The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
Use itEssay: theory must lead to action; interpretation without change is incomplete.
Thinker · 13 quotes
Karl Marx quotes for UPSC
13 sourced quotes by Karl Marx on economy, development & poverty, history & civilisation, duty & responsibility, governance & administration, equality & social justice, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.
— Karl MarxLetter to W. Bracke (5 May 1875)
Use itGS2: implementation over announcements; one real step beats many programmes.
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.
Use itEssay on solidarity: no group is free while another is oppressed.
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?
Use itGS3: automation/AI displaces workers; new jobs elsewhere don't compensate those lost.
Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.
— Karl MarxNotebook II, The Chapter on Money, p. 142
Use itGS4: money as source of greed; root of corruption.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
— Karl MarxAuthor's prefaces to the First Edition
Use itGS3: development paths; industrialised nations preview developing countries' futures and pitfalls.
The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.
Use itEssay on growth vs welfare: aggregate wealth can hide mass suffering of poor.
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.
Use itGS3: speculative bubbles; everyone expects the crash to hit someone else.
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.
— Karl MarxVol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556
Use itGS3: unsustainable growth exhausts both soil and labour.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
— Karl MarxThe Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Chapter 3 (1850)
Use itGS1: revolutions as drivers of historical change.
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
— Karl MarxAbsolute Criticism’s Second Campaign, Ch. 6:2a p.116 (1845)
Use itEssay: history is made by human actions, not fate.
Only that position can impart dignity in which we do not appear as servile tools but rather create independently within our circle.
— Karl MarxWritings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 38
Use itEssay on dignity at work: autonomy and creativity, not servility.
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.
Use itEssay on imagination: humans design in the mind first; vision precedes creation.