''The German Ideology'' (German: ''Die deutsche Ideologie'', sometimes written as ''A Critique of the German Ideology'') is a set of manuscripts originally written by
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
. The first part of the book is an exposition of Marx's "
materialist conception of history
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
", though recent research for the new ''Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe'' (MEGA) indicates that much of the 'system' in this part was created afterwards by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the 1930s, from the set of manuscripts written by
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
and
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ,"Engels" '' polemic
Polemic () is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called ''polemics'', which are seen in arguments on controversial topic ...
s against
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer (; 6 September 180913 April 1882) was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Te ...
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt (25 October 1806 – 26 June 1856), known professionally as Max Stirner, was a German post-Hegelian philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. Stirner is often seen a ...
The text itself was written by Marx and Engels in Brussels in 1845 and 1846 but it was not published until 1932. The Preface and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx's hand. The bulk of the manuscript is in Engels' hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages of Chapter III of Volume I which are in Joseph Weydemeyer's hand. Chapter V in Volume II was written by
Moses Hess
Moses (Moritz) Hess (21 January 1812 – 6 April 1875) was a German-Jewish philosopher, early communist and Zionist thinker. His socialist theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He is considered a pioneer of Labor ...
and edited by Marx and Engels. The text in German runs to around 700 pages.
General outline
Marx and Engels argue that humans distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence; what individuals are coincides with their production in both how and what they produce. The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.
How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown by the degree to which the
division of labor
The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with, or acquire specialised capabilities, and ...
has been carried. Also, there is a direct link between division of labor and forms of ownership.
The ruling class, in ruling the material force of society, is simultaneously the ruling intellectual force of society. They regulate the production and distribution of ideas of their age. As the ruling class changes with time, so too do the ideals and the new ruling class must instill upon its society its own ideas which will become universal. The ruling ideas are thought to be the universal interest. However, it is an illusion that the ideas of the ruling class are the communal interests. This system will forever remain in place so long as society is organized around the need for a ruling class.Karl Marx. "The German Ideology". Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 653-658. Print.
To illustrate this theoretical framework, Marx draws on his formulation of
base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base (or substructure) and superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and relations of production (e.g. employer–employee work conditions, the te ...
. Historical development is the reflection of changes in the economic and material relations of the base. When the base changes, a revolutionary class becomes the new ruling class that forms the superstructure. During revolution, the revolutionary class makes certain that its ideas appeal to humanity in general so that after a successful revolution these ideas appear natural and universal. These ideas, which the super-structural elements of society propagate, then become the governing ideology of the historical period. Furthermore, the governing ideology mystifies the economic relations of society and therefore places the proletariat in a state of false consciousness that serves to reproduce the working class.Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Riv-kin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 653-8.
"Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer retain the semblance of independence; they have no history and no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their collective thinking."
This approach allows us to cease understanding history as a collection of dead facts or an imagined activity of subjects.
See also
*
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutiona ...
*''
The Indian Ideology
''The Indian Ideology'' is a 2012 book by the British Marxist historian Perry Anderson, published by Three Essays Collective. A near-polemical critique of the modern Indian nation-building project, the book consists of three essays originally pub ...
'' and ''
The Californian Ideology
"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism".Barbrook 2007Imaginary Futures: Other Works In ...
'', whose titles were inspired by ''The German Ideology''
*
Lumpenproletariat
In Marxist theory, the ''Lumpenproletariat'' () is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary a ...
*
Marxist philosophy
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew fro ...
Young Hegelians
The Young Hegelians (german: Junghegelianer), or Left Hegelians (''Linkshegelianer''), or the Hegelian Left (''die Hegelsche Linke''), were a group of German intellectuals who, in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ...
*
Young Marx
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a ''break'' in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be ...
Footnotes
Further reading
* Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, ''Marx and Engels's German Ideology Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the "Feuerbach Chapter."'' New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
* Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, ''Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels's "German Ideology Manuscripts."'' New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
* Margaret A. Rose, ''Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry, Parody, and the Censor.'' London: Croon Helm, 1978.
Marxists.org
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich En ...
Progress Publishers
Progress Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publisher founded in 1931.
Publishing program
Progress Publishers published books in a variety of languages: Russian, English, and many other European and Asian languages. They issued many scientific ...
,
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...