Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845
Part I: Feuerbach.
Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook
A. Idealism and Materialism
The Illusions of German Ideology
As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few
years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The
decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy, which began with
Strauss, has developed into a universal ferment into which all the
“powers of the past” are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires
have arisen only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged
momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity by bolder and stronger
rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was
child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi
[successors of Alexander the Great] appear insignificant. Principles
ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with
unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45 more of the past
was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries.
All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought.
Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the
putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had
failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to
decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances.
The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the
exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new
combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his
apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to
start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later
when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all
efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled
in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production,
deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of
labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of
any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is
now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world
significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and
achievements.
If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which
awakens even in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of
national pride, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial
narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular
the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their
achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at
the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany.
[In the first version of the clean copy there follows a passage, which is crossed out:] |p. 21|
We preface therefore the specific criticism of individual representatives of this movement with a few general observations, elucidating the ideological premises common to all of them. These remarks will suffice to indicate the standpoint of our criticism insofar as it is required for the understanding and the motivation of the subsequent individual criticisms. We oppose these remarks |p. 3| to Feuerbach in particular because he is the only one who has at least made some progress and whose works can be examined de bonne foi.
1. Ideology in General, and Especially German Philosophy
<"science">A. We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.
[There follows a passage dealing with the premises of the materialist conception of history. It is not crossed out and in this volume it is reproduced as Section 2; see pp. 31-32]
Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular
German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the
realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic
premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the
soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their
answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This
dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics
has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system,
however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their
polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this –
each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the
whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To
begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as
“substance” and “self-consciousness,” later they desecrated these
categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique,”
“Man,” etc.
The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to
Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these philosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness
and a religious conception really meant was determined
variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the
allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other
conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and
similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as
religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man – “man” in
the last resort – as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for
granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a
religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of
the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief
in dogmas. The world was sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at
last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all.
The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was
reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised
everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it
a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old
Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal
principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion
as usurpation. while the other extols it as legitimate.
Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in
fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an
independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old
Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident
that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of
consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of
men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of
their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral
postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical
or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This
demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret
reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation.
The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering"
statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most
recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when
they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget,
however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other
phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world
when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only
results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at
that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of
view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further
embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant
elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.
It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into
the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation
of their criticism to their own material surroundings.
First Premises of Materialist Method
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 under which they live, both those which they find already
existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus
be verified in a purely empirical way.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation
to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual
physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man
finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The
writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their
modification in the course of history through the action of men.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion
or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of
subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation.
By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing
their actual material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends
first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in
existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be
considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of
the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these
individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life
on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they
are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they
produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus
depends on the material conditions determining their production.
This production only makes its appearance with the increase of
population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of
individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again
determined by production.<"5a3">
[3. Production and Intercourse.
Division of Labour and Forms of Property – Tribal, ancient, feudal]
The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the
extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of
labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised.
But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole
internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of
development reached by its production and its internal and external
intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is
shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has
been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a
quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance
the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development
of the division of labour.
The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation
of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the
separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its
further development leads to the separation of commercial from
industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside
these various branches there develop various divisions among the
individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position
of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in
agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates,
classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed
intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.
The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so
many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division
of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with
reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.
The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It
corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people
lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest
stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of
uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still
very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural
division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore,
limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below
them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the
family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the
growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of
war and of barter.
The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership
which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by
agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery.
Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also
immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form
subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their
labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone,
therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the
communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain
in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their
slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this
communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the
same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The
division of labour is already more developed. We already find the
antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those
states which represent town interests and those which represent country
interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between
industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens
and slaves is now completely developed.
With the development of private property, we find here for the first
time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more
extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the
concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as
the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from the
time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other
hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small
peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate
position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an
independent development.
The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity
started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started
out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the
sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a
large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In
contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset,
therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman
conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The
last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the
barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had
declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out
or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had
decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the
conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the
influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and
communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly
producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the
ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As
soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the
towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed
bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the
serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient
communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing
class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers
were different because of the different conditions of production.
This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns
in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades.
Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person.
The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the
need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist
was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the
escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the
whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually
accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable
numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of
journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a
hierarchy similar to that in the country.
Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on
the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on
the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding
the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by
the restricted conditions of production – the small-scale and primitive
cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little
division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself
the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly
strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility,
clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen,
apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns,
no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered
difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the
peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of
labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between
them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in
existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the
towns entered into mutual relations.
The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a
necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the
ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its
head.<"5a4">
[4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History
Social Being and Social Consciousness]
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively
active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political
relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out
empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the
connection of the social and political structure with production. The
social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process
of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may
appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are;
i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under
definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of
their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material
intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the
mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of
their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as
expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion,
metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their
conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a
definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can
never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of
men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their
circumstances 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.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven
to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, 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. They have no history, no development; but men,
developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter,
along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of
their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point
is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method,
which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves,
and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from
the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its
premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their
actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite
conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history
ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists
(themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects,
as with the idealists.
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science
begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical
process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases,
and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted,
philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of
existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of
the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation
of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history,
these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can
only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate
the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe
or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of
history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about
the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our
historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The
removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite
impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process
and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make
evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use
in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by
historical examples.
<"a3"> <"p41">
History: Fundamental Conditions
Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we
must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and,
therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a
position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But 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. And
indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history,
which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be
fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous
world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer],
it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any
interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental
fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due
importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and
they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and
consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if
they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in
an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in
the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts
to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to
write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.
The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action
of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been
acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the
first historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual ancestry
of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they run out of
positive material and when they can serve up neither theological nor
political nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the
“prehistoric era.” They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we
proceed from this nonsensical “prehistory” to history proper; although,
on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this
“prehistory” with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves
safe there from interference on the part of “crude facts,” and, at the
same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative
impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.
The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into
historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life,
begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between
man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to
begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased
needs create new social relations and the increased population new
needs, a subordinate one (except in Germany), and must then be treated
and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to
“the concept of the family,” as is the custom in Germany.
[1]
These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as
three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the
Germans, three “moments,” which have existed simultaneously since the
dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in
history today<"language">.
The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in
procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a
natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand
the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions,
in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain
mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a
certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation
is itself a “productive force.” Further, that the multitude of
productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society,
hence, that the “history of humanity” must always be studied and
treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. But it is also
clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history,
because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of
comprehension and the material but also the “evidence of their senses,”
for across the Rhine you cannot have any experience of these things
since history has stopped happening. Thus it is quite obvious from the
start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one
another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of
production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is
ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of
the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition
may hold men together.
Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the
primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses
“consciousness,” but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness.
From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened”
with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated
layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as
consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for
other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as
well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the
necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a
relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations”
with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal,
its relation to others does not exist as a relation<"god">. Consciousness is,
therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as
long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely
consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and
consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things
outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it
is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely
alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations
are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus
a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because
nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately:
this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is
determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere,
the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted
relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one
another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s
restricted relation to nature.) On the other hand, man’s consciousness of
the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the
beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This
beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere
herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep
by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or
that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal
consciousness receives its further development and extension through
increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental
to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops
the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of
labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops
spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g.
physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labour only
becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and
mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is
concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter
itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice,
that it really represents something without representing something real;
from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the
world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology,
philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy,
ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can
only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction
with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a
particular national sphere of relations through the appearance of the
contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national
consciousness and the practice of other nations, i.e. between the
national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in
Germany).
Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on
its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these
three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and
consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another,
because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that
intellectual and material activity – enjoyment and labour, production and
consumption – devolve on different individuals, and that the only
possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its
turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that
“spectres,” “bonds,” “the higher being,” “concept,” “scruple,” are merely
the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the
isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations,
within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse
coupled with it move.
Private Property and Communism
With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit,
and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the
family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to
one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the
unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its
products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the
family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This
latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property,
but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of
modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power
of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover,
identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with
reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the
product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the
interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the
communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one
another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the
imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the
mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is
divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how,
as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage
exists between the particular and the common interest, as long,
therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own
deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him
instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of
labour 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 herdsman, 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, herdsman or
critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves
produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control,
thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of
the chief factors in historical development up till now.
[2]
The social power,
i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation
of different individuals as it is determined by the division of
labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not
voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power,
but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of
which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the
contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages
independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime
governor of these.
How otherwise could for instance property have had a history at all,
have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example,
according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from
parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from
centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the
case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing
more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries,
rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand – a
relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like
the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and
misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes
nations to rise and to disappear – while with the abolition of the basis of
private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and,
implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and
what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and
demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production,
the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
History as a Continuous Process
In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that
separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into
world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power
alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick
on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has
become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to
be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the
overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of
which more below) and the abolition of private property which is
identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians,
will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual
will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes
transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real
intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his
real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated
from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical
connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole
world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided
production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round
dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of
individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the
control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the
action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed
men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be
expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as “self-generation
of the species” (“society as the subject”), and thereby the
consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other
can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery
of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly make one
another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.
5. Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism]
This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the
philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical
premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against
which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the
great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time,
the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of
which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a
high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this
development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual
empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local,
being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it
want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for
necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be
reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal
development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men
established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the
phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes
each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has
put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local
ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2)
the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as
universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred
conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of
intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is
only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and
simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of
productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.
Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious
position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from
even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily
deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world
market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically,
just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical”
existence. World-historical existence of individuals means
existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
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. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in
existence.
<"p50">
In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the reshaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the reshaping of men by men .... [Intercourse and productive power]
Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society. ...
Footnotes
Contradiction between Individuals and their conditions of life
1.
The building of houses. With savages each family has as a matter of course its
own cave or hut like the separate family tent of the nomads. This separate
domestic economy is made only the more necessary by the further development
of private property. With the agricultural peoples a communal domestic
economy is just as impossible as a communal cultivation of the soil. A great
advance was the building of towns. In all previous periods, however, the
abolition of individual economy, which is inseparable from the abolition of
private property, was impossible for the simple reason that the material
conditions governing it were not present. The setting-up of a communal
domestic economy presupposes the development of machinery, of the use of
natural forces and of many other productive forces – e.g. of water-supplies, of
gas-lighting, steam-heating, etc., the removal [of the antagonism] of town and
country. Without these conditions a communal economy would not in itself form
a new productive force; lacking any material basis and resting on a purely
theoretical foundation, it would be a mere freak and would end in nothing more
than a monastic economy – What was possible can be seen in the towns
brought about by condensation and the erection of communal buildings for
various definite purposes (prisons, barracks, etc.). That the abolition of
individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident.
2. [This paragraph appears as a marginal note in the manuscript – Ed.]
And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the
individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent
form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and
community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always
based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal
conglomeration – such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour
on a larger scale, and other interests – and especially, as we shall enlarge
upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour,
which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one
dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the
State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the
struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in
which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among
one another (of this the German theoreticians have not the faintest
inkling, although they have received a sufficient introduction to the
subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and Die heilige
Familie). Further, it follows that every class which is struggling for
mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat,
postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of
domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to
represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first
moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general
is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them
as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them as in its turn a
particular, peculiar “general” interest; or they themselves must remain
within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the
practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really
run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes
practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory
“general” interest in the form of the State.