Marx, Sartre and Freud Compared
Karl Marx
Karl Marx believed in the ‘Materialist conception of history’. He believed that the ‘driving force of historical change was material rather than spiritual’. ‘Not in mere ideas and certainly not in any cosmic Spirit, but in the economic conditions of life lay the key to all history. Alienation… is at root neither metaphysical nor religious but social and economic.’ Under capitalism, labor is something alien to the laborer. He works not for himself but for someone else who directs the process and owns the product as private property. Marx sought, “not just to interpret the world, but to change it”. He was convinced that history was ‘moving forward to the revolution where capitalism would give way to communism’. In Marx’s work we find ‘German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy’. He took these three things together and ‘welded them into the theory of history’, which Engels came to call ‘scientific socialism’. Marx believed that he and Engels had discovered the correct scientific method for the study of human society.
