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

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.

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

Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without human beings living together and talking to each other

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

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.

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.

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.

The dialectic was based on two assumptions. First, that “all things are contradictory in themselves.” Secondly, that “contradiction is at the root of all movement and life, and it is only insofar as it contains a contradiction that anything moves and has impulse and activity.”