Flagrant violation

“It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declarations of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation (and is, therefore, urgently called for), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a crime…thus even in the period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a means, who’s end is the life of civil society.  It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.”

-Karl Marx, 1843.  (“On the Jewish Question”.  In The Marx-Engles Reader.  1978. Robert Tucker (ed).  New York: WW Norton.  Pg. 43-4.)

Oh snap

“On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects”

-Karl Marx, not a fan of John Stuart Mill, 1867 (Capital volume 1.  New York: The Modern Library. Pg 568)

General ripening

“By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, [the concentration of capital] matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital Volume 1.  New York: The Modern Library.  Pg 552)

Factory enthusiasts

“It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of the labor of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.”

-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital, volume 1. New York: The Modern Library. Pg 391)

Shall we overcome?

“[Marx's] analysis implies that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming the limits to democratic politics that result from systematically grounded exploitation  and inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, relatedly, the horizon of politics”

-Moishe Postone, 2006 (“History and Helplessness: mass  mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism”.  Public Culture 18(1).  P 94)