marxism

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.

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

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.

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 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).

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.

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