The general result which has guided me in my further studies may be summarized in the following manner. Men make their own lives in a social way. In doing so, they enter into relations which are necessary and do not depend on their own free will. These relations are production relations. They correspond to the phase of evolution of the material means of production. The whole of the production relations constitute the economic conditions of society. The whole of production relations is the real basis of life. On this basis men build a juridical and political structure, and to these structures corresponds a way of thinking. The method of production conditions social, political, and spiritual life. At certain moments of history the material means of production surpass the economic, social, and juridical structures. Then the latter no longer promote production, but rather obstruct is. At such a time mankind has come to a period of revolution. The change of the means of production compels mankind, sooner of later, to change the whole superstructure. In our study of such revolutions we must always distinguish between the change of the economic conditions of production—this change is material and can be diagnosed in a strictly scientific manner—and the juridical, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical, briefly, the ideological forms in which men become aware of the conflict and fight it out. If we must judge an individual, we will not judge him by what he thinks of himself. No more can we base our judgment of a period of revolution on what people think of it. We must understand the consciousness of such a period, on the contrary, from the contradictions of material life. We must study the contradiction between the social means of production and the conditions of production.
勞動作為人類歷史的核心。我們須意識到,馬克思在尋找歷史的決定性因素。他試圖通過嚴格的科學方法理解歷史,這要求他必須發現歷史的決定性因素。在引述的文本中,馬克思從「人們在社會中生產他們的生活」(「In der gesellschaftlichen Produktion ihres Lebens」)這個論點開始自己的理論。在這裏馬克思預知了存在主義和現象學,它們把人看做是實現自身的存在。薩特在他的著名的論斷中表達了這種思想:「人的存在先於本質」。它表明人自己決定自己的存在。馬克思在《資本論》中說: