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Karl Marx: Ideas
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Ideas, Marx maintained, must be traced to the life-conditions and the historical situations of those who uphold them. For example, it is not sufficient to state that the ideas of bourgeois writers are the ideas of the bourgeoisie. Distinctions must be made between those ideas that emerge at the beginning of the bourgeois era and those that come at it height. Utilitarian notions in the writings of Helvetius and d'Holback differed from those that made their appearance with James Mill and Bentham. "The former correspond with the struggling, still undeveloped bourgeoisie, the latter with the dominant, developed bourgeoisie."
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Marx believed that state control of production (socialism) was a necessary first step. Workers would need re-education under socialism to move them away from selfish capitalist ideas, and this might take many years of state control. But eventually a country could move to true communism, where the 'state' would disappear.
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According to Marx, individual consciousness develops as a reflection of the material conditions of existence. He says that the ruling class is capable of obstructing the development of consciousness in the lower classes. He put it this way: The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class. The class that dominates the economic sphere ... dominates such spheres as politics, religions, and so on.
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It is a myth that Marx had been pursuing the ideal of helping mankind, that religion was the obstacle on the way to the realization of those ideals, and that this was the reason why he took an anti-religious position. On the contrary, Marx hated all gods and couldn't hear about God. Socialism was only a decoy to attract the proletariat and intelligensia to the realization of a satanic ideal.
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Marx's thinking contrasted sharply with that of Comte, as well as of Hegel, for whom the evolution of mankind resulted primarily from the evolution of ideas or of the human spirit. Marx took as his point of departure the evolution in man's material conditions, the varying ways in which men combined together in order to gain a livelihood. "Legal relations as well as form of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel . . . combines under the name of 'civil society'. . . The anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy."
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Marx's poems are difficult to decipher, but a number of recurring themes are apparent. One of the most influential was the idea that there is a unlimited "surplus" of resources in the world. The idea of "surplus value" was supposed to license his well-known hedonism. Marx is known to promote Socialism, Communism, liberalism, and hobos.
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