The German Ideology

Overview

The German Ideology is two hundred pages in the usual selection and it was never finished, never published by its authors, and never read by anyone who mattered until eighty-six years after it was written. Marx and Engels drafted it in Brussels in 1845 and 1846, failed to find a publisher, and abandoned it. Marx wrote later that they had left the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since they had achieved their main purpose, which was self-clarification.

That history is the first thing to know about it. Lenin never read Part One. Neither did Kautsky, Luxemburg or Plekhanov. The full text appeared in Moscow in 1932, by which time there had been a revolution conducted in Marx’s name, and the discovery of the young Marx it made possible caused a substantial upheaval in how the whole tradition was understood.

The book divides sharply. Part One, on Feuerbach, is about a hundred pages, is a first-order piece of philosophy, and is what gets assigned. Everything after it is an enormously long and largely unreadable demolition of two now-forgotten Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer and, at extraordinary length, Max Stirner, whose book on the ego occupies several hundred pages of mockery under the name Saint Max.

Part One is also a mess as a manuscript: unfinished, with blank spaces, marginal additions in both hands, and passages struck out. Editors have arranged it differently, which is worth knowing if you compare editions.

The argument

The premises. Marx opens by attacking the whole method of German philosophy. It has been criticising religion, then criticising philosophy, then criticising criticism, and imagining that changing ideas about the world changes the world. He compares this to a man who believed people drowned because they were possessed by the idea of gravity, and thought that if they gave up the idea they would be safe from water.

The alternative premises are stated flatly. We begin from real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live, both those they find and those they produce. These are verifiable empirically. The first historical act is not thinking anything; it is producing the means to satisfy needs, and the satisfaction of one need produces new needs, which is the beginning of history.

Consciousness follows. From this the central claim. Morality, religion, metaphysics and the rest of ideology have no history and no development of their own. People developing their material production alter their thinking and the products of their thinking along with it. Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness.

The image Marx uses for ideology is the camera obscura, in which the picture appears inverted, and he says this inversion arises from the historical life process just as the inverted retinal image arises from a physical one. Ideas present themselves as independent and as governing, when in fact they are outcomes.

The division of labour. The mechanism that generates everything else. It begins in the family, becomes the separation of material from mental labour, then of town from country, and each stage fixes people in roles they did not choose and cannot leave. Out of it come private property, unequal distribution, and classes whose interests genuinely conflict.

The state then appears, and Marx’s account of it is the one the tradition inherited. It is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and it presents itself as the general interest while being nothing of the kind.

And the ruling ideas. The class that owns the means of material production also controls the means of mental production, so the dominant ideas of an epoch are the ideas of its dominant class, and they are presented as eternal and universal truths rather than as the interests of particular people.

Alienation, restated. The concept from the 1844 manuscripts reappears without the Hegelian vocabulary. The division of labour means a person’s own activity confronts them as an alien power, consolidating into something that rules them rather than being ruled by them. It is in this context that the famous passage occurs, the one about hunting in the morning and criticising after dinner, and its point is narrower than it is usually taken to be: what communism abolishes is not work but the fixing of a person into a single occupation for life.

Revolution. History proceeds by a conflict between productive forces and the existing relations of production. When the forces have developed to the point where the relations have become fetters, the relations break. Marx adds a condition that is easy to miss: communism is only possible on the basis of a high development of productive forces, because without it want is merely generalised and the old struggle begins again.

And a note on method: communism is not a state of affairs to be established or an ideal to which reality must adjust, but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

The Theses on Feuerbach. Eleven short notes Marx wrote in a notebook in spring 1845, published by Engels in 1888 and usually printed with this book. They are the most compressed thing Marx wrote. Feuerbach is credited with seeing that religion is a human projection and faulted for stopping there: having dissolved the religious world into its secular basis, he failed to ask why the secular basis produces a religious projection at all. The last thesis is the one on his gravestone.

How to read it

Read the Theses on Feuerbach first. They are two pages and they announce everything Part One does at length.

Then read Part One, and stop there. The attacks on Bauer and Stirner are of historical interest and nothing else, and even sympathetic editors abridge them.

Get an edition that gives you the manuscript honestly. The standard Progress Publishers text arranges the material in an order the editors chose, and some passages are Engels’ hand with Marx’s insertions. Knowing which is which occasionally matters.

Read it after the 1844 manuscripts and before the Communist Manifesto. The trajectory is visible: alienation described in Hegelian terms, then reformulated as an effect of the division of labour, then turned into a political programme two years later.

Watch the question the whole tradition argues about. If consciousness is determined by material life, how determined? Marx says elsewhere that people make their own history but not under conditions of their choosing, and the range between hard determination and loose conditioning is where every subsequent dispute in Marxist theory lives.

Questions it raises

• Consciousness is determined by life. Does that claim apply to itself, and if it does, what is its own material basis?
• Ideology is described as an inversion produced by the life process. How would you distinguish an ideological idea from a true one, and who is in a position to?
• The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Is that true of mathematics, or of the natural sciences?
• The division of labour is presented as the source of classes, the state and alienation. Can a complex society exist without it?
• Communism requires a high development of productive forces. What follows for revolutions attempted where that condition was not met?
• The manuscript was unread for eighty-six years. What does it mean that a movement’s founding theoretical statement played no part in its formation?