“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.”
This passage is a critical one because, contrary to the tone of some of The German Ideology, it makes clear that Marx and Engels believe that ideas and ideologies are in fact determinative forces in society—not just accidental emissions, so to speak, of material production. Even further, this passage encourages a reading in which—in contrast to many critics of Marx’s materialist theory—his thought does not imply a fundamental, or quasi-metaphysical, separation between ideological and material realms (as embodied in the popular but misguided notion of a split between the ideological “superstructure" and the material "base”). Notice the direct parallelism: “means of mental production” and “means of material production.” When Marx refers to “the means of production,” he doesn’t simply mean machines, tools, and so on, but also the overall social infrastructure, the available networks of transportation, a more or less functional government able to maintain basic stability, the relative abundance and level of training of the workforce, etc. (For example, almost as much as the development of early automated looms, the growth of a massive class of highly experienced weavers, workers who had acclimated to the vastly different expectations, pace, and protocols of industrial production, was a major development of the means of production in the textile capital of the world, Manchester.) Despite the language of “nothing more than” towards the end of the quote, Marx’s assertion that “the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to [the ruling ideas]” makes clear that he is quite conscious that the elaboration and propagation of ideas and ideologies is just as much a material process, dependent on control over institutions, capital intensive machinery (e.g., printing presses) and resources like education, as is the production of linen.
"As individuals express their life, so they are."
One of the more famous quotes from this text, this short phrase is easily misread. “Express” shouldn’t be taken here to refer to the putting out into the world of something that already exists, i.e., in philosophical terms, that humans have a pre-existing “essence” that they then “express” through their existence (activity). Instead, Marx is saying that people’s actions, their “life-activity,” simultaneously express and create what they truly are.
“Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations."
This quote is a succinct expression of Marx’s core criticism of other theorists, historians, and philosophers. He argues that, instead of proceeding from actually existing reality—from human beings and human society as they in fact are—and developing their concepts on this basis, these thinkers start with abstract, idealized concepts and seek to bend reality to fit them. This mode of thought forecloses any possibility of real change, since such change can only be effected on the level of material reality.
“We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.”
One of the most concise explanations of the method of historical materialism, this quote captures the basic thesis of The German Ideology. One of the less-obvious implications of this statement, however, is that Marx’s conception of communism shouldn’t automatically be understood as the “utopian” project it’s often described as. Though one may ultimately disagree, Marx and Engels see themselves as delineating the possible realization of a form of society based on possibilities that already exist within capitalist society. Communism, in other words, is not a perfect society dreamed up by Marx against which capitalism is measured. Instead, the idea is that despite its manifest unfreedom and the severe oppression faced by the proletariat under capitalism, elements of capitalist society such as globalization, the increasing interconnection of all people, and the large-scale expansion of human productive powers, already and concretely contain the seeds of a different, truly free system.
“For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
Marx is often criticized for failing to describe in detail what a communist society would look like, how it would function, and so on. And the fact that this brief, mostly evocative passage is often cited—positively and negatively—as one of his most direct statements about what he imagines will succeed capitalism, shows the extent to which this criticism is in some sense factually accurate. More significant than what it doesn’t say, however, is what this quote does make clear about the kind of freedom Marx believes communist society will make possible through the abolition of the division of labor. Fundamentally, the distinction between “fishing” or “criticising” and being a fisherman or critic is that in the latter case what I do contributes to my restriction to a particular sphere of activity, to the closing off of my opportunity to develop the vast majority of the myriad capacities I possess as a human being. In a communist society, however, my activity becomes an end in itself, in that its purpose is merely the pleasure or self-actualization afforded by fishing or writing criticism—not the material need to be a fisherman or critical critic merely in order to survive.
