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About this quote

What does it mean?
Marx states that the basic fact of history is the existence of living individuals, whose physical organization and relation to nature must be first established.
In plain terms
History starts with living people and how they are physically organized.
What can you take from it?
Begin any analysis with the material conditions of individuals.

Where it applies

  • historical research
  • social policy

Putting it to work

  • map demographic structures
  • assess environmental interactions

Questions to consider

  • How do material conditions shape consciousness?
  • Can we separate individuals from their environment?

Another view

It reduces complex cultural factors to mere physical organization.

More from Karl Marx

  1. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movem…

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  2. The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empir…

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  3. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization…

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