Labor theory of value Quotes

“Capital is a result of labor and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force and labor is therefore the employer of capital.”

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.”

“Capital is dead labor that vampirelike lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more the more labor it suck.”

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.”

“The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." &“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people”– –”

“The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”

“Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor nor labor without capital.”