 Marxist Standpoint Theory. Marxism offers the classic model of standpoint theory, claiming an epistemic advantage over fundamental questions of social science and history, on behalf of the standpoint of the proletariat (Marx 1964, Lukács 1971). Workers attain this standpoint by gaining collective consciousness of their role in the capitalist system. In virtue of their oppression, they have an interest in the truth about whose interests capitalism serves. In virtue of their centrality, they have experiential access to the fundamental relations of capitalist production. In virtue of their practical productive activity, they represent it in terms of use values (labor values), which are the terms in which the fundamental laws of economics and history are expressed. In virtue of their standing as the agents for the universal class they will become under communism, they represent the social world in relation to universal human interests. (Capitalists, by contrast, represent the world ideologically in superficial (exchange value) and parochial (class interested) terms.) Finally, the collective self-consciousness of the workers involves, like all successful intentional action, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers’ collective insight into their common predicament and the need to overcome it through revolutionary action generates a self-understanding which, when acted upon, gets realized. The epistemic advantage of the standpoint of the proletariat is thus also grounded in the epistemic privilege that autonomous agents have over what they are consciously doing.