These eleven paragraphs are the shortest famous text in the whole of Marxism, and among the most consequential. Marx jotted them in a notebook in Brussels in the spring of 1845, under the plain heading "Concerning Feuerbach," and then forgot them. They were never meant for a reader. He was settling accounts with the philosopher who had freed him from Hegel — Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity had dissolved God into a projection of human longing — and marking the point where he had to leave Feuerbach behind. The notes stayed in a drawer for forty-three years. It was Engels who found them again after Marx's death and printed them, lightly edited, as an appendix to his own 1888 essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, calling them "the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of a new world outlook." That germ is the idea the theses turn on: that reality is not something the mind contemplates from a safe distance but something human beings make, and can therefore remake. Marx's word for it was practice (in the German, Praxis) — activity that is at once material and thinking, the point where knowing and changing meet.
The volume this edition draws on is the Progress Publishers Selected Works, where the theses sit as a coda to The German Ideology, in the text Engels prepared and with a few refinements — italics and quotation marks — restored from Marx's manuscript by the Soviet editors. The reader should know at once that the famous words are, in their famous form, partly Engels's. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism says so with unusual candour in its note: Engels "made certain editorial changes to render the document, which Marx had not intended for publication, more comprehensible," and even "The title 'Theses on Feuerbach' has been supplied by the Institute" — Marx gave them no title at all. The most quoted sentence in all of Marxism carries the mark of this editing. Marx's own notebook ended the last thesis without the pivot the world knows; the adversative "however" in "the point, however, is to change it" is Engels's touch, sharpening a rough note into an epigram. Nothing is falsified by this — Engels was the most faithful of editors — but a text canonised as pure Marx is in fact Marx read through Engels, and an honest edition should say so rather than let the scripture stand seamless.
What the theses do, even in a page and a half, is enormous, and what they leave undone is the price of their brevity. The break with the old materialism is total: its defect, Marx writes in the first thesis, is that reality "is conceived only in the form of the object … but not as human sensuous activity, practice." From that single move everything follows — that "Social life is essentially practical"; that truth is not contemplated but proved in the doing; that the human essence "is no abstraction inherent in each single individual" but "the ensemble of the social relations," so that to change the relations is to change the human being. This is the founding gesture of a Marxism that is neither a mechanical materialism nor a dressed-up idealism, and it has fed everything alive in the tradition since. But the theses are notes, not a doctrine. Their compression is exactly what makes them quotable and what makes them contestable: a century of readers — the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Sartre, Althusser — has drawn opposite systems out of the same eleven paragraphs. And buried in the third thesis is a warning Marx never developed, which would come to indict much that was done in his name. Against the reformers who dreamed of educating society into virtue, he objects that their doctrine "necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society," and adds the sentence that ought to hang over every vanguard: "the educator himself needs educating."
Did the state that made these theses holy actually live by them? The eleventh — "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" — was carved on banners, set over lecture-hall doors, recited by every schoolchild in the Soviet bloc. And the regime that recited it most had turned Marxism into precisely the thing the first thesis condemns: a contemplative system, "dialectical materialism," a catechism to be memorised and professed, its truths settled in advance by authority rather than proved in practice. The philosophy of doing became a philosophy of reciting. Worse, the third thesis reads, in hindsight, like a diagnosis written before the disease. A party that placed itself above the class as the sole possessor of correct consciousness, that undertook to re-educate a whole society from above while never submitting to education itself, had made itself the part that stands "superior to society," the one Marx warned against — the educator who would not be educated. Marx had aimed the point at Robert Owen's benevolent factory-owner; it landed on the Stalinist bureaucracy. And the sixth thesis, which denies that there is any fixed human essence apart from social relations, was inverted into its opposite: the decreed "New Soviet Man," an essence handed down from the top, the very abstraction Marx had abolished.
The theses keep their value because they are the charter of the anti-fatalist Marxism the bureaucracy could not use. Gramsci called Marxism itself the philosophy of praxis, and the phrase is only the eleventh thesis made into a name: a doctrine that refuses to wait on History, that holds circumstances are changed by human activity and not by an iron law grinding toward its appointed end. This is the Marxism the Fourth International carried against both the evolutionism of the Second International and the mechanical determinism of the Third — Trotsky's insistence that the revolution is made by living people and can be betrayed by them, that the bureaucracy is not a new human essence but a set of social relations, and that what is made by human activity can be unmade by it. Read against its own ossification, the last thesis turns homeward with full force. The point is not to interpret the world, nor to administer it, nor to recite the correct interpretation of it — but to change it, including the world the administrators built in Marx's name. That is the sense in which these eleven paragraphs, scribbled and abandoned in 1845, are still unfinished business.