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The German Ideology
Anna Kornbluh
Reading The German Ideology isn’t easy. The difficulties are not only conceptual, but also formal, starting with the text’s decidedly mixed genre. Genres are conventions for writing and reading, but in 1845 there weren’t any conventions for writing a critique of ideology or a manifesto for materialist method—let alone a hybrid of the two—and thus there certainly weren’t conventions for reading all the many experimental fragments that Marx and Engels composed in that vacuum. The text we have received today, 500 pages in two volumes and eight uneven parts, was never published in its authors’ lifetimes, and indeed was constantly rejected for publication, such that the authors left it, as Engels said, “to the gnawing criticism of the mice. ” It was finally, although partially, published in Russian in 1924, in German in 1926, and fully published in 1932, though not appearing in an English translation until 1969. The publication difficulties surely reflect the text’s genrelessness, since it contains uneven multitudes; sections of it are as polished as the later works with which Marxist readers are better acquainted, while sections of it are basically unreadable.
Within this unevenness, the project of the text is twofold: “to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience … in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy” (Marx 1998) and to formulate an alternative. However, while Marx and Engels succeed in laying out the materialist alternative, they struggle to succinctly prove that idealism is ubiquitous and wrong. The text’s genre-bending bears the strains of this struggle; the 500 pages incorporate essays, manifestos, declarations of philosophical tenets, logical equations, sustained jokes, lists of maxims, uninterrupted catalogues of uninterpreted quotations, shorthand notes for future elucidation, gnomic slogans unadorned and play-written scripts for the dramas that might take place among idealists after the crush of critique. All these different types of writing strive to illustrate the pervasiveness of ideology, and strive as well to implement the critique of ideology as a new genre.
Conceptual questions formulated in this text continue to animate political and philosophical debate today: What is ideology? Can ideology be documented or evidenced in quantitative fashion? Is hegemony a necessary dimension of ideology or not? Is there an outside of ideology? How do science, philosophy and intellectual history each expose ideology differently, and each entail their own ideologies? The first point to make about The German Ideology, then, is that the very undigestibility of its form actually enhances its content, since Marx and Engels set out to improvise and model the practice and attitude of materialist critique, which is and should be a manifold, poliform, unfixed and roving activity. Critique on this account is an unfinishable business, a praxis merging caustic polemic and projective utopianism with the raw intensity of the picket line.
On its face, the text is organized by grappling with three different figureheads of idealism: Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. These three sections are disparately constructed. The first assumes everybody knows Feuerbach’s corpus (perhaps because Marx had already drafted the Theses on Feuerbach just before sitting down with Engels to work on The German Ideology), so it goes straight to a rebuttal: presenting a fairly systematic articulation of materialism, including some principles of communism. But the second and third sections do not take Bauer and Stirner as being known, instead documenting their positions with multipage excerpts from their works, and interspersing rebuttals less systematically than in the first section, often in sarcastic comebacks. Even though the three sections are, therefore, inconsistent, the three thinkers together are used to demonstrate the widespread tendency in modern German thought to an overly religious, overly Christian approach to philosophy (Marx and Engels had already begun to oppose this tendency in The Holy Family). In The German Ideology, religiosity signifies the social and political clout of idealist thought, and its power to cement complacency for the status quo. More than being epistemically flawed, idealism is at the same time politically suspect, colluding with the powerful, and this is why it warrants critique.
Showing how dominant frameworks for knowledge wield their own kind of power—how “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” (Marx 1998: 67)—was not the kind of self-reflection in which philosophy had much engaged before Marx. The unprecedented quality of the enterprise would seem to explain much of the strangeness of this text. Compared to the earnestness of Kant or the seriousness of Hegel, the voice of Marx is satirical, iconoclastic and epithetic. He makes extreme pronouncements like: “Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves” and “Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away” (Marx 1998: 29). This ironic tone of Marx’s voice is compounded by his use of other voices: at times in the text, he talks in the voice of “Saint Max, ” or of Hegel, or of bourgeois theologians, political-economists and bureaucrats. He stages confrontations in which he ventriloquizes both sides of a disagreement. He even pretends to be Don Quixote. The effect of all these voices is a performance of materialism as a different kind of language to idealism; if idealism is rigorous philosophical argument and common sense, materialism can mark its difference by taking on a shape at odds with both of these. It jostles among many voices many perspectives; it jousts with hegemony; it jumps with jokes, and it doesn’t always make common sense. All these things that leave The German Ideology hard to read, that define it as different from previous philosophy, motivate Louis Althusser’s reading of it as a beginning of the “end of philosophy. ”
The first section is the most widely read, most commonly cited, and the most compelling, clearly asserting “premises” and “methods” of materialism, and doing so in a way that overcomes the habitual opposition of idealist Hegelian spirit and materialist Epicurean sensuousness. Marx’s materialism carves out a space oblique to the philosophy it criticizes, inventing itself as a para- or anti-philosophy (as Balibar and others have called it), a kind of knowing that positions itself on different footing than hitherto existing philosophy, whether idealist or materialist. This footing leads philosophy away from speculative looking inward (how does the mind know what it knows?) and toward quasi-empirical looking backward (how have human beings produced their own lives, including the production of knowledge?). Moreover, this new materialism admits that its way of knowing is “conjunctural” (Balibar 2017: 6), situated at the nexus of existing political conditions and the utopian desire to transform them. Materialism differs from idealism not only because one is matter and the other mind, one historical and the other ontological, one vibrant action and the other “the realm of pure thought, ” but because one directly avows the material effects of its own knowledge project while the other represses them. “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality” (Marx 1998: 36). The ideology of the idealists, the German ideology, is the forgetting of their own conjuncture. It substitutes for the particular contingency of human history a motionless universality of humanity.
Materialism differs from idealism stylistically, insofar as it requires a paraphilosophic genreless genre to produce its critical insights into how philosophy functions socially—it requires what we might call “the form” of ideology critique. However, it also differs substantively, insofar as it produces philosophical insights about different subjects other than idealism’s elaboration of spirit. The trick for any reader of The German Ideology is to keep both of these balls in the air: whenever it seems as though we can be sure that materialism is specifiable stuff that contradicts idealist generalities, this kind of surety has to be rejected, since materialism is also a procedure for moving beyond what appears as knowledge, a procedure for negating what everyone knows, a procedure for critique. So let us consider a few substantial formulations of materialism offered up in The German Ideology, but consider them as points of departure rather than destinations in themselves.
Materialism emerges as distinct from idealism in its approach to constructing knowledge as the writing of human history from the vantage point of the collectively lived experience of social relations, rather than from the vantage point of the individual consciousness. It shares the idealist pursuit of writing the future progress of ideas (the Bildung of Geist), but starts out from ideas’ contingent history (the species-being of thinking animals). The opposition between the collective and the individual, the plural and the singular, is at least as important as those dividing sociality and consciousness, living and thinking, and practices and ideas. Where Young Hegelians take consciousness as the first premise of any judgment of the world, Marx offers a counter starting point, which he notably pluralizes—it is not a single fact nor a single strata of matter but a plural “First Premises of a Materialist Method, ” and the premises directly concern plurality: “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals” (Marx 1845: 37). Marx’s manifest materialism launches thought from actual living individuals that are plural in their definite social relations. The point is not just that embodiment precedes consciousness but that plurality too is prior; the field of relations always precedes individuals.
Crucially, this plurality is on the move. Immediately after this first premise, the next sentence already completely confounds the very notion of a premise: “Thus the first fact of the case to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature” (Marx 1998: 37). A premise is not self-identical, but is divisible into premise and fact, a premise is not a point of departure but a promontory to be “established, ” “stated ” and “verified”; the very registering of the material is already a representational process charged with mental and aesthetic qualities. The question of “organization” rests on this fulcrum of fact and representation. Plurality is social, the first fact is aggregation, a quantity to which corresponds the quality of organization. Material “organization” is the elementary, primal fact, the ratification of which distinguishes a materialist from an idealist.
To focus on the organization of human relations, Marx proposes the major idea of “the mode of production”: “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself” (Marx 1998: 47). Any mode of production combines “means of production”—materials like natural resources or technology—with “relations of production”—the social and political relationships among the people whose material lives are being produced. Crucially, for the materialist, “organization” is elementary, but any given organization is contingent, resulting from “the first historical act. ” There is no “natural” mode of production, but it is a natural activity of human beings to produce their collective “material life itself” and, within this universal activity, Marx notes a common denominator: all modes of production involve some sort of “division of labor. ” The division of labor differentiates man from woman, town from country, private property from communal property, local economy from alternative economy, production from circulation and, vexingly, intellectual activity from physical activity. Ideas are “at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, ” but because those material activities tend towards division and specialization, ideas come to be disjoined from the mode of production of life. This disjoining, aka ideology, is inevitable, as Marx explains in analogizing the division of labor to the anatomy of the eye:
Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real active men, as they are conditioned by the definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything other than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, 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.
Marx 1998: 42
Humans naturally divide the herculean labors of producing their own existence, and this division precludes individuals from directly perceiving the whole of their existence, that is, its contingency owing to the historical particularity of its mode of production. Materialism is the study of ideology, that intellectual predicament of human physical life—but it cannot attain a place outside of ideology. There is no realm of pure matter to be dwelled in as against the realm of pure thought, for the matter of human life is already contingently—which is to say, ideologically—produced.
In contrast to the German ideology, Marx identifies that kind of intellectual activity capable of understanding its own genesis within the division of labor as “the writing of history” (Marx 1998: 37). After establishing its premises in the relations of living individuals and the contingency thereof, this materialist writing of history turns toward building out a schema of concrete history, comprised of different epochs (ancient/tribal nomadism, middle ages/feudalism, early modern/mercantilism and modern/industrial capitalism) and motored by the division of labor itself. Communism comes into relief as both an implied future epoch and the historiographic attitude through which new futures become possible—as, in other words, a synonym for “materialism. ” Communism beholds the contingent material history of the division of labor (unlike idealism or ideology, which behold ideas in the abstract, or contingency as inevitability), and from that assessment of contingent division it “turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality which communism is creating is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals themselves, insofar as reality is only the product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves” (Marx 1998: 90). If idealism comprises ideas abstracted from social relations, there would also be a touch of idealism within any materialism that naturalized the division of labor and the trajectory toward capitalism and the world market. Against this idealist materialism, materialist materialism considers the unnaturalness of nature itself, the particular veins of nature that problematically stand in for universal nature. “The communists in practice treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without however … believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them” (Marx 1998: 90). The division of labor is natural, yet it begets the divisions of exploitation and caste inequality and the division between the productive forces and existence, divisions which unjustly thwart the full production of human beings. The materialist revolution in philosophy, like the communist revolution in society, is not the fetishistic ecstasy of the concrete matter of nature, but on the contrary the restless “ridding itself of all the muck of the ages, ” and the projection of new ideals “fitted to found society anew. ” The German Ideology, in all its generic muck, remains an inventive gambit of which we cannot yet be rid.
References
Althusser, L. (2007), Philosophy of the Encounter, London: Verso.
Balibar, E. (2017), The Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso.
Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998), The German Ideology, New York: Prometheus Books.
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