The German Ideology

Why is an unpublished manuscript counted as Marxism's starting point?

The German Ideology is not a finished book. It is a pile of manuscripts the two authors failed to publish and put away. Yet few texts in the history of Marxism are called its starting point as often, because here Marx and Engels first stepped out of the language of Hegel and the Young Hegelians and explained history in their own terms. The German Wikipedia ranks it, together with the Theses on Feuerbach written the same year, as a key work of historical materialism.

In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx recalled the work. In Brussels in 1845 the two resolved "to work out together the contrast between our view and the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience"; the manuscript reached its publisher, but changed circumstances prevented printing. "We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose, self-clarification."

Wir überließen das Manuskript der nagenden Kritik der Mäuse um so williger, als wir unsern Hauptzweck erreicht hatten – Selbstverständigung.

Who wrote it, why, and what became of the manuscript?

According to the English Wikipedia, most of the manuscript was written between November 1845 and the summer of 1846. It began as a plan for a quarterly proposed by Moses Hess, to be financed by two Westphalian "true socialist" businessmen, Julius Meyer and Rudolph Rempel. In May 1846 the main part of the manuscript went to Joseph Weydemeyer in Westphalia, but the backers, put off by its polemics, withdrew and the plan collapsed. Through 1846 and 1847 the authors looked for another publisher and failed, partly because of the police and partly because publishers sympathised with the trends they attacked.

The long original title is The German Ideology: Critique of the Newest German Philosophy in Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism in Its Various Prophets. Volume I consists of "Feuerbach", "Saint Bruno" (on Bruno Bauer) and "Saint Max" (on Max Stirner); Volume II attacks "true socialism". The German Wikipedia says Marx wrote most of it, Engels parts, and that Hess, Weydemeyer and Roland Daniels contributed for a time.

Only one article by Marx was printed in the authors' lifetimes. The critique of Stirner, about two thirds of the whole, was printed in part by Eduard Bernstein in 1903–1904 in Dokumente des Sozialismus as "Saint Max". The "Feuerbach" chapter was published first by David Riazanov in 1926 in the Marx-Engels-Archiv. The whole appeared in 1932 as volume I/5 of the MEGA, edited by Vladimir Adoratsky after Riazanov's arrest. It entered the German Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW) as volume 3 in 1958, and the new historical-critical MEGA² volume I/5, which keeps the state of the manuscripts, came out in November 2017 after decades of preparation, at 1,894 pages.

What does the "Feuerbach" chapter say?

The most read part is the unfinished first chapter. After mocking the Young Hegelians for fighting "phrases" rather than the reality that produces them, the authors state their own starting point: "The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those they find already existing and those produced by their own activity."

Die Voraussetzungen, mit denen wir beginnen, sind keine willkürlichen, keine Dogmen, es sind wirkliche Voraussetzungen, von denen man nur in der Einbildung abstrahieren kann.

To make history people must first be able to eat, drink, dress and find shelter, so "the first historical act is the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself". Ideas, morality and religion have no independent history; people who develop their material production and intercourse change, along with this reality, their thinking too. Hence the famous sentence: "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness."

Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein.

The chapter goes on to the history of the division of labour and of forms of property, to the state and law, and to domination: "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." Against a division of labour that ties a person to being a hunter, fisherman or critic, it imagines a communist society that makes it possible "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner". Communism is defined thus: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."

Wir nennen Kommunismus die wirkliche Bewegung, welche den jetzigen Zustand aufhebt.

The verdict on Feuerbach is just as clear: "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not occur in him, and as far as he takes history into account, he is not a materialist." Feuerbach brought religion back to the human essence but left that human being an abstraction outside history and social relations. The German Ideology replaces it with real individuals who produce and interact.

What are Saint Bruno, Saint Max and the critique of true socialism?

Most of the manuscript is polemic that is hardly read today. "Saint Bruno" takes on Bruno Bauer, who believed criticism by self-consciousness alone could change the world; "Saint Max" follows, sentence by sentence and with relentless mockery, Max Stirner, whose The Ego and Its Own (1844) called every general concept a "spook" and put forward the ego alone. Calling them "saints" jeers that they remain caught in the religious way of thinking they claim to criticise. Volume II attacks the "true socialism" of writers such as Karl Grün, who translated French socialism into the language of German philosophy and turned class struggle into love of "man" in general. The critique returns in brief as the section on "German or true socialism" in the third chapter of the Communist Manifesto of 1848.

How is the manuscript read today?

The German Wikipedia says the manuscript marks the boundary between the so-called young and mature Marx, his break with Feuerbach's humanist materialism. Louis Althusser placed his "epistemological break" in 1845 on the strength of this manuscript and the Theses. Other readings stress the continuity between it and the theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

There is also the editorial problem. As the English Wikipedia puts it, the book known today is an "editorial construction" assembled by twentieth-century editors from manuscript fragments. The "Feuerbach" chapter in particular is a mixture of drafts and fair-copy fragments in uncertain order, arranged differently from edition to edition. The MEGA² editors read the manuscripts less as the statement of a finished philosophical system than as a programmatic turn away from philosophy towards "real positive science". Engels himself, rereading the old manuscript for the 1888 preface to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, found the Feuerbach section unfinished and noted that it only showed how incomplete their knowledge of economic history had then been. Instead he appended the eleven theses he found in an old notebook of Marx's.