Summary
In The German Ideology, the young Marx and Engels, in what was their first and perhaps most extensive attempt to outline what they later called the “materialist conception of history,” took great pains to establish what exactly was unique, and uniquely powerful, about their approach. As this first section makes clear, the primary targets of their critique were the so-called “Young Hegelians,” a contemporary movement within German philosophy, as well the German materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.
At the time The German Ideology was written, the work of the Young Hegelians was considered the height of German philosophical achievement. To many, it appeared that massive intellectual discoveries were being made, an intellectual upheaval that in the minds of its participants rivaled actual revolutions in historical significance. To Marx and Engels, all of the value attributed to this body of work is illusory; its methods and entire conception of the nature and purpose of knowledge and philosophy are flawed on a fundamental level.
As their name suggests, the Young Hegelians saw themselves as continuing the work of the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was also an important influence on Marx, especially in his earlier works. Yet, according to Marx, none of these thinkers have made any original advances on Hegel’s ideas, but merely extracted and repurposed various parts of his system without engaging in any critical analysis of that system. The key flaw in the thinking of both Hegel and his imitators is that they never leave the realm of so-called “pure thought,” and that they attribute to ideas and consciousness a reality independent of the material world.
Marx and Engels argue for an approach that, so to speak, inverts the methods outlined above. They propose that philosophy can only produce real, useful knowledge insofar as it takes material conditions as the foundational premises for its analysis. The most basic of these “premises” is the fact that human beings need to produce their “means of subsistence,” i.e., the basic things required to live, and that they do so under particular forms of physical and social organization.
Rather than simply reproducing their own “physical existence,” Marx and Engels argue that it is in this process, which they call an individual’s “mode of life,” that people produce themselves, their very nature. This form of social production only appears once human population increases beyond a certain level, which brings them into relationships of various kinds with other people (Marx and Engels often call this “intercourse”). Developments in production, intercourse, and the division of labor—initially just a matter of how necessary work is divided up between different members of families, tribes, towns, etc.—all influence one another, and correspond to different forms of society and stages in human history.
As the division of labor develops, it necessarily entails different forms of ownership, i.e., of property. The first of these is tribal ownership, corresponding to hunter-gatherer societies and the earlier forms of agriculture. At this point, the social system is still essentially based on the patriarchal family structure, headed by a chief. The second form is “ancient communal,” which emerges when tribes unite by agreement or conquest to form a city/town. Both of these forms rely heavily on forms of slavery, the difference being that in the latter citizens derive their power over their slaves from their membership in their given community, which is what binds them to that community.
Conquest and war, often considered a driving force of human history, are themselves, Marx and Engels seek to show, both driven and determined in their consequences by the material conditions of the peoples involved. The need for new resources or means of production, or the weakening of social bonds due to changes in the material bases of a given society, provide opportunity and impetus for war. The fall of Rome, an early example of something approaching a modern society, is a pertinent example they provide of the latter situation.
Finally, Marx and Engels describe the feudal system and the third and final form of the pre-modern development of property. In the countryside, it was defined by the property-owning nobility and serf labor, while in the towns the masters of guilds commanded the labor of so-called “journeymen,” alongside an underclass of casual laborers, generally escaped serfs.
This abbreviated, rough history serves as both an example of and evidence for the validity of Marx and Engels's theory. Empirically verifiable details such as the division of labor, dominant modes of production, property, and labor, serve as the necessary starting point for an analysis of the social system—including law, religion, and politics—of a given period. Consciousness can only be understood as conditioned by, and as just one piece of, this overall-life process, and ideas have no history independent of the history of material conditions.
Analysis
In this first section, Marx and Engels introduce very quickly, often without much explanation, many concepts that are critical to understanding their overarching argument. Identifying these concepts, and tracking how they are developed over the course of the work as a whole, is crucial for understanding the details of their theory. It’s also important to keep in mind that this work is simultaneously theoretical and polemical: Marx and Engels are not just expounding their ideas, but also criticizing the opposing viewpoint and contrasting it with their own.
In the first several paragraphs, for example, they describe the beliefs of the Young Hegelians and the recent developments in German philosophy using language, here metaphorical, that, taken literally, applies to the themes and subjects that form the core of their own argument. This ironic hyperbole, which refers to “an unparalleled revolution” in which “mighty empires have arisen only to meet with immediate doom” is meant to demonstrate the absurdity of equating abstract philosophical debates with great historical events. Metaphors such as the “industrialists of philosophy” and their “competition...carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion” serve a similar purpose, but, insofar as the comparisons are apt, implicitly function as evidence for the explanatory power of analyzing developments in the so-called “realm of thought” by means of developments in the economic structure of society. The message is: our opponents are merely acting out a farce of the events we intend to analyze directly.
The core of Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians—who he uses as an example of the “idealist” conception of history—is that they begin with abstract ideas and then seek to understand reality on the basis of those ideas. Thus, instead of looking first at actually existing men and women and their real-life conditions, they start out from the general concept “Man” and judge what they find in the world against it. This is what Marx means when he calls their approach fundamentally “religious”: it reduces everything to a simple matter of dogmas and beliefs, i.e., people subscribe to certain political beliefs because they “believe” in a “dogma” that prescribes those beliefs. Crucially, Marx argues that this approach not only leads to shoddy thinking, but also necessarily produces a “conservative” political program. The illusion that ideas have an independent existence and determine reality makes it impossible for them to see “that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world” (149).
Present but somewhat under-emphasized in this critique and the following passages is one of Marx’s most significant contributions to philosophy and intellectual history generally. He argues that the way in which people produce their “means of subsistence” necessarily entails an entire “mode of life”—a particular way of living, thinking, and being. In all the various activities that make up this mode of life, human beings also produce themselves, in a holistic sense: “The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (150). There is, for Marx, no trans-historical, abstract “human nature” besides the fact that people, in contrast to animals, produce their nature through their own activity. It is only on the basis of this activity, which can be defined in terms of empirical facts about the forms of production, property, intercourse/exchange, and division of labor, among other things, that one can develop an adequate understanding of the dominant social, political, and ideological forms of any given period of human history.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels have not yet achieved the sharp definition and consistency of these core concepts—private property, labor and division of labor, intercourse/exchange, and the means and forces of production—characteristic of their (especially Marx’s) mature works. “Intercourse” is, in this work, often used to refer to both strictly economic exchange (i.e. trade) and social and interpersonal relations more broadly. Likewise, “forms of ownership” and forms of “private property” are also often used interchangeably. They also use the phrase “division of labor” to describe both how labor is allocated among different classes within society and to the ways in which labor comes to be “divided up,” so to speak, within a particular productive process—such as when the process of making a shirt comes to be separated out into a series of simpler tasks, each of which is completed by a different worker. Often, in this work, Marx and Engels will refer to the “modern” or “developed” form of the division of labor, private property, etc., by which they mean the forms they take under industrial capitalism. It is part of the nuance of their analysis that they don’t insist that the “modern” forms of these practices only exist under capitalism, but rather it is only under capitalism that they are fully developed and emerge as the dominant ways of organizing a given economy and society.
It’s crucial to understand that Marx and Engels are not, here, rejecting the use of abstract concepts as such. Instead, the main thrust of their argument is that abstractions are only useful insofar as they are developed out of, and therefore accurately characterize, observations about the real, concrete life-processes and material conditions of human beings. They do not claim that there’s no value in analyzing the ideological products of human consciousness such as philosophy, politics, and religion, but simply that instead of “descend[ing] from heaven [i.e., the realm of ideas] to earth” the only pathway to arrive at real knowledge is to “ascend from earth to heaven” (154). Accordingly, they also reject purely empiricist analysis of history, which sees the past merely as a “collection of dead facts” because it fails to contextualize them within the total “active life-process” of human beings.
Finally, in a thought that will be developed further throughout The German Ideology and elsewhere in Marx and Engels's work, they urge against reading their method of historical analysis as implying that human history has any sort of teleology (in which each historical development is destined to, aimed at, or necessarily leads to the historical period that follows it). This is a common misreading, and criticism, of Marxist analysis.
There are several key questions regarding the nature of the methods and concepts Marx and Engels introduce in this first section that remain unanswered and are important to keep in mind as one approaches the rest of the text. Why exactly is it that, as the authors claim, “the various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership...” (151)? And why do these two features seem to be accorded an especially significant or central role in Marx and Engels’s historical analysis? The theme of the antagonism between town and country, which will recur throughout the text, also appears in this first section, but its significance is as yet not fully clear. And, finally, what do Marx and Engels mean when they say that “if in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down,” as they do with the idealists, “this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process” (154)?
