THE IDES OF MARX

Last words are for people who haven’t said anything in life.  Before I speak, I have something important to say.

Workers of the world, unite!  You might, but I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.  Only one man is a leader of men; the other 999 follow women.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature.   All people are born alike except Republicans and Democrats. 

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills.  When the garbage man comes by, tell him we don’t want any

Religion is the opium of the masses.  And I want to thank you all for the enjoyment you’ve taken out of it.

Experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.  Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money. 

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.  Very well, we’ll give them shorter hours.  We’ll start by cutting their lunch hour by twenty minutes.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.  Money frees you from doing things you dislike.  Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.

The rich will do anything for the poor.  Time wounds all heels.

The ideas of the ruling class for the proletariat are to work your way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.  

What should I care about posterity?  What’s posterity done for me?  All I know is that I’m not a Marxist.

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape, but politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows – marriage does.

We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.  Those are my principles and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others. 

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.  Humour is reason gone mad.

Necessity is blind.  The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing.  If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

Do I obey laws if I extract money for sale?  I made a killing a few years ago

. . . I shot my broker.

To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.  But for man, the root is man himself.  Behind every successful man is a woman; behind her is his wife.

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.  We have to have a war.  I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield.

Democracy is the road to socialism.  You can fool some of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, all of the . . . oh!  the hell with that.  I just made that up.  Lincoln copped it from me.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.  I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession.  Pure mush.  Art is art, isn’t it?  On the other hand, water is water!  And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does . . .  Now, uh . . . Now tell me what you know.

And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement – and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.  But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.  Why, a four-year old could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year old child.  I can’t make head or tail of it.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses this distinct feature:  it has simplified class antagonisms.  Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.  Matter of fact, from the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter.  Some day I intend reading it.

                                   

            August 6-September 15, 2009                                                   Michael Small                            

      who gratefully accepts the assistance of Karly & Grouch for their wisecrax