Sublime

In this process, Marx saw the seeds of a society that would eventually be reduced to two classes—owners and workers.

Marx...was among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase or something that could be easily cured, but rather a deep disability of the system...

Karl Marx was among the very first to see that the industrial revolution...opens the possibility of a society in which we people can be lovers of wisdom without being supported by the labor of a mass of illiterate, brutalized, half-starved, and overworked slaves...

Marx the economist got a lot about the economic history of the development of modern capitalism in England right--not everything, but he is still very much worth grappling with as an economic historian of 1500-1850. Most important, I think, are his observations that the benefits of industrialization do take a long time--generations--to kick in...

Marx’s thought was in many ways rooted in that of one Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, the German late-Enlightenment philosopher with a teleological view of history, whom Schopenhauer hated and lost his students to. To Hegel, the chapters of humanity’s story are connected by violence and revolution. These charges are brought about by visionary revol

Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we’re now realizing he was also right about some stuff. When you remove people’s emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce effort, it’s soul killing.

Thus Marx launches himself on the path that leads to ‘socially necessary labour’ as the ‘hidden’ value within every equation of exchange.

The entire works of Marx are permeated with a spirit incompatible with the vulgar materialism of Engels and Lenin. He never regards man as being a mere part of nature, but always as being at the same time, owing to the fact that he exercises a free activity, an antagonistic term vis-à-vis nature.

Marx saw history as an ongoing struggle between the social classes of each era, the outcome of which was based on the “tension and antagonism” of the struggle. In Marx’s view, this meant capitalist society was a historical stage, not a permanent one. As an economist, he contested the classical view of market growth as a force that produced harmonio