Reading

Now read Chapter 1, Volume 1 of The German Ideology. This is the section on Feuerbach, pages 29 to 105 in the Prometheus edition. Then answer the following questions.

Questions to Consider

1. What’s wrong with the way that men (and women) have interpreted the world?

2. Why is it ridiculous for the young and innocent Hegelians to look for world historical individuals to save Germany?

3. Who engineered the German revolution in thought according to Marx?

4. Why does Marx consider all these Hegelian debates silly?How is German philosophy like capitalism run amuck?

5. Where do all these foolish debates originate?

6. What do the young Hegelians relate all the actions of mankind to?

7. What should the first premise of all human history be?

8. What is the technical phrase that Marx uses to describe the production of man’s material life?

9. What is the whole of political, social and civilized life based upon, and how is this dependence reflected in human history?

10. What does Marx believe to be the most prominent development in this evolutionary process?

11. What different kinds of property have existed in history and what mode of production/division of labour do they reflect?

12. What important development in medieval or feudal society greatly stimulated and focused class antagonisms and economic conflict in western civilization?

13. What does urbanization in late feudal society conclusively demonstrate?

14. How does Marx’s analysis of the relationship between the economy and consciousness change our conception of history?

15. How should we understand ideas and ideals according to this new way of viewing history?

16. Who is Feuerbach’s man?

17. Why is the idealistic paradigm useless as a tool for understanding human society?

18. Who is Saint Bruno?

19. Consciousness is what separates humans from animals. What does Marx argue is necessary for self-consciousness to emerge in the species Homo sapiens?

20. What does the division of labour conclusively demonstrate?

21. Why is it wrong to talk about the battle between liberalism and elitism in human history, according to Marx?

22. Why are these economic differences and conflicts less evident in societies where the division of labour is undeveloped?

23. Why is the working class emerging as a world class individual that will transform the world?

24. Why is a communist revolution inevitable and what revolution in civil society will it engender?

25. How does communist liberation differ from the liberation of spirit described by the Young Hegelians (who now include Max Steiner, another one of Marx’s targets)?

26. What is the ultimate failing of the liberal humanist conception of the citizen, humanity, and the “essence of man”?

27. How does the ruling class perpetuate its economic power past the time when it has become obsolete?

28. Why does Marx believe that ideology will be less effective in the present (his present) rather than in the past?

29. What particular features of industrial society were opening peoples eyes to the trickery and deceit of the ruling class?

30. Why were the urban workers of the past unable to overturn society and create a communist society?

31. What other division in society prevented the revolutionary tendencies of workers to develop?

32. What did the introduction of manufactures (factories) achieve?

33. What was the impact of large scale industry?

34. Why is community important to Marx? How does this show Marx’s transitional role between Hegelianism and modern sociology?

35. Why is the bourgeois definition of freedom/liberty/rights/identity so hypocritical?

36. How is communism different than all the economic and political systems that preceded it?

    Marx ends the section on Feuerbach by discussing the revolutionary role of the working class and its critical role in abolishing private property. Try to read these last few pages on your own and to make your own questions and answers to summarize these pages. These pages on the inevitability of revolution are the true heart and end point of the communist system. In these comments, Marx moves from philosophy to praxis. Once one understood the imperative of revolution, there was no longer any need to generate philosophical questions. In a sense Marx had arrived at the end of philosophy.

Sample Answers

1. They rely on concepts, which they use to develop dogmatic systems, that have no basis in reality.

2. They just show how ridiculously backward the German state is in terms of its politics. These would be revolutionaries plot change without the economic foundation needed for change.

3. Young Helegians like Strauss and Feuerbach, all trying to protect and increase their turf in German philosophy.

4. Just as capitalism gluts the market with cheap and useless products, so does German philosophy.

5. In the philosophy of Hegel. Marks argues that German philosophy has not been able to escape or rise above the Hegelian system. Recent criticisms of Hegel have focused on the religious nature of his thought without escaping its idealized concepts that have no basis in the real life of human society. The analytical focus still remains abstractions of man, history, and the evolution of ideas.

6. Human consciousness rather than praxis is the key for understanding human development. Marx thinks this is completely wrong headed.

7. According to Marx, it should be the actual “existence of living beings.” It should be man’s interactions and place in nature. In particular, it should focus on their “means of subsistence” and the way they produce their “material life.”

8. “The mode of production” that only makes progress as human population increases and as people work together in increasingly sophisticated ways to produce the goods needed to sustain these larger populations.

9. It depends on this mode of production and the existing division of labour, and the mode of production/division of labour reflects the evolutionary stage of the economy that gives rise to this superstructure.

10. The development of the towns and the increasing separation of the urban and rural environment. An equally important development later on would be the separation of industrial capitalism from mercantile commerce.

11. a) Tribal property exists in a hunter-gatherer society with only a very elementary division of labour; b) ancient states that reflect a clan based society, the development of rudimentary cities, the communal holding of land, and a rudimentary division of labour into distinct classes (citizens and slaves); c) the development of private property in the form of land and more distinctive class of property owners (lords) and labourers (serfs and peasants).

12. The development of the towns and the increasing complexity of the division of labour and the mode of production in the new urban environment. These new arrangements were the capitalist for the development of new social and political relations.

13. It demonstrates that new ideas and novel conceptions of human society don’t simply pop into people’s heads. Empirical investigation demonstrates that these ideas come of out changes in the economic mode of production and the division of labour/class antagonisms that these changes create. Marx says that people “produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.” Thinking is the “direct efflux of their material behaviour.”

14. History isn’t a collection of “dead facts”. It is an evolutionary economic progress characterized by class conflict. The way to practice historical investigation is to focus on the economic facts and to understand the process to which they contribute.

15. Ideas and ideals are not merely superstructures, they are ideological tools of manipulation. Philosophy, theology and consciousness generally are the ideas that economic classes use to promote their own interests.

16. He’s a nineteenth-century German and a liberal humanitarian living in a commercially and industrially backward state. He is thereby incapable of presenting a clear view of sensuous reality or human essense. He hardly refers to industry, which is more highly developed in England than Germany. His understanding of human relations focuses on brotherly love and humanity, ignoring the suffering and economic conflict in society. He’s a misguided idealist rather than a practical reformer.

17. It ignores all the things that are most important, such as: eating, drinking, housing, clothing and the various other things involved in the production of human life. These real historical facts are the “fundamental condition of most history” but are ignored by the German investigators who simply have no clue about where the economy is heading when they talk about brotherly love.

18. He’s one of the Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer. Edgar and Bruno Bauer were in the same league as Feuerbach. Marx makes fun of him by calling him “Saint Bruno.”

19. The first thing that is necessary is social life and the second thing that is necessary is the interaction with nature, primarily to produce the goods we need for survival. Marx is arguing that our consciousness does not separate us from our species or nature – there is no such thing an independent individual. Who and what we are are intimately connected to our species life in nature.

20. It demonstrates that there is no such thing as an isolated individual. It shows that humans have to cooperate with one another to produce the goods necessary for human life and society. It also shows, however, that there is considerable conflict and inequality in the way we produce and distribute these goods. The division of labour in an advancing industrial society demonstrates that people have always been divided into economic classes. Those with power and property, those who control the mode of production in a given society, oppress others. This oppression can be seen historically when economic classes enter into economic conflict with one another.

21. This sloppy language obscures the fact that the struggle is not between different visions or ideas of society. The battle between liberalism and elitism (conservativism) is really the battle between different economic classes. These classes are the bourgeoisie (capitalists, merchants, industrialists) and the aristocracy (lords, landowners). Real history is economic history and it is the story of the conflict between economic classes. Ideas are not the battle ground or slaughter bench of history, the struggle to establish new and dominant modes of production is the real issue.

22. It’s too easy to think that the general interest in society is the same as your own interests in an underdeveloped society. The real oppressive relationships between people are obscured. People feel that they have real choices and freedom when they have control over the timing and the tasks that they do. Complex forms of cooperation are not required. Once those complex forms develop, it becomes evident that some people (classes) have much more power than others. It is necessary for the dominant classes to develop increasingly subtle forms of ideological control to maintain their position.

23. The propertyless proletariate are: 1) the overwhelming majority of people in society; 2) increasingly gathered together in factories and have an opportunity to understand their common interest; 3) increasingly linked to the working class in other countries (world citizens); 4) completely cut of from capital, power, and control; 5) operate in a highly advanced technological society that, for the first time in history, could produce and distribute all the necessities of life; 6) can see the contradictions in a capitalist society that is excellent at producing goods, but highly inefficient when it comes to distributing those goods.

24. Communist revolution is not an ideal goal but a practical necessity. The working class is being oppressed by the very private property that its surplus labour value creates. Once that is fully realized, the many must overthrow the few. The civil society that results will be the first society in which there is no longer any underclass to oppress. It will provide universal citizenship that is grounded in the sharing of property and the use of the mode of production to make the “production of the earth” fairly available to all. The present productive forces of society are in many ways destructive forces in that they are based on oppression and force individuals to become alienated from their labour and their life as a member of their species. Marx, in this youthful writing, is impressed by the liberation, happiness and fulfillment that the inevitable revolution will bring and the way that it will change production that benefits some into production for all.

25. The fundamental difference is that the liberation the Young Hegelians speak of is local, parochial and national. It involves people becoming the servants of the nation state and playing the role of patriotic citizens. What this kind of nationalist thinking fails to appreciate is that the nation state is itself a limited historical form. It is the ideological tool to maintain and obscure class oppression. Patriotism is the new religion. Communism doesn’t need the nation state and, in effect, is universal and international in its perspective. Communism doesn’t rely on patriotic ideals; its fulfillment is based upon production and distribution of goods that people need in real life. Marx scorns German nationalists who he calls “the beer swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany.”

26. It is not revolutionary enough. It cannot change the world. It merely explains and reinforces the world as it currently exists. The point of a genuine philosophy is to genuinely increase freedom for all, not to create new forms of false consciousness. False consciousness happens when people don’t really understand their economic position in society or their role as either exploiters or exploited. German nationalism would make people feel like liberated citizens when it only sealed their materialist domination.

27. It develops ideological as well as material control. By perpetuating intellectual or ideological ideas that support its power, it fools people, provides them with a false consciousness, and delays the inevitable conflict. These subtle forms of intellectual dominance only consisted of ideas and concepts in Marx’s time. In today’s environment, where the machinery of manipulation and propaganda has increased dramatically, the possibilities of domination are considerably greater.

28. In modern industrial society, the oppression of the many by the few was much more obvious than in the past. The ideas propagated by the ruling class were becoming ever more separate from the reality of life. (Remember that Marx was writing during a time when the ruling classes could not project their image of society through television, radio, movies, glossy magazines and advertising.)

29. Factory labour was reducing the relations between men to a crude cash nexus. The boom slump cycle of capitalism routinely ruined people’s lives. Even members of the upper classes kept falling into the proletariate as a result of bankruptcy and fierce competitions. Working class families were being divided up by capitalism; women and children were forced to work in the factories. The paternalism of the aristocrat or the apprentice master was destroyed by the factory. The labour in the new factories was unfulfilling and even alienating. When Marx wrote, it was also the case that people were being paid at very close to subsistence levels, so they could not even purchase many of the products that they produced.

30. They were unable to organize. They entered into the urban equivalent of rural feudalism – the guild system. They apprenticed in small workplaces and were under the thumbs of their masters. As members of guilds, they were also dominated by the rules and codes of their crafts. Relationships between masters and workers were parochial, patriarchal and even psuedo familial. Contrast this situation with that of the new industrial worker who joined many more people in a large factory and who had no craft skills to be proud of and no professional organization to shape his identity.

31. There was a marked difference between rural and urban workers who often felt that they had different interests. But with the development of an industrial society and the systematic division of labour, all of the country was being urbanized and people were beginning to view themselves as disenfranchised workers rather than uniquely separated groups. More frequent intercourse between town and country was also lifting the scales from workers’ eyes.

32. It totally negated the former paternalistic relations of the guilds and the feudal system. At first, this process wrought a horrible psychological effect on workers. But gradually workers were forming unions and uniting in their own distinctive interest. According to Marx, they were rapidly losing their rural idiocy and becoming very clear about their significance and revolutionary role as an economic class.

33. Fierce competition and the need to achieve economies of scale led to larger factories characterized by an increasingly sophisticated division of labour. The process began to replace the paternalistic family firm with modern industrial organizations. The new factories were the antithesis of the old crafts. Their basis was clearly competition and the society that they supported was highly antagonistic, disconnected and reduced to relationships between economic classes. Whereas in the past, the crafts and village life separated workers from one another and prevented the development of a common consciousness. But the large factories brought former rural labourers and craftsmen together and allowed them, for the first time, to see clearly their common experience and interest in social change.

34. Only by being a member of a community can an individual learn who they are and develop their potential. Marx has no time for those who believe in unique and isolated individual. Hegel believed that individuals were only significant and could only achieve a degree of freedom in society (specifically the state). The discipline of sociology that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, viewed individuals as members of groups, who played roles and developed their identity by belonging to and acting with the other members of a group.

35. The society that the bourgeoisie created was one in which the lives of workers were economically dominated by a ruthless market. In a critical sense, people were less free than they had ever been in that their entire life process was decided for them. With the division of labour, workers did not even have control over how they accomplished a task or the work rythms that they could choose from.

36. Not only did it negate all previous modes of, and relations to, production, but it was the first historical system that treated the vast majority of people as equals and provided them with the technological expertise to produce and equally distribute the necessities of life.