No Secret Handshakes, I
History: Fundamental Conditions (Marx, the German Ideology)

"""""Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry."""""



"Du essen. Daher ist es dich gibt": a point which most theists, metaphysicians, idealist historians, and romantics (whether left or right) never quite realize. Marx, of course follows Thomas Hobbes here (and Hobbes had already said as much contra-Descartes), and is not so far from Malthus or Darwin really, except that he has a keener awareness of economics (not that his proposed cures for the disease of finance capitalism are so grand, taken across the board). Marx's writing also might serve as an effective antitode to the identity-politics of blogland, and various e-moralists, whether links oder rechts..