Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other… — Karl Marx

It is in fact not the consciousness dominating life but the very life dominating consciousness.

Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.