Author: Laura Reagan

...I went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman's smile on one of the faces, and on the other a murderous conspirator's scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which the theory dwelt?

"The absolute magnitude of the value added by the transportation of commodities is, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the productive power of the transport industry and directly proportional to the distance traveled... The useful effect is the alteration of the place of the thing... The productive power of transport is inversely proportional to the time it takes to move the commodity from one place to another."

"In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage."

"In $M — M'$ we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree: the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form."