Karl Marx Quotes on Knowledge
Marx's epistemology is inseparable from his historical materialism. The German Ideology presents the founding statement: it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness — that is, the prevailing forms of consciousness (philosophical, religious, legal, moral) are best understood as ideological reflections of the real material conditions of production from which they arise and which they characteristically misrepresent. The later Marx of Capital developed the analysis of commodity fetishism — the way capitalist social relations appear to consciousness as natural relations among things — as the most rigorous case of how the cognitive forms of bourgeois society systematically misdescribe the social reality those forms organize.
Quotes
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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretirt; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern. -
Attributed to Karl Marx:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
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“Thus heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God , is chosen for hell .”
The Pale Maiden” (1837) ballad -
“The Pale Maiden” (1837) ballad”
Thus heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God , is chosen for hell . -
“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet”
Wikiquote -
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2 -
“And your education ! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”
As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (21 February 1848), p19-20. -
“I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.”
Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Author's prefaces to the First Edition. -
“As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.”
1850s | Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852–55 (2010), p. 32