Scott Alexander Is Very Wrong About Marx (Part 1)

Quite a long time ago I was randomly linked to Scott Alexander’s blog, Slate Star Codex. Now, I kind of have a habit when I come across a new writer or journalist on the internet, I tend to read the original article I was linked to, then look through the writer’s body-of-work and see if they have any writings on topics I happen to know a lot about. In Scott Alexander’s case this was his article reviewing Peter Singer’s book on Marx. A lot of people get Marx pretty wrong, but there’s typically a boilerplate standard wrongness that most people writing about Marx tend to fall into. I wondered if Scott Alexander would fall into the same generic traps. But as I read onwards I discovered something interesting. Scott Alexander wasn’t just wrong about Marx, he was wrong in unique, bizarre ways that surprised me paragraph after paragraph. When I look around for critique of Alexander’s writings on leftist political theory I find very little. In fact I found very few criticisms of his writings in general, despite some quite glaring issues. I highly recommend reading through Scott Alexander’s article before you read my article, so you have a grasp on what I’m referring to, and so you know that my criticisms are fair.

My goal in this essay is not convince you that Marx was 100% right, that's probably a bridge too far for people reading a short essay on the internet. The actual goal of this essay is to convince you that Scott Alexander didn't really understand what he was reading, and therefore could not engage in a robust way with Marxist thought. That's a goal which is much simpler, and I think fairly self-evident when you start looking closely at Scott Alexander's writing. So this isn't really a matter of political ideology, it's a simple matter of reading comprehension. If you learn a little about the basics of Marxism along the way I consider that a bonus. To help people towards this goal I have very extensively quoted Marx's writings. One of the really striking things about Scott Alexander's essay is that he barely quotes Marx at all, direct quotes from Marx makes up roughly 50 words out of 3,000. I will try to remedy this, so you can get a better idea of Marx's positions in Marx's own words.

Scott Alexander has a habit of densely packing mistakes into his essays. Many of his statements are vague and misleading enough to give the reader a false impression of having learnt something. He also rarely gives proper citations (e.g. supplying page numbers or anything like that) so it's difficult to trace the origin of his mistakes. I'll try my best to unravel and comment on his multitude of errors, and therefore this essay is fairly long. It actually became so long that I thought it would be best to split it into multiple parts and publish it serially, so if you’re reading this and desperately waiting for me to cover one of Scott Alexander’s mistakes, you’ll just have to be patient.

I. Is it Rationalist nature to read carefully?

I'm starting my critique in the middle of Alexander's essay, which might seem unusual at first. But this part of his essay is important because it is the only part that actually quotes Marx. It's also important because those quotes show that Scott Alexander is making quite a large and obvious mistake. Alexander doesn't usually provide citations so this part of his essay is very important for pinpointing his errors. I want to start here before I eventually move onto other aspects of Alexander’s essay.  I'm going to quote the important passage in full, including nested quotes.

Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”, and I had always thought that complaint was unfair. Like sure, liberals say that you can make people less racist, and one could counterargue that a tendency toward racism is inborn, but it sure seems like you can make that tendency more or less strongly expressed and that this is important. This is part of the view I argue in Nature Is Not A Slate, It’s A Series Of Levers.

But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.

And:

It is evidence that economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form

Which Singer glosses with:

This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation.

I understand this is still a matter of some debate in the Marxist community. But it seems to me that if Singer is right, if this is genuinely Marx’s view, it seems likely to be part of what contributed to his inexcusable error above.

Did you catch the big mistake in this series of paragraphs? The big mistake is that in neither of the quoted paragraphs does Marx say anything even close to "no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable"! Let's have a look at those quotes again, this time in detail:

It is evidence that economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form.

Firstly Scott Alexander screwed up the transcription here. It's "evident" in the translated text he’s quoting from, not "evidence".¹ Whatever, everyone makes mistakes. But nowhere here does Marx say anything like there is "no such thing as human nature". This quote is Marx simply saying that economists have been incorrect about human nature. Marx says that the economists are looking at human interactions under capitalism and projecting those interactions as "essential, original and natural". In other words they are looking at how we behave in a very modern system (capitalism) and assuming there's something timeless about that behaviour. Thinking that someone else is wrong about human nature does not imply that you think there is "no such thing" as human nature. Singer is quoting this excerpt from Marx's obscure notes on James Mill, and the translation Singer used is different to the one widely available on the internet. We might as well quote that other translation here to get another view of what Marx said:

It is seen that political economy defines the estranged form of social intercourse as the essential and original form corresponding to man's nature.²

Again, Marx does not say there is “no such thing” as human nature here. Just that some other people are wrong about what exactly constitutes human nature. This is extremely straightforward. I'm honestly baffled as to why Scott Alexander thought this was good evidence to back up his own argument.

Let's have a look at that other quote, which I think is actually a lot more interesting and complicated:

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.³

Here Marx is talking about "essence of man" and says it is the ensemble of social relations. Again, he doesn't say anything close to "no such thing as human nature" or that it is "completely malleable". He just said that there is an essence! I've actually had discussions with people about this quote, and it seems like people are having trouble with words like "ensemble". When we're talking about human nature we're necessarily talking about generalisations about a group, i.e. an ensemble. Not every member of the ensemble has the exact same qualities. I’ll start with an example that everyone uses; greed. It’s human nature to be greedy. I definitely feel that way. But then you could ask: is everyone is equally greedy? I don’t think so. And is every type of greed the same? Actually, the guy who has crown made of jewels and servants feeding him grapes seems a bit different somehow to the guy who goes back for thirds at the cheap buffet. Already our ensemble is looking pretty varied.

But Marx goes deeper than just looking at consumer behaviour. What Marx was interested in is the labour processes that lie behind all these different acts of consumption. Marx was not so interested in the greedy guy that stuffs himself full at the buffet, that’s a simple consumer choice. What Marx was most interested in is how the food is produced and how profit is made selling these goods. He grounds his analysis in the historical and material conditions of society. This is Marx’s methodology, known as historical materialism.

With this in mind, we can take another look at that Marx quote in context, it's actually from a very short piece called Theses On Feuerbach:

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated - human individual.

2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.

Feuerbach consequently does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form.⁴

I think when you look at the quote in context, Marx’s positions have held up remarkably well. They’ve almost become, dare I say it, common sense. There’s enough agnostics and atheists in the world now that I don’t think we can say that a desire to be religious is something inherent to all individuals. Religious institutions still hold a lot of influence of course, but a good criticism of religion would look at the economics and institutional structures that help maintain that power, that’s Marx’s point here. Scott Alexander didn’t write about any of this and misread the whole passage.

II. Doing the research, doing the reading

Those two excerpts from Marx that Scott Alexander quoted aren’t the only time Marx wrote about Feuerbach or human nature. If Scott wanted to research this matter he probably should have read a little more widely and then cited those works in his essay. To begin our understanding of Marx’s position regarding human nature, religion and Feuerbach we can look at a piece written by Friedrich Engels (Marx’s close collaborator and comrade) titled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy⁵:

Feuerbach’s idealism consists here in this: he does not simply accept mutual relations based on reciprocal inclination between human beings, such as sex love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., as what they are in themselves — without associating them with any particular religion which to him, too, belongs to the past; but instead he asserts that they will attain their full value only when consecrated by the name of religion. The chief thing for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they shall be conceived of as the new, true, religion. They are to have full value only after they have been marked with a religious stamp. Religion is derived from religare [“to bind”] and meant, originally, a bond. Therefore, every bond between two people is a religion. Such etymological tricks are the last resort of idealist philosophy. Not what the word means according to the historical development of its actual use, but what it ought to mean according to its derivation is what counts. And so sex love, and the intercourse between the sexes, is apotheosized to a religion, merely in order that the word religion, which is so dear to idealistic memories, may not disappear from the language. The Parisian reformers of the Louis Blanc trend used to speak in precisely the same way in the forties. They, likewise, could conceive of a man without religion only as a monster, and used to say to us: “Donc, l’atheisme c’est votre religion!” [“Well, then atheism is your religion!”] If Feuerbach wishes to establish a true religion upon the basis of an essentially materialist conception of nature, that is the same as regarding modern chemistry as true alchemy.⁶

Marx and Engels’ disagreement with Feuerbach isn’t that Feuerbach thought that there was such a thing as human nature. In the opinion of Marx and Engels, Feuerbach treats religious sentiment too reverently, sticking with the word “religion” when it really doesn’t apply anymore. He’s putting it on a pedestal. As far as I can tell Feuerbach thinks that a deep understanding of humankind will form a new secular “religion”. Take for example this section from Feuerbach’s Principles of Philosophy of the Future:

The old philosophy possesses a double truth; first, its own truth – philosophy – which is not concerned with man, and second, the truth for man – religion. The new philosophy as the philosophy of man, on the other hand, is also essentially the philosophy for man; it has, without in the least compromising the dignity and autonomy of theory – indeed it is in perfect harmony with it – essentially a practical tendency, and is practical in the highest sense. The new philosophy takes the place of religion; it has within itself the essence of religion; in truth, it is itself religion.⁷

Obviously, Marx and Engels disagree with this. However, this isn’t to say that there was some blood feud, Feuerbach vs. Marx and Engels. They actually praised Feuerbach a lot for his work, again I’ll quote from Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy:

Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. With one blow, it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The spell was broken; the “system” was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new conception and how much — in spite of all critical reservations — he was influenced by it, one may read in the The Holy Family.⁸

In short, Marx and Engels agree with Feuerbach’s materialism, then argue that Feuerbach did not push his own materialist conceptions far enough. Now, honestly, I haven’t really read Feuerbach much, so I couldn’t tell you if Marx’s and Engels’ criticisms of Feuerbach are 100% fair. But this is the nature of the debate. Scott Alexander’s piece doesn’t say anything about this at all, and the entire point of what Marx was arguing in that quote from Theses On Feuerbach has gone flying over his head. To be quite frank, I think Peter Singer spends a disproportionate amount of pages on Feuerbach in Marx: A Very Short Introduction. That, after reading Singer, Scott Alexander still misunderstood the material so badly is surprising, and I’m honestly not sure if it reflects worse on Singer or Alexander.

Remember that all this stuff about religious sentiment being inherent to human nature isn’t some abstract question for Marx. He’s living through a time where religious institutions are losing power in society and governments are becoming more secular. Why is it that this rising industrial capitalist class seems to be less religious than the classes that have come before them? That was an interesting question to Marx, and one that he grappled with in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

[…]

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.⁹

So I think by now it’s pretty clear that those two Marx quotes Scott Alexander used do not say what he thinks they say. But what did Marx say about human nature? It's actually kind of a niche and marginal topic, most of Marx's work is about an economic critique of capitalism. But we can easily look for some more statements about human nature sprinkled throughout his work. Actually if Scott read things carefully and followed up on citations he would see Marx makes a statement about human nature in the Comments On James Mill that he quotes. This statement is written just a couple of paragraphs above:

Exchange, both of human activity within production itself and of human product against one another, is equivalent to species-activity and species-spirit, the real, conscious and true mode of existence of which is social activity and social enjoyment. Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth.¹⁰

Now, you might agree with this or you might not, I should again state that I'm not expecting to make Marxists of every person who reads this essay. But this is a very long way from believing that "there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable". Here Marx is very clearly saying that it is human nature to be social, to produce and to exchange things.

Let's say that Scott Alexander didn't really want to read through all the works Singer cited in order to see their greater context. That's fine! I can understand that, but I wonder if there's any quicker way to find out what Marx thought about human nature... Perhaps using technology to skim through archives of his works? Using the wonders of technology and the built-in search-function on marxists.org, we can do such a thing! Wow! Let's quote a few of those results just out of interest. I’m using search terms like “human nature” and “nature”, and also phrases like “essence of man”, “species being” and “species essence” which Marx (or his translators, I guess) uses more-or-less synonymously with human nature. Consider this a small sample.

Here’s a section from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 where he very clearly mentions human nature and human needs:

We have seen what significance, given socialism, the wealth of human needs acquires, and what significance, therefore, both a new mode of production and a new object of production obtain: a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.¹¹

It would be strange for Marx to talk about the forces of human nature and the enrichment of human nature if he, as Scott Alexander claimed, thought there was “no such thing” as human nature. Here’s another section from the same text where he talks about gaining an understanding of “the natural essence of man”:

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man.¹²

But maybe these are some freak occurrences, maybe Marx will never ever say anything like this ever again, especially not in his more widely read works…

Here's a quote by Marx from volume 1 of Capital, which is probably Marx’s second-most widely read work after the Manifesto:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operation s that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.¹³

In this section Marx talks about the facets of human labour that “stamps it as exclusively human” and nominates things like imagination and planning. This was also written much later than the other pieces I’ve quoted from, so we can see that his references to human nature run throughout Marx’s life. Let’s skip a bit further and also have a look at Capital volume 3:

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.¹⁴

Here Marx talks about human nature and the necessity of labour in satisfying our wants. Again, you can agree with these statements or you can disagree. My point here isn't to make you agree completely with Marx. The important part is that these statements exist and are easy to find if you have even the slightest curiosity and basic computer literacy. There's clearly something there that Marx is analysing; he's not saying that there is "no such thing" as human nature or that it is "completely malleable". Marx is very obviously, in all quotes, musing on what it means to be human and nominating things like social interactions, imagination, planning and labour. If Scott wanted to make a point about Marx's opinion on human nature he could have engaged with these works.

III. Singer and Alexander

At the start of this section I'll note that Singer is perhaps partially to blame for Scott Alexander going so far astray here, making unfounded claims about Marx's "misconception" of the "flexibility" of human nature¹⁵ and saying "human nature is not as pliable as he believed"¹⁶. However, nowhere in the book does Singer make any claims as strong as saying that Marx believed that there "was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable". As far as I can tell, that's entirely Scott's own phrasing.

Now that I've established that Scott Alexander provided quotes by Marx which do not say what he claims they say, and that Marx does indeed refer to a human nature numerous times, we can look more closely at the structure of Scott Alexander's argument:

But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

So how did Scott Alexander make this mistake regarding Marx in the first place? Alexander seems to be a moderately intelligent person, so it's odd that he could be so wildly incorrect about Marx, to the point of not even being able to read the words that were on the page right in front of him. Potentially Alexander was psychologically primed in some way, someone told him that this is what Marx believed and therefore Alexander skimmed over the two quotations and falsely believed that they added evidence to his argument. This is why citations are so important, so we can trace the origin of mistakes like this. Alexander gives "conservatives their due", but we're never told which conservative made this argument about Marx and human nature or where they made such an argument. Regarding the issue of what Marx actually said, Alexander is apparently weighing the opinions of nameless uncited conservatives more heavily than Marx’s own writings.

Then we get into some very poor argumentation. "As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable [...]" As far as you can tell? But the quotes Scott Alexander himself provided state the opposite of what Alexander says they do. So if this is "as far as I can tell", then it seems Alexander cannot tell very far at all. Scott hasn't done any research beyond reading one secondary source and reading a couple of short excerpts from Marx incorrectly, so he hasn't even tried particularly hard. I also don't know what it means for a position to be "unstrawmannable". It’s very odd that Alexander argues that Marx is "unstrawmannable" on this topic immediately before providing quotes that do not say what Alexander claims they say. I’m not going to say that Scott purposely constructed a strawman, but the end effect is the same. This is the kind of strange, densely-packed, poor writing that makes Alexander's piece so inane. It's not enough for Alexander to just get something wrong like a normal person, he then has to also say the thing he's plainly wrong about is actually "unstrawmannable".

Let's look even more closely at Scott Alexander's claim about what Marx believed. Apparently Marx "believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable." So which is it, Alexander? Did Marx believe there was no such thing as human nature, or did he believe everything was completely malleable? For something to be malleable, it has to exist in the first place, so those two positions are self-contradictory. If you're making the argument that someone holds contradictory positions, then you need to quote that person saying both things. Alexander doesn't provide evidence for Marx holding either one of those positions, let alone both of them at the same time. What does "completely" malleable even mean when we're talking about something like "human nature" anyway? Does it mean that human nature can turn into dog nature? Again, this is an absolute mess of an argument and very poor writing.

Scott Alexander goes on to claim that "I understand this is still a matter of some debate in the Marxist community." Scott Alexander also gives no citation here, so we don't know who he's referring to, we don't know the nature of the debate or the different sides. Another dead end, maybe we're just supposed to take it for granted that Alexander has read a litany of inter-Marxist discussion. I have my doubts, especially since he couldn’t even read Marx correctly. Scott Alexander’s assertion that this is still a matter of some debate also comes into conflict with Alexander’s earlier statement that Marx believed these things "so strongly" as to be "unstrawmannabe". So is there debate over this in the Marxist community, or is it something so strongly believed that they can't even be strawmanned about it?

One last point, Peter Singer makes the following claim here, which Scott Alexander quotes:

This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation.¹⁷

Peter Singer is talking nonsense here. The large majority of Marx's work is a critique of political economy using the "presuppositions" of economists of the time. This is also what most of Capital Vol. 1-3 is all about. If you ever take the time to seriously read Marx, the large majority of what you'll be reading about is the economy and criticism of economists.  Peter Singer's book actually later partially corrects this ridiculous oversight and does go over some of Marx's criticism of the capitalist economy, even stating that:

Capital has a familiar-sounding subtitle - Critique Of Political Economy - and once again the work criticizes classical economic theories, both within their own presuppositions and from a broader point of view.¹⁸

Just 33 pages earlier Singer was saying that "Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science", now we're being told the opposite. I honestly don't know how this kind of thing got past Singer's editors. Sloppy writing from Singer then inspires even sloppier writing from Alexander.¹⁹

IV. Wrapping things up for now

So far we have seen that Scott Alexander could not comprehend the material he was reading, that his argument had obvious contradictions in it, and that he rarely cites things properly. These are all problems which continue in the rest of the piece, which I will analyse in part 2 of this series.

Thanks to everyone who read early versions of this essay. The feedback was very helpful. Any mistakes here are my own, please alert me to any potential errors in the comments section.

1. Karl Marx, On James Mill, quoted in Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), page 34.

2. Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique, (1844) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

3. Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach, (1845) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/

4. Ibid.

5. In general if you’re having trouble reading Marx I would suggest trying to find things by Engels that cover the same topic. He usually has similar viewpoints written more plainly. Then you can re-visit Marx’s writing and it will make more sense to you.

6. Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, (1886) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch03.htm

7. Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of Philosophy of the Future, (1843) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future2.htm

8. Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, (1886) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm

9. Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (1848) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

10. Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique, (1844) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

11. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, (1844) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

12. Ibid.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

13. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, (1867) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

14. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume Three: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, (1894) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm

15. Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), page 97.

16. Ibid, page 94.

17. Ibid, page 34.

18. Ibid, page 67.

19. Interestingly, in 2018 Peter Singer would repeat Scott Alexander’s argument that Marx thought there was “no such thing” as human nature. He even used the exact same quote from Theses On Feuerbach as Alexander. Since Singer doesn’t cite Alexander it’s impossible to know for sure, but he does appear to be using Alexander’s review as a guide, like an ouroboros of bad takes.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/karl-marx-200th-birthday-by-peter-singer-2018-05