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“And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society: the working class alone produces all values. For value is only another expression for labour, that expression, namely, by which is designated, in our capitalist society of today, the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in a particular commodity. But, these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labour-power of the working class. Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it. And, as we have just seen, the other portion, which the capitalist class retains, and which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord class, is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall.”
― Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital

“If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1/The Communist Manifesto

“One has to 'leave philosophy aside,' one has to leap out of it and devote oneself
like an ordinary man to the study of actuality . . . Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

“Is war inevitable? Is not war an anachronism? Why should man, able to discover atomic processes, not be able to establish world peace? Those who pose this question do not know what capitalism means. Can there be world peace when in Russia millions of slaves are worked to death in concentration camps, and the entire population lacks freedom? Can there be world peace when in America the kings of capital keep the entire society in subjection and exploitation without being faced by any trace of a fight for social freedom? Where capitalist greed and capitalist exploitation dominate world peace must remain a pious wish.

When we say that, hence, war is inseparable from capitalism, that war can only disappear with capitalism itself, this does not mean that war against war is of no use and that we have to wait till capitalism has been destroyed. It means that the fight against war is inseparable from fight against capitalism. War against war can be effective only as part of the workers' class war against capitalism.”
― Anton Pannekoek, Workers' Councils