Summary
Throughout The German Ideology, Marx and Engels have claimed that both the communist movement, and the system that movement seeks to establish—communism—are historically unique. Up to this point, their explanations of what this uniqueness consists of, and their evidence for their claim, have been haphazard and partial, and here they seek to give their argument full elaboration and grounding.
Earlier in the text (pp. 163-176), Marx and Engels described how the social and economic order of any given epoch or society comes to present as the “natural” order of things to the people living in it. Thus, despite the fact that the given mode of production corresponding political and social systems were, in reality, products of human activity, they were not subject to conscious human control. One crucial, unique feature of what the authors call “communism” is that it strips all previously existing customs, modes of production, exchange, and intercourse, etc., of their “natural” character and subjects them to “the power of united individuals” (p. 193).
If communism is historically unique, then, based on the materialist approach Marx and Engels have laid out, the economic system characterized by modern private property, i.e., capital and capitalism, must also be somehow historically unique. Each historical period can be described in terms of a “form of intercourse,” that is, the overall organization of interrelations between people, which corresponds to the “productive forces” available to those people.
So long as the form of intercourse remains in harmony with the productive forces, it appears as natural, as opposed to what the authors call “accidental,” that is, historically contingent, or “inorganic.” In terms of individuals, their “self-activity” appears to correspond to the definite conditions under which they produce and reproduce those conditions. However, as the productive forces develop—and this point is a theme that runs throughout The German Ideology—they come into conflict with the dominant form of intercourse, which becomes a “fetter” or restraint on their further development.
To draw on an example from Marx and Engels's analysis, as manufacture as a mode of production spread and proved more efficient, the entire social system (“form of intercourse”) built around the guild system became a mere obstacle to its further development. As a result, that form of intercourse came to seem merely “accidental” rather than natural and necessary, and disappeared along with the material conditions that sustained it.
At this point, a new form of intercourse that corresponds to the more developed productive forces replaces the old one, and this new form necessarily corresponds also to the more advanced “self-activity” of individuals that accompanies every advance in the forces of production. These developments are not quick, neat, or all-encompassing. Prior forms of intercourse—customs, beliefs, social arrangements—are not totally abolished, and can persist for centuries alongside the new ones. Likewise, forms of intercourse or production that will end up becoming dominant in future periods can, and usually do, exist as peripheral practices in prior historical periods.
Crucially, this trajectory of historical change appears coherent only retrospectively. It follows no teleology—in no way is the “purpose” of the changes in one system to produce the next one—and occurs “naturally,” that is, it is not consciously planned or controlled by any group of people. As a theory of historical development, Marx and Engels intend their system to be holistic, taking into account all of the various material conditions—social, economic, ideological—that lead to conflict, from political battles to all-out war, or any significant change, from legislated reform to violent revolution. A major criticism they have of other historians is that they tend to single out just one “key” factor in any significant upheaval, isolate it from its real context, and attempt to explain the entire historical phenomenon on that basis.
However, what none of these prior conflicts, revolutionary or otherwise, affected whatsoever was the basis of the contradiction between the form of intercourse and the productive forces, which is why this contradiction continued to reappear. Marx and Engels’ key claim is that this is because they never abolished the division of labor, which is necessarily connected to private property, but merely replaced it with a different division of labor and a different form of private property. In doing so, they simply traded one ruling class for another, and personal freedom continued to exist only “for the individuals developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class” (197).
Classes, the state and its institutions, just as much as the ancient tribe, are for Marx and Engels mere “illusory” forms of community. And since freedom is only possible, as they see it, within community—since, among other reasons, without the productive powers made possible through association with others life would be a constant struggle for bare survival—neither real community nor real freedom have ever been established. Thus the term “communism,” which they intend to denote the establishment of the basis of real, substantive community among individuals.
A precondition for both real freedom and real community is that individuals enter into it not as “average” or “abstract” individuals, but as their real, particular selves. If I am a capitalist, for example, what makes me a “member” of the bourgeoisie is not anything essential about me, but merely the fact that I possess the capital to operate several shoe factories. I “belong” to my class only as an abstract “person who possesses capital and employs it to make profit.” Obviously, the logic applies to members of, e.g., the working class as well.
Yet these facts that seem entirely “accidental” to who I am fundamentally as an individual—the fact that I work at a call center for a living, or the fact that I own and operate a large chain of call centers—determine almost the entirety of the conditions of my life. Paradoxically, this deeply unjust state of affairs is one of the key conditions, specific to modernity, that Marx and Engles argue makes communism possible. This separation between what I am and what I do is a feature particular to capitalism: it does not exist for the serf or the nobleman. A serf is a serf no matter what he does, and the fact that he is a serf determines what he does; likewise with a lord.
There is, then, an inescapable contradiction between the individuality of each proletarian—who, rightly, feels that they are more than merely a body that performs three small movements that produce 1/10th of the head of a pin—and their conditions of existence, which increasingly appear as merely accidental as this contradiction sharpens. Therefore, Marx and Engels conclude, in order to realize themselves as individuals, the proletariat must abolish that which is the basis of their existence as proletarians, i.e., labor. And to establish a society that functions as a real community, they must also abolish the dominant form of illusory community: the state.
Analysis
The central subject of this closing section of the first part of The German Ideology is the relationship between overarching forms of economic and social organization and the individual, specifically what we think of as individual “freedom.” In the course of their argument, Marx and Engels develop their own definition of “freedom” as a concept, and seek to outline how communism as a system differs from all previous forms of society, how it is uniquely adequate to allowing for real freedom, and what the material bases and preconditions for establishing communism are.
Throughout the text, the authors have described various forms of unfreedom, often referred to as “domination,” the most pertinent of which is that specific to modern capitalism. The fundamental feature of the form of domination they claim is particular to the capitalist form of society is that it produces a dynamic in which people’s own productive capacity comes to confront them as an “alien” power.
This power, though actually the product of human activity, appears as an objective force independent of human control, one that, in fact, determines and controls their activity. Their name for this force is capital. In their analysis, the division of labor itself, rather than any particular form of the division of labor, is central to this process of alienation. This is what Marx and Engels mean when they say that the division of labor is responsible for the “transformation...of personal powers (relationships) into material powers…” (197). As a concrete example, the productive power of the accumulated human knowledge, labor, and network of relations that allow for advanced industrial production presents as the productive power of the machines that are, in fact, mere instruments of production.
In order to understand how this line of thought relates to the authors’ concept of freedom, one must understand their closely related conception of “necessity.” For Marx and Engels, freedom and necessity are mutually exclusive; the realm of freedom begins only where that of necessity ends. In this regard, whether “necessity” takes the form of that which is necessary for the continued accumulation of capital, or the necessity, (for example for the serf) of producing enough food to survive, is irrelevant. The crucial difference between these two forms of necessity is that the latter is truly “natural,” while the former is in fact merely a social fact, a feature of capitalism as an economic system, that only seems to be a natural, organic feature of human existence.
The material basis for this difference is that in modern capitalism the productive forces available to humanity have advanced to the point where it’s possible, potentially, to free all people from the necessity of spending most of their lives performing meaningless labor, i.e., laboring simply to survive. This allows, again potentially, for the creation of a society, which Marx and Engels also refer to as a form of “community,” in which one’s position in that society, indeed one’s ability to participate in society at all, is no longer dictated by one’s role within the division of labor.
Marx and Engels acknowledge that capitalism appears to create more freedom for the individual, since their conditions of life appear “accidental,” rather than inseparable from their very nature. In other words, a serf performs a certain role because they are a serf, whereas what makes a worker a worker is simply the fact, a matter of circumstance, that they perform the role of worker. While real freedom, on this account, is possible only through association between people (that is, through participation in society) the form of that participation will always be a form of domination so long as it consists only of being slotted into some predetermined form of activity. Communism is their name for a form of community, incompatible with any “natural” or predetermined division of labor, and necessarily universal, in which association with others is fundamentally the means by which I realize, develop, cultivate myself as an individual, rather than carry out some restricted form of activity in service of a purpose imposed, so to speak, from on high.
