Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving"[1] from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.[2]
Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works such as Capital.[3] They hold that it is necessary to grasp Marx's philosophical foundations to understand his later works properly.[4]
Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and to interpretations of Marx based in the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism.[5] Where other Marxist philosophies see Marxism as a natural science, Marxist humanism reaffirms the doctrine of "man is the measure of all things"– that humans are essentially different to the rest of the natural order and should be treated so by Marxist theory.[6]
Korsch's book underscores Marx's doctrine of the unity of theory and practice, viewing socialist revolution as the "realization of philosophy".[8] Marxism does not make philosophy obsolete, as "vulgar" Marxism believes; instead Marxism preserves the truths of philosophy until their revolutionary transformation into reality.[7]
The salient essay in Lukács's collection introduces the concept of "reification".[9] In capitalist societies, human properties, relations and actions are transformed into properties, relations and actions of Man-produced things, which become independent of Man and govern his life. These Man-created things are then imagined to be originally independent of Man. Conversely, human beings are transformed into thing-like beings that do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Lukács argues that elements of this concept are implicit in the analysis of commodity fetishism found in Marx's magnum opus Capital.[10]Bourgeois society loses sight of the role of human action in the creation of social meaning. It thinks value is immanent in things and regards persons as commodities.[11]
The writings of Antonio Gramsci are also extremely influential on the development of a humanist understanding of Marxism. Gramsci insists on Marx's debt to Hegel, seeing Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" and an "absolute historicism" that transcends traditional materialism and traditional idealism.[12]
The first publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932 greatly changed the reception of his work.[13] This early work of Marx was written in 1844, when Marx was twenty-five or twenty-six years old.[14] The Manuscripts situated Marx's reading of political economy, his relationship to the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, and his views on communism, within a new theoretical framework. In the Manuscripts, Marx borrows philosophical terminology from Hegel and Feuerbach to posit a critique of capitalist society based in "alienation".[13] Through his own activity, Man becomes alien from himself: to the products of his own activity, to the nature in which he lives, to other human beings and to his human possibilities. The concept is not merely descriptive, it is a call for de-alienation through radical change of the world.[15]
As they provided a missing link between the Hegelian philosophical humanism of Marx's early writings and the economics of the later Marx,[19] Marx's Grundrisse were also an important source for Marxist humanism.[20] This 1,000-page collection of Marx's working notes for Capital was first published in Moscow in 1939 and became available in an accessible edition in 1953.[21] Several analysts (most notably Roman Rosdolsky) have commented that the Grundrisse shows the role played by the early Marx's concerns with alienation and the Hegelian concept of dialectic in the formation of his magnum opus.[22]
In the aftermath of the occupation of France and the Second World War, the independent leftist journal Les Temps modernes was founded in 1946.[23] Among its original editorial board were the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.[24] Sartre and Merleau-Ponty both lent support to the politics and tactics of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union during this period. Concurrently, they attempted to formulate a phenomenological and existential Marxism that opposed the Stalinist version. In their view, the failure of the Western Communist Parties to lead successful revolutions and the development of an authoritarian state structure in the Soviet Union were both connected to the "naturalism" and "scientism" of the official orthodox Marxist theory. Orthodox Marxism is not a theory of revolutionary self-emancipation. It is instead a self-proclaimed science that imposes a direction upon history from above in the name of irrefutable "iron laws".[25] Against this understanding of Marxism, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty argued for a subject-centered view of history that emphasized the lived experience of historical actors as the source of cognition.[26]
In 1939, Henri Lefebvre, then a member of the French Communist Party, published Dialectical Materialism.[27] This book, written in 1934–35, advanced a reconstruction of Marx's oeuvre in the light of the 1844 Manuscripts.[28] Lefebvre argued here that Marx's dialectic was not a "Dialectics of Nature" (as set forth by Friedrich Engels) but was instead based on concepts of alienation and praxis.[27] In the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Lefebvre– together with Kostas Axelos, Jean Duvignaud, Pierre Fougeyrollas and Edgar Morin– founded the journal Arguments. This publication became the center of a Marxist humanist critique of Stalinism. In his theory of alienation, Lefebvre drew not only from the Manuscripts, but also from Sartre, to present a critique that encompassed the styles of consumption, culture, systems of meaning and language under capitalism.[27]
Starting in the late 1950s, Roger Garaudy, for many years the chief philosophical spokesman of the French Communist Party, offered a humanistic interpretation of Marx stemming from Marx's early writings which called for dialogue between Communists and existentialists, phenomenologists and Christians.[29]
The period following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 saw a number of movements for liberalization in Eastern Europe.[20] Following Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech, where he denounced Stalinism, Marx's 1844 Manuscripts were used as the basis for a new "socialist humanism" in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.[20] The Petofi Circle, which included some of György Lukács's disciples, was a center of what was termed "revisionism" in Hungary.[30] In 1959, the Polish writer Leszek Kołakowski published an article "Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth" that drew a sharp distinction between the theory of knowledge found in the works of the young Marx and the theory found in Engels and Lenin.[31] This challenge was taken up by Adam Schaff,[32] a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party, and expanded into an investigation into the persistence of alienation in existing socialist societies.[33] The Czechoslovak Karel Kosik also began the critique of communist dogmatism that would develop into his Dialectics of the Concrete, and would eventually land him in jail.[34]
This period also saw the formation of a humanist Marxism by Yugoslav philosophers Mihailo Marković and Gajo Petrović that would come to act as the basis of the Praxis School.[20] From 1964 to 1975, this group published a philosophical journal, Praxis, and organized annual philosophical debates on the island of Korčula. They concentrated on themes such as alienation, reification and bureaucracy.[35]
Marxist humanism opposes the philosophy of "dialectical materialism" that was orthodox among the Soviet-aligned Communist Parties.[6] Following Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, where Engels marries Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectics to philosophical materialism, the Soviets saw Marxism as a theory not just of society but of reality as a whole.[36] Engels's book is a work of what he calls "natural philosophy", and not one of science. Nonetheless, he claims that discoveries within the sciences tend to confirm the scientific nature of his theory. This world-view is instantiated within both the natural and social sciences.[37] For dialectical materialism, Marxist theory will eventually lose its philosophical character and be absorbed into fully developed theoretical natural science.[6]
Marxist humanists attack an understanding of society based on natural science, as well as science and technology themselves, as bourgeois and manipulative modes of enquiry.[6] Marxist humanism asserts the centrality and distinctiveness of people and society. Social science differs from natural science because people and society are not instantiations of universal natural processes, as in the view of dialectical materialism. People are not objects but subjects– centers of consciousness and values– and science is an embedded part of the totalizing perspective of humanist philosophy.[6]
Whereas dialectical materialism sees Marxist theory as primarily scientific, Marxist humanism views Marxist theory as primarily philosophical. Marxist humanism echoes earlier cultural trends, particularly the Romantic reaction against Enlightenmentrationalism, and draws heavily from the German idealist traditions, including the works of Kant, Hegel, and hermeneutic philosophy.[6] These traditions reject the empiricist idea of a unified scientific methodology, instead asserting that human social practice has a purposive, transformative character, and thus requires a mode of understanding different from the detached, empirical observation of the natural sciences.[38] Such understanding is less about causal explanation and more about interpreting meaning — particularly the language, ideas, and cultural practices of a society. Importantly, participants’ understanding of their own language and society is seen as an essential insight that no external science can replace. This requires an empathetic or participatory methodology, more philosophical and conceptual than empirical.[6]
Alienation
In line with this, Marxist humanism treats alienation as Marxism's central concept.[6] In his early writings, the young Marx advances a critique of modern society on the grounds that it impedes human flourishing.[39] Marx's theory of alienation suggests a dysfunctional or hostile relation between entities that naturally belong in harmony with one another[40]– an artificial separation of one entity from another with which it had been previously and properly conjoined.[41] The concept has "subjective" and "objective" variants.[42] Alienation is "subjective" when human individuals feel "estranged" or do not feel at home in the modern social world.[43] Individuals are objectively alienated when they are hindered from developing their essential human capacities. For Marx, subjective alienation stems from objective alienation: individuals experience their lives as lacking meaning or fulfilment because society does not promote the deployment of their human capacities.[44]
Marxist humanism views alienation as the guiding idea of both Marx's early writings and his later works.[45] According to this school of thought, the central concepts of Capital cannot be fully and properly understood without reference to this seminal theme.[46]Communism is not merely a new socioeconomic formation that will supersede the present one, but the re-appropriation of Man's life and the abolition of alienation.[47]
In the state
The earliest appearance of this concept in Marx's corpus is the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right from 1843.[48] Marx here discusses the modern state. For Marx, the modern state is characterized by an historically unprecedented separation between an individual's "real" life in civil society from his "political" life as a citizen of the state.[49] This contrasts starkly with the ancient and medieval worlds, where civil and political life formed a unity.[50]
Modern civil society, driven by individual self-interest and the pursuit of private property, fragments society and alienates individuals from one another. Individuals in this "atomistic" civil society relate to each other primarily as means to their own ends. Modern civil society does not sustain the individual as a member of a community. This egoistic social sphere is antithetical to the "general interest" embodied by the state.[51]
While the modern state claims to represent the common good, it remains detached and remote from the everyday lives of citizens.[39] Marx uses the term "abstract" to highlight this detachment, contrasting the "real life" of civil society with the "transcendental existence" of the state.[39] This abstraction, resulting from the separation of particular and common interests, leads to a political sphere where matters of universal concern are decided "without having become the real concern of the people."[52] The state exists in theory as a representation of the common good but lacks tangible connection to citizens’ daily lives. While the state acknowledges the communal dimension of human flourishing, it does so in an inadequate manner. Individuals participate in this "heaven" of the political state as abstract citizens, separated from their concrete existence in civil society.[48]
The most well-known metaphor in Marx's Critique– that of religion as the opium of the people– is derived from the writings of the theologianBruno Bauer.[53] Bauer's primary concern is religious alienation. Bauer views religion as a division in Man's consciousness. Man suffers from the illusion that religion exists apart from and independent of his own consciousness, and that he himself is dependent on his own creation. Religious beliefs become opposed to consciousness as a separate power. Self-consciousness makes itself into an object, a thing, loses control of itself, and feels itself to be nothing before an opposing power. A religious consciousness cannot exist without this breaking up or tearing apart of consciousness: religion deprives Man of his own attributes and places them in a heavenly world.[54]
Since religious belief is the work of a divided mind, it stands in contradiction to itself: the Gospels contradict each other and the world; they contain dogmas so far removed from common sense that they can be understood only as mysteries. The God that men worship is a subhuman God– their own imaginary, inflated and distorted reflection.[55] The Gospel narrative contains no historical truth– it is an expression of a transient stage in the historical development of self-consciousness. Christianity was of service to self-consciousness in awakening a consciousness of values that belong to every human individual, but it also created a new servitude. The task of the present phase of human history is to liberate Man's spirit from the bonds of Christian mythology, free the state from religion, and thereby restore to Man his alienated essence.[56]
In the Critique, Marx adopts Bauer's criticism of religion and applies this method to other fields. Marx sees Man's various alienations as peels around a genuine center.[57] Religion is the most extreme form of alienation: it is at once both the symptom of a deep social malaise and a protest against this malaise.[58] The criticism of religion leads to the criticism of other alienations, which must be dealt with in the same way.[59] The influence of Bauer follows Marx through all his later criticism: this is visible in the many places where Marx establishes an economic point by reference to a religious analogy.[60]
The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right credits Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel with significant insight into both the basic structure of the modern social world and its disfigurement by alienation.[61] Hegel believes alienation will no longer exist when the social world objectively facilitates the self-realization of human individuals, and human individuals subjectively understand that this is so.[62]
For Hegel, objective alienation is already non-existent, as the institutions of the modern social world – the family, civil society, and the political state – facilitate the fulfilment of human individuals, both as individuals and members of a community. In spite of this, modern people still find themselves in a state of widespread subjective alienation.[62] Hegel wishes not to reform or change the institutions of the modern social world, but to change the way in which society is understood by its members.[63] Marx shares Hegel's belief that subjective alienation is widespread, but denies that the institutions of the rational or modern state enable individuals to actualize themselves. Marx instead takes widespread subjective alienation to indicate that objective alienation has not been overcome.[64]
Marx further develops his critique of Hegel in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.[65] Marx here praises Hegel's dialectic for its view of labor as an alienating process: alienation is an historical stage that must be passed through for the development and deployment of essential human powers.[66] It is an essential characteristic of finite mind (Man) to produce things, to express itself in objects, to objectify itself in physical things, social institutions and cultural products. Every objectification is of necessity an instance of alienation: the produced objects become alien to the producer.[67] Humanity creates itself by externalizing its own essence, developing through a process of alienation alternating with transcendence of that alienation. Man externalizes his essential powers in an objectified state, and then assimilates them back into him from outside.[68]
For Hegel, alienation is the state of consciousness as it acquaints itself with the external, objective, phenomenal world.[69] Hegel believes that reality is Spirit realizing itself. Spirit's existence is constituted only in and through its own productive activity. In the process of realizing itself, Spirit produces a world that it initially believes to be external, but gradually comes to understand is its own production.[70]
All that exists is the Absolute Spirit (Absolute Mind, Absolute Idea or God). The Absolute is not a static or timeless entity but a dynamic Self, engaged in a cycle of alienation and de-alienation. Spirit becomes alienated from itself in nature and returns from its self-alienation through the finite Mind, Man. Human history is a process of de-alienation, consisting in the constant growth of Man's knowledge of the Absolute. Conversely, human history is also the development of the Absolute's knowledge of itself: the Absolute becomes self-aware through Man.[67] Man is a natural being and is thus a self-alienated Spirit. But Man is also an historical being, who can achieve adequate knowledge of the Absolute, and is thus capable of becoming a de-alienated being.[71]
Marx criticizes Hegel for understanding labor as "abstract mental labour".[66] Hegel equates Man with self-consciousness and sees alienation as constituted by objectivity.[72] Consciousness emancipates itself from alienation by overcoming objectivity,[73] recognizing that what appears as an external object is a projection of consciousness itself.[74] Hegel understands that the objects which appear to order men's lives– their religion, their wealth– in fact belong to Man and are the product of essential human capacities. Hegel sees freedom as the aim of human history. He believes freedom to consist in men's becoming fully self-conscious, understanding that their environment and culture are emanations from Spirit. Marx rejects the notion of Spirit, believing that Man's ideas, though important, are by themselves insufficient to explain social and cultural change.[70] In Hegel, Man's integration with nature takes places on a spiritual level and is thus, in Marx's view, an abstraction and an illusion.[65]
The main influence on Marx's thinking in this regard is Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his Essence of Christianity aims to overcome an inappropriate separation of individuals from their essential human nature. Feuerbach believes modern individuals are alienated by their holding false beliefs about God. People misidentify as an objective being what in actuality is a man-made projection of their own essential predicates.[75]
For Feuerbach, Man is not a self-alienated God; God is self-alienated Man. God is Man's essence abstracted, absolutized and estranged from Man.[67] Man creates the idea of God by gathering the best features of his human nature– his goodness, knowledge and power– glorifying them, and projecting them into a beyond.[76] Man is alienated from himself not because he refuses to recognize nature as a self-alienated form of God, but because he creates, and puts above himself, an imagined alien higher being and bows before him as a slave.[67]Christian belief entails the sacrifice, the practical denial or repression, of essential human characteristics.[77] Liberation will come when people recognize what God really is and, through a community that subjects human essence to no alien limitation, reclaim the goodness, knowledge and power they have projected heavenward.[78]
This critique extends beyond religion, as Feuerbach argues in his Theses on the Reform of Philosophy that Hegelian philosophy is itself alienated. Hegel regards alienation as affecting thought or consciousness and not humanity in its material being. For Hegel, concrete, finite existence is merely a reflection of a system of thought or consciousness. Hegel starts and ends with the infinite. The finite, Man, is present as only a phase in the evolution of a human spirit, the Absolute.[79] In opposition to this, Feuerbach argues that Man is alienated because he mediates a direct relationship of sensuous intuition to concrete reality through religion and philosophy.[80] By recognizing that his relationship to nature is instead one of immediate unity, Man can attain a "positive humanism" that is more than just a denial of religion.[81]
In work
Following Feuerbach, Marx places the earthly reality of Man in the center of the picture.[82] Where Hegel sees labor as spiritual activity, Marx sees labor as physical interchange with nature: in nature, Man creates himself and creates nature. Where Hegel identifies human essence with self-consciousness,[65] Marx articulates a concept of species-being (Gattungswesen),[83] according to which Man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing his own conditions of life.
Man's nature is to be his own creator, to form and develop himself by working on and transforming the world outside him in cooperation with his fellow men. Man should be in control of this process but in modern conditions Man has lost control of his own evolution.[84] Where land-ownership is subject to the laws of a market economy,[85] human individuals do not fulfill themselves through productive activity.[86] A worker's labor, his personal qualities of muscle and brain, his abilities and aspirations, his sensuous life-activity, appear to him as things, commodities to be bought and sold like any other.[87] Much as Bauer and Feuerbach see religion as an alienating invention of the human mind, so does Marx believe the modern productive process to reduce the human being to the status of a commodity.[88] In religion, God holds the initiative and Man is in a state of dependence. In economics, money moves humans around as though they were objects instead of the reverse.[84]
Marx claims that human individuals are alienated in four ways:
Firstly, the product of a worker's labor confronts him "as an alien object that has power over him". A worker has bestowed life on an object that now confronts him as hostile and alien. The worker creates an object, which appears to be his property. However, he now becomes its property.[89] When he externalizes his life in an object, a worker's life belongs to the object and not to himself; his nature becomes the attribute of another person or thing.[90] Where in earlier historical epochs, one person ruled over another, now the thing rules over the person, the product over the producer.[89]
Secondly, the worker relates to the process by which this product is created as something alien that does not belong to him. His work typically does not fulfill his natural talents and spiritual goals and is experienced instead as "emasculation".[89]
Thirdly, the worker experiences mutual estrangement– alienation from other individuals. Each individual regards others as a means to his own end. Concern for others exists mainly in the form of a calculation about the effect those others have on his own narrow self-interest.[91]
Fourthly, the worker experiences self-estrangement: alienation from his human nature. Because work is a means to survival only, the worker does not fulfill his human need for self-realization in productive activity.[91] The worker is only at ease in his animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating. In his distinctly human functions, he is made to feel like an animal.[92] Modern labor turns the worker's essence as a producer into something "alien".[91]
Marx mentions other features of alienated labor: overwork, or the amount of time that the modern worker has to spend engaged in productive activity; "more and more one-sided" development of the worker, or the lack of variety in his activity; the machine-like character of labor, and the intellectual stunting that results from the neglect of mental skills in productive activity.[93]
The capitalist does not escape the process of alienation. Where the worker is reduced to an animal condition, the capitalist is reduced to an abstract money-power. His human qualities are transformed into a personification of the power of money.[87]
In contrast to this negative account of alienated labor, Marx's Notes on James Mill offer a positive description of unalienated labor.[93] Marx here claims that in self-realizing work, a worker's personality is made objective in his product and he enjoys contemplating that feature in the object he produces.[94] As he has expressed his talents and abilities in the productive process, the activity is authentic to his character. It ceases to be an activity he loathes.[95] Marx further claims that the producer gains immediate satisfaction from the use and enjoyment of his product– the satisfaction arising from the knowledge of having produced an object that corresponds to the needs of another human being.[94] In an unalienated society, a worker can be said to have created an object that corresponds to the needs of another's essential nature. His productive activity is a mediator between the needs of another person and the entire species. Marx suggests that this confirms the "communal" character of human nature, because individuals play this essential role in the affirmation of each other's nature.[95]
To overcome alienation and allow humankind to realize its species-being, it is not enough, as Hegel and Feuerbach believe, to simply understand alienation. It is necessary to transform the world that engenders alienation: the wage-labor system must be transcended, and the separation of the laborer from the means of labor abolished. This is not the task of a solitary philosophical critic, but of class struggle.[96] The historic victory of capitalism in the middle of the 19th century has made alienation universal, since everything enters in to the cycle of exchange, and all value is reduced to commodity value.[96] In a developed capitalist society, all forms of alienation are comprised in the worker's relation to production.[97] All possibilities of the worker's very being are linked to the class struggle against capital. The proletariat, which owns nothing but its labor power, occupies a position radically different to all other classes.[96] The liberation of the working class will therefore be the liberation of mankind.[98]
This emancipation is not simply the abolition of private property. Marx differentiates his communism from the crude communism that seeks to abolish everything that cannot be the property of all. For Marx, this would be the generalization of alienation and the abolition of talent and individuality– tantamount to abolishing civilization. Marx instead sees communism as a positive abolition of private property, where Man recovers his own species-being, and Man's activity is no longer opposed to him as something alien. This is a direct affirmation of humanity: just as atheism ceases to be significant when the affirmation of Man is no longer dependent on the negation of God, communism is a direct affirmation of Man independent of the negation of private property.[99]
In division of labor
In The German Ideology, Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels identify the division of labor as the fundamental source of alienation, again placing private property as a secondary phenomenon. Importantly, the division of labor is not simply a clearer expression of alienation but a specific cause. According to Marx, the division of labor — driven by improvements in tools — leads to commerce, which transforms Man-made objects into commodities that carry abstract exchange-value. This shift marks the beginning of alienation because people relate to products as commodities rather than as the result of human labor. From this, inequality, private property, and alienated political institutions emerge, all perpetuating the same alienating process.[100] Division of labor and exchange relations subsume individuals in classes, subordinating them to forces to which they have no choice but to comply. Alienated processes appear to individuals as if they were natural processes.[101]
A further form of alienation occurs when physical labor becomes separated from mental labor. This division encourages ideologists to believe their ideas exist independently of social needs, as though ideas have intrinsic power. The existence of such ideologists reinforces the false notion that ideas have their own inherent validity.[100]
Marx and Engels here attack Feuerbach for advancing an "essentialist" account of human nature that reduces real historical men to a philosophical category. They argue that it is not a philosophical concept ("Man") that makes history, but real individuals in definite historical conditions.[101]
In economics
In the Grundrisse, Marx continues his discussion of the problem of alienation in the context of political economy.[102] Here, the central themes of the 1844 Manuscripts are dealt with in a much more sophisticated manner.[103] Marx builds on his earlier conception of Man as a productive, object-creating being.[104] The concepts found in Marx's earlier work– alienation, objectification, appropriation, Man's dialectical relationship to nature and his generic or social nature– all recur in the Grundrisse.[105]
Marx views political economy as a reflection of the alienated consciousness of bourgeois society. Political economy mystifies human reality by transforming the production of commodities into "objective" laws which independently regulate human activity. The human subject is made into the object of his own products.[106] A key difference between the Grundrisse and the Manuscripts is Marx's starting with an analysis of production, rather than the mechanisms of exchange.[103] The production of objects must be emancipated from the alienated form given to it by bourgeois society.[102] Moreover, Marx no longer says that what a worker sells is his labor, but rather his labor-power.[103]
The discussion of alienation in the Grundrisse is also more firmly rooted in history.[107] Marx argues that alienation did not exist in earlier periods– primitive communism– where wealth was still conceived as residing in natural objects and not man-made commodities.[102] However, such societies lacked the creation of objects by purposive human activity. They cannot be a model for a fully-developed communism that realizes human potentiality.[102]Capital is an alienating force, but it has fulfilled a very positive function. It has developed the productive forces enormously, has replaced natural needs by ones historically created and has given birth to a world market. Nonetheless, Marx sees capitalism as transitory: free competition will inevitably hinder the development of capitalism.[107]
The key to understanding the ambivalent nature of capitalism is the notion of time. On the one hand, the profits of capitalism are built on the creation of surplus work-time, but on the other the wealth of capitalism has emancipated Man from manual labor and provided him increasing access to free time.[108] Marx criticizes political economy for its division of Man's time between work and leisure.[102] This argument misunderstands the nature of human activity. Labor is not naturally coercive. Rather, the historical conditions in which labor is performed frustrate human spontaneity.[109] Work should not be a mere means for Man's existence, it should become the very contents of his life.[110]
In property
The Grundrisse also continues the discussion of private property that Marx began in the German Ideology.[111] Marx's views on property stand in contrast to those of Hegel, who believes that property realizes human personality through objectification in the external, phenomenal world.[112] For Marx, property is not the realization of personality but its negation. Those who have property and those who do not are both alienated in Marx's view. The possession of property by one person necessarily entails its non-possession by another. Property is thus not to be assured to all, but to be abolished.[112]
The first form of property, according to Marx, is tribal property. Tribal property originates in the capacity of a human group to gain possession of land. Tribal property precedes the existence of permanent settlement and agriculture. The act of possession is made possible by the prior existence of group cohesion, i.e. a social, tribal organization. Property does not pre-date society but results from it. An individual's relation to tribal property is mediated through membership of the group. It is a form of unalienated property that realizes Man's positive relationship to his fellow tribesmen.[111] However, this relationship limits the individual's power to establish a self-interest distinct from the general interest of society.[113] This primitive type of common ownership disappears with the development of agriculture.[111]
The unity of the individual and society is preserved by more complex societies in two distinct forms: oriental despotism and the classical polis. In oriental despotism, the despot personifies society– all property belongs to him.[114] In the polis, the basic form of property is public. Economic activity depends on community-oriented considerations. Political rights depend on participation in common ownership of land. Agriculture is considered morally and publicly superior to commerce. Public agricultural policy is judged on its ability to produce more patriotic citizens, rather than economic considerations.[114] Alienation between the public and private sphere does not exist in the polis.[115]
Marx does not idealize the polis or call for its restoration. Its foundation on naturalistic matter is specific and limited. Marx opposes to this the universality of capital. Capital is objectified human labor: on the one hand it indicates hidden human potentialities but on the other its appearance is accompanied by alienation.[115] Capitalism develops a kind of property free from social limitations and considerations. Concurrently, capitalism ends individual private property as traditionally conceived, in that it divorces the producer from the ownership of the means of production. Such property is at the exclusive disposition of its owner. Yet, the development of capitalist society also entails more complex production, requiring combined efforts that cannot be satisfied by individual property.[116]
In commodity fetishism
To make a fetish of something, or fetishize it, is to invest it with powers it does not in itself have.[117] The concept of fetishism originates in religion. In religious fetishism, a cultural process of thought attributes power to an object, such as an idol. Such power exists only in the realm of belief, not in reality. In Capital. Volume 1, Marx extends this idea to the economic sphere, identifying the phenomenon of "commodity fetishism".[117] Marx argues that the failure of human beings to understand their own social existence arises from the way production is organized in capitalist society.[118] While religious fetishes entirely lack real power, an economic fetish holds genuine powers, but these powers derive from the labor and social organization underlying production. Unlike religious fetishism, where the illusion arises from thought, the illusion in commodity fetishism emerges from the external world and the production process itself, persisting even when understood rationally.[119]
Exchange-value is a key concept in understanding Marx's analysis of commodities. Every commodity has a dual nature: use-value (its utility) and exchange-value (its value in the market). Exchange-value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity, rather than its physical usefulness.[120] Commodity fetishism describes how the exchange-value of commodities appears to come from the commodities themselves, rather than from the labor required to produce them. This illusion obscures the social relations behind the production process, giving the false impression that value is an inherent property of the object.[121]
Commodity fetishism is unique to market economies, where the social character of labor is expressed only through exchange, not production itself. Unlike other social forms, such as feudalism or communal production, where production is directly social and relations between producers are transparent, commodity production isolates producers. Producers connect only indirectly through the exchange of commodities, which obscures the labor that creates value. This separation between production and social relations creates an alienated, illusory world where value appears to emanate from objects themselves.[122]
The root of this fetishism lies in the specific social form of market economies. In such societies, producers do not recognize their collective authorship of value. Instead, social relations between producers are replaced by apparent relations between objects, with products acquiring a mysterious exchange-value, as though value was a natural, physical property of things. This exchange-value integrates fragmented producers in a disconnected system, regulating their lives while masking its foundation in labor. Producers lose awareness of their agency, attributing value creation to things rather than their own labor.[122]
This process is a form of alienation. Human beings fail to see their own products for what they truly are. They unwittingly become enslaved by the power of their own creations.[123] Things rule the men who have created them.[124] Marx no longer uses the term "alienation", but the description of the phenomenon is the same as in his earlier works, and so is the analogy with religion that he owes to Feuerbach.[125] Fetishism encapsulates all other forms of alienation. Political institutions develop autonomy and turn into instruments of oppression. Religious fantasies invented by the human mind similarly become autonomous. Social progress — whether in scientific advancement, labor organization, improved administration, or the increase in useful products — ultimately turns against humanity, transforming into quasi-natural forces beyond human control. Each genuine advancement appears only to deepen human subjugation.[123] The result is a world where social relations are obscured, and producers are alienated from the products of their labor.
Marx contrasts market economies with societies like feudalism, primitive communism, or a hypothetical future communist society consisting of a free association of producers. In these systems, production is inherently social, with products bearing the direct imprint of personal relationships or communal duties. In contrast, market societies rely on an illusory market mechanism to connect producers, creating a duplication of worlds where fragmented elements are unified only through alienated and surrogate forms. This alienation is central to Marx's critique of commodity production.[122] This alienation is compounded by money, which embodies exchange-value independent of use-value. Money serves as a representation of social labor, masking the relationships between producers.[126]
Market economies replace feudal subjugation with contractual freedoms, but this new "freedom" brings a different form of dependence—on commodities and their exchange. Bourgeois ideology celebrates liberation from feudal bonds, but it also enforces dependence on the "rule of things," where social power is derived from objects like money.[127]
In reification
In Marx’s analysis, productive labor, the process of shaping material objects to meet human needs, is the sole source of value. While secondary forms of capital (e.g., merchants, bankers, landowners) participate in acquiring surplus value, they do not contribute to its production. Industrial capital, including the organization of transport, uniquely creates surplus value: it converts human labor into commodities that embody exchange value. For Marx, only the labor involved in producing or transporting goods adds to society’s total value, while purely commercial activities (acts of exchange) do not.[128]
A particular expression of alienation is the reification of labor power, in which human persons appear in the context of labor as commodities bought and sold on the market according to the laws of value.[123] The foundation of capitalist production lies in the commodification of labor-power, whereby human abilities and energies are bought and sold like any other commodity. This reification, or transformation of human qualities into things, epitomizes the degradation of humanity under capitalism. Marx argues that the worker’s labor becomes external to his life — it is a means to survive rather than an expression of self. The capitalist mode of production subjugates the worker’s life activity, transforming it into a process of generating surplus value for others.[129]
In this system, the worker produces wealth that does not belong to him. His labor is continually transformed into capital — an alien power that dominates and exploits him. As Marx puts it, "The laborer constantly produces material wealth as capital, an alien force, while the capitalist produces labor power as a dependent and exploited resource." This dynamic perpetuates the worker’s poverty and dehumanization.[130]
Capitalism reduces human relationships to alienated cooperation, where individuals are compelled to work together under conditions of isolation. The social nature of labor is experienced as an external force — the will of the capitalist — rather than a collective human endeavor. Workers contribute to a productive system that is fundamentally indifferent to their individual development, while capitalists embody the impersonal force of capital itself.[131]
Machinery, which could otherwise liberate humanity, serves to intensify exploitation under capitalism. It extends working hours, increases labor intensity, and transforms workers into mere appendages of the machine. The very tools created to control nature instead enslave humanity.[131] Marx describes this as the vampire-like nature of capital, which thrives by extracting the life energy of labor.[132]
In socialization
The apparent social character of labor under capitalism is purely technological and fails to build genuine community. Workers engage in forced cooperation, not as free individuals, but as fragmented components of capital’s productive machinery. The division of labor isolates individuals, reducing them to specialists whose sole function is to serve the system’s pursuit of surplus value.[133]
In this arrangement, both workers and capitalists lose their humanity. Workers are reduced to instruments of production, while capitalists become personifications of capital, driven solely by its imperative to expand. Marx insists that capitalist production strips both classes of subjectivity: workers are exploited, and capitalists are dehumanized, but only the working class has the potential to resist this condition. Their alienation gives rise to a revolutionary class consciousness aimed at dismantling capitalism and reclaiming their humanity.[134]
For Marx, the essence of capitalism lies not merely in poverty, but in the loss of human subjectivity and community. The socialist movement emerges not from poverty alone, but from the class antagonisms that awaken the working class to its historical mission. Socialism, in contrast to capitalism, represents a world where humanity reclaims its subjectivity and builds authentic social relations, free from alienation.[132]
Praxis
Marx's theory of alienation is intimately linked to a theory of praxis.[41] Praxis is Man's conscious, autonomous, creative, self-reflective shaping of changing historical conditions. Marx understands praxis as both a tool for changing the course of history and a criterion for the evaluation of history.[135] Marxist humanism views Man as in essence a being of praxis[136]– a self-conscious creature who can appropriate for his own use the whole realm of inorganic nature[137]– and Marx's philosophy as in essence a "philosophy of praxis"– a theory that demands the act of changing the world while also participating in this act.[138]
Naturalism is the view that Man is part of the system of nature.[140] Marx sees Man as an objective, natural being[73]– the product of a long biologicalevolution.[140] Nature is that which is opposed to Man, yet Man is himself a part of nature.[141] Man, like animals and plants, is conditioned by nature and his natural needs.[142] It is through nature that Man satisfies the needs and drives that constitute his essence.[141] Man is an "object" that has other "objects":[142] he needs objects that are independent of him to express his objective nature.[141]
Humanism is the view that Man is a being of praxis who both changes nature and creates himself.[140] It is not the simple attribute of consciousness that makes Man peculiarly human, but rather the unity of consciousness and practice– the conscious objectification of human powers and needs in sensuous reality.[143] Marx distinguishes the free, conscious productive activity of human beings from the unconscious, compulsive production of animals.[144] Praxis is an activity unique to Man: while other animals produce, they produce only what is immediately necessary.[137] Man, on the other hand, produces universally and freely. Man is able to produce according to the standard of any species and at all times knows how to apply an intrinsic standard to the object he produces.[137] Man thus creates according to the laws of beauty.[145]
The starting point for Man's self-development is the wealth of his own capacities and needs that he himself creates. Man's evolution enters the stage of human history when, through praxis, he acquires more and more control of blind natural forces and produces a humanized natural environment.[140] History is made neither by objective forces nor dialectical laws. History is made by people, who act to transform their world within the limits of historically defined possibilities.[146]
As human knowledge
For Marx, the essence of humanity lies in labor—humans’ active and practical engagement with nature. This understanding demands a reevaluation of traditional epistemology.[147] Marx's epistemology centers on two key themes:[148]
1) Objectivity: Marx emphasizes the independent reality of both natural and social forms, asserting that these exist independently of their being known or perceived. This aligns with a realist perspective in ontology (or the "intransitive" dimension).
2) The Role of Labor: Marx highlights the importance of work or labor in the process of cognition. Knowledge is a social and inherently historical product, shaped by human practice (or "praxis") and reflecting a "practicist" viewpoint in epistemology (the "transitive" dimension).
Marx challenges the foundational questions posed by philosophers like Descartes and Kant. He critiques the notion of pure self-consciousness as a starting point, dismissing the idea that the subject can perceive itself in isolation from its existence within nature and society. Similarly, Marx rejects the idea that nature exists as a fully independent reality to which human subjectivity is a mere byproduct. Instead, he emphasizes that humanity's relationship with nature is inherently practical and active, not a passive or detached contemplation.[147]
Perception, for Marx, arises from the dynamic interplay of human action and nature. This interaction produces a reality shaped by human sociality and purpose. Through this lens, human senses are not simply biological tools but are socially shaped and transformative. For instance, the ability to appreciate music depends on cultivated faculties, just as the recognition of any object is tied to its relevance to human life and activity. Marx asserts that the senses of a "social man" differ significantly from those of an isolated individual, as they are deeply intertwined with social practices and communal life.[149]
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx admonishes the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach for its contemplative theory of knowledge. Marx criticizes Feuerbach for treating objects in a purely contemplative manner, neglecting their basis in "sensuous, practical, human activity." In Marx’s view, perception and knowledge are not passive but are embedded in humanity’s active relationship with the world. Objects are not merely "given" by nature but are shaped by human needs and efforts. Marx dismisses speculative disputes about the conformity of thought to reality, arguing that truth must be proven through practice: thought’s reality and power lie in its ability to transform the world. For Marx, questions about the nature of thought are inseparable from its practical effects in human society.[150] Through praxis, human beings come to understand the world and themselves.
Criticisms and defences
Criticisms
As the terminology of alienation does not appear in a prominent manner in Marx's later works,[151] Marxist humanism has been controversial within Marxist circles. The tendency was attacked by the Italian Western MarxistGalvano Della Volpe and by Louis Althusser, the French Structuralist Marxist.[152] Althusser criticizes Marxist humanists for not recognizing what he considers to be the fundamental dichotomy between the theory of the "Young Marx" and that of the "Mature Marx". Althusser holds that Marx's thought is marked by a radical epistemological break, to have occurred in 1845[153]– The German Ideology being the earliest work to betray the discontinuity.[154] For Althusser, the humanism of Marx's early writings– an ethical theory– is fundamentally incongruous with the "scientific" theory he argues is to be found in Marx's later works.[155] In his view, the Mature Marx presents the social relations of capitalism as relations within and between structures; individuals or classes have no role as the subjects of history.[22]
Althusser believes socialist humanism to be an ethical and thus ideological phenomenon. Humanism is a bourgeoisindividualist philosophy that ascribes a universal essence of Man that is the attribute of each individual,[153] and through which there is potential for authenticity and common human purpose.[156] This essence does not exist: it is a formal structure of thought whose content is determined by the dominant interests of each historical epoch.[157] The argument of socialist humanism rests on a similar moral and ethical basis. Hence, it reflects the reality of discrimination and exploitation that gives rise to it but never truly grasps this reality in thought. Marxist theory must go beyond this to a scientific analysis that directs to underlying forces such as economic relations and social institutions.[156] For this reason, Althusser sympathized with the criticisms of socialist humanism made by the Chinese Communist Party,[158] which condemned the tendency as "revisionism" and "phony communism".[159]
Althusser sees Marxist theory as primarily science and not philosophy but he does not adhere to Friedrich Engels's "natural philosophy". He claims that the philosophy implicit in Marxism is an epistemology (theory of knowledge) that sees science as "theoretical practice" and philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice".[152] However, he later qualifies this by claiming that Marxist philosophy, unlike Marxist science, has normative and ideological elements:[152] Marxist philosophy is "politics in the field of theory" and "class struggle in theory".[160]
Defences
Althusser is critical of what he perceives to be a reliance among Marxist humanists on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, which Marx did not write for publication. Marxist humanists strongly dispute this: they hold that the concept of alienation is recognizable in Marx's mature work even when the terminology has been abandoned.[161]Teodor Shanin[162] and Raya Dunayevskaya[163] assert that not only is alienation present in the late Marx, but that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the "young Marx" and "mature Marx". The Marxist humanist activist Lilia D. Monzó states that "Marxist-Humanism, as developed by Raya Dunayevskaya, considers the totality of Marx's works, recognizing that his early work in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, was profoundly humanist and led to and embeds his later works, including Capital."[164]
Contra Althusser, Leszek Kołakowski argues that although it is true that in Capital Marx treats human individuals as mere embodiments of functions within a system of relations apparently possessed of its own dynamic and created independently, he does so not as a general methodical rule, but as a critique of the dehumanizing nature of exchange-value.[165] When Marx and Engels present individuals as non-subjects subordinated to structures that they unwittingly support, their intention is to illuminate the absence of control that persons have in bourgeois society. Marx and Engels do not see the domination of alien forces over humans as an eternal truth, but rather as the very state of affairs to be ended by the overthrow of capitalism.[166]
Marxist humanists
Notable thinkers and schools of thought associated with Marxist humanism include:
Kevin B. Anderson (born 1948), American social theorist and activist.
John Berger (1926–2017), English art critic, novelist, painter, and author.
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.
Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire, Murray Rothbard, and many others. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.
In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism or anti-humanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism, traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, ideological or metaphysical.
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a manuscript written by the German political philosopher Karl Marx in 1843 but unpublished during his lifetime—except for the introduction, published in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. In the manuscript, Marx comments on excerpts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 1820 book Elements of the Philosophy of Right that deal with 'civil society' and the state paragraph by paragraph. One of Marx's major criticisms of Hegel in the document is the fact that many of his dialectical arguments begin in abstraction.
The Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical circle, whose members were influenced by Western Marxism. It originated in Zagreb in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s.
Some Marxists posit what they deem to be Karl Marx's theory of human nature, which they accord an important place in his critique of capitalism, his conception of communism, and his materialist conception of history. Marx does not refer to human nature as such, but to Gattungswesen, which is generally translated as "species-being" or "species-essence". According to a note from Marx in the Manuscripts of 1844, the term is derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy, in which it refers both to the nature of each human and of humanity as a whole.
Religious alienation is a term some use to describe how religion creates an impediment to human self-understanding.
Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution is a work about Marxism by the political philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. Its three volumes in English are The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown. It was first published in Polish in Paris in 1976, with the English translation appearing in 1978. In 2005, Main Currents of Marxism was republished in a one volume edition, with a new preface and epilogue by Kołakowski. The work was intended to be a "handbook" on Marxism by Kołakowski, who was once an orthodox Marxist but ultimately rejected Marxism. Despite his critical stand toward Marxism, Kołakowski endorsed the philosopher György Lukács's interpretation of the philosopher Karl Marx.
In Marxist philosophy, reification is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
Classical Marxism is the body of economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their works, as contrasted with orthodox Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, and autonomist Marxism which emerged after their deaths. The core concepts of classical Marxism include alienation, base and superstructure, class consciousness, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, ideology, revolution; and the forces, means, modes, and relations of production. Marx's political praxis, including his attempt to organize a professional revolutionary body in the First International, often served as an area of debate for subsequent theorists.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, also known as the Paris Manuscripts or as the 1844 Manuscripts, are a series of unfinished notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. They were compiled and published posthumously in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. They were first published in their original German in Berlin, and there followed a republication in the Soviet Union in 1933, also in German.
Herbert Marcuse was a German–American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University and then at Freiburg, where he received his Ph.D. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, which later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of science. As a materialist philosophy, Marxist dialectics emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of functional contradictions within and among social relations, which derive from, but are not limited to, the contradictions that occur in social class, labour economics, and socioeconomic interactions. Within Marxism, a contradiction is a relationship in which two forces oppose each other, leading to mutual development.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, analyzes the concept of "class consciousness," and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.
Marxist ethics is a doctrine of morality and ethics that is based on, or derived from, Marxist philosophy. Marx did not directly write about ethical issues and has often been portrayed by subsequent Marxists as a descriptive philosopher rather than a moralist. Despite this, many Marxist theoreticians have sought to develop often conflicting systems of normative ethics based around the principles of historical and dialectical materialism, and Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production.
Cohen, G.A. (2001a) [1978]. Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (7thed.). New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN0-691-07068-7.
——— (2001b). If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (3rded.). London: Harvard University Press. ISBN0-674-00693-3.
Colletti, Lucio (1992) [1974]. Introduction. Early Writings. By Marx, Karl. Translated by Livingstone, Rodney; Benton, Gregory. Penguin Classics. pp.7–56. ISBN0-14-044574-9.
Leopold, David (2007). The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics and Human Flourishing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490606. ISBN978-0-511-28935-4.
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