Democracy is the road to socialism.

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.

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

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

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.

Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

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

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.

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

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

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!

But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price.

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.

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.

Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too.

The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.

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.

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

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

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

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.

Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities.

Capital is money: Capital is commodities. [...] 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.

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

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

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

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

Capital is money, capital is commodities. ... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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 capitalist cannot store labour-power in warehouses after he has bought it, as he may do with the raw material.

In capitalist society however where social reason always asserts itself only post festum great disturbances may and must constantly occur.

But simultaneously with the development of capitalist production the credit system also develops. The money-capital which the capitalist cannot as yet employ in his own business is employed by others, who pay him interest for its use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy.