Democracy is the road to socialism.

Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

In a social order dominated by capitalist production even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.

Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce.

Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

In a constantly revolving circle every point is simultaneously a point of departure and a point of return. If we interrupt the rotation, not every point of departure is a point of return.

In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.

On the other hand one must not entertain any fantastic illusions on the productive power of the credit system, so far as it supplies or sets in motion money-capital.

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

One capitalist always kills many.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

We have just seen that, apart from money-capital, circulating capital is only another name for commodity-capital. But to the extent that labour power circulates in the market,it is not capital, no form of commodity-capital. It is not capital at all; the labourer is not a capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.

There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.

In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.

These numerous points at which money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated in numerous individual hoards or potential money-capitals appears as so many obstacles to circulation, because they immobilise the money and deprive it of its capacity to circulate for a certain time.

In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone 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.

A house sold by A to B does not wander from one place to another, although it circulates as a commodity.

Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however,consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.

The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

We see then, commodities are in love with money, but "the course of true love never did run smooth".

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine.

Titles of property, for instance railway shares, may change hands every day, and their owner may make a profit by their sale even in foreign countries, so that titles to property are exportable, although the railway itself is not.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.

Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

The process is so complicated that it offers ever so many occasions for running abnormally.

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

A circuit performed by a capital and meant to be a periodical process, not an individual act, is called its turnover. The duration of this turnover is determined by the sum of its time of production and its time of circulation.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.

Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

But capitalist production begets,with the inexorability of a law of Nature,its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is below all calculation.

Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market.

The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

Long hours of labour seem to be the secret of the rational and healthful processes, which are to raise the condition of the labourer by an improvement of his mental and moral powers and to make a rational consumer out of him.

If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

As a beast of toil an ox is fixed capital. If he is eaten, he no longer functions as an instrument of labour, nor as fixed capital either.

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.

Nor is it the irrationality of the form which is taken as characteristic. On the contrary, one overlooks the irrational.

But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet makers, thrown on the streets?