history is, as McLellan writes,
part of a polemic against the assumption that the whole of human history was determined by ideas, whether human or extra-human in origin: an assumption which complacently and cruelly ignored the long history and present facts of human labor, through which the necessary physical existence and survival of human beings were gained and assured. The counter-emphasis, that human labor is central, necessary and thus genuinely originating, remains as Marx's major contribution to modern thought.
Marx says in a number of areas that there "is no history" of ideas, of art, of politics, of law, of science, of religion, etc. What he means is not that these "areas" of human concern
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