The Wisdom of Karl Marx

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• Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453201664
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

An A-to-Z reference of the great social reformer's own words Among modern philosophers, few have had a greater impact on history than Karl Marx. Now this easy-to-use introduction to the nineteenth-century theorist breaks down his work into definitions of his terms and concepts, including Bourgeois State, Classless Society, and Freedom of the Press. Accompanied by an insightful introductory essay that puts the included excerpts from his works in context, The Wisdom of Marx is essential reading for an understanding of the man whose work incited far-reaching social and economic change.

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SACRIFICE, PROLETARIAN

The raising of wages gives rise to overwork among the workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labor, in the service of avarice completely losing all their freedom, thereby they shorten their lives. This shortening of their life span is a favorable circumstance for the working class as a whole, for as a result of it an ever-fresh supply of labor becomes necessary. This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed.—M.

SATISFACTION, MODE OF

An object satisfies the wants directly as a means of subsistence, or indirectly as a means of production.—C. 1.

SAVING

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.” Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital!—C. 1.

The less you eat, drink, and read books; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure, which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital.—M.

SCARCITY

The greater the scarcity of the products offered relative to the demand, the dearer they are.—P. P.

SELLING AND BUYING

If selling and buying disappear, free selling and buying disappear also.—C. M.

SENSE PERCEPTION

Sense perception must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense perception in the twofold form both of sensuous consciousness and of sensuous need—that is, only when science proceeds from nature—is it true science.—M.

SENSES

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.—M.

Wherever the sensuous affirmation is the direct annulment of the object in its independent form (as in eating, drinking, working, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object.—M.

SENSUOUS WORLD

The more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor—to be his labor’s means of life; and secondly, that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.—M.

SEPARATION

Separation appears as the normal relation in this society. Where therefore it does not in fact apply, it is presumed and so far correctly; for in this society unity appears as accidental, separation as normal, and consequently separation is maintained as the relation even when one person unites separate functions.—C. 4.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

Was it not Christianity before anything else that separated church and state?—L. A.

SEPARATION OF LABORERS

The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale.—C. 1.

SERVICES

Services may also be forced on me—the services of officials, etc.—C. 4.

SERVICES, ENJOYMENT OF

Certain services, or the use-values, resulting from certain forms of activity or labor are embodied in commodities; others on the contrary leave no tangible result existing apart from the persons themselves who perform them; in other words, their result is not a vendible commodity. For example, the service a singer renders to me satisfies my aesthetic need; but what I enjoy exists only in an activity inseparable from the singer himself, and as soon as his labor, the singing, is at an end, my enjoyment too is at an end. I enjoy the activity itself—its reverberation on my ear.—C. 4.

SEXUAL RELATIONS

The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural relationship of the sexes man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature—his own natural function. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reducible to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature has to him become the human essence of man.—M.

In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain, and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural procreative relationship is conceived.—M.

Mill suggests public acclaim for those who prove themselves continent in their sexual relations.—M.

SHAKESPEARE

In “Timon of Athens”, Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money.—M.

SHORTENING OF LABOR-TIME

The shortening of the working day is by no means what is aimed at, in capitalist production, when labor is economized by increasing its productiveness. It is only the shortening of the labor-time necessary for the production of a definite quantity of commodities that is aimed at.—C. 1.

SIGHT

The light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye.—C.

SIMPLE REPRODUCTION

In the case of simple reproduction the surplus-value produced and realized annually, or periodically, if there are several turnovers during the year, is consumed individually, that is to say, unproductively, by its owner, the capitalist.—C. 2.

Apart from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production, in other words, simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value.—C. 1.

SKEPTICISM

The medical skepticism of the Parisian professors and students seems to be the order of the day.—Ltr. to Engels.

SLAVE CLASS

The worker gets the smallest and utterly indispensable part of the whole produce—as much, only, as is necessary for the propagation, not of humanity, but of the slave class of workers.—M.

SLAVE DEALER

The capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his own labor power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave dealer.—C. 1.

SLAVE MARKET

The slave market maintains its supply of the commodity labor power by war, piracy, etc., and this rapine is not promoted by a process of circulation, but by the actual appropriation of the labor power of others by direct physical compulsion. Even in the United States, after the conversion of the buffer territory between the wage-labor states of the North and the slavery states of the South into a slave-breeding region for the South, where the slave thrown on the market thus became himself an element of the annual reproduction, this did not suffice for a long time, so that the African slave trade was continued as long as possible to satisfy the market.—C. 2.

SLAVERY

Slavery is an economic category as well as any other.—P. P.

Man has often made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material of money.—C. 1.

The purchase and sale of slaves is formally also a purchase and sale of commodities. But money cannot perform this function without the existence of slavery. If slavery exists, then money can be invested in the purchase of slaves. On the other hand, the mere possession of money cannot make slavery possible.—C. 2.

SLAVERY, BOURGEOIS

Direct slavery is the pivot of bourgeois industry as well as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you cannot have modern industry. It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce in the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the highest importance.—P. P.

SLUMP

Whilst labor brings about the accumulation of capitals and with this the increasing prosperity of society, it renders the worker ever more dependent on the capitalist, leads him into competition of a new intensity, and drives him into the headlong rush of overproduction, with the subsequent corresponding slump.—M.

SMALL CAPITALIST

It is obvious that where industrial labor has reached a high level, and where therefore almost all manual labor has become factory-labor, the entire capital of a small capitalist does not suffice to provide him even with the necessary fixed capital.—M.

The small capitalist has the choice: (1) either to consume his capital, since he can no longer live on the interest—and thus cease to be a capitalist; or (2) to set up a business himself, sell his commodity cheaper, buy dearer than the wealthier capitalist, and pay increased wages—thus ruining himself, the market-price being already very low as a result of the intense competition presupposed.—M.

SMALL PROPERTY

While every social improvement benefits the big estate, it harms small property, because it increases its need for ready cash.—M.

SMITH, ADAM

Adam Smith, like all economists worth speaking of, takes over from the physiocrats the conception of the average wage, which he calls the natural price of wages.—C. 4.

Adam Smith discovered the division of labor.—P. P.

Engels was right to call Adam Smith the Luther of political economy.—M.

Adam Smith very acutely notes that the really great development of the productive power of labor starts only from the moment when it is transformed into wage-labor, and the conditions of labor confront it on the one hand as landed property and on the other as capital.—C. 4.

The capitalist, Adam Smith says, “could have no interest to employ the laborers, unless he expected from the sale of their work something more than what was sufficient to replace his stock to him.”—C. 4.

Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance because they contain problems which it is true he does not solve, but which he reveals by contradicting himself. His correct insistence in this connection is best shown by the fact that his successors take opposing stands based on one aspect of his teaching or the other.—C. 4.

Adam’s twistings and turnings, his contradictions and wanderings from the point, prove that, once he had made wages, profit, and rent the constituent component parts of exchangeable value or of the total price of the market, he had got himself stuck in the mud and had to get stuck.—C. 4.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonism.—C. M.

SOCIAL EVENTS

While every social improvement benefits the big estate, it harms small property.—M.

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.—C. 1.

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.—P. E.

SOCIAL RANK

In the early epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate graduations.—C. M.

SOCIAL RELATIONS

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will.—P. E.

SOCIAL SCUM

The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Copyright Page