Practice - distinctively Marxist?

[penguinfoot]

In The German Ideology, following some of the ideas introduced in Theses on Feuerbach, Marx counterposes historical materialism to what he regards as traditional materialism by arguing that Feuerbach, as an adherent of the latter, conceived of the relationship between man and the world only in terms of passive contemplation and observation, whereas Marx's emphasis is on the fact that man is compelled to interact with and work on the world in order to create what he needs for his own sustenance, and that man transforms himself in the process of shaping the world around him, such that the relationship between man and the world is an active and mutual one, and it is wrong to counterpose the history of nature and the history of man to one another as if they were distinct and can be understood independently of one another. Marx sees his understanding of material conditions as practice to be what makes his materialism historical, because it does not treat the world as given from eternity, but as something that is always being transformed through human intervention, with man himself being transformed in the process.

What I want to ask is, to what extent is the notion of practice as deployed by Marx a distinctly Marxist notion? I ask because, whilst I don't think there's any other theory of history in which it has a central role, there are certainly other political theorists and philosophers who have emphasized the active side of human nature - Humboldt being the most obvious, and also Mill, who probably took up his own conception of the active and innovative human being from reading Humboldt. Is there any evidence of Marx having read Humboldt? How similar are their conceptions?

[cenv]

Where other philosophies recognize the importance of the active subject, but only contemplate it, Marxism dissolves the boundary between theory and practice. Marxism as an understanding of social relations is inseparable from Marxism as a weapon for overthrowing bourgeois society. Sure, a lot of people have threorized about action, but Marxism transcends pure theory altogether because at the bottom line, its entire purpose of practical. It has an agenda, and it is a tool for specific practical ends. So it's not about "understanding" practice as much as it is becoming a part of it.