Capital, Grundrisse, Communist Manifesto
I’m a regular scavenger at those book donation bins they leave out before graduation, and I found this treasure, a collection of Marx and Engels’ writings on political economy. I read through selections from the Grundrisse (which translates to “groundwork” loosely), the precursor to Marx’ most known work, Das Kapital; in addition, the short Communist Manifesto and a few other shorter essays. Reading these take quite a bit of attention since the writing is very repetitive. I still found new ideas, especially relating to Marx’ references of Malthus (on overpopulation) and Sismondi (early socialistic ideas). Even though the main ideas are no longer as revolutionary as they were centuries ago, the more nuanced ones that dealt with wage labor and economic crises are still provocative and relevant.
Das Kapital is Marx’ great railing against capitalism, and he sometimes mentions contradictions in capitalism that make it unsustainable. One interesting and especially prescient contradiction Marx described is population’s role in capitalism. The more the world is populated with surplus labor (young people able to do work), the more leverage the capitalists will have to lower wages for the currently employed since the hungry and unemployed are eager and able to step in to those jobs. Yet, the more this happens, the more the currently employed will be less able and less willing to have children due to high relative costs of raising children, as prices get more expensive in the city relative to their wages (effectively, lower wages). The catch is that if fewer people have children due to wages, capitalism has fewer of the surplus labor that it thrives on, and hence the more developed nations have problems with too many old and not enough young, so the economy stagnates. The contradiction goes, the more a society develops, the more it will stagnate, and from East Asia and many parts of Europe this is an increasingly alarming reality.
% grep -i "capital, grundrisse, communist manifesto" quotes.txt9 matches
on capital
“The worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labor power, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence”
— Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital
on capital
“The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract”
— Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital
on capital
“It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. It creates a world after its own image”
— Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
on wealth
“The measure of wealth is then not labor time, but disposable time. Labor time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty”
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse
on capitalism
“The boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital
on capitalism
“Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labor-power. It’s just as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital
on capitalism
“Capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into the social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the laborer”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital
on market crisis
“Overproduction is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is, to exploit the maximum amount of labor with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital
on automation
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him”
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital