Abstract
The main philosophical context for Marx was the thought of Hegel, which Marx modified in a crucial respect: he removed its idealist perspective. Marx can also, however, be placed in a much longer philosophical tradition, which takes us back to the ancient Greeks, for in his doctoral thesis he engaged with pre-Platonic and post-Platonic thought. The entire thrust of Marx’s argumentation is anti-Platonic, and it cannot be sufficiently emphasized how Marx saw his work as a contribution to the science of economics. For Marx, there is no path out of the cave, for there is nothing outside the cave: rather, the revolutionary politics he and Engels espoused aimed at changing how the prisoners governed themselves, and the Marxist conception of liberation is entirely materialist and immanent.
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Bishop, P. (2019). Marx and Engels: The Revolution. In: German Political Thought and the Discourse of Platonism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04510-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04510-4_7
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