The Classics, Beginnings,
Part 1a
The German Ideology
From August
1844 when they re-met in Paris, France, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels began a
lifelong collaboration, and immediately began to write together the book that
was published the following year as “The Holy Family” - a
polemic against the “Young Hegelians” or otherwise “The Free”, a group of
German political intellectuals (“Saint Bruno” Bauer, “Saint Max” Stirner, and
others).
But it was
in their second major joint work that the two managed to firmly lay down the
basics of what we know as Marxism in the book called “The German Ideology”,
again critiquing the Young Hegelians and now also Ludwig Feuerbach. This manuscript
was written between 1845 and 1847 but it was never published, or even prepared
for publication, during the lifetimes of the two authors, Marx and Engels.
The “Theses on Feuerbach” that we studied
as our previous item are said to be notes of Marx’s in preparation for “The
German Ideology”, according to the Preface to this
work in Progress Publishers’ Collected Works of Marx, which also says
of “The German Ideology” and its associated writings:
“They were all written between the spring of
1845 and the spring of 1847, during Marx’s stay in Brussels, where he moved in
February 1845 following his deportation from France by the Guizot government.
Engels came to Brussels from Barmen in April 1845 and remained till August
1846. This was the period when Marxism
was finally evolved as the scientific world outlook of the revolutionary
proletariat. Marx and Engels had arrived at the decisive stage in working out
the philosophical principles of scientific communism.”
This, then,
is the Holy Grail for those who seek the precise origin of “Marxism”. Progress
Publishers go on:
“It was in The German Ideology that the
materialist conception of history, historical
materialism, was first formulated as an integral theory. Engels said later
that this theory, which uncovered the genuine laws of social development and
revolutionised the science of society, embodied the first of Marx’s great
discoveries (the second being the theory of surplus value) which played the
main role in transforming socialism from a utopia into a science.”
What is
this thing called “historical materialism”? Here are two paragraphs from the
chapter of The German ideology that is downloadable via the link below.
"This conception
of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production,
starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the
form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production
(i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history;
describing it in its action as the state, and to explain all the different
theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics,
etc. etc. arise from it, and trace their origins and growth from that basis.
Thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and
therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)…
"It shows that
history does not end by being resolved into "self-consciousness as spirit
of the spirit", but that in it at each stage there is found a material
result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of
individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each
generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and
conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but
also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a
definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men
just as much as men make circumstances.”
Later on
the work says says “In reality and for
the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of
revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing
existing things.”
The point
is to change the world, as the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach says.
In the last
part of the chapter, in the part called “Ruling
Class and Ruling Ideas”, you will read the following
well-known, classic words:
“The
ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production
at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental
production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack
the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing
more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the
dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships
which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its
dominance.”
The Progress
Publishers Preface quotes Marx as writing, in 1859, about “The German Ideology”: “We
abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more
willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification.”
Image: Statue of Marx and Engels in Marx-Engels-Forum,
Berlin, Germany.
Please download
and read this short text:
Further
reading:
Theses on Feuerbach, 1845, Marx
(789 words)
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