Daily Inspiration Quote by Karl Marx

Industrial capitalism’s cruel magic trick is that it can turn abundance into abandonment. Marx’s line lands because it flips the expected moral of productivity: more “useful things” should mean more comfort, more dignity, more time. Instead, he argues, the system converts that very success into a surplus of people deemed “useless” not by nature, but by the labor market’s shifting needs.

The phrasing is deliberate. “Useful things” sounds neutral, even wholesome; it’s the language of progress, of rational production. Marx uses it as bait, then snaps the trap with “useless people,” a phrase that feels obscene precisely because it treats human beings like inventory. The subtext is that capitalism doesn’t simply exploit workers; it categorizes them. When output rises faster than the demand for labor, workers become expendable, a “reserve army” whose insecurity disciplines everyone else. Unemployment isn’t an accident; it’s a feature that keeps wages down and obedience up.

Context matters: Marx is writing in the age of factories, mechanization, and periodic crises, when productivity gains didn’t translate into broad stability. The system could produce more with fewer hands, and that efficiency, unbuffered by social guarantees, meant dislocation: layoffs, poverty, migration, the moral stigma of idleness. The line also anticipates a modern anxiety: automation, “lean” staffing, gig work. If value is measured only by profitability, human worth becomes conditional. Marx’s sting is ethical as much as economic: a society that can feed everyone but chooses to sort people into “useful” and “useless” is indicting itself.