Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism
Not Karl Marx — an anonymous line, first documented in 2008Unknown — an anonymous online forwardFirst documented 23 December 2008 · spread by email and blog comment during the financial crisis
“Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism” Not Karl Marx. "Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods…" first appears as a reader comment signed "Gpkkid" on the New York Times Economix blog on 23 December 2008, credited only to "Karl Marx, 1867." No matching passage has been found in Das Kapital or elsewhere in Marx; Snopes rates the attribution False (21 April 2009) and Wikiquote lists it as misattributed. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Karl Marx. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the themes of power, justice and change. Theme: "Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The paper trail
Claimed source
Das Kapital, Volume I (1867)
Actual first appearance
Reader comment signed “Gpkkid,” New York Times Economix blog, 23 December 2008
Translation
None — no German original has ever been produced for these sentences
Verdict
Fabrication — rated False by Snopes, 21 April 2009; listed as Misattributed on Wikiquote
“Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable.
The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.” – Karl Marx, 1867
Reader comment, 23 December 2008, 8:19 am
This is the earliest documented form, quoted exactly as it was posted. Note what is missing: no book, no chapter, no translator — just a name and a year. Every later version adds specificity the original never had, and the wording itself keeps drifting (“nationalized” becomes “nationalised,” “technology” becomes “technological products”), which is how anonymous forwards behave and is not how a printed translation behaves.
14 January 2009 — now tagged “Das Kapital, 1867,” the quote is circulating on Wall Street. Megan McArdle calls it fake in The Atlantic ↗: Marx’s thesis was that falling wages would immiserate the working class, not that workers would be done in by their overdrafts.
No rights status can honestly be asserted for this wording, because no source work exists for it: the earliest documented instance is an anonymous 2008 comment, and no manuscript, edition or translation has ever been produced. The book it is falsely credited to is a separate matter — Das Kapital, Volume I was published in German in 1867 and in English in 1887 in Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s translation, both long in the public domain — but that has no bearing here, since the sentences are not in it.
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Fact-check
What gets claimed, and what the record shows
This is one of the crisis era’s most successful fabrications: a paragraph of modern economics dressed in a nineteenth-century name. Three separate claims travel with it, and all three fail.
The earliest documented instance credits only “Karl Marx, 1867” with no book named; within days the “Das Kapital, 1867” tag was attached, and it is that version Megan McArdle quoted on 14 January 2009 ↗ as it circulated on Wall Street. The distinctive strings “bankruptcy of banks,” “expensive credits” and “eventually lead to communism” do not occur anywhere in the Moore and Aveling English text of Capital, Volume I ↗.
✕
A rival origin storythe satire site NewsMutiny denied
✓No one has produced a manuscript, letter, edition or translation containing these sentences. The whole documented life of the quote begins in a comment box on a New York Times blog in December 2008 ↗, and the burden of proof has stayed with the believers ever since.
Context
Why a fake Marx quote was irresistible in 2009
The lines surfaced in the worst weeks of the financial crisis, days after the Madoff fraud broke and months after governments began taking banks onto their own balance sheets. Read in that moment, the passage looked like a dead economist calling the score in advance: mortgages, consumer credit, bank failure, nationalisation. It travelled by email, then by trading-desk forward, and by mid-January 2009 Megan McArdle was reporting that it was “making the rounds of Wall Street” ↗ with “Das Kapital, 1867” attached.
What gave it away was the economics, not the prose. Marx’s case was that competition forces wages down and ruins workers as producers; a story in which workers ruin themselves as over-extended borrowers, and in which the state walks calmly down a road to communism rather than being overthrown, belongs to a much later argument. The Los Angeles Times called it a hoax quote in February 2009 ↗, and nobody who went looking has produced the passage since.
“If only he had actually said it, Americans might have a healthy new respect for — or maybe fear of — Karl Marx.” — Tom Petruno, Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2009
The anachronism test, in detail
McArdle’s objection was that ordinary working people of Marx’s day simply had no access to bank credit. They might run up an account with a landlord or a butcher, but the first mass extension of credit to people who owned no land was the instalment-buying boom of the 1920s — long after Marx died. A prophecy about households taking “more and more expensive credits” has no nineteenth-century object to describe.
One popular objection does not hold up, and it is worth retiring. Sceptics often say the word “technology” is anachronistic for Marx. It is not: the ClockBackward essay found he discussed technology and technological change with some frequency, and the term appears in the Moore and Aveling English text of Capital, Volume I — where Marx calls for “a critical history of technology” and says technology “discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature.” That is the study of industrial processes, not gadgets bought on credit. The quote fails on its argument and on its documentary record, which is a far stronger case than a vocabulary hunch.
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1818–1883 · German philosopher, economist and author of Das Kapital
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist whose first volume of Das Kapital appeared in German in 1867; the later volumes were completed after his death by Friedrich Engels. His argument there is that competition drives capitalists to squeeze wages and lengthen hours, immiserating the working class — not that workers would be undone by their own borrowing. Marx wrote at length about the wretched housing available to workers, and he used the word technology in the sense of the study of industrial processes, not of consumer goods on credit.
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Cite this
Earliest documented appearance
“Gpkkid,” reader comment, 23 December 2008, on Utpal Bhattacharya, “Do Bailouts Encourage Ponzi Schemes?” Economix, The New York Times, 18 December 2008. Attribution rated False in David Mikkelson, “Did Karl Marx Say This About Consumer Debt?” Snopes, 21 April 2009.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/owners-of-capital-will-stimulate-working-class-to-buy-more/