capitalism is an exploitative social system whose contradictions must lead either to socialism or to barbarism, and that the only hope for humanity lies in the working class destroying the capitalist state machine and replacing it with its own rule.

It follows that human beings are fundamentally social creatures. It doesn’t make any sense to conceive of people as existing outside society. Here Marx was challenging the political economists, who based their theories on the notion of the individual in isolation from society, and explained the workings of the capitalist market as arising from the

The materialist conception of history—“the simple fact,” as Marx’s lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels put it at his graveside, “hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.” (SW iii 162)—is so powerful that even

This, said Feuerbach, is at the root of all religion. Religion takes what are human powers—the ability to think, to act on and change the world, and so on—and transfers them to an imaginary being, God. Thus human beings turn their own powers into something alien from themselves.

“Man lives on nature—nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die” (CW iii, 275).

In other words, there is no such thing as “human nature” in the abstract. Rather, as society changes, so also do the beliefs, desires and abilities of men and women. The way people are cannot be separated from the sort of society in which they live.

The acorn contains within itself its own negation, and is thus contradictory. It is this contradiction, says Hegel, and only this contradiction, that allows it to grow.

Materialism, the belief that thought reflects the world, and does not create it, lay at the basis of his conception of history. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being which determines their consciousness” (SW i, 503).

For the Hegelian left, all that people had to do to become free was to think themselves free, to rid themselves of the “illusion of unfreedom.”