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, ...
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