Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx’s second major theoretical effort during his time in Brussels is commonly known as The German Ideology, although, as the researchers on the new MEGA have painstakingly demonstrated, such a work does not and never did exist.20 The German Ideology as book title appears only once in a letter to the editor Marx wrote in 1847 announcing that one volume of a two-volume work would not be appearing in print. In the surviving manuscripts, the line “Ideology in General, and the German Ideology in Particular” designates a chapter.

  This dissection of a title may seem picky and pedantic. But it is important, because the manuscripts of what is known as The German Ideology were not one intellectually consistent enterprise. They evolved in erratic fashion, acquiring and shedding co-authors, and differing in argument and proposed method of publication, between their origination in late 1845–early 1846 and their final abandonment by mid-1847. The work began as a collaboration between Marx, Engels, and Hess; it was to contain critiques of the Young Hegelian radicals along the lines of The Holy Family that were to appear as a series of articles to be published in the proposed revival of the Franco-German Yearbooks. Parts of this original emphasis continued throughout the project; in particular, criticism of one of the Young Hegelians reached enormous length.

  As the manuscript expanded, Marx began to think of it as a book, and, increasingly, a two-volume work. The first volume would be a biting critique of the Young Hegelians; the second, an equally savage attack on the “True Socialists,” a group of German intellectuals professing socialist ideas. Moses Hess was, in many ways, the intellectual leader of the True Socialists, so that a project beginning as a collaboration among Marx, Engels, and Hess ended up as an assault on Hess’s own ideas. Since Hess had introduced Marx to socialism, and strongly influenced his initial concepts of it, the denunciation of the True Socialists was a form of veiled self-criticism. A manuscript of the two proposed volumes circulated in 1846 and 1847, but Marx was unable to find a publisher for it. A small excerpt from the second volume, an attack on the True Socialist Karl Grün, published in the Westphalian Steamboat in 1847, was the only portion of the work to appear in print during Marx’s lifetime.

  The initial stages of the book, composed in the fall of 1845, were a continuation of the materialist, Feuerbachian polemics of The Holy Family, describing a church meeting, the “Council of Leipzig,” at which “Saint Bruno” (i.e., Bruno Bauer) denounced the schismatic Ludwig Feuerbach, the heretical authors of The Holy Family, and their fellow heretic Moses Hess. The chapter title was an inside joke: there really had been a church council in Leipzig in 1845, a meeting of dissident, mostly Unitarian, German Protestants of generally leftist political sympathies.21 As this example suggests, The German Ideology began as a work written for a small circle of intellectuals, well acquainted with each other and in the know, underscoring Marx’s commitment to this group even after he established connections with Karl Schapper and the communist German artisans in London.

  The work then took an odd turn, in late 1845 and the first part of 1846. Marx and Engels focused ever more on the ideas of a member of Bauer’s circle, one Johann Schmidt—generally known by his pen name, Max Stirner—who had made a reputation for himself as a particularly acerbic critic of religion and a proponent of a lifestyle-oriented radicalism. His marriage ceremony to the feminist Marie Dähnhardt had been deliberately designed as a scandalous spectacle rejecting the connection between marriage and religion. The ceremony was held in Stirner’s Berlin apartment rather than a church, and the officiating clergyman was confounded by the guests, who acted as if they were at a tea party, or paid no attention to the proceedings. Stirner followed up his provocative marriage with an equally provocative book, The Unique Individual and His Property, generally known in English by the looser translation, The Ego and Its Own. Infuriating communists as well as the more politically oriented Young Hegelians, the author asserted that egoism should be the highest ethical principle; that individuals’ intellectual and physical capabilities were equivalent to property ownership; and that revolution was useless, because true social and political change was only possible through the transformation of individual consciousness.22

  Marx and Engels became obsessed with Stirner, and the portion of the book devoted to him, originally just a small part of the “Council of Leipzig,” got completely out of hand. They blasted his ignorance, denounced his capitalist sympathies, and made fun of his speaking in Berlin dialect, but at increasingly bizarre length. Most of the extant manuscript of The German Ideology deals with Stirner—about 65 percent of the 517 pages in the German-language collected works, an obsessive attention paid to a distinctly minor figure who died soon afterward in obscurity. Published editions of The German Ideology tend to omit the criticism of Stirner almost entirely, and the judgment of Franz Mehring, Marx’s first major biographer, that these writings were a “super-polemic . . . [that] . . . soon degenerates into hair splitting and quibbling, some of it of a rather puerile character,” has been widely shared ever since.23

  One feature of Stirner’s work that did reverberate strongly, if briefly, among the Young Hegelians was his criticism of Feuerbach’s concept of human species essence. If Feuerbach had asserted that divinity was the projection of species essence onto an imaginary being, Stirner retorted that Feuerbach’s species essence, and the concept of humanity in general, was the projection of human individuals onto another imaginary being. Marx and Engels rejected Stirner’s assertions, but even as they criticized them, they realized that there were weaknesses in Feuerbach’s concepts. Increasingly, the chapter on Stirner came to include long passages criticizing Feuerbach. Finally, in the spring of 1846, Marx and Engels decided that the material on Feuerbach should become a separate chapter, with the subtitle “The German Ideology,” which has become the public face of their unpublished work. It was in this chapter that Marx made the distinctions between his ideas and Feuerbach’s (which had previously been briefly and vaguely articulated) clear and apparent.24

  Marx and Engels described the essential characteristic of humanity in terms of economic activity: “One can distinguish humans from animals by consciousness, religion, or in any way you want. Humans themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals, as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. . . . By producing their means of subsistence, humans produce, indirectly, their material life.”25 The idea that what made human beings human was their collective production, their working together to procure their subsistence from nature, had already appeared in the Paris manuscripts. Marx and Engels now fleshed it out by emphasizing three elements of production: productive forces, that is, technology and economic organization; the division of labor; and forms of property. Combined, these three elements of production generated social classes.

  This material production, according to Marx and Engels, determined ideas, culture, forms of law, and politics—all united under the concept of ideology. Their explication followed along the lines of previous criticisms of the Young Hegelians for making ideas, rather than economic conditions, the moving force in history. But, as was the case with the notion of humans as producers, it was formulated more specifically and with much greater clarity:

  The production of ideas, representations of consciousness, is, as a first point, immediately woven up with the material activity and the material intercourse of humans, the speech of genuine life. . . . The same is true of intellectual production, as it is represented in the language of politics of the laws, of morality, of religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. . . . Morality, religion, metaphysics and other ideology and the corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain a semblance of independence. . . . It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.26

  Economic activity, the “production of the material conditions of life,” was the descendant of Hegel’s Absolute Idea, Bauer’s infinite self-consciousness, and Feuerbach’s human species essence as the moving force in history, from which all ot
her aspects of history appeared in alienated and disguised form.

  A good portion of the chapter was a recounting of human history—mostly European history, from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and the early modern era, then the French Revolution and on to the mid-nineteenth century—in terms of the changes in the productive forces, the division of labor, and property. Marx and Engels concluded that the course of history led to situations in which productive forces had developed to such an extent that further development “just produces perdition.” The very same historical development also produced a social class “that must bear all the burdens of society,” which as a result of its social position developed a consciousness of the necessity of revolution, and eventually rose up against the dominant class and overthrew it.27

  Marx and Engels saw this process as happening in their own time, leading to the creation of a communist society. Communism, they insisted, was not an ideology: “Communism is for us not a condition that can be created, an ideal, to which reality will have to conform. We call communism the genuine movement that abolishes the existing state of affairs.”28 In terms of the three elements of production, communism would, of course, involve the replacement of private property with communal ownership. In this chapter, Marx and Engels also introduced the idea, stemming from French socialist thinkers such as Saint-Simon, and articulated by Moses Hess (very likely the source of Marx’s own thinking on this point), that a communist society was only possible following the growth of industrialization and of a capitalist world market. Communism, in other words, had not been an option throughout human history (an idea popular with a number of Marx’s contemporaries) but emerged out of the progress of the productive forces.29

  A particularly striking aspect of Marx and Engels’s outline of communist society was their assertion that communism would involve the abolition of the division of labor. In a celebrated passage, they made this point in vigorous and witty language:

  As soon as labor begins to be divided then each person has a determined exclusive sphere of activity that is forced upon him, from which he cannot depart; he is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critical critic and must remain so, if he does not wish to lose the means to maintain his subsistence. In a communist society, on the other hand, where each person does not have an exclusive circle of activity, but can learn and be trained in any branch he pleases, where society regulates general production and in that way makes it possible for me to do one thing today, another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, to herd cattle in the evening, and, after dinner, to criticize, just as I please, without ever becoming hunter, fisher, herdsman or critic.30

  This assertion, probably taken from Charles Fourier, who envisaged a society in which individuals would enjoy their labor and would work on tasks that most appealed to them, has frequently drawn skeptical commentary. It seems difficult to reconcile with the specialization required in an industrial society, and contains evident internal difficulties as well: might not society’s regulation of general production be at odds with individuals’ wishes to do as they please? Marx and Engels themselves introduced an element of irony in their assertions, given that their future communist included among his occupations being a critical critic, an activity they repeatedly described in their manuscript as producing worthless nonsense.

  The discussion of the division of labor in the chapter on Feuerbach was complicated and multifaceted, a reflection of the incomplete nature of the surviving manuscripts. In some passages, Marx and Engels linked the division of labor to class differences between workers and capitalists, so that the abolition of the division of labor would correspond to the creation of a communist society without social classes. At another point, the authors noted that the division of labor led to a product of labor standing independent from and against those who created it. The contrast between particular individuals and their joint product led to the desire for a common interest, in the form of the state, an “illusory commonality,” hiding the existence of different and conflicting class interests.31 This assertion was a continuation of a train of thought begun with the new social and political order described in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, where the particular interests of individuals in civil society and the general interest as represented by the state would coincide. Abolishing the division of labor and, with it, different social classes and private property, was Marx’s new iteration of this aspiration, informed by his study of political economy and by the controversy over Max Stirner’s attacks on Feuerbach’s conception of humanity.

  In this Feuerbach chapter, Marx and Engels certainly criticized Feuerbach’s conception of an ahistorical human species essence; but their development of a positive alternative to it outweighed their criticism, which lacked the vehemence, anger, and sarcasm of their other forays against the Young Hegelians. As their manuscript evolved, a new critical target emerged, the True Socialists, the group of pro-communist German intellectuals, part of a more explicitly political turn to the project that included a section (not preserved) criticizing liberalism in Germany.32

  Marx and Engels’s denunciation of the True Socialists ran in parallel with their attacks on the Young Hegelians: that both groups placed intellectual movements rather than the political struggles resulting from social and economic conditions at the center of the historical process, rendering their ideas, for Marx and Engels, yet another example of ideology.33 Their chief target, Karl Grün, was accused of regarding religion and politics as the “essence of man,” and of being ignorant of “genuine production”—that is, the structures of the economy and of production. Grün and other True Socialists were denounced for seeing the goal of the socialist movement as the liberation of “man,” and the redemption of “men” from their alienated condition, following in the footsteps of Feuerbach’s theories of religion as human alienation.34

  What provoked the greatest ire for Marx and Engels was the True Socialists’ insistence that German Wissenschaft was required to transform the doctrines of communism and socialism expounded in France and England into philosophically authentic and correct theories. This appeared to them as downright perverse, taking the English and French criticisms of economy and society and their proposed political remedies and transforming them into questions of conceptual development. True Socialism was “nothing but the distortion of proletarian communism and the more or less related parties and sects of France and England into the heaven of the German spirit and . . . German sentimentality.”35

  Following the invidious comparisons of the Young German authors between dreamy Teutons and the vigorous practicality of Germany’s neighbors, Marx and Engels quoted Heine on how Britannia ruled the waves, Russia and France held the land, but Germany had undisputed dominion over the “airy realm of dreams.” Not surprisingly, Marx and Engels linked this German tendency toward impractical philosophy with economic, social, and political backwardness, with a country lacking modern industry, modern political institutions, well-developed social classes, and sharper class antagonisms. German society was not yet divided into bourgeois and proletarians, as was the case in England or France; most Germans were Kleinbürger, petit bourgeois. The use of this phrase in the discussion of the True Socialists marked the beginning of its long career as a Marxist political epithet.36

  Yet Marx’s own previous thought was strikingly similar to the ideas condemned in The German Ideology as petit bourgeois. In the Paris manuscripts, Marx had described communism as the recovery of human essence from its alienated existence. In “The Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” he had stated that the heart of the future communist revolution was the proletariat, but its head was philosophy, and he had also spoken about the advantages of German philosophy for the development of communism. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels had designated their standpoint as “real humanism,” a Feuerbachian phrase the True Socialists employed.37

  The biting criticisms of the True Socialists were a form of extern
alization and objectification not unlike the processes of alienation explained in Hegelian philosophy. Marx took his own previous ideas and projected them onto other thinkers, where he could then reject them without having to criticize himself. He would repeat this process in future works, particularly The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It was the only form of self-criticism that his personality would allow, and one that enabled him to maintain his position as the person articulating the direction of human history.

  Composing these lengthy manuscripts criticizing the Young Hegelians and True Socialists required Marx to put off his planned critique of political economy. As he told his long-suffering publisher, Karl Leske, “it seemed to me very important to send out in advance of my positive development a polemical piece against German philosophy and against German socialism as it has hitherto existed . . . to prepare the public . . . for . . . my economics. . . .”38 At the beginning of 1847, Marx returned to economics, once again in the form of a critical attack on a contemporary, in this case Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in The Poverty of Philosophy.

  One of the leading French socialist theorists of the 1840s (today, Proudhon is generally regarded as an anarchist, but contemporaries placed him along with other socialists), Proudhon’s famous assertion that “Property is theft” had made him a figure known, admired, and hated throughout Europe. Moving from bon mots to a system, Proudhon’s magnum opus, The System of Economic Contradictions, Or: The Philosophy of Poverty, applied Hegel’s philosophy to the principles of political economy in order to demonstrate the latter’s internal contradictions. Marx’s response, ironically retitling Proudhon’s work, was to ridicule these findings of contradictions, to show that Proudhon had not understood political economy, particularly as propounded by David Ricardo—Adam’s Smith’s chief disciple, and the leading figure of pro-capitalist economics—and also to assert that the Frenchman had not understood Hegel either.