People as puppets?

How Marx and Engels suppressed the real psyche in their teaching

By Andreas Peglau

Starting points

Today, as the US-led „West“ accepts the destruction of the entire planet in order to maintain its „rules-based“ hegemony, there is a greater need than ever to find alternatives to irresponsible greed for profit and power, warmongering and hostility towards life.

Socialism, which had been tried out in practice, at least to some extent, in several countries, was seen as such an alternative. Its most important theoretical starting point was the teachings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), which were often distorted in the context of ‚Marxism-Leninism‘. „Real socialism“ was massively discredited early on, particularly by state terror under Stalin and later under Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, and collapsed around 1990. Since then, such concepts have generally been considered permanently discredited, and capitalism has been regarded as without alternative.

Precisely because Marx and Engels sensibly did not even attempt to draft programmes for future societies, it is wrong to blame them for their failure. In any case, they bear no responsibility for state terror.

Anyone who does not yet know or does not want to know that systems based on capitalist exploitation are unjust and should therefore be „overthrown“, who wants to understand the important socio-economic dependencies and interrelationships underlying these systems, who is interested in the assumptions derived from them about past and future social orders, can still draw much of value from the legacy of Marx and Engels.

Read more:

https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/people-as-puppets-how-marx-and-engels-suppressed-the-real-psyche-in-their-teaching/

PDF:

https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/AP-People-as-puppets-How-Marx-and-Engels-suppressed-the-real-psyche-in-their-teaching.pdf

 

Author’s note:

This is a DeepL translation I have not checked. I apologize for any errors and inaccuracies that are sure to occur. Please use the original German text, written in 2024, for comparison:

https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/menschen-als-marionetten-wie-marx-und-engels-die-reale-psyche-in-ihrer-lehre-verdraengten/).

List of sources (mostly in German

Original German text

German audio-book

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Further publications by Andreas Peglau

https://andreas-peglau-psychoanalyse.de/

https://afsaneyebahar.com/category/andreas-peglau/

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