“The question is not: who has the guns? But rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.”
| — | Marx - Economic Manuscripts 1864 (via dailymarx) |
| — |
Marx & Engels | Manifesto of the Communist Party (via probablyasocialecologist) |
| — | Karl Marx | Wages of Labour (1844) (via dailymarx) |
By Fred Goldstein
Marx explained in the third volume of his fundamental work, “Capital,” what measures the capitalists take to bolster their profits when they are facing a decline. He listed some of them in a famous chapter titled “The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Decline.”
Here are some of the measures he outlined that tend to drive up profits:
- Intensification of exploitation of the workers.
- Lowering wages to below subsistence.
- Mass unemployment or increasing the reserve army of unemployed.
- Promoting foreign trade to gain additional profits abroad.
These are the same measures that are negatively affecting the working class today.
| — | Karl Marx | Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) |
