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Karl Marx
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
The German
Ideology
Karl Marx
ISBN 1 84327 104 4
THE GERMAN
IDEOLOGY
Part One
With selections from Parts Two and Three together with
Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy”
Edited
and with an Introduction by
C J Arthur
ElecBook London
1998
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CONTENTS
EDITOR’S PREFACE 6
EDITOR’ S INTRODUCTION 10
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY
Preface 55
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach 167
Karl Marx. Introduction to a Critique of
Political Economy 171
Name and Authority Index 208
EDITOR’S PREFACE
T
he Complete Edition of Marx and Engels’ early work, The German
Ideology, comprises more than 700 pages. The bulk of it consists
of detailed line by line polemics against the writings of some of
their contemporaries. This is likely to be of interest only to scholars.
However, in the first part of the work, ostensibly concerned with
Feuerbach, the authors work quite differently. What they do is to set out
at length their own views, in so doing providing one of their earliest
accounts of materialism, revolution, and communism—as trenchant and
exciting as anything they ever wrote, including the Manifesto. Hence the
usefulness of the present abridgement, based on this material.
The bulk of The German Ideology was written between November
1845 and the summer of 1846. By that time the greater part of the first
volume had been written—namely the chapters devoted to the criticism
of the views of Bauer and Stirner—and the second volume, on “True”
Socialism, for the most part also. The authors continued to work on the
first section of Volume I (the criticism of Ludwig Feuerbach’s views)
during the second half of 1846, but did not complete it.
In May 1846 the major part of the manuscript of Volume I was sent
from Brussels to Joseph Weydemeyer in Westphalia. Weydemeyer was
to make arrangements for the publication of the book with the financial
support that had been promised by two local businessmen, the “true”
socialists Julius Meyer and Rudolph Rempel. But after the bulk of the
manuscript of Volume 2 had arrived in Westphalia, Meyer and Rempel
informed Marx that they were unwilling to finance the publication of The
of the chapter.1
1
The German Ideology, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1965, p.670.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
T
he German Ideology of 1846 is the first recognisably “Marxist”
work—although, as the authors themselves state, their earlier
publications, essays in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and
The Holy Family, “pointed the way”. Also we now know of the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Marx, in which the German
idealists’ concept of “Alienation” had been decisively transformed and
rooted in the labour process. However, the latter work could still be
considered an extension of Feuerbach’s humanism.1 It was not until
1845-1846 that Marx and Engels took their distance from Feuerbach—
although he is not criticised in detail in The German Ideology. Here is
how Engels recalls that period in the Preface to his essay on Feuerbach
of 1888:
1
This view is persuasively argued in D. McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl
Marx, London, 1969.
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The excitement and exultation of the authors armed with their new
world outlook can still be felt almost palpably in the pages of The
German Ideology, just as it can in the Manifesto two years later.
In order to grasp the position that Marx and Engels had reached in
1846 it may be useful to retrace their route, in the course of which such
technical terms as “civil society” and “alienation” can be explained.
Hegel
1
Marx-Engels Selected Works, 1962, Vol. II, p. 359.
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amounts to the demand for its dissolution. That is, the deficiencies arise,
not from the imperfect form of the State, but from the fact that even the
most perfect State could not realise Hegel’s hopes because of its
separation, indeed estrangement, from “civil society”. It is necessary,
therefore, for us to say something about civil society (“Bürgerliche-
Gesellschaft”), and its relation to the State.
The term “Bürgerliche Gesellschaft” should not be translated as
“bourgeois society” even though it was a term much used by bourgeois
theoreticians. A two-fold contrast is involved in talking about “civil
society”. On the one hand it refers to civilised society i.e. a condition
with settled laws and institutions. But, at the same time, a distinction is
intended between the personal and economic relations of men and the
political institutions which govern, and sanction, these relations. This
latter distinction was not obvious in feudal times because all the
elements of “civil” life,—property, the family, and types of occupation—
determined directly the place of the individual in the political sphere. At
the summit stood the monarch, and, because of the nature of this feudal
organisation, affairs of state appeared not as “public affairs” but as the
personal prerogative of the monarch. The term “civil society” therefore
only emerged when the time was ripe to insist on setting free private
property and the process of accumulation from these multifarious
political restrictions, and at the same time transforming arbitrary
personal rule into the general function of protecting the right of property.
As Marx sums up in The German Ideology:
1
See below p. 81 Compare also the passage in a Preface of 1859 where Marx
speaks of “the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after
the fashion of the English and French of the eighteenth century under the name
‘civil society’”, and says that “the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in
political economy.” (Marx-Engels Selected Works (in 2 vols) Vol. One p.362).
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1
Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” by Karl Marx; Ed. J. O’Malley,
Cambridge 1970.
2
“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means
prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a
comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It
must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel
within the mystical shell.” Capital: afterword to second German edition. (Marx-
Engels Sel. Wks. Vol. One p. 456). Compare also the beginning of Engel’s
Socialism Utopian and Scientific.
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1
For the influence of Moses Hess on Marx in this essay see McLellan op. cit.
2
Cf. Thesis VI on Feuerbach.
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1
T.B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx, Early Writings, p. 10.
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1
Early Writings, pp. 11-12.
2
Ibid., p. 21.
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1 2 3
Early Writings, p. 20. Ibid. p. 24. Ibid., p. 25.
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1 2 3 4
Ibid., pp. 25-26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 30.
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