ABSTRACT
Karl Marx in his youth exposed the more naive versions of materialism, culminating in Feuerbach’s “Man is what he eats.” If Marxism belongs in the great tradition of materialist thought, yet the character of Marx’s materialism already displays one of those striking inconsistencies and ambiguities that are interspersed throughout his whole system. Marx’s rigorous dogmatism has set his critics on a gleeful and rather easy hunt for exceptions, qualifications, and inconsistencies in each step of his materialist argument. The passion of Marx and Friedrich Engels for social justice and revolutionary activity, their propaganda and their literary activity seem to belie their teaching. The scaffolding of Marx’s argument discloses Marx the romantic revolutionary assailing his contemporary society for its preoccupation with money. From the perspective of a modern non-Marxist, the surplus-value theory is a clear example of an ideology masquerading as a scientific theory.
