I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the relentless drive of capitalism to seek new markets for its products globally.
Karl Marx's statement emphasizes the insatiable need of capitalist enterprises to continuously find and exploit new markets. This pursuit leads the bourgeoisie—capitalist class—to search far and wide, transforming economic behavior and relationships across the globe, while also highlighting the inherent dynamics and consequences of capitalism in its quest for profit.
Themes
CapitalismGlobalizationBourgeoisieMarketsExploitation
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on economic theories, I quoted Marx to illustrate how fundamental capitalist dynamics shape global trade.
More from Karl Marx
All quotes →Religion is the opiate of the people.
Karl MarxRead
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
Karl MarxRead
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Karl MarxRead
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Karl MarxRead
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Karl MarxRead
Similar quotes
Perhaps the hardest challenge has been to persuade the public, impatient for rapid growth, of the need to ensure stability first. Growth, it is argued, is always more important, regardless of the looming economic risks.
Raghuram RajanRead
An economy can survive with 10% of the population insolation. It can't survive when 50% of the population is in isolation.
Paul RomerRead
Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.
Janet YellenRead
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
Niall FergusonRead
When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.
Malcolm GladwellRead
I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.
Milton FriedmanRead