ABSTRACT
Karl Marx regards education directed at restraining the passions as characteristic of the moralism of his own Victorian bourgeois society in which only the passion of avarice was tolerated. For Marx and Frederick Engels, the early socialists such as Robert Owen inherited an environmentalist psychology rooted in a "passive materialism". The prophetic and important part of Marx is the one that goes beyond the mere social reconstruction of nature to a praxis motivated by a philosophically inspired theory that has gripped the masses and that surpasses naturalism almost entirely. Thus, the important part of his concept of radical need is historical and cannot be understood naturalistically. Marx's analytical dependence on the view that industrial society increasingly regards luxury as a necessity explains his failure to construct an adequate distinction between needs and desires or between natural and social needs.
