to Friedrich Engels, May 10, 1861 "Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were fantasy-mongers, that the Israelites were idolators ... that the tribe of Simeon (exiled under Saul) had moved to Mecca where they built a heathenish temple and worshipped stones." Karl Marx, letter to Engels, June 16, 1864 "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we shall call its history is but the history of the successive invaders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society." Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853 "Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs, do not belong at all to the Indo-German race, but are des intrus [intruders], who must again be hurled back beyond the Dnieper, etc." Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, June 24, 1865 Human nature and historical materialism Marx's theory of history attempts to describe the way in which humans change their environments and (in dialectical relation) their environments change them as well. That is: Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. Further Marx sets out his "materialist conception of history" in opposition to "idealist" conceptions of history; that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for instance. "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature." Thus:History does nothing, it "possesses no immense wealth", it "wages no battles". It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.So we can see that, even before we begin to consider the precise character of human nature, "real, living" humans, "the activity of man pursuing his aims" is the very building block of Marx's theory of history. Humans act upon the world, changing it and themselves; and in doing so they