You're listening to The Partially Examine Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 355 is something like, how can we explain people's economic behavior?

We read three 1844 essays by Karl Marx's estranged labor, private property and communism,

and the power of money on bourgeois society.

More information about the text and the podcast, please see PartiallyexamineLife.com.

This is Mark Lintonmeyer emanating from man for man in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, existing as a physical subject only in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Allone with more sense than sense.

That's S-E-N-S-E versus C-E-N-T-S in London, England.

This is Dylan Casey, the most wretched of all commodities in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Lawrence Dahlman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lawrence, welcome back. We've not had you on the

show in a long time. You'd been one of our go-to analytic guys, but you recommended this reading.

Why this reading? Yeah, thank you for having me back. I think it's been six years, which is wild. I've always

worked on Marx. I am kind of analytically trained. I love the analytic tradition, but I work

primarily on Marx, and I think each of Marx's major works has a kind of special quality of its own,

but this one gives us the clearest picture of his understanding of what it is to be a human

being. I think there's a lot to get out of it. Yes, we haven't had you on for a long time, but we

haven't talked about Marx for much longer than that. January 2013, I see it's our episode 70 on the

German ideology, which was a never published book written two years later than these essays.

So, yes, as we said for that discussion, he was more philosophic.

At this point, maybe we'll still cover Das Kapital at some time.

It's sort of been one of the things on our list.

...