From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves… [read more]

I am very pleased to find you so resolute, and to see your thoughts turning away from the past and towards a new enterprise. To Paris, then! That ancient bastion of philosophy — absit omen! [May this be no ill omen!] — and the modern capital of the modern world. Whatever… [read more]

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. [read more]

In 1867 there appeared in Hamburg Capital, a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I, Marx’s chief work, which expounds the foundations of his economic socialist conceptions and the main features of his criticism of existing society, the capitalist mode of… [read more]

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from… [read more]

The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists to buy the labour power of the worker at its value, but to extract from it much more than its value, by making the worker work longer than is necessary in order… [read more]

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. [read more]

This has now been the motto of the English working-class movement for the last fifty years. It did good service in the time of the rising Trades Unions after the repeal of the infamous Combination Laws in 1824 ; it did still better service in the time of the glorious Chartist… [read more]

The author of the article “Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr. Zhukovsky” is obviously an intelligent man and, had he found a single passage in my account of “primitive accumulation” to support his conclusions, he would have quoted it. For want of such a passage he considers it… [read more]

This is Engels’s afterword to the 1894 reprint of his book On Social Relations in Russia (1875). In it, he addresses a polemic in which Marx is very implicated, regarding the applicability of his theories to the Russian situation. I discovered it through Anatoly… [read more]

Why can’t capitalists treat workers better? Why do we get paid so much less than the value of what we produce with our labour? That capitalism exploits workers is obvious to anyone who has worked for wages, and Marx was not the first person to point it out. Utopian socialists… [read more]

Commodity fetishism is the observation that through many small separate acts of market exchange we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. It’s a key concept in Marx’s critique of… [read more]

Yesterday I received a letter in which you demand from me a detailed judgment of Proudhon. Lack of time prevents me from fulfilling your desire. Added to which I have none of his works to hand. However, in order to assure you of my good will I will quickly jot down a… [read more]

Forty years ago England stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearance by force only. The immense and rapid development of manufactures had outstripped the extension of foreign markets and the increase of demand. Every ten years the march of industry was violently… [read more]

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment. [read more]

The Doctor was found in his library, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He must be over seventy years of age. His physique is well knit, massive, erect. He has the head of a man of intellect, and the features of a cultivated Jew. His hair and beard are long… [read more]

Marx, at the height of fury, slammed his fist down on the table so hard that the lamp on the table reverberated and tottered, and jumping up from his place, said at the same time: “Ignorance has never yet helped anybody.” [read more]

Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The… [read more]

This is, perhaps, the place to make a few remarks, by way of explanation and justification, about the Hegelian dialectic — both in general and in particular, as expounded in the Phenomenology and Logic, as well as about its relation to the modern critical… [read more]

It’s possible to discern a bifurcation in the theoretical history of Marxism. If we represent this history as a great tree that splits near the base into two thick, well-defined branches — which in turn have divisions and subdivisions of their own — this would not be far removed… [read more]

Despite all the wrongheaded effort on the part of “Anarcho-Communists,” the chasm between Marxism and Anarchism remains fundamental and unbridgeable. Engels and Lenin are often cited, but Marx was explicit, among other occasions, in this tear-down of Bakunin’s work. [read more]

The question has often been asked, in what degree are the different classes of society useful or even necessary? And the answer was naturally a different one for every different epoch of history considered. There was undoubtedly a time when a territorial aristocracy was an… [read more]

In capitalism, we get most of the things we need to survive through exchange. Commodities are useful things people exchange. The fact that they’re exchanged is what makes them commodities. Each one has a double character: [read more]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. [read more]

It has been said that we are living in “an era of primitive accumulation.” Whether or not processes of primitive accumulation especially mark the present, invocations of the term certainly do. When Taiaiake Alfred credits Glen Coulthard with having “rescued Karl Marx from his… [read more]

The distinguishing feature of the period in which Sismondi wrote was the rapid development of exchange (what in modern terminology we refer to as “money economy”), which manifested particularly sharply after the remnants of feudalism were destroyed by the French… [read more]

There are four things one needs to know about Marx’s relationship to his immediate philosophical context. [read more]

The subjective essence of private property, private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person, is labor. It, therefore, goes without saying that only that political economy which recognized labor as its principle (Adam Smith), and which therefore no longer regarded… [read more]

A number of Socialists have recently launched a veritable crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to label this or that act authoritarian for them to condemn it. This summary procedure is abused to such an extent that it has become… [read more]