Quotes from Alfred Schmidt

What is remarkable is that Marx, precisely because he agreed with Hegel in rejecting the construction of abstract utopias, became probably the greatest utopian in the history of philosophy

The free social individual can only come into existence with the abolition of the division of labour, and the division of labour is fundamentally identical with the division of society into classes.

It belongs essentially to the advance of civilization as more and more organized increasing domination, that nature takes revenge on the men who have degraded it to mere material for human aims, by ensuring that men can only buy their domination by an ever-increasing suppression of their own nature. The division of nature and man in labour is reflected in the irreconcilability of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

The knowing consciousness is a form of the social consciousness, and should not therefore be viewed in isolation from psychology and human history.

Man can work only as nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.

It is 'the work of history', said Marx, 'to discover the various uses of things'.

The use-values coat, linen, etc., in short the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, material and labour. If we subtract the total sum of useful labour embodied in the coat, linen, etc., a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by nature without the help of man.

It is the socio-historical character of Marx's concept of nature which distinguishes it from the outset. Marx considered nature to be 'the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour',3 i.e. he saw nature from the beginning in relation to human activity. All other statements about nature, whether of a speculative, epistemological, or scientific kind, already presuppose social practice, the ensemble of man's technologico-economic modes of appropriation.