complex, ideas also become more complex. In every case, Marx says, ideas in history are dependent on the changes which occur in the material world in which man himself lives and changes.
For Marx, the idea can either advance the cause of human development, or retard it. Ideas which advance it are those which are rooted in actual human experience. Such ideas may lead to the intensification of the struggle between the classes, in the short run, but they nevertheless help to eventually bring about the revolution and the coming of communism. Ideas which retard the development of man are not rooted in human experience in the physical world but are instead abstract and imposed from without. For example, the concept of alienation is an important part of Marxist theory:
By "alienation" Marx meant . . . that the projections of human experience in thought or social institutions are misleadingly separated from man in abstract speculation and acquire a harmful power over him in his social life, dividing him from himself and his fellow men so that he is never truly whole and never truly "at home."
Marx sees ideas as dependent on actual human experience for a number of reasons. First, his philosophy is rooted in the material world, in social and economic relations. If ideas have a source other than the material world, then his materialistic philosophy is threatened. If, for example, ideas could be shown to be the source of the world (as in idealistic philosophy), then Marxism would be immediately meaningless. Second, Marx's philosophy is rooted in the desire for material change, change which will bring about a more just world for human beings who suffer under economic and other inequities. Therefore, ideas which do not relate to this end are, for Marx, meaningless.
Man---the real, actual human being in a physical body working and suffering and yearning in the material world---is at the heart of Marxism. Marx's philosophy of ideas in ...