Now, you know I'm not one to agree with Carrol lightly, but I do reckon Carrol is on to what the young Marx was after here. If you take the other ten theses and the first part of *The German Ideology* (upon which the two lads - but mostly Marx - were just embarking at this time) as context, you can see it's all about working out 'the materialist conception of history'. The XIth thesis is wonderful rhetoric (which is why it's on his headstone, no doubt), but its original raison d'etre was to make the point Carrol uses Mao to make: history is our practical sensuous activity - it is within practice, then, that we generate our thinking and it is within this context that our thinking du jour must be located - else you open yourself to Marxist criticisms of ahistorical, idealist and idle contemplation. Thesis II helps a lot here, I think.
And yeah, it was a pretty wild idea at the time - the 27-year-old Marx was beginning to toy with the notion of tipping Hegel upside down in a philosophical environment still ruled by 'the German Ideology' as represented by Karl's erstwhile drinking buddies (who cop an absolute earful in the book).
Cheers, Rob.
>It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
>
>Slightly more seriously, this post was the most wonderful
>inversion of meaning I have seen all week. Marx says,
>philosophers have only interpreted world, the point is
>to change it, and CC says marx is really talking about
>the "this-sidedness of knowledge." Wild.
>
>mbs