Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
1. What basic philosophical error does Marx attribute to Adam Smith and the “Political Economists” when
they enunciate the laws of economics? How might Adam Smith have responded to this critique?
2. What does Marx appear to mean by his term "alienation" (estrangement)? In what senses are workers
alienated? Why, according to Marx, is this process of alienation inherent in capitalist production?
3. How does the capitalist relate to commodified objects and the workers in comparison with how workers
relate to the commodified objects that they produce and their employers? Explain Marx’s notion of
“reification.”
4. Why is praxis, understood as labor, central to human existence? What basic account of human nature
(species-being) underlies Marx's theory of alienation and his comments about labor? Why is the importance
of “free activity” and the “free association of producers”?
5. Marx claims that his materialism differs from that of Feuerbach and previous thinkers. How and why
does it differ?
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46)
6. What is a camera obscura and what does it imply about the possibility of arriving at true statements about
human relations? Does the figure imply that we can actually perceive ourselves and the world directly as is?
How is the world mediated via human activities and interpretations and products? What does this imply
about its constant nature?
7. What does Marx mean by “historical materialism”? What are the historical stages of human development
and what conditions allow for a new stage of development to occur?
8. What basic philosophical error does Marx accuse German Idealists like Hegel? Why is it that "Morality,
religion, metaphysics, [and] all the rest of ideology [...] have no history"?
9. What does Marx mean by ideology and how does ideology demand the critique of ideology? What
constitutes real history? How does ideology relate to the material conditions of social organization?
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
10. How is history "the history of class struggles"? Trace the development of the bourgeoisie. That is,
within and against what historical conditions did this class arise—how did feudalism generate the
bourgeoisie, and how did the bourgeoisie come into conflict with the basic property relations of the feudal
order?
11. What distinguishes the "epoch of the bourgeoisie" from all previous ones? How does this distinction
spell trouble for the continued existence of capitalism, according to Marx?
12. How does Marx interpret the activities of the "executive of the modern State"? What does he say about
democracy?
13. In what sense is the bourgeoisie a "revolutionary" class? How does it strip away the illusions held by
members of pre-capitalist societies? With what does it replace them?
14. On the whole, what attitude does Marx suggest that his readers should take towards the advent of the
capitalist order? Is its development a positive development in human affairs?
15. We know that market societies produce objects for sale as commodities, but in what sense might they be
said to "manufacture" new desires? Why would that be necessary?
16. Marx describes capitalism as an international phenomenon that tends to give a "cosmopolitan character"
to production and consumption all over the world. How would you relate his comments to what people
today are calling "globalization"? Is capitalism fully compatible with the idea of separate, sovereign nationstates? Why or why not?
17. How should we interpret Marx’s economic and political philosophy today? Should he still be taken
seriously as long as there is capitalism? Why or why not?