KARL MARX
Marx was the father of Communism, as him and his co-writer Frederich Engels wrote the Communist-Manifesto, in the mid-1800's. Karl Marx's book inspired V.I. Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, whom overthrew the Provisional Government in Russia, and created the Soviet Union. Karl Marx did not live to see other leaders of Communist Revolutions.
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The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (1848).
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Their commodity, labor-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. So much money for so long a use of labor-power. (1847).
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The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. (1867).
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A country which, like ancient Athens, regards lickspittles, parasites and flatterers as exceptions to the good sense of the people, as fools among the people, is a country of independence and self-reliance. (1842).
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"The capacity for all products, whether natural or industrial, to contribute to man's subsistence is specifically termed use value; their capacity to be given in exchange for one another, exchange value.... How does use value become exchange value? (1847).
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One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. (1857).
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The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold aspect -- use-value and exchange-value. (1859).
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