On Karl Marx's The German Ideology, Part I, an early, unpublished work from 1846.

What is human nature? What drives history? How can we improve our situation? Marx thought that fundamentally, you are what you do: you are your job, your means of subsistence. All the rest, this culture, this religion, this philosophy, is just a thin layer over our basic situation. Ideas are not primarily what changes the world; it's economics. In fact, you can't even have an idea that doesn't end up being in some way a product of your economic situation, and any given culture inevitably reflects and reinforces the interests of the rich within that culture. Marx saw history as following an inevitable progression driven by the division of labor and development of technology, which would inevitably lead to a situation so awful for the vast majority that we'll have no choice but revolution leading to Communist paradise.

OK, so that last part is a pretty big stretch, but some of Marx's diagnoses seem on point: our alienation from our jobs, the fact that our opinions really do more often than not reflect our situation and are not therefore the product of a wholly free intellectual choice, the fact that a lot of philosophy ignores our practical situation to its detriment (Marx really rips into the "Young Heglians" that were dominating German thought at the time), our general lack of self-knowledge (this idea among others being lifted from Hegel), and some of his analysis of past cultural advances (mostly lifted from Adam Smith). The original threesome of Mark, Seth, and Wes are back to hack into these issues and more.

You can find the entire unabridged Marx podcast, along with dozens of others discussing philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, at the Partially Examined Life website: [ Ссылка ]

About PEL: The podcasters were all graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin back in the Clinton years. They all left the program at some point before getting their doctorates and have consequently since had time to get outside that whole weird world of academia and reflect on it and the various philosophical topics with a different, and probably much more lazy, perspective.

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