Read more about the article Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1
Menzel, Adolph. The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclops. 1872 1875

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1

"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."

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Read more about the article Marx: Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
Cruikshank, George. Robinson Crusoe on his Raft. 1831

Marx: Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

"The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. It is no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by means of a contract. This is the semblance and only the aesthetic semblance of the Robinsonades, great and small."

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Read more about the article Marx The First International & After Political Writings Volume 3
Freidrich, Caspar David. The Monk by the Sea. 1808 1810

Marx The First International & After Political Writings Volume 3

...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?

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Read more about the article Marx Surveys from Exile Political Writings volume 2
barricade in the rue de la mortellerie june 1848 jean louis ernest meissonier

Marx Surveys from Exile Political Writings volume 2

A century earlier, in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habakkuk. In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt the new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again.

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Read more about the article Marx Early Writings
Gustave Courbet The Stonebreakers

Marx Early Writings

The basis of representation, its essence, turns out to be 'something wholly superfluous, etc.' for representation. With one and the same breath Hegel puts forward absolutely contradictory statements: representation is grounded on trust, on the confidence placed by one man in another, and, at the same time, it is not grounded on trust. It is rather a merely formal game. The object of representation is not the particular interest but man and his citizenship of the state, the universal interest. On the other hand, the particular interest is the material of representation and the spirit of this interest is the spirit of the representative. p.197

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Read more about the article Cicero On the Ends of Good and Evil
The dance to the music of time c. 1640

Cicero On the Ends of Good and Evil

"For if the whole of a man's life is to be measured by the standard of pleasure, you see how much trouble is in store for us. We must consider not what is pleasant, but what is consistent with the dignity of human nature; for there is a certain dignity in man, which the beasts do not share. If we lose sight of this, we shall be unable to maintain any standard of conduct." (Cicero, De Finibus 2.44).

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Read more about the article Cicero Tusculan Disputations
Jean Germain Drouais's Marius at Minturnae

Cicero Tusculan Disputations

"But what is this 'bearing'? It is the same as the endurance of labor... we must then apply to the soul that which is called fortitude, which consists of two parts, the contempt of pain and the contempt of death. To these we must bring a certain alertness of mind, so that we may not only not fear, but even despise them." (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.53).

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Read more about the article Cicero On Duties
Jacques Louis David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons

Cicero On Duties

"But when with a rational spirit you have surveyed the whole field, there is no social relation among them all more close and none more dear than that which links each one of us with our country. Parents are dear; children, relatives, friends are dear; but our country has on its own embraced all the affections of all of us together; for which what good man would hesitate to face death, if he could do her a service?" (Cicero, De Officiis 1.57).

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