Wealth & Money Quote by Karl Marx

Marx is doing something sly here: he turns the sober language of economics into the language of superstition. Capital, he says, is just money and commodities, ordinary stuff. Yet the moment it becomes "value" in motion, it’s treated as if it has an "occult ability" to reproduce. That word choice matters. He’s mocking the way capitalist society mystifies a social relationship - people extracting labor from other people - and dresses it up as a property of things. Money seems to breed money. Commodities appear to generate surplus on their own. The trick is that the system encourages everyone, including its beneficiaries, to talk as if capital has agency.

The animal imagery sharpens the critique. "Living offspring" and "golden eggs" parody the fairy-tale promise that investment is natural, benign fertility: put wealth in the nest, and it hatches more wealth. Marx is pointing to the ideological seduction of compounding returns, interest, and profit as if they were laws of nature rather than outcomes of organized power - ownership, wages, and the compulsion to sell labor to survive.

Contextually, this sits inside Marx’s broader attack on commodity fetishism and the capitalist mode of production in the industrial 19th century, when factories made wealth explode while workers were disciplined into long hours and precarious lives. The point isn’t that growth is imaginary. It’s that the story we tell about growth hides its parentage. Capital’s "magic" is a social arrangement with a human cost, made to look like a miracle.