Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 2hEvery step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. 021
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 6hEveryone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included). 061
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 8hyears we shall have more of them than we need. 030
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 8hideas are making headway everywhere, as much among teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. as among the workers. If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists. Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already. In five or ten 130
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 8hThe day when we are in the majority, what the French army did instinctively in not firing on the people will be repeated in our country quite consciously. Yes, whatever the frightened bourgeois say, we are able to calculate the moment when we shall have the majority of the people behind us; our 130
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 06/10/2026The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a 150
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 06/10/2026In 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. 040
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party. 030
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! 073
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a 1136
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used 1176
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought 12311
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual 120
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature....Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by 130
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought. 071
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. 050
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a 161
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them. 020
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less 120
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to 172
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026In 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. 040
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026In 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. 051
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. 030
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual 142
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. 020
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with 130
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026In general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence. 020
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. 070
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with 1145
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. 041
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. 041
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. 021
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. 031
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better 131
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is 142
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo. 021
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026It is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom ‘I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing 121
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. 092
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026at one time in the perfect and at another in the present. 040
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026giving 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, 140
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026For 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 140
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite! 073
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a 1108
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026... defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. 073
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. 030
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels @kmfe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a 140
