apologists of the factory system can find nothing worse to say of any proposal for the general organisation of social labour, than that it would transform the whole of society into a factory.

Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. [6]

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ... Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ... The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ... The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...

The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.

Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics had simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes. In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.

But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.

Franklin says, “war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.”[164] If the transformation of merchants’ money into capital is to be explained otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would be necessary, which, at present, when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only assumption, are entirely wanting.

إن حقيقة أن الرأسمالي رقم (1) يملك النقود وأنه يشتري وسائل الإنتاج من الرأسمالي رقم (2) الذي يملكها، في حين أن العامل يشتري وسائل عيشه من الرأسمالي رقم (3) بالنقود التي حصل عليها من الرأسمالي رقم (2) لا يغير في شيء من الوضع الجوهري المتمثل في أن الرأسماليين (1) و(2) و(3)، هم، معًا، مالكون حصريون للنقود ووسائل الإنتاج والعيش. إن الإنسان لا يستطيع أن يعيش إلا بأن ينتج وسائل عيشه الخاصة، ولا يمكن له أن ينتجها إلا إذا كان يمتلك وسائل الإنتاج؛ الشروط الشيئية للعمل. ومن الجلي منذ البداية أن العامل المجرد من وسائل الإنتاج هو محروم من وسائل العيش أصلًا، مثلما أن الإنسان المحروم، على العكس، من وسائل العيش، ليس في وضع يؤهله لخلق وسائل إنتاج. وهكذا، حتى في العملية الأولى، فإن ما يسم النقود والسلع بميسم رأسمال، منذ البداية، حتى قبل أن يتم تحويلها فعليًا إلى رأسمال، ليس طبيعتها النقدية ولا طبيعتها السلعية، ولا القيمة الاستعمالية، المادية، لهذه السلع كوسائل إنتاج أو وسائل عيش، بل الظرف الذي يجعل هذه النقود وهذه السلع، وسائل الإنتاج هذه ووسائل العيش هذه، تواجه قدرة العمل، المحرومة من كل ثروة مادية، كقوى ذاتية مستقلة، مجسدة كأشخاص في إهاب مالكيها. إن الشروط الشيئية الضرورية لتحقيق العمل مغَّربة عن العامل، وتتجلى كأصنام حُبيت بإرادة وروح من عندها. وباختصار تظهر السلع كشارٍ للأشخاص. فشاري قدرة العمل ليس سوى تجسيد في صورة شخص للعمل المتشيئ الذي يكرس جزءً من نفسه إلى العامل في شكل وسائل عيش كما يٌلحق قدرة العمل الحي لصالح الجزء المتبقي منه، ويُبقي نفسه سليمًا بل حتى أن ينمو متجاوزًا حجمه الأصلي بفضل هذا الإلحاق. ليس العامل هو من يشتري وسائل الإنتاج والعيش، بل وسائل العيش هي من يشتري العامل بغية دمجه في وسائل الإنتاج.

Was I (am I not still?) a victim of words and books merely, and are books just an excuse for living, living things out in parenthesis, even in the most desolate stony place as I was, quotations and misquotations raining down on me thick and fast – words, words, words – the multitude of words, a parody of rain? For after all, as old Mrs Feany said, the rain is healthy. And the rain it raineth everyday. But the stuff of books and solitude and spying on the poor, could they be healthy? Or were my doubts the real heresy and treason? What book ever changed the world? It seems a solipsism to say that what changes the way we see the world, changes the world, but it is not. Where do you want me to begin? The Bible, Das Kapital? The Divine Comedy, The Satanic Verses?

If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction. He will then agree with Sismondi: “that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold.

all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction, is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist,[181] but also by a series of more enduring consequences.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[14] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.

When gold replaced silver as a measure of value, the same name was applied according to the ratio between the values of silver and gold, to perhaps 1-15th of a pound of gold. The word pound, as a money-name, thus becomes differentiated from the same word as a weight-name.[70] (3) The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and princes to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but the names.[71]

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, at least in its author’s eyes, dealt solely with the natural world. Yet it was as attractive to political theorists as a candle’s flame is to moths. Karl Marx asked if he could dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, an honor the great naturalist declined.5 Darwin’s name was slapped on to Spencer’s political ideas, which would far more accurately have been called Social Spencerism. Darwin himself demolished them in a lapidary reproof. Yes, vaccination has saved millions whose weaker constitutions would otherwise have let them succumb to smallpox, Darwin wrote. And yes, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind, which, to judge from animal breeding, “must be highly injurious to the race of man.” But the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is part of our social instincts, Darwin said. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature,” he wrote. “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.” 6 Had Darwin’s

The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves. In the middle ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors, who lost their political power together with the economic basis on which it was established. Nevertheless, the money relation of debtor and creditor that existed at these two periods reflected only the deeper-lying antagonism between the general economic conditions of existence of the classes in question.

Die Europäer lernten, wissenschaftlich und kapitalistisch zu denken und zu handeln, lange bevor sie einen spürbaren technischen Vorsprung daraus zogen. Als ihre Technologie Früchte trug, waren die Europäer besser als alle anderen in der Lage, sie zu nutzen, und deshalb eroberten sie die Welt. Es ist daher kein Zufall, dass Wissenschaft und Kapitalismus das wichtigste Erbe sind, das der europäische Imperialismus der post-europäischen Welt des 21. Jahrhunderts hinterlässt. Europa und die Europäer mögen nicht mehr die Welt beherrschen, doch Wissenschaft und Kapital werden immer stärker.

In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value form.

This is determined by a wide range of circumstances; it is determined amongst other things by the workers’ average degree of skill, the level of development of science and its technological application, the social organization of the process of production, the extent and effectiveness of the means of production, and the conditions found in the natural environment. For example, the same quantity of labour is present in eight bushels of corn in favourable seasons and in only four bushels in unfavourable seasons. The same quantity of labour provides more metal in rich mines than in poor. Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour-time.

This is not a hypothetical example. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights he predicted an increasingly violent conflict between the proletariat and the capitalists, ending with the inevitable victory of the former and the collapse of the capitalist system. Marx was certain that the revolution would start in countries that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution – such as Britain, France and the USA – and spread to the rest of the world. Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read. At first only a handful of disciples took Marx seriously and read his writings. But as these socialist firebrands gained adherents and power, the capitalists became alarmed. They too perused Das Kapital, adopting many of the tools and insights of Marxist analysis. In the twentieth century everybody from street urchins to presidents embraced a Marxist approach to economics and history. Even diehard capitalists who vehemently resisted the Marxist prognosis still made use of the Marxist diagnosis. When the CIA analysed the situation in Vietnam or Chile in the 1960s, it divided society into classes. When Nixon or Thatcher looked at the globe, they asked themselves who controls the vital means of production. From 1989 to 1991 George Bush oversaw the demise of the Evil Empire of communism, only to be defeated in the 1992 elections by Bill Clinton. Clinton’s winning campaign strategy was summarised in the motto: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Marx could not have said it better. As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly. Capitalists in countries such as Britain and France strove to better the lot of the workers, strengthen their national consciousness and integrate them into the political system. Consequently when workers began voting in elections and Labour gained power in one country after another, the capitalists could still sleep soundly in their beds. As a result, Marx’s predictions came to naught. Communist revolutions never engulfed the leading industrial powers such as Britain, France and the USA, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was consigned to the dustbin of history. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist—in his own phrase, a “utopian Socialist.” He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370.

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense.

Even more impressive was Sorel’s application of the idea of myth to Marxism itself. Again, Sorel held that Marxist prophecy didn’t need to be true. People just needed to think it was true. Even at the turn of the last century it was becoming obvious that Marxism as social science didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Taken literally, Marx’s Das Kapital, according to Sorel, had little merit. But, Sorel asked, what if Marx’s nonsensicalness was actually intended? If you looked at “this apocalyptic text… as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness, it…is a good illustration of the principle on which Marx believed he should base the rules of the socialist action of the proletariat.

Sich der Globalisierung zu widersetzen, sie mit national beschränkten Maßnahmen verhindern zu wollen, bedeutet unweigerlich die Kapitulation vor dieser Globalisierung. Es kann nicht darum gehen, die Globalisierung zu bekämpfen und zu versuchen, sich ihr zu entziehen. Vielmehr gilt es auf globaler Ebene, mit globalen Mitteln für eine andere Globalisierung zu kämpfen. Der Widerstand gegen das transnationale Kapital muß selbst ein transnationaler sein und der gegen die Akteure dieser Globalisierung verlangt vor allem Akteure, die für eine andere Globalisierung streiten, eine Globalisierung, die von einer den ganzen Erdball einbeziehenden Vision und Solidarität und einem weltumspannenden Zivilisationsaufruf getragen wird.

Schließlich verdanken wir nur einen Bruchteil unseres Wohlstands unseren eigenen Anstrengungen. Wir, die wir im Land des Überflusses leben, sind reich dank der Institutionen, des Wissens und des sozialen Kapitals, das unsere Vorfahren angehäuft haben. Dieser Reichtum gehört uns allen. Und ein Grundeinkommen wird uns allen erlauben, daran teilzuhaben.

Critics such as Slavoj Žižek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (“Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’”). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, “The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!,” adding to a long list of guilty associations—“the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!,” “Deleuze spouts the fashionable nonsense of pseudoscience!” Deleuze’s defenders are correct to dismiss such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it.

Das scheue Reh des Kapitals, das goldige Bambi, ein Fluchttier, das ängstlich zitternd im Börsendickicht äst. Ein falsches Wort, es knackt im Unterholz, ein Finanzminister fällt vom Ast, und schon schrickt es auf und springt über den Zaun und rennt nach Luxemburg, das scheue Reh.

Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, Mahavira, Guru Nanak, Plato, Socrates, Marx, and many others, have conveyed approaches to life that were captured in books such as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Talmud, the Quran, the I Ching, the Five Books and Four Classics, the Analects, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Brama Sutras, Meditations, Republic, Metaphysics, The Wealth of Nations, and Das Kapital. These, together with the discoveries of scientists, artists, politicians, diplomats, investors, psychologists, etc., all encountering their realities and adapting to them in their own ways, are what determines a people’s culture.

By bringing together in compact form all the arts of show business-music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity-the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourtselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.

Was wir heute als Volatilität und Instabilität der Märkte bezeichnen, hat damit zu tun, dass die Vertrauensgrundlagen der Ökonomie inzwischen so tief erschüttert sind, dass im Grunde nur noch diejenigen wirklich Geschäfte machen können, die auch zu verlieren bereit sind. Das sogenannte spekulative Kapital und die Spekulanten sind diejenigen, die nicht vom Vertrauen ausgehen, sondern von der Gewinnchance - sie sind die eigentlichen Spieler. Die allmähliche Transformation von der vertrauensbasierten Ökonomie in die Spielerökonomie, die eine sozialpsychologische Umstilisierung ganzer Gesellschaften einschließt, ist ein Teil des Dramas, das wir heute erleben.

For however decisive the Bolsheviks’ victory had been over the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat, they would be having banquets soon enough. Perhaps there would not be as many as there had been under the Romanovs – no autumn dances or diamond jubilees – but they were bound to celebrate something, whether the centennial of Das Kapital or the silver anniversary of Lenin’s beard. Guest lists would be drawn up and shortened. Invitations would be engraved and delivered. Then, having gathered around a grand circle of tables, the new statesmen would nod their heads in order to indicate to a waiter (without interrupting the long-winded fellow on his feet) that, yes, they would have a few more spears of asparagus.

Ich sehe zu. Ist das nichts?" "Wem ist damit geholfen?" "Wem ist zu helfen?", fragte Fabian. "Du willst Macht haben. Du willst, träumst du, das Kleinbürgertum sammeln und führen. Du willst das Kapital kontrollieren und das Proletariat einbürgern. Und dann willst du helfen, einen Kulturstaat aufzubauen, der dem Paradies verteufelt ähnlich sieht. Und ich sage dir: Noch in deinem Paradies werden sie sich die Fresse vollhauen! Davon abgesehen, dass es nie zustande kommen wird ... Ich weiß ein Ziel, aber es leider keines. Ich möchte helfen, die Menschen anständig und vernünftig zu machen. Vorläufig bin ich damit beschäftigt, sie auf ihre diesbezügliche Eignung hin anzuschauen.

Por consiguiente, si la producción de los medios de subsistencia que cada día consume el obrero, término medio, requiere 6 horas, éste habrá de trabajar 6 horas por día, de promedio, para producir diariamente su fuerza de trabajo o reproducir el valor obtenido mediante la venta de la misma. La parte necesaria de su jornada laboral asciende entonces a 6 horas, y por ende, permaneciendo incambiadas las demás circunstancias, es una magnitud dada. Pero con esto no está todavía dada la extensión de la jornada laboral misma. (...) La jornada laboral no es, por tanto, una magnitud constante sino variable. Una de sus partes, ciertamente, se halla determinada por el tiempo de trabajo requerido para la reproducción constante del obrero mismo, pero su magnitud global varía con la extensión o duración del plustrabajo. Por consiguiente, la jornada laboral es determinable, pero en sí y para sí indeterminada (...)El hombre necesita tiempo para la satisfacción de necesidades espirituales y sociales, cuya amplitud y número dependen del nivel alcanzado en general por la civilización. La variación de la jornada laboral oscila pues dentro de límites físicos y sociales. Unos y otros son, sin embargo, de naturaleza muy elástica y permiten la libertad de movimientos. Encontramos, así, jornadas laborales de 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 horas, o sea de las extensiones más disímiles.

Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.

The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.

Товар есть прежде всего внешний предмет, вещь, которая, благодаря её свойствам, удовлетворяет какие-либо человеческие потребности. Природа этих потребностей, — порождаются ли они, например, желудком или фантазией, — ничего не изменяет в деле. Дело также не в том, как именно удовлетворяет данная вещь человеческую потребность: непосредственно ли, как жизненное средство, т. е. как предмет потребления, или окольным путём, как средство производства.

Полезность вещи делает её потребительной стоимостью. Но эта полезность не висит в воздухе. Обусловленная свойствами товарного тела, она не существует вне этого последнего. Поэтому товарное тело, как, например, железо, пшеница, алмаз и т. п., само есть потребительная стоимость, или благо. Этот его характер не зависит от того, много или мало труда стоит человеку присвоение его потребительных свойств. При рассмотрении потребительных стоимостей всегда предполагается их количественная определённость, например дюжина часов, аршин холста, тонна железа и т. п. Потребительные стоимости товаров составляют предмет особой дисциплины — товароведения. Потребительная стоимость осуществляется лишь в пользовании или потреблении. Потребительные стоимости образуют вещественное содержание богатства, какова бы ни была его общественная форма. При той форме общества, которая подлежит нашему рассмотрению, они являются в то же время вещественными носителями меновой стоимости.

Вещь может быть потребительной стоимостью и не быть стоимостью. Так бывает, когда её полезность для человека не опосредствована трудом. Таковы: воздух, девственные земли, естественные луга, дикорастущий лес и т. д. Вещь может быть полезной и быть продуктом человеческого труда, но не быть товаром. Тот, кто продуктом своего труда удовлетворяет свою собственную потребность, создаёт потребительную стоимость, но не товар. Чтобы произвести товар, он должен произвести не просто потребительную стоимость, но потребительную стоимость для других, общественную потребительную стоимость. {И не только для других вообще. Часть хлеба, произведённого средневековым крестьянином, отдавалась в виде оброка феодалу, часть — в виде десятины попам. Но ни хлеб, отчуждавшийся в виде оброка, ни хлеб, отчуждавшийся в виде десятины, не становился товаром вследствие того только, что он произведён для других. Для того чтобы стать товаром, продукт должен быть передан в руки того, кому он служит в качестве потребительной стоимости, посредством обмена.} Наконец, вещь не может быть стоимостью, не будучи предметом потребления. Если она бесполезна, то и затраченный на неё труд бесполезен, не считается за труд и потому не образует никакой стоимости.

Полезность вещи делает её потребительной стоимостью (use value)

Меновая стоимость (exchange value) прежде всего представляется в виде количественного соотношения, в виде пропорции, в которой потребительные стоимости одного рода обмениваются на потребительные стоимости другого рода, — соотношения, постоянно изменяющегося в зависимости от времени и места. Меновая стоимость кажется поэтому чем-то случайным и чисто относительным, а внутренняя, присущая самому товару меновая стоимость (valeur intrinsèque) представляется каким-то contradictio jecto [противоречием в определении].

Или, как говорит старик Барбон: «Один сорт товаров так же хорош, как и другой, если равны их меновые стоимости. Между вещами, имеющими равные меновые стоимости, не существует никакой разницы, или различия». Как потребительные стоимости товары различаются прежде всего качественно, как меновые стоимости они могут иметь лишь количественные различия, следовательно не заключают в себе ни одного атома потребительной стоимости.

Общественно необходимое рабочее время есть то рабочее время, которое требуется для изготовления какой-либо потребительной стоимости при наличных общественно нормальных условиях производства и при среднем в данном обществе уровне умелости и интенсивности труда. Так, например, в Англии после введения парового ткацкого станка для превращения данного количества пряжи в ткань требовалась, быть может, лишь половина того труда, который затрачивался на это раньше. Конечно, английский ручной ткач «48» и после того употреблял на это превращение столько же рабочего времени, как прежде, но теперь в продукте его индивидуального рабочего часа была представлена лишь половина общественного рабочего часа, и потому стоимость этого продукта уменьшилась вдвое.

Стоимость товара определяется количеством труда .... Величина стоимости товара изменяется, таким образом, прямо пропорционально количеству и обратно пропорционально производительной силе труда, находящего себе осуществление в этом товаре.

Технология вскрывает активное отношение человека к природе, непосредственный процесс производства его жизни, а вместе с тем и его общественных условий жизни и проистекающих из них духовных представлений. Даже всякая история религии, абстрагирующаяся от этого материального базиса, — некритична. Конечно, много легче посредством анализа найти земное ядро туманных религиозных представлений, чем, наоборот, из данных отношений реальной жизни вывести соответствующие им религиозные формы. Последний метод есть единственно материалистический, а следовательно, единственно научный метод. Недостатки абстрактного естественнонаучного материализма, исключающего исторический процесс, обнаруживаются уже в абстрактных и идеологических представлениях его защитников, едва лишь они решаются выйти за пределы своей специальности.

In Das Kapital, Marx made an insightful comment on the failure of Overend Gurney. High interest might indicate prosperity, wrote Marx, but it could also indicate ‘that the country is undermined by the roving cavaliers of credit who can afford to pay a high interest because they pay it out of other people’s pockets … and meanwhile they live in grand style on anticipated profits.’54

Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China's man-made famines or the Soviet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed.

Seit der sogenannten Wiedervereinigung haben vor allem Menschen aus Westdeutschland bestimmt, auf welche Weise über welche Themen gesprochen wurde. Man kann das für jedes Feld durchspielen: Ob beim Aufeinandertreffen von West- und Ostjournalist*innen, von West- und Ostfeminist*innen oder von West- und Ostlinken, überall galten dieselben Spielregeln, bei denen die Erfahrungen und das Wissen der Menschen mit Ostbiografien nahezu nichts mehr wert waren. Als hätte ihr kulturelles und politisches Kapital gemeinsam mit der Ostmark die Konversion nicht überlebt.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, political theorist, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known works are the “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”. He died stateless and poverty-stricken with fewer than a dozen mourners attending his funeral. His last words reportedly were: “Go away! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

Während ich das schreibe, läßt nebenan im Werbefernsehen das Kapital seine heiligen Kühe steuerbegünstigt aufmarschieren, denen durch revolutionäre Gewalt versagt ist, am eigenen Leib zu erfahren, daß die Endlösung des Konsumproblems für den Kapitalismus im Ernstfall immer die Wegrationalisierung der Konsumenten ist; und man muß weder Kommunist noch Mitglied des Club of Rome sein, um zu prophezeihen, daß auch diese Gespenster ihrer natürlichen Bestimmung nicht entgehen werden.

„Hochgeehrter Herr! Mein letzter Brief erfordert einen Abschluss. Da haben Sie ihn: Ich habe die Sache aufgegeben... Den Juden ist vorläufig noch nicht zu helfen. Wenn Einer ihnen das gelobte Land zeigte, würden sie ihn verhöhnen. Denn sie sind verkommen. Dennoch weiss ich, wo es liegt: in uns. In unserem Kapital, in unserer Arbeit und in der eigenthümlichen Verbindung Beider, die ich ersonnen habe. Aber wir müssen noch tiefer herunterkommen, noch mehr beschimpft, angespuckt, verhöhnt, geprügelt, geplündert und erschlagen werden, bis wir für diese Idee reif sind.

Das Kapital

Die Entfremdung erscheint sowohl darin, daß mein Lebensmittel eines andern ist, daß das, was mein Wunsch, der unzugängliche Besitz eines andern ist, als daß jede Sache selbst ein andres als sie selbst, als daß meine Tätigkeit ein andres, als endlich – und das gilt auch für den Kapitalisten – daß überhaupt die unmenschliche Macht her[rscht].