Karl Marx - Get in, Loser - We're seizing the means of production

Karl Marx, beard flowing and sunglasses on, at the wheel of a red convertible against a retro sunset, with the slogan Get in, Loser – We’re seizing the means of production. A breezy pop-culture invitation meets the most serious project of the nineteenth century. The car is idling; the revolution has room for passengers.

It means that workers collectively take ownership and control of the factories, land, machines and infrastructure they work with, instead of these belonging to private owners. In Marx’s analysis, whoever owns the means of production controls what is produced and who receives the surplus, so changing ownership is the key to ending class exploitation.

Not in that exact wording; the snappy phrase is a later paraphrase. The Communist Manifesto (1848) says the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie and centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state. Engels wrote in Socialism – Utopian and Scientific (1880) that the proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state property.

The means of production are everything besides human labour that is used to produce goods – land, raw materials, tools, machines, factories, and today also servers and software. Marx distinguishes the forces of production (these means plus labour power and know-how) from the relations of production, meaning who owns them and who works for whom.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party is a short pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in London in February 1848. It opens by declaring that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, analyses capitalism’s revolutionary dynamism and its contradictions, and ends with the call, Workers of all countries, unite.

Historical materialism is Marx’s theory that the way a society organises production – its economic base – shapes its politics, law, religion and ideas. History moves forward when developing productive forces come into conflict with existing property relations, as when feudalism gave way to capitalism. Marx summarised it in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

Surplus value is the difference between the value a worker produces and the wage the worker is paid. In Capital, Volume One (1867), Marx argues that labour power is the one commodity that creates more value than it costs; the employer keeps that surplus as profit. This, for Marx, is exploitation built into the wage relation, even when wages are fair by market standards.

Yes – it is a friendly way to say solidarity with a grin. The design comes as a classic t-shirt, women’s t-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker, so it suits union reps, history and politics students, reading-group regulars and anyone who has explained surplus value at a party.