“The Bardoli resolution of 1922 clearly defines the horror the leaders felt when they saw the

gigantic peasant
class rising to shake off not only the domination of an alienated nation but also the yoke of the landlords. It is
there that our leaders prefer a surrender to the British than to the peasantry. Leave alone Pt. Jawaharlal. Can
you point out any effort to organize the peasants or labourers? No they will not run the risk. There they lack.
That is why I say they never meant a complete revolution…you cry “Long Live Revolution”. Let me assume that
you really mean it. According to our definition of the term, as stated in our statement in the Assembly Bomb
Case, revolution means the complete overthrow of the existing social order and its replacement with a socialist
order. For that purpose our immediate concern is the achievement of power. As a matter of fact, the state, the
Government machinery is just a weapon in the hands of the ruling class to further and safeguard its interest.
We want to snatch and handle it to utilize if for the consummation of our ideal i.e. social reconstruction on
new, i.e. Marxist basis. “
Bhagat Singh “To The Young Political Workers”, February 2, 1931.

What remains of Karl Marx is a residue of fire, small but still very important. The residue in my view consists of
four items:
1) The function of philosophy is to reconstruct the world and not to waste its time in explaining the
origin of the world
2) That there is a conflict of interest between class and class
3) That private ownership of property brings power to one class and sorrow to another through
exploitation
4) That it is necessary for the good of society that the sorrow be removed by the abolition of private
property

B.R. Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx”

Concerning Feuerbach (1845)

I. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the
thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but
not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to
materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not
know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the
thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence,
in Das Wesen des Chistentums he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human
attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed .. he does not grasp the significance of
“revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.
II. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of
theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the
this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking
that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
III. The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that
circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This
doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The
coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be
conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
IV. Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into
a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its
 secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an
independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions
within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its
contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is
discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory
and in practice.

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed,
the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already
lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state,
society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because
they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic
in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and
its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since
the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the
struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real
suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call
on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires
illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is
the halo.

Critical Notes on the ‘King of Prussia’ and Social Reform (1844)

A social revolution possesses a total point of view because – even if it is confined to only one factory district –
it represents a protest by man against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the point of view of the
particular, real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is
reacting, is the true community of man, human nature. In contrast, the political soul of revolution consists in
the tendency of the classes with no political power to put an end to their isolation from state and from power.
Its point of view is that of the state, of an abstract totality which exists only through its separation from real
life and which is unthinkable in the absence of an organized antithesis between the universal idea and the
individual existence of man. In accordance with the limited and contradictory nature of the political soul a
revolution inspired by it organizes a dominant group within society at the cost of society…every revolution
dissolves the old order of society; to that extent it is social. Every revolution brings down the old ruling power;
to that extent I is political.

Poverty of Philosophy (1847)

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial
and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural
institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion
which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists
say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are
the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature.
These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal
laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has
been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite
different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as
natural and as such, eternal.

Grundrisse (1857-8)

The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form
regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific
conditions able to criticize itself ---leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves
as times of decadence---it always conceives them one-sidedly. The Christian religion was able to be of
assistance in reaching an objective understanding of earlier mythologies only when its own self-criticism had
been accomplished to a degree, so to speak. Likewise, bourgeois economics arrived at an understanding of
feudal, ancient, oriental economics only after the self-criticism of bourgeois society had begun.

The creation by capital of absolute surplus value – more objectified labour – is conditional upon an expansion,
specifically constant expansion of the sphere of circulation. ..a precondition of the production based on capital
is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere itself is directly
expanded or whether more points within it are created as points of production..the tendency to create the
world market as directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.
Initially to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct
use vales not entering into exchange i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier
modes of production which appear primitive from its standpoint. …

For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be
recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse
so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or a means of production. In
accordance with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond
nature worship, as well as the traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfaction of present needs, and
the reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it,
tearing down all barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs,
the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But
from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by
any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its
production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. The
universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature which will at a certain
stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and
hence will drive it towards its own suspension

Capital (1867)

Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The
power of abstraction must replace both

Of course the mode of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the
material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only
after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if
the life of the subject matter is now reflected in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a
priori construction

To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and
landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of
economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.
The secret of expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so
far as they are human labour in general could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had
already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society
where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation
is the relation between men as possessors of commodities.

The second essential condition which allows the owner of money to find labour power in the market as a
commodity is this, that the possessor of labour power instead of being able to sell commodities in which his
labour has been objectified, must rather be compelled to offer for sale as commodity that very labour power
which exists only in his living body

One thing however is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and
on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural
history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, it is clearly the result of a past
historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older
formations of social production

Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and surely these are
what make up material wealth!) as labour. Labour is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human
labour power. This phrase can be found in any children’s primer; it is correct in so far as it is assumed that
labour is performed with the objects and instruments necessary to it. A socialist programme, however cannot
allow such bourgeois formulations to silence the conditions which give them the only meaning they possess.
Man’s labour only becomes a source of use-values, and hence also of wealth if his relation to nature, the
primary source of all instruments and objects of labour, is one of ownership from the start, and if he treats it
as belonging to him. There is every good reason for the bourgeois to ascribe supernatural creative power to
labour, for when a man has no property other than his labour power it is precisely labour’s dependence on
nature that forces him, in all social and cultural conditions, to be the slave of other men who have taken the
objective conditions of labour into their own possessions. He needs their permission to work, and hence their
permission to live.

Oriental Despotism Asiatic Mode of Production

Commuality of Labour and Communal Property [Despotic Democratic]

The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated
means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its
commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the
barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of the foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization
into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

British Rule in India (1853)

There cannot, however remain, any doubt that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an
essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before…All the civil
wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive
action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire
framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of the reconstitution yet appearing, this loss of his old
world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo
and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history

England, it is true, is causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was
stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its
destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not whatever have been the crimes of
England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution

India (1853)

The zamindar and the Ryotwar were both of them agrarian revolutions, effected by British ukases; and
proposed to each other, the one aristocratic, the other democratic; the one a caricature of English landlordism,
the other of French proprietorship; but pernicious, both combining the most contradictory character – both
made not for the people, who cultivate the soil, nor for the holder, who owns it, but for the government that
taxes it

Thus in Bengal we have a combination of English landlordism, of the Irish middleman system, of the Austrian
system, transforming the landlord into a tax-gatherer, and of the Asiatic system making the State the real
landlord. In Madras and Bombay we have a French peasant proprietor who is at the same time a serf, and a
metayer of the State. The drawbacks of all these various systems accumulate upon him without his enjoying
any of their redeeming features

The Future Results of British Rule in India (1853)

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British
bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial
proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of
that great and interesting country, whose gentle natives have astonished the British officers by their bravery,
whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient
German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin…

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning
from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked. They are the
defenders of property, but did any revolutionary party ever originate agrarian revolutions like those in Bengal,
in Madras and in Bombay? Did they not, in India, to borrow an expression of that great robber, Lord Clive
himself, resort to atrocious extortion, when simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity?

The Revolt in the Indian Army (1857)

Before this there had been mutinies in the Indian army, but the present revolt is distinguished by characteristic
and fatal features. It is the first time that the Sepoy regiments have murdered their European officers; that
Mussulmans and Hindoos, renouncing their mutual antipathies have combined against their common masters,
that “disturbances beginning with the Hindoos, have actually ended in placing on the throne of Delhi a
Mohammedan Emperor”; that the mutiny has not been confined to a few localities and lastly, that the revolt in
the Anglo-Indian army has coincided with a general disaffection exhibited against English supremacy on the
part of the great Asiatic nations..

The Indian Revolt (1857)

The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable – such as one
is prepared to meet only in wars of insurrections, of nationalities, of races, and above all religion; in a word,
such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the ‘Blues’, by the Spanish
guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen, by Serbians on the German and Hundarian neighbours, by Croats on
Viennese rebels..However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form of
England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern empire, but even
during the last ten years of a long settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed
an organic institution of its financial policy

Engles, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and
woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of
one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely un- known hitherto in
prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846 [The German
Ideology], I find these lines: "The first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding."
And today I can add: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the
antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the
female sex by the male.

In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat

Gramsci Selections from Prison Notebooks

A few characteristics of historical economism: 1. In the search for historical connections it makes no distinction
between what is ‘relatively permanent’ and what is a passing fluctuation, and by an economic fact it means the
self-interest of an individual or a small group…in other words it does not take economic class formations into
account, with all their inherent relations, but is content to assume motives of mean and usurious self-interest

The dual perspective can present itself on various levels, from the most elementary to the most complex; but
these can all theoretically be reduced to two fundamental levels, corresponding to the dual nature of
Machiavelli’s centaur – half animal and half-human. They are the levels of force and of consent, authority and
hegemony, violence and civilization, of the individual moment and of the universal moment, of agitation and
of propaganda, of tactics and strategy etc. some have reduced the theory of “dual perspective” to something
trivial and banal, to nothing but two forms of ‘immediacy’ which succeed each other mechanically in time and
with greater or lesser ‘proximity’. In actual fact, it often happens that the more the first ‘perspective’ is
‘immediate’ and elementary, the more the second has to be distant (not in time, but as a dialectical relation),
complex and ambitious. In other words, It may happen as in human life, that the more an individual is
compelled to defend his own immediate physical existence, the more will he uphold and identify with the
highest values of civilization and humanity, in all their complexity.

It is certain that prediction only means seeing the present and the past clearly as movement. Seeing them
clearly: in other words, accurately identifying the fundamental and permanent elements of the process. But it
is absurd to think of a purely ‘objective’ prediction.