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Quote by Karl Marx

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Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

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Karl Marx
Karl Marx

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, political theorist, and revolutionary. He is one of the founders of Marxism and his works, including 'Das Kapital' and 'The Communist Manifesto', have had a profound impact on the world. more

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“Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea.”

InspirationEncouragement
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“Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them. Those rules, logical deductions from the nature of the parties and the circumstances one has to deal with in such a case, are so plain and simple that the short experience of 1848 had made the Germans pretty well acquainted with them. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority: unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!”

RevolutionMarxEngels
Author:Karl marx and friedrich engels
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“Lenin clearly and unambiguously poses the question of the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, of the impermissibility of identification of the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is found in those concrete-scientific ideas about the constitution of matter (about the ‘physical’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and in natural scientific generalizations of these ideas that are inevitably turn out to be historically limited, changing, subject to reconsideration by the natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism is found in the acceptance of the objective reality that exists independently of human cognition and that is only reflected in it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the ‘philosophical conclusions derived from the newest discoveries of natural science’ is, according to Lenin, found not in the reconsideration of this essence and not in making the ideas of natural scientists eternal, but in the deepening of the understanding of the ‘relationship between cognition and the physical world’ that is connected with these new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and therefore, the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical materialism”

PhilosophyScienceReligionIdealismMarxEngelsLeninDialectical MaterialismObscurantismPositivist Science
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“In 1858 Engels sarcastically described the tamed British workers in the bluntest terms: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a na- tion which exploits the whole world this is to a certain ex- tent justifiable." (2) Britain was the Imperial Rome, the Amerikan Empire of that day - a nation which "feasted" on the exploitation of colonies around the entire world. Engels, as a communist, didn't make lame excuses for the corrupted English workers, but exposed them. He held the English workers accountable to the world proletariat for their sorry political choices.”

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“(On Engels' critique of anti-authoritarianism) “Nobody was talking about the use of revolutionary violence being authoritarianism. That's always been an invalid thing to point out. You know, is a slave rising up and overthrowing their master, is that "authoritarian"? Is a woman trying to escape her abusive husband or defending herself against her abusive husband, is that "authoritarian"?”

ViolenceAnarchismDominanceAuthoritarianismEngelsLibertarian Socialism
Author:Anark
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“So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.”

PhilosophySocialismMarxismMarxPolitical TheoryEngelsRoutledge
Author:Alex Callinicos Stathis Kouvelakis Lucia Pradella
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“As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.”

LibertyAuthorityMarxEngels
Author:Friedrich Engels
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“Si tratta di pensare in maniera diversa l'esistenza concreta della specie. Non che il tempo passa e noi invecchiamo: noi siamo protagonisti del nostro tempo e costruiamo la nostra vita, giorno per giorno, settimana per settimana, mese per mese, anno per anno, idea per idea, sentimento per sentimento, apprendimento per apprendimento, riflessione per riflessione, espressione per espressione. Allora abbiamo una visione più chiara: quando parliamo di interrelazione universale (lo ha detto anche Engels cercando di realizzare Hegel) non ci riferiamo a una interrelazione universale fatidica e fatale, tutta negativa, che quindi potrà realizzarsi solo attraverso bagni di sangue. Di vittoria in vittoria nascerà una nuova sconfitta, o di sconfitta in sconfitta cerchiamo la vittoria? Questo è il punto, il punto di partenza. Ecco perché non partiamo dal conflitto, non partiamo dalla negazione e non partiamo dalla negazione della negazione. Può sembrare una sfida eccessiva all'obbrobrio, all'oppressione, alla devastazione del sistema, ma è obbligatorio domandarsi: tutti coloro che sono partiti dal conflitto e lo hanno assolutizzato dove sono arrivati, a che conclusioni sono giunti, che strade ci hanno fornito, che chance ci hanno dato? Ci hanno insegnato molto, ma che obiettivo ci propongono? È possibile vincere continuando a partire dal conflitto? E il conflitto non è forse il terreno a cui l'avversario vuole costringerci, non è forse quello che dobbiamo rifiutare, che dobbiamo cercare di superare da tutti i punti di vista? Per esempio: il conflitto di genere c'è, addirittura abbiamo parlato di uno scontro necessario con il marxismo. Tuttavia questo è il punto di partenza o una conseguenza? Il vero punto di partenza è cercare di ricostruire a un livello più alto, nella logica dell'autosuperamento - che contiene profondamente opposizione, contrarietà, contrapposizione, conflitto, ma tende già a superarli -, l'unità della specie, la sua possibilità di sviluppo a un livello superiore. Su questo si gioca tutto. Cominciamo da un sì o cominciamo sui no? E dove andiamo a finire? Da che punto di vista partiamo e dove arriviamo, dove vogliamo arrivare? Questo è un problema filosoficamente molto profondo. Purtroppo Hegel ha fornito le ragioni maggiori di questa dialettica della negatività che dobbiamo cercare di superare d'entrata. Non è soltanto un desiderio (e se già lo fosse sarebbe una cosa molto grande), ha a che fare con tutto il modo in cui pensiamo alla nostra impresa, alla nostra causa, alla nostra vita.”

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“Those who have been forced to study 'dialectical materialism', the strange concoction that was supposed to form the philosophical foundation of Marxism in the Soviet Union and other countries of socialist camp, will never forget the definition Friedrich Engels gave : Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies. If one sets aside the disgust form the relentless drilling of this formula into our poor brains, along with other jewels of Marxist wisdom, it does not sound so bad now, even if trivial and largely beside the point.”

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