communistquotes/quotes/Karl Marx/The Grundrisse.csv

author,linktitle,link,quote
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#1`,`The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#3`,`It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. ... if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#p107`,`In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#p109`,`Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. `
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm`,`Relations of personal dependence are the first social forms in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm#individuals`,`Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm#iiic`,`Capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm`,`For example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, of the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with. ... The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm`,`The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state. In bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue — including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. — belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services — often coerced — all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist’s revenue. But it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production.`
`Karl Marx`,`The Grundrisse (1857)`,`http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm`,`The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.`