marxism

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.

Capitalism, for Marx, is a world in which the worker is dominated by the products of his labor, which have taken on the shape of an alien being, capital.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”