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.

Socialism is a good idea, people say, but it will never happen, because you can’t change human nature. Any attempt to create a society free of poverty, exploitation and violence is bound to run up against the fact that human beings are naturally selfish, greedy and aggressive.

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.”

The proposition that men and women are first and foremost producers radically challenged basic assumptions about society that had been accepted by almost all earlier thinkers.

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

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).

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

Human history, on the other hand, is about the changing ways in which the same species has organized to meet its needs.

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.