ABSTRACT
Marx views his own social thought as involving some definite ideas about the nature of ultimate reality, the source of human knowledge and other matters which philosophers would place under the rubric of ‘metaphysics and epistemology’. The chief Marxian view about knowledge, apart from the insistence that human beings can attain it, is that none of it is a priori. In The Holy Family, Marx asserts that the whole tradition of modern materialism has been ‘an open, explicit struggle against metaphysics’, which in this context seems to mean the attempt to found science or philosophy on knowledge which is innate or a priori. ‘Historical materialism’ may be so named by Marx and Engels partly because it emphasizes the degree to which human social behavior is explainable by people’s orientation toward nature (‘matter’) rather than toward ‘spirit’. Marx attacks theism once more in the Paris writings, late in the manuscript ‘Private Property and Communism’.
