Science & Tech Quote by Karl Marx

Marx names a central contradiction of capitalism: it excels at advancing the productive forces while undermining the very conditions that make wealth possible. Technology multiplies output and links specialized tasks into a tightly coordinated whole, but under the rule of profit these achievements rest on the depletion of nature and the wearing down of human bodies and minds. By calling the soil and the laborer the original sources of wealth, he insists that value does not spring from money or machines alone; it arises from human work acting upon the natural world.

The phrase social whole points to the vast interdependence forged by modern industry: factories, transport, and finance knit countless processes together. Yet this socialization of production does not arrive with social control over its aims. Instead, it becomes a means to extract surplus value more efficiently. Machinery shortens the time needed to make goods but, paradoxically, intensifies labor, disciplines the worker, extends or fragments the working day, and creates a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wages low. Cooperation becomes a tool of domination.

Marx grounds this judgment in the nineteenth-century experience of English industry and agriculture. He drew on chemist Justus von Liebig’s claim that industrial farming practiced soil robbery, stripping nutrients that were not returned, while cities accumulated waste and filth. The separation of town and country broke the metabolic cycle between humans and the earth, forcing a turn to distant guano, bones, and later synthetic inputs to sustain yields. The parallel on the shop floor was the exhaustion, injury, and alienation recorded in factory reports.

The line remains prescient. From climate change and soil degradation to burnout and precarious work, the costs of productivity are pushed onto workers and ecosystems. Capitalism socializes production but privatizes gains, externalizing depletion. The critique also implies a horizon beyond it: if wealth depends on living labor and a living earth, then a rational economy would organize technology and cooperation to repair, not sap, their vitality.