Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels begin with the question of what makes human beings unique as a species. They propose that humans alone can be said to have a “history.” This history, on their view, is fundamentally the history of the development of the modes of production and forces of production available to human beings at any given time, and that these essential features of human life are inextricably bound up in the history of the development of human needs and social relations.
These are the fundamental building blocks of the reality within which humans carry out what Marx and Engels call their “life-activity,” and through their experience of this activity, they create themselves, including their consciousness of themselves. Whichever class is the ruling class within any given mode of production and social organization thus, essentially, controls and defines the reality for everyone living within that society. Thus the “ideas” of a given period, far from being neutral reflections of the world, are in fact defined by the ruling class of that period. Throughout the work, Marx and Engels attack other thinkers for failing to account for the role of material conditions, including relations of power, in shaping human consciousness and abstract thought.
According to Marx and Engels, the material basis for the common misconception that ideas shape reality—that, e.g., the French Revolution was driven by a “belief” in the idea of freedom—is the division between mental and material labor, which is simply one form of the general social division of labor, though a highly significant one. And what motivates their attack on this form of thought—often called “idealism”—is that it stands in the way of practical action to change reality by making it appear as though historical change is a matter of changing ideas or consciousness. Their political goal, which they see as essential to achieving a just society, is a revolution of the proletariat, which can only occur through overthrowing the capitalist mode of production as it actually exists in the world. A “revolution” in the realm of ideas is to them, essentially, an oxymoron.
