Karl Marx's 
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY 

Written: Fall 1845 -- mid-1846 
First Published: 1932
Translated: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, 1965
Transcribed: Tim Delaney 1999. 




PREFACE 



 
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about 
themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged 
their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The 
phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have 
bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the 
ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. 
Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to 
exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; 
says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to 
knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse. 
These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian 
philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, 
but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its 
cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the 
present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves 
and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a 
philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of 
these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real 
conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic 
struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled 
German nation. 
Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water 
only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock 
this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a 
religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. 
His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful 
results all statistic brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow 
was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany. 





Part I
FEUERBACH. 
OPPOSTION 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. 
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 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]1 of individuals with one 
another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production. 
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]1 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 1 ) 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. 
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. 



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. 
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. 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? 
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. 
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, (i) 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. 



FOOTNOTES
[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-Franzsische Jahrbcher 
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 fothem 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 hind, 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. 




Part I
FEUERBACH. 
OPPOSTION OF THE MATERIALIST
AND IDEALIST OUTLOOK



B. THE ILLUSION OF THE EPOCH 



 
Civil Society and the Conception of History 
The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at all 
previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil society. 
The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its premises and 
basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called tribe, the more precise 
determinants of this society are enumerated in our remarks above. Already here 
we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and 
how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real 
relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states. 

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a 
definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole 
commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the 
State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in 
its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itself as 
State. The word "civil society" [brgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the 
eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated 
themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such 
only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly 
out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State 
and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been 
designated by the same name. 
History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which 
exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to 
it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the 
traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, 
modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be 
speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier 
history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the 
eruption of the French Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims 
and becomes "a person rating with other persons" (to wit: "Self-Consciousness, 
Criticism, the Unique", etc.), while what is designated with the words 
"destiny", "goal", "germ", or "idea" of earlier history is nothing more than an 
abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence which earlier 
history exercises on later history. 
The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another, extend in the 
course of this development, the more the original isolation of the separate 
nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of production and intercourse 
and the division of labour between various nations naturally brought forth by 
these, the more history becomes world history. Thus, for instance, if in England 
a machine is invented, which deprives countless workers of bread in India and 
China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires, this 
invention becomes a world-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and 
coffee which have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth 
century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the 
Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against Napoleon, and 
thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of liberation of 1813. From this 
it follows that this transformation of history into world history is not indeed 
a mere abstract act on the part of the "self-consciousness", the world spirit, 
or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite material, empirically 
verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes 
and goes, eats, drinks and clothes himself. 
This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of 
production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to 
comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode 
of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all 
history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different 
theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, 
etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of 
course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the 
reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the 
idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains 
constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the 
idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly 
it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot 
be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into "self-consciousness" or 
transformation into "apparitions", "spectres", "fancies", etc. but only by the 
practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this 
idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of 
history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows 
that history does not end by being resolved into "self-consciousness as spirit 
of the spirit", but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a 
sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to 
nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its 
predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, 
on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other 
prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a 
special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make 
circumstances. 
This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, 
which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is 
the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and 
"essence of man", and what they have deified and attacked; a real basis which is 
not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of 
men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as 
"self-consciousness" and the "Unique". These conditions of life, which different 
generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically 
recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis 
of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete 
revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing productive 
forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not 
only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very 
"production of life" till then, the "total activity" on which it was based), 
then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial 
whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, 
as the history of communism proves. 
In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history 
has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite 
irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore, always be written 
according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life seems to be 
primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from 
ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man 
to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and 
history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have 
consequently only been able to see in history the political actions of princes 
and States, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular 
in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For 
instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely "political" or 
"religious" motives, although "religion" and "politics" are only forms of its 
true motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The "idea", the "conception" 
of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the 
sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their practice. 
When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and 
Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the 
historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this 
crude social form. While the French and the English at least hold by the 
political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in 
the realm of the "pure spirit", and make religious illusion the driving force of 
history. The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence, reduced to 
its "finest expression", of all this German historiography, for which it is not 
a question of real, nor even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, 
which consequently must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of "thoughts" that 
devour one another and are finally swallowed up in "self-consciousness". ------ 
[(So-called objective historiography just consists in treating the historical 
conditions independent of activity. Reactionary character.) marginal note by 
Marx -- Ed.) 



Feuerbach: Philosophic, and Real, Liberation 
[. . . .] It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is 
deceiving himself when (Wigand's Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2) by virtue of 
the qualification "common man" he declares himself a communist, transforms the 
latter into a predicate of "man", and thereby thinks it possible to change the 
word "communist", which in the real world means the follower of a definite 
revolutionary party, into a mere category. Feuerbach's whole deduction with 
regard to the relation of men to one another goes only so far as to prove that 
men need and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness 
of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a 
correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it 
is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things. We thoroughly 
appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to produce consciousness 
of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing 
to be a theorist and philosopher.... 
As an example of Feuerbach's acceptance and at the same time misunderstanding of 
existing reality, which he still shares with our opponents, we recall the 
passage in the Philosophie der Zukunft where he develops the view that the 
existence of a thing or a man is at the same time its or his essence, that the 
conditions of existence, the mode of life and activity of an animal or human 
individual are those in which its "essence" feels itself satisfied. Here every 
exception is expressly conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which 
cannot be altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented 
with their living conditions, if their "existence" does not in the least 
correspond to their "essence", then, according to the passage quoted, this is an 
unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The millions of 
proletarians and communists, however, think differently and will prove this in 
time, when they bring their "existence" into harmony with their "essence" in a 
practical way, by means of a revolution. Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of 
the world of man in such cases, but always takes refuge in external nature, and 
moreover in nature which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new 
invention, every advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this 
domain, so that the ground which produces examples illustrating such 
Feuerbachian propositions is steadily shrinking. 
[. . . .] We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise 
philosophers by explaining to them that the "liberation" of man is not advanced 
a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to 
"self-consciousness" and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases, 
which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only 
possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real 
means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule 
and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, 
and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to 
obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 
"Liberation" is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by 
historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the 
conditions of intercourse. . . . [1] 
In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is taking 
place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective trivialities, 
naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development, and they 
take root and have to be combated. But this fight is of local importance. 
In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a 
question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and 
changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, 
they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on 
his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable 
of development. Feuerbach's conception of the sensuous world is confined on the 
one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says 
"Man" instead of "real historical man". "Man" is really "the German". In the 
first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on 
things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony 
he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of 
man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double 
perception, a profane one which only perceives the "flatly obvious" and a 
higher, philosophical, one which perceives the "true essence" of things. He does 
not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all 
eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state 
of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the 
result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on 
the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, 
modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of 
the simplest "sensuous certainty" are only given him through social development, 
industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all 
fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by 
commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society 
in a definite age it has become "sensuous certainty" for Feuerbach. 
Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are and happened, 
every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be seen even more 
clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For instance, the important 
question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno [Bauer] goes so far as to speak 
of "the antitheses in nature and history" (p. 110), as though these were two 
separate "things" and man did not always have before him an historical nature 
and a natural history) out of which all the "unfathomably lofty works" on 
"substance" and "self-consciousness" were born, crumbles of itself when we 
understand that the celebrated "unity of man with nature" has always existed in 
industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser 
or greater development of industry, just like the "struggle" of man with nature, 
right up to the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis. 
Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the necessities of life, 
themselves determine distribution, the structure of the different social classes 
and are, in turn, determined by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; 
and so it happens that in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only 
factories and machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and 
weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture 
lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing but 
the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists. Feuerbach speaks in particular of 
the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only 
to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be 
without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with 
an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the 
sensuous activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous 
labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as 
it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not 
only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that 
the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, 
were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains 
unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by 
generatio aequivoca; [Spontaneous generation. -- Ed.] but this differentiation 
has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For 
that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means 
the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists 
anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and 
which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach. 
Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the "pure" materialists in that 
he realises how man too is an "object of the senses. But apart from the fact 
that he only conceives him as an "object of the senses, not as sensuous 
activity", because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men 
not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of 
life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really 
existing active men, but stops at the abstraction "man", and gets no further 
than recognising "the true, 
individual, corporeal man,' emotionally, i.e. he knows no other "human 
relationships" "of man to man" than love and friendship, and even then 
idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he 
never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous 
activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when, for example, he 
sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive 
starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the "higher perception" and in 
the ideal "compensation in the species", and thus to relapse into idealism at 
the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the 
same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social 
structure. 
As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far 
as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and 
history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is already obvious from 
what has been said. 



Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas 
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. The class which has the means of material production 
at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental 
production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the 
means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more 
than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant 
material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make 
the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The 
individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, 
and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine 
the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its 
whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of 
ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: 
thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and 
in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for 
mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation 
of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law". 
The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of 
history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division 
of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the 
thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the 
perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of 
livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and illusions is more 
passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this 
class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within 
this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and 
hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical 
collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to 
nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas 
were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power 
of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period 
presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the 
latter sufficient has already been said above. 
If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling 
class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent 
existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were 
dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of 
production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals 
and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for 
instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts 
honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the 
concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole Imagines 
this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, 
particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the 
phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which 
increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts 
itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to 
carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all 
the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its 
ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, 
universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very 
start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the 
representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society 
confronting the one ruling class. [2] It can do this because, to start with, its 
interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other 
non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions 
its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a 
particular class. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the 
other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it 
now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling 
class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it 
thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the 
proletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class, 
therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class 
ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the 
new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these 
things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling 
class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous 
conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule. 
This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of 
certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in 
general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is to say, as 
soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general 
or the "general interest" as ruling. 
Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above 
all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of 
production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is 
always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various 
ideas "the idea", the notion, etc. as the dominant force in history, and thus to 
understand all these separate ideas and concepts as "forms of 
self-determination" on the part of the concept developing in history. It follows 
then naturally, too, that all the relationships of men can be derived from the 
concept of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by 
the speculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the 
Geschichtsphilosophie that he "has considered the progress of the concept only" 
and has represented in history the "true theodicy". (p.446.) Now one can go back 
again to the producers of the "concept", to the theorists, ideologists and 
philosophers, and one comes then to the conclusion that the philosophers, the 
thinkers as such, have at all times been dominant in history: a conclusion, as 
we see, already expressed by Hegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of 
the spirit in history (hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confirmed to the 
following three efforts. 
No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, under 
empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from these actual rulers, and 
thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in history. 
No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a mystical 
connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is managed by understanding 
them as "acts of self-determination on the part of the concept" (this is 
possible because by virtue of their empirical basis these ideas are really 
connected with one another and because, conceived as mere ideas, they become 
self-distinctions, distinctions made by thought). 
No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this "self-determining concept" it 
is changed into a person -- "Self-Consciousness" -- or, to appear thoroughly 
materialistic, into a series of persons, who represent the "concept" in history, 
into the "thinkers", the "philosophers", the ideologists, who again are 
understood as the manufacturers of history, as the "council of guardians", as 
the rulers. Thus the whole body of materialistic elements has been removed from 
history and now full rein can be given to the speculative steed. 
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish 
between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have 
not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and 
believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true. 
This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the reason why, 
must be understood from its connection with the illusion of ideologists in 
general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the practical 
statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings and distortions of these 
fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from their practical position in 
life, their job, and the division of labour. 



FOOTNOTES
1. There is here a gap in the manuscript. 
2. [Marginal note by Marx:] Universality corresponds to (1) the class versus the 
estate, (2) the competition, world-wide intercourse, etc., (3) the great 
numerical strength of the ruling class, (4) the illusion of the common interests 
(in the beginning this illusion is true), (5) the delusion of the ideologists 
and the division of labour. 




Part I
FEUERBACH. 
OPPOSTION OF THE MATERIALIST
AND IDEALIST OUTLOOK



C. THE REAL BASIS OF IDEOLOGY 



 
Division of Labour: Town and Country
[. . . .] [1] From the first there follows the premise of a highly developed 
division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the second, the locality. In 
the first case the individuals must be brought together; in the second they find 
themselves alongside the given instrument of production as instruments of 
production themselves. Here, therefore, arises the difference between natural 
instruments of production and those created by civilisation. The field (water, 
etc.) can be regarded as a natural instrument of production. In the first case, 
that of the natural instrument of production, individuals are subservient to 
nature; in the second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, 
property (landed property) appears as direct natural domination, in the second, 
as domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The first 
case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family, tribe, 
the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent of one another and 
are only held together by exchange. In the first case, what is involved is 
chiefly an exchange between men and nature in which the labour of the former is 
exchanged for the products of the latter; in the second, it is predominantly an 
exchange of men among themselves. In the first case, average, human common sense 
is adequate -- physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity; 
in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must already be 
practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over 
the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of 
community; in the second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third 
party-money. In the first case, small industry exists, but determined by the 
utilisation of the natural instrument of production and therefore without the 
distribution of labour among various individuals; in the second, industry exists 
only in and through the division of labour. 
The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town 
and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition 
from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, 
and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day (the 
Anti-Corn Law League). 
The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of 
administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus of 
politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the population 
into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on 
the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the 
concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, 
of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, 
isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist 
within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the 
subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite 
activity forced upon him -- a subjection which makes one man into a restricted 
town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew 
the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, 
power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must 
exist. The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is one of the 
first conditions of communal life, a condition which again depends on a mass of 
material premises and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can 
see at the first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The 
separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of 
capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development 
of capital independent of landed property -- the beginning of property having 
its basis only in labour and exchange. 
In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made from an 
earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had become free, each man's 
own particular labour was his only property apart from the small capital he 
brought with him, consisting almost solely of the most necessary tools of his 
craft. The competition of serfs constantly escaping into the town, the constant 
war of the country against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised 
municipal military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of 
labour, the necessity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a time 
when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of the 
unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests of the 
various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously acquired skill, 
and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country: these were the causes 
of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds. We have not at this point 
to go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system, which arise 
through later historical developments. The flight of the serfs into the towns 
went on without interruption right through the Middle Ages. These serfs, 
persecuted by their lords in the country, came separately into the towns, where 
they found an organised community, against which they were powerless and in 
which they had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the 
demand for their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. 
These workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power, 
since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the 
guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to their 
interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and therefore 
not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never managed to organise, 
remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for day-labourers in the towns created 
the rabble. 
These towns were true "associations", called forth by the direct need, the care 
of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying the means of 
production and defence of the separate members. The rabble of these towns was 
devoid of any power, composed as it was of individuals strange to one another 
who had entered separately, and who stood unorganised over against an organised 
power, armed for war, and jealously watching over them. The journeymen and 
apprentices were organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the 
masters. The patriarchal relationship existing between them and their masters 
gave the latter a double power -- on the one hand because of their influence on 
the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen 
who worked with the same master, it was a real bond which held them together 
against the journeymen of other masters and separated them from these. And 
finally, the journeymen were bound to the existing order by their simple 
interest in becoming masters themselves. While, therefore, the rabble at least 
carried out revolts against the whole municipal order, revolts which remained 
completely ineffective because of their powerlessness, the journeymen never got 
further than small acts of insubordination within separate guilds, such as 
belong to the very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of the Middle 
Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally ineffective 
because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the peasants. 
In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was as yet 
[quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds themselves, not at all developed 
between the individual workers. Every workman had to be versed in a whole round 
of tasks, had to be able to make everything that was to be made with his tools. 
The limited commerce and the scanty communication between the individual towns, 
the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division 
of labour, and therefore every man who wished to become a master had to be 
proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval 
craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was 
capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason, however, 
every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his work, to which he had a 
contented, slavish relationship, and to which he was subjected to a far greater 
extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him. 
Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consisting of a house, 
the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers; and not being 
realisable, on account of the backwardness of commerce and the lack of 
circulation, it descended from father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can 
be assessed in money and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or 
that, this capital was directly connected with the particular work of the owner, 
inseparable from it and to this extent estate capital. 
The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of production 
and commerce, the formation of a special class of mer-chants; a separation 
which, in the towns bequeathed by a former period, had been handed down (among 
other things with the Jews) and which very soon appeared in the newly formed 
ones. With this there was given the possibility of commercial communications 
transcending the immediate neighbourhood, a possibility, the realisation of 
which depended on the existing means of communication, the state of public 
safety in the countryside, which was determined by political conditions (during 
the whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants travelled in armed 
caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced needs (determined by the stage of 
culture attained) of the region accessible to intercourse. 
With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the extension of trade 
through the merchants beyond the immediate surroundings of the town, there 
immediately appears a reciprocal action between production and commerce. The 
towns enter into relations with one another, new tools are brought from one town 
into the other, and the separation between production and commerce soon calls 
forth a new division of production between the individual towns, each of which 
is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions of 
earlier times begin gradually to be broken down. 
It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the productive forces 
achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for later development or 
not. As long as there exists no commerce transcending the immediate 
neighbourhood, every invention must be made separately in each locality, and 
mere chances such as irruptions of barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are 
sufficient to cause a country with advanced productive forces and needs to have 
to start right over again from the beginning. In primitive history every 
invention had to be made daily anew and in each locality independently. How 
little highly developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, 
given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians, 
whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come through the 
ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its 
consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting in the Middle Ages. 
Only when commerce has become world commerce and has as its basis large-scale 
industry, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the 
permanence of the acquired productive forces assured. 



The Rise of Manufacturing
The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the various towns 
was the rise of manufactures, branches of production which had outgrown the 
guild-system. Manufactures first flourished, in Italy and later in Flanders, 
under the historical premise of commerce with foreign nations. In other 
countries, England and France for example, manufactures were at first confined 
to the home market. Besides the premises already mentioned manufactures depend 
on an already advanced concentration of population, particularly in the 
countryside, and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of 
individuals, partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly 
among the merchants. 
That labour which from the first presupposed a machine, even of the crudest 
sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development. Weaving, earlier 
carried on in the country by the peasants as a secondary occupation to procure 
their clothing, was the first labour to receive an impetus and a further 
development through the extension of commerce. Weaving was the first and 
remained the principal manufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, 
consequent on the growth of population, the growing accumulation and 
mobilisation of natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for 
luxuries called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual 
extension of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus, 
which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing. Alongside the 
peasants weaving for their own use, who continued, and still continue, with this 
sort of work, there emerged a new class of weavers in the towns, whose fabrics 
were destined for the whole home market and usually for foreign markets too. 
Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and soon splitting 
up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted the trammels of the 
guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly in villages and market-centres 
without guild organisation, which gradually became towns, and indeed the most 
flourishing towns in each land. 
With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly changed. The first 
advance beyond naturally derived estate capital was provided by the rise of 
merchants whose capital was from the beginning movable, capital in the modern 
sense as far as one can speak of it, given the circumstances of those times. The 
second advance came with manufacture, which again made mobile a mass of natural 
capital, and altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against that of 
natural capital. 
At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants from the guilds 
which excluded them or paid them badly, just as earlier the guild-towns had 
[served] as a refuge for the peasants from [the oppressive landed nobility]. 
Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a period of 
vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of retainers, the 
disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against 
their vassals, the improvement of agriculture, and the transformation of great 
strips of tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this 
vagabondage is strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal system. 
As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind, but 
only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth does this 
vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were 
so numerous that, for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, 
were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the 
most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise of 
manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually. 
With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered into a competitive 
relationship, the struggle for trade, which was fought out in wars, protective 
duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the nations, insofar as they were 
connected at all, had carried on an inoffensive exchange with each other. Trade 
had from now on a political significance. 
With the advent of manufacture the relationship between worker and employer 
changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relationship between journeyman and 
master continued to exist; in manufacture its place was taken by the monetary 
relation between worker and capitalist -- a relationship which in the 
countryside and in small towns retained a patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, 
the real manufacturing towns, quite early lost almost all patriarchal 
complexion. 
Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous 
impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of 
America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, 
particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation and 
totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard 
blow to feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of 
adventurers, colonisation; and above all the extension of markets into a world 
market, which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and more a 
fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into which in general 
we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation of the newly discovered 
countries the commercial struggle of the nations amongst one another was given 
new fuel and accordingly greater extension and animosity. 
The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumu-lation of movable 
capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated to extend their 
production, natural capital remained stationary or even declined. Trade and 
manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the guilds was concentrated the 
petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was dominant in the towns as formerly, but 
had to bow to the might of the great merchants and manufacturers. Hence the 
decline of the guilds, as soon as they came into contact with manufacture. 
The intercourse of nations took on, in the epoch of which we have been speaking, 
two different forms. At first the small quantity of gold and silver in 
circulation involved the ban on the export of these metals; and industry, for 
the most part imported from abroad and made necessary by the need for employing 
the growing urban population, could not do without those privileges which could 
be granted not only, of course, against home competition, but chiefly against 
foreign. The local guild privilege was in these original prohibitions extended 
over the whole nation. Customs duties originated from the tributes which the 
feudal lords exacted as protective levies against robbery from merchants passing 
through their territories, tributes later imposed likewise by the towns, and 
which, with the rise of the modern states, were the Treasury's most obvious 
means of raising money. 
The appearance of American gold and silver on the European markets, the gradual 
development of industry, the rapid expansion of trade and the consequent rise of 
the non-guild bourgeoisie and of money, gave these measures another 
significance. The State, which was daily less and less able to do without money, 
now retained the ban on the export of gold and silver out of fiscal 
considerations; the bourgeois, for whom these masses of money which were hurled 
onto the market became the chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly 
content with this; privileges established earlier became a source of income for 
the government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation there 
appeared the export duty, which, since it only [placed] a hindrance in the way 
of industry, had a purely fiscal aim. 
The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted 
almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and navi-gation had expanded more 
rapidly than manufacture, which played a secondary role; the colonies were 
becoming considerable consumers; and after long struggles the separate nations 
shared out the opening world market among themselves. This period begins with 
the Navigation Laws [2] and colonial monopolies. The competition of the nations 
among themselves was excluded as far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and 
treaties; and in the last resort the competitive struggle was carried on and 
decided by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime nation, the 
English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture. Here, already, we find 
concentration in one country. 
Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the home market, 
by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as much as possible by 
differential duties. The working-up of home-produced material was encouraged 
(wool and linen in England, silk in France), the export of home-produced raw 
material forbidden (wool in England), and the [working-up] of imported material 
neglected or suppressed (cotton in England). The nation dominant in sea trade 
and colonial power naturally secured for itself also the greatest quantitative 
and qualitative expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be carried on 
without protection, since, if the slightest change takes place in other 
countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably favourable 
conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for this very reason 
can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the mode in which it is 
carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century, in the countryside, it is to 
such an extent interwoven with the vital relationships of a great mass of 
individuals, that no country dare jeopardise its existence by permitting free 
competition. Insofar as it manages to export, it therefore depends entirely on 
the extension or restriction of commerce, and exercises a relatively very small 
reaction [on the latter]. Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of 
[the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants and especially 
the shippers who more than anybody else pressed for State protection and 
monopolies; the manufacturers also demanded and indeed received protection, but 
all the time were inferior in political importance to the merchants. The 
commercial towns, particularly the maritime towns, became to some extent 
civilised and acquired the outlook of the big bourgeoisie, but in the factory 
towns an extreme petty-bourgeois outlook persisted. Cf Aikin, [3] etc. The 
eighteenth century was the century of trade. Pinto says this expressly: "Le 
commerce fait la marotte du sicle" ; and: "Depuis quelque temps il n'est plus 
question que de commerce, de navgation et de marine." [ "Commerce is the rage of 
the century." "For some time now people have been talking only about commerce, 
navigation and the navy." -Ed.] 
This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the export of 
gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in money; by banks, national 
debts, paper money; by speculation in stocks and shares and stockjobbing in all 
articles; by the development of finance in general. Again capital lost a great 
part of the natural character which had still clung to it. 
The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country, England, developing 
irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradually created for this country a 
relative world market, and thus a demand for the manufactured products of this 
country, which could no longer be met by the industrial productive forces 
hitherto existing. This demand, outgrowing the productive forces, was the motive 
power which, by producing big industry -- the application of elemental forces to 
industrial ends, machinery and the most complex division of labour -- called 
into existence the third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages. 
There already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new phase: 
freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of theoretical 
mechanics, etc. (Indeed, the science of mechanics perfected by Newton was 
altogether the most popular science in France and England in the eighteenth 
century.) (Free competition inside the nation itself had everywhere to be 
conquered by a revolution -- 1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France.) 
Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical 
role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties 
were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big 
industry under protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in 
spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective 
duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established 
means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to 
itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the 
rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation 
of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their 
energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, 
morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It 
produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised 
nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of 
their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness 
of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took 
from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It 
destroyed natural growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour 
exists, and resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the 
place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities 
which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed the crafts 
and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of the commercial 
town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the automatic system. [Its 
development] produced a mass of productive forces, for which private [property] 
became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the 
small, rural workshop for the developing craft. These productive forces received 
under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and became 
for the majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces 
could find no application at all within this system. Generally speaking, big 
industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, 
and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities. And 
finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national 
interests, big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same 
interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid 
of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it. Big industry 
makes for the worker not only the relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, 
unbearable. 
It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level of development in 
all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard the class movement of 
the proletariat, because the proletarians created by big industry assume 
leadership of this movement and carry the whole mass along with them, and 
because the workers excluded from big industry are placed by it in a still worse 
situation than the workers in big industry itself. The countries in which big 
industry is developed act in a similar manner upon the more or less 
non-industrial countries, insofar as the latter are swept by universal commerce 
into the universal competitive struggle. [4] 
These different forms are just so many forms of the organisation of labour, and 
hence of property. In each period a unification of the existing productive 
forces takes place, insofar as this has been rendered necessary by needs. 



The Relation of State and Law to Property
The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle Ages, is 
tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war, with the Germans by 
the rearing of cattle. In the case of the ancient peoples, since several tribes 
live together in one town, the tribal property appears as State property, and 
the right of the individual to it as mere "possession which, however, like 
tribal property as a whole, is confined to landed property only. Real private 
property began with the ancients, as with modern nations, with movable property. 
-- (Slavery and community) (dominium ex jure Quiritum [5] ). In the case of the 
nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through 
various stages -- feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital 
invested in manufacture -- to modern capital, determined by big industry and 
universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all 
semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any 
influence on the development of property. To this modern private property 
corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of 
property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the 
national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial 
credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected 
in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that 
it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise 
itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean 
average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the 
community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil 
society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the 
bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the 
mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State 
is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet 
completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more 
advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; 
countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve 
dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most 
perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English 
and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the 
sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the 
consciousness of the normal man. 
Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert 
their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is 
epitomised, it follows that the State mediates in the formation of all common 
institutions and that the institutions receive a political form. Hence the 
illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its 
real basis -- on free will. Similarly, justice is in its turn reduced to the 
actual laws. 
Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the 
disintegration of the natural community. With the Romans the development of 
private property and civil law had no further industrial and commercial 
consequences, because their whole mode of production did not alter. (Usury!) 
With modern peoples, where the feudal community was disintegrated by industry 
and trade, there began with the rise of private property and civil law a new 
phase, which was capable of further development. The very first town which 
carried on an extensive maritime trade in the Middle Ages, Amalfi, also 
developed maritime law. As soon as industry and trade developed private property 
further, first in Italy and later in other countries, the highly developed Roman 
civil law was immediately adopted again and raised, to authority. When later the 
bourgeoisie had acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in 
order to overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie, there began 
in all countries -- in France in the sixteenth century -- the real development 
of law, which in all countries except England proceeded on the basis of the 
Roman Codex. In England, too, Roman legal principles had to be introduced to 
further the development of civil law (especially in the case of movable 
property). (It must not be forgotten that law has just as little an independent 
history as religion.) 
In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result 
of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi [6] itself asserts on the one 
hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the 
community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based 
solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing. In practice, 
the abuti 1 has very definite economic limitations for the owner of private 
property, if he does not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi 
pass into other hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with 
reference to his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true 
property in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which the 
philosophers call an idea). This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the 
mere will, necessarily leads, in the further development of property 
relationships, to the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing 
without really having the thing. If, for instance, the income from a piece of 
land is lost owing to competition, then the proprietor has certainly his legal 
title to it along with the jus utendi et abutendi. But he can do nothing with 
it: he owns nothing as a landed proprietor if in addition he has not enough 
capital to cultivate his ground. This illusion of the jurists also explains the 
fact that for them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that 
individuals enter into relationships among themselves (e.g. contracts); it 
explains why they consider that these relationships [can] be entered into or not 
at will, and that their content rests purely on the individual [free] will of 
the contracting parties. 
Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of 
intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has 
always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property. 



FOOTNOTES
[1] Four pages of the manuscript are missing here.-Ed. 
[2] Navigation Laws -- a series of Acts passed in England from 1381 onwards to 
protect English shipping against foreign companies. The Navigation Laws were 
modified in the early nineteenth century and repealed in 1849 except for a 
reservation regarding coasting trade, which was revoked in 1854. 
[3] The movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still remained, 
however, relatively slow. The splitting-up of the world market into separate 
parts, each of which was exploited by a particular nation, the exclusion of 
competition among themselves on the part of the nations, the clumsiness of 
production itself and the fact that finance was only evolving from its early 
stages, greatly impeded circulation. The consequence of this was a haggling, 
mean and niggardly spirit which still clung to all merchants and to the whole 
mode of carrying on trade. Compared with the manufacturers, and above all with 
the craftsmen, they were certainly big bourgeois; compared with the merchants 
and industrialists of the next period they remain petty bourgeois. Cf. Adam 
Smith. 
[4] Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois 
but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. 
Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite, apart from the fact 
that for the purposes of this union -- if it is not to be merely local -- the 
necessary means, the great industrial cities and cheap and quick communications, 
have first to be produced by big industry. Hence every organised power standing 
over against these isolated individuals, who live in relationships, daily 
reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand 
the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist 
in this definite epoch of history, or that the individuals should banish from 
their minds relationships over which in their isolation they have no control. 
[5] Ownership in accordance with the law applying to full Roman citizens.-Ed. 
[6] The right of using and consuming (also: abusing), i.e. of disposing of a 
thing at will.-Ed. 




Part I
FEUERBACH. 
OPPOSTION OF THE MATERIALIST
AND IDEALIST OUTLOOK



D. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISM 



 
Individuals, Class, and Community 
In the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to unite against the 
landed nobility to save their skins. The extension of trade, the establishment 
of communications, led the separate towns to get to know other towns, which had 
asserted the same interests in the struggle with the same antagonist. Out of the 
many local corporations of burghers there arose only gradually the burgher 
class. The conditions of life of the individual burghers became, on account of 
their contradiction to the existing relationships and of the mode of labour 
determined by these, conditions which were common to them all and independent of 
each individual. The burghers had created the conditions insofar as they had 
torn themselves free from feudal ties, and were created by them insofar as they 
were determined by their antagonism to the feudal system which they found in 
existence. When the individual towns began to enter into associations, these 
common conditions developed into class conditions. The same conditions, the same 
contradiction, the same interests necessarily called forth on the whole similar 
customs everywhere. The bourgeoisie itself with its conditions, develops only 
gradually, splits according to the division of labour into various fractions and 
finally absorbs all propertied classes it finds in existence [1] (while it 
develops the majority of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto 
propertied classes into a new class, the proletariat) in the measure to which 
all property found in existence is transformed into industrial or commercial 
capital. The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to 
carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile 
terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn 
achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the 
latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their 
position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, 
become subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as the subjection of the 
separate individuals to the division of labour and can only be removed by the 
abolition of private property and of labour itself We have already indicated 
several times how this subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it 
their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc. 
If from a philosophical point of view one considers this evolution of 
individuals in the common conditions of existence of estates and classes, which 
followed on one another, and in the accompanying general conceptions forced upon 
them, it is certainly very easy to imagine that in these individuals the 
species, or "Man", has evolved, or that they evolved "Man" -- and in this way 
one can give history some hard clouts on the ear. [2] One can conceive these 
various estates and classes to be specific terms of the general expression, 
subordinate varieties of the species, or evolutionary phases of "Man". 
This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a 
class has taken shape, which has no longer any particular class interest to 
assert against the ruling class. 
The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers 
(relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the 
general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals 
again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division 
of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with 
others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all 
directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In 
the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom 
has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of 
the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The 
illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took 
on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since 
it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely 
illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the 
individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. 
Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on themselves within 
their given historical conditions and relationships, not on the "pure" 
individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course of historical 
evolution, and precisely through the inevitable fact that within the division of 
labour social relationships take on an independent existence, there appears a 
division within the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and 
insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions 
pertaining to it. (We do not mean it to be understood from this that, for 
example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc. cease to be persons; but their 
personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relationships, 
and the division appears only in their opposition to another class and, for 
themselves, only when they go bankrupt.) In the estate (and even more in the 
tribe) this is as yet concealed: for instance, a nobleman always remains a 
nobleman, a commoner always a commoner, apart from his other relationships, a 
quality inseparable from his individuality. The division between the personal 
and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for 
the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a 
product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and 
developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, 
in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie 
than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of 
course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of 
things. The difference from the estate comes out particularly in the antagonism 
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the estate of the urban 
burghers, the corporations, etc. emerged in opposition to the landed nobility, 
their condition of existence -- movable property and craft labour, which had 
already existed latently before their separation from the feudal ties -- 
appeared as something positive, which was asserted against feudal landed 
property, and, therefore, in its own way at first took on a feudal form. 
Certainly the refugee serfs treated their previous servitude as something 
accidental to their personality. But here they only were doing what every class 
that is freeing itself from a fetter does; and they did not free themselves as a 
class but separately. Moreover, they did not rise above the system of estates, 
but only formed a new estate, retaining their previous mode of labour even in 
their new situation, and developing it further by freeing it from its earlier 
fetters, which no longer corresponded to the development already attained. [3] 
For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their existence, 
labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, 
have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate 
individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give 
them control. The contradiction between the individuality of each separate 
proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident 
to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own 
class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the 
other class. 
Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those 
conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only 
arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as 
individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto 
(which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, 
labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, 
hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves 
collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert 
themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State. 
It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the communal 
relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was 
determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a 
community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, only 
insofar as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class -- a 
relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a 
class. With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who 
take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under 
their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals 
participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals (assuming the 
advanced stage of modern productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions 
of the free development and movement of individuals under their control -- 
conditions which were previously abandoned to chance and had won an independent 
existence over against the separate individuals just because of their separation 
as individuals, and because of the necessity of their combination which had been 
determined by the division of labour, and through their separation had become a 
bond alien to them. Combination up till now (by no means an arbitrary one, such 
as is expounded for example in the Contrat social, but a necessary one) was an 
agreement upon these conditions, within which the individuals were free to enjoy 
the freaks of fortune (compare, e.g., the formation of the North American State 
and the South American republics). This right to the undisturbed enjoyment, 
within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has up till now been called 
personal freedom. These conditions of existence are, of course, only the 
productive forces and forms of intercourse at any particular time. 



Forms of Intercourse
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of 
all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time 
consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing 
men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of 
the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, 
the material production of the conditions of this unity; 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, insofar as reality is only a product of the 
preceding intercourse of individuals themselves. Thus the communists in practice 
treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as 
inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the 
destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without believing 
that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them. The 
difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is 
not a conceptual difference but an historical fact. This distinction has a 
different significance at different times -- e.g. the estate as something 
accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less 
too. It is not a distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which 
each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in 
existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material 
collisions in life. What appears accidental to the later age as opposed to the 
earlier -- and this applies also to the elements handed down by an earlier age 
-- is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite stage of 
development of the productive forces. The relation of the productive forces to 
the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the 
occupation or activity of the individuals. (The fundamental form of this 
activity is, of course, material, on which depend all other forms-mental, 
political, religious, etc. The various shaping of material life is, of course, 
in every case dependent on the needs which are already developed, and the 
production, as well as the satisfaction, of these needs is an historical 
process, which is not found in the case of a sheep or a dog (Stirner's 
refractory principal argument adversus hominem), although sheep and dogs in 
their present form certainly, but malgr eux, are products of an historical 
process.) The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each 
other, so long as the above-mentioned contradiction is absent, are conditions 
appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions 
under which these definite individuals, living under definite relationships, can 
alone produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the 
conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. The 
definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the 
contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned nature, 
their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when 
the contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists for the later individuals. 
Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter, and the consciousness that 
it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well. 
These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, 
later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent 
series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the 
place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is 
put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the 
advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals-a form which in its turn 
becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another. Since these conditions 
correspond at every stage to the simultaneous development of the productive 
forces, their history is at the same time the history of the evolving productive 
forces taken over by each new generation, and is, therefore, the history of the 
development of the forces of the individuals themselves. 
Since this evolution takes place naturally, i.e. is not subordinated to a 
general plan of freely combined individuals, it proceeds from various 
localities, tribes, nations, branches of labour, etc. each of which to start 
with develops independently of the others and only gradually enters into 
relation with the others. Furthermore, it takes place only very slowly; the 
various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only 
subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter for 
centuries afterwards. It follows from this that within a nation itself the 
individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have quite different 
developments, and that an earlier interest, the peculiar form of intercourse of 
which has already been ousted by that belonging to a later interest, remains for 
a long time afterwards in possession of a traditional power in the illusory 
community (State, law), which has won an existence independent of the 
individuals; a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a 
revolution. This explains why, with reference to individual points which allow 
of a more general summing-up, consciousness can sometimes appear further 
advanced than the contemporary empirical relationships, so that in the struggles 
of a later epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities. 
On the other hand, in countries which, like North America, begin in an already 
advanced historical epoch, the development proceeds very rapidly. Such countries 
have no other natural premises than the individuals, who settled there and were 
led to do so because the forms of intercourse of the old countries did not 
correspond to their wants. Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of 
the old countries, and, therefore, with the correspondingly most advanced form 
of intercourse, before this form of intercourse has been able to establish 
itself in the old countries. This is the case with all colonies, insofar as they 
are not mere military or trading stations. Carthage, the Greek colonies, and 
Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, provide examples of this. A 
similar relationship issues from conquest, when a form of intercourse which has 
evolved on another soil is brought over complete to the conquered country: 
whereas in its home it was still encumbered with interests and relationships 
left over from earlier periods, here it can and must be established completely 
and without hindrance, if only to assure the conquerors' lasting power. (England 
and Naples after the Norman conquest. when they received the most perfect form 
of feudal organisation.) 
This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse, 
which, as we saw, has occurred several times in past history, without, however, 
endangering the basis, necessarily on each occasion burst out in a revolution, 
taking on at the same time various subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing 
collisions, collisions of various classes, contradiction of consciousness, 
battle of ideas, etc., political conflict, etc. From a narrow point of view one 
may isolate one of these subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these 
revolutions; and this is all the more easy as the individuals who started the 
revolutions had illusions about their own activity according to their degree of 
culture and the stage of historical development. 
Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the 
contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. 
Incidentally, to lead to collisions in a country, this contradiction need not 
necessarily have reached its extreme limit in this particular country. The 
competition with industrially more advanced countries, brought about by the 
expansion of international intercourse, is sufficient to produce a similar 
contradiction in countries with a backward industry (e.g. the latent proletariat 
in Germany brought into view by view by the competition of English industry). 



Conquest
This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of 
conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and robbery, etc. have been 
accepted as the driving force of history. Here we must limit ourselves to the 
chief points and take, therefore, only the most striking example -- the 
destruction of an old civilisation by a barbarous people and the resulting 
formation of an entirely new organisation of society. (Rome and the barbarians; 
feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks.) 
With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as indicated above, a 
regular form of intercourse, which is the more eagerly exploited as the increase 
in population together with the traditional and, for it, the only possible, 
crude mode of production gives rise to the need for new means of production. In 
Italy, on the other hand, the concentration of landed property (caused not only 
by buying-up and indebtedness but also by inheritance, since loose living being 
rife and marriage rare, the old families gradually died out and their 
possessions fell into the hands of a few) and its conversion into grazing land 
(caused not only by the usual economic forces still operative today but by the 
importation of plundered and tribute-corn and the resultant lack of demand for 
Italian corn) brought about the almost total disappearance of the free 
population. The very slaves died out again and again, and had constantly to be 
replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the whole productive system. 
The plebeians, midway between freemen and slaves, never succeeded in becoming 
more than a proletarian rabble. Rome indeed never became more than a city; its 
connection with the provinces was almost exclusively political and could, 
therefore, easily be broken again by political events. 
Nothing is more common than the notion that in history up till now it has only 
been a question of taking. The barbarians take the Roman Empire, and this fact 
of taking is made to explain the transition from the old world to the feudal 
system. In this taking by barbarians, however, the question is, whether the 
nation which is conquered has evolved industrial productive forces, as is the 
case with modern peoples, or whether their productive forces are based for the 
most part merely on their association and on the community. Taking is further 
determined by the object taken. A banker's fortune, consisting of paper, cannot 
be taken at all, without the taker's submitting to the conditions of production 
and intercourse of the country taken. Similarly the total industrial capital of 
a modern industrial country. And finally, everywhere there is very soon an end 
to taking, and when there is nothing more to take, you have to set about 
producing. From this necessity of producing, which very soon asserts itself, it 
follows that the form of community adopted by the settling conquerors must 
correspond to the stage of development of the productive forces they find in 
existence; or, if this is not the case from the start, it must change according 
to the productive forces. By this, too, is explained the fact, which people 
profess to have noticed everywhere in the period following the migration of the 
peoples, namely, that the servant was master, and that the conquerors very soon 
took over language, culture and manners from the conquered. The feudal system 
was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the 
conquerors were concerned, in the martial organisation of the army during the 
actual conquest, and this only evolved after the conquest into the feudal system 
proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered 
countries. To what an extent this form was determined by the productive forces 
is shown by the abortive attempts to realise other forms derived from 
reminiscences of ancient Rome (Charlemagne, etc.). 



Contradictions of Big Industry: Revolution
Our investigation hitherto started from the instruments of production, and it 
has already shown that private property was a necessity for certain industrial 
stages. In industrie extractive private property still coincides with labour; in 
small industry and all agriculture up till now property is the necessary 
consequence of the existing instruments of production; in big industry the 
contradiction between the instrument of production and private property appears 
from the first time and is the product of big industry; moreover, big industry 
must be highly developed to produce this contradiction. And thus only with big 
industry does the abolition of private property become possible. 
In big industry and competition the whole mass of conditions of existence, 
limitations, biases of individuals, are fused together into the two simplest 
forms: private property and labour. With money every form of intercourse, and 
intercourse itself, is considered fortuitous for the individuals. Thus money 
implies that all previous intercourse was only intercourse of individuals under 
particular conditions, not of individuals as individuals. These conditions are 
reduced to two: accumulated labour or private property, and actual labour. If 
both or one of these ceases, then intercourse comes to a standstill. The modern 
economists themselves, e.g. Sismondi, Cherbuliez, etc., oppose "association of 
individuals" to "association of capital". On the other hand, the individuals 
themselves are entirely subordinated to the division of labour and hence are 
brought into the most complete dependence on one another. Private property, 
insofar as within labour itself it is opposed to labour, evolves out of the 
necessity of accumulation, and has still, to begin with, rather the form of the 
communality; but in its further development it approaches more and more the 
modern form of private property. The division of labour implies from the outset 
the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the 
splitting-up of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the 
division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself. 
The more the division of labour develops and accumulation grows, the sharper are 
the forms that this process of differentiation assumes. Labour itself can only 
exist on the premise of this fragmentation. 
Thus two facts are here revealed. First the productive forces appear as a world 
for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, 
alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the individuals, whose 
forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the 
other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association 
of these individuals. Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive 
forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the 
individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and 
hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property 
themselves. Never, in any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a 
form so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals, because 
their intercourse itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand, 
standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the 
individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus 
of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, 
however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into relation with one 
another as individuals. 
The only connection which still links them with the productive forces and with 
their own existence -- labour -- has lost all semblance of self-activity and 
only sustains their life by stunting it. While in the earlier periods 
self-activity and the production of material life were separated, in that they 
devolved on different persons, and while, on account of the narrowness of the 
individuals themselves, the production of material life was considered as a 
subordinate mode of self-activity, they now diverge to such an extent that 
altogether material life appears as the end, and what produces this material 
life, labour (which is now the only possible but, as we see, negative form of 
self-activity), as the means. 
Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate 
the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, 
but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first 
determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have 
been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal 
intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a 
universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse. 
The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of 
the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of 
production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for 
this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals 
themselves. 
This appropriation is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the 
proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all 
self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted 
self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive 
forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All 
earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose 
self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited 
intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely 
achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their 
property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and 
their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of 
individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the 
appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be 
made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal 
intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by 
all. 
This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be 
effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the 
proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, 
in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and 
intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there 
develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without 
which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the 
proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous 
position in society. 
Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which 
corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the 
casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into 
self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited 
intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation 
of the total productive forces through united individuals, private property 
comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition always 
appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and the particular 
private gain of each man have themselves become accidental. 
The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of labour, have been 
conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name "Man". They have 
conceived the whole process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process 
of "Man", so that at every historical stage "Man" was substituted for the 
individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole process was thus 
conceived as a process of the self-estrangement of "Man", and this was 
essentially due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was 
always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on 
to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first 
is an abstract image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the 
whole of history into an evolutionary process of consciousness. 
Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further 
conclusions: (1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage 
when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, 
under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer 
productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this 
a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without 
enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most 
decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all 
members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity 
of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, 
arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of 
this class. (2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be 
applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose 
social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic 
expression in each case in the form of the State; and, therefore, every 
revolutionary struggle is directed against a class, which till then has been in 
power.[4] (3) In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always 
remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of 
this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the 
communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does 
away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes 
themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as 
a class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the 
expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present 
society; and (4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist 
consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on 
a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a 
practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not 
only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also 
because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding 
itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. 



FOOTNOTES
[1] [Marginal note by Marx:] To begin with it absorbs the branches of labour 
directly belonging to the State and then all [more or less] ideological 
estates. 
[2] The Statement which frequently occurs with Saint Max that each is all that 
he is through the State is fundamentally the same as the statement that 
bourgeois is only a specimen of the bourgeois species; a statement which 
presupposes that the class of bourgeois existed before the individuals 
constituting it. [Marginal note by Marx to this sentence:] With the philosophers 
pre-existence of the class. 
[3] N.B. -- It must not he forgotten that the serf's very need of existing and 
the im-possibility of a large-scale economy, which involved the distribution of 
the allotments among the serfs, very soon reduced the services of the serfs to 
their lord to an average of payments in kind and statute-labour. This made it 
possible for the serf to accumulate movable property and hence facilitated his 
escape out of the possession of his lord and gave him the prospect of making his 
way as an urban citizen; it also created gradations among the serfs, so that the 
runaway serfs were already half burghers. It is likewise obvious that the serfs 
who were masters of a craft had the best chance of acquiring movable property. 
[4] [Marginal note by Marx:] The people are interested in maintaining the 
present state of production. 



