Marx Commodity Quotes & Sayings

Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities. — Karl Marx

If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities. — Patti Smith

The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money. — Karl Marx

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed. — Karl Marx

Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step, so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt. — Kenneth Roberts

Asians love schoolgirls in uniforms. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that? — David Cronenberg

The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production. — Karl Marx

Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange, because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison. — Karl Marx

Marx then asks how wages are determined and answers that the price of labour is determined like the price of any other commodity. It may rise or fall according to supply and demand, — Anonymous

That's why I bake. To fill fairies with goodness."

And it was true, she realized. She didn't run the kitchen just to boss other fairies around. She didn't give orders just to make herself feel important. Well, at least she wouldn't anymore. No. The day before, she hadn't missed that part of her job at all. She had missed the baking. She had missed creating something for others to enjoy.

And, oh, how she wanted to go back to work! — Gail Herman

Forty minutes later, I leaned back in my chair, and looked at the thousand or so pages of manuscript towering on my desk. It hit me. Holy cow. This author had total control over this book. Total. And it was one of seven. One. Of. Seven. — Carla Bolte

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. — Karl Marx

Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time. — Martin Heidegger

Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present oriented. — Sonja Lyubomirsky

There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. — Karl Marx

What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production. — Karl Marx

If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences - social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about. — David Harvey

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc. — Karl Marx

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity. — Karl Marx

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. — Vladimir Lenin

Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From — Karl Marx

At times, Singer Johnny Cash rubbed dirt from the earth under his fingernails in order to avoid any arrogance which might stem from his fame, by reminding himself of his roots and origins. — Robert Hilburn

Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth. — Karl Marx

Sure, but don't expect great observations. Mostly I just looked for dirty pictures hidden within the artwork. Did you know Monet put a boob in all his paintings? Apples and Grapes - get it? I mean, come on. The guy was a horn-dog. — Penny Reid

They knew that to survive in Manhattan he would have to know something of bitterness before he arrived. — Mark Helprin

In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form no longer bears any marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relationship of a thing, money, to itself ... Capital is now a thing, but the thing is capital. The money's body is now by love possessed.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 516-517, containing a literary reference at the end there to Goethe, Faust, Part I. The context is Marx's discussion of how the commodity fetish's obfuscation of the true relations of capitalist production (i.e. the exploitation of labor) reaches its epitome in the form of interest-bearing capital (i.e. finance capital). — Karl Marx

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. — Gyorgy Lukacs

The point of this, as Marx explains, is to show that according to classical economics the worker becomes a commodity, the production of which is subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive. — Peter Singer

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is. — Andi Zeisler

The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on something useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article. — Karl Marx

We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. — Karl Marx

The labour-power is a commodity , not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself. — Karl Marx

But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life. — Karl Marx

Comedians are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world. — Groucho Marx

All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs. — Karl Marx

These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. — Karl Marx

Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum. — Karl Marx

Dance me slowly along a moonlit path,
Soaked with light from moon and stars above,
Hold my hand and whistle a tune,
Dance me slowly to the edge of Love.
Waltz here with me on forest grass,
Soft ballet pirouettes round sun dappled trees,
Hold my hand and hum a tune,
Catch my freshly blown kiss off the breeze. — Michelle Geaney

There was no one in the world but Sydney and me just then, and the only things that mattered were our love and the way I felt in her arms. — Richelle Mead