ABSTRACT
Epistemology was a preoccupation of Karl Marx from his earliest writings, and it has been a preoccupation of Marxists ever since. Marxists have generally agreed that the material world, and especially that which is created or transformed by human effort or labor, is the primary—perhaps the only proper—object of knowledge. Importantly, Marx criticizes naturalizing social processes and attributing the qualities and capacities of human energy and labor-induced sweat to "things". Marx's critique of "idealism" as a false or mistaken epistemological stance can be found in his discussions, scattered throughout his writings, about demystification. Knowledge effects reverberate throughout a social formation and are productive, in combination with other cognitive raw materials, in their own right. For many Marxist epistemologists, knowledge is active and actionable, and its existence as material image/image of the material is one requisite condition for the revolutionary socioeconomic—especially class—change that Marx vehemently proposed.
