Science & Tech Quote by Karl Marx

Marx lands the punch where Victorian triumphalism was loudest: the idea that capitalism’s genius is purely additive. He concedes its real achievement - technology, coordination, the stitching of scattered crafts into a single “social whole” - then flips the ledger. Progress, in his telling, is financed by a quiet liquidation of the very inputs it pretends to celebrate. The sentence is built like a factory line: “therefore” signals inevitability, “only by” names the cost, and “sapping” does the moral work. It’s not dramatic theft; it’s drainage, slow depletion, a system that can look productive while hollowing out its foundations.

The pairing of “soil and the labourer” is deliberate. Marx collapses nature and human effort into the “original sources of all wealth,” refusing the bourgeois fantasy that value comes from clever exchange or enlightened management. Soil isn’t scenery; it’s a metabolic partner. The labourer isn’t a free agent; he’s a body with limits. By linking them, Marx anticipates what we now call an ecological critique of political economy: capitalism externalizes wear-and-tear, treating fertility and vitality as bottomless.

Context matters: he’s writing in the century of coal, enclosure, urban overcrowding, and early industrial agriculture. “Technology” here is not neutral invention but a competitive weapon, deployed under private ownership to intensify extraction. The subtext is bluntly contemporary: a system that must constantly expand will treat both land and people as expendable inventories. Its coordination is real, even dazzling - and structurally parasitic.