Materialism Term Analysis

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products 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 this rule of concepts. Let us teach men, says one, how to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says another, how to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, how to get them out of their heads; and existing reality will collapse.

From these examples, therefore, it is superabundantly evident how Jacques le bonhomme, who strives to “get rid as quickly as possible” of empirical history, stands facts on their heads, causes material history to be produced by ideal history, “and in so in everything”. At the outset we learn only the alleged attitude of the ancients to their world; as dogmatists they are put in opposition to the ancient world, their own world, instead of appearing as its creators; it is a question only of the relation of consciousness to the object, to truth; it is a question, therefore, only of the philosophical relation of the ancients to their world—ancient history is replaced by the history of ancient philosophy, and this only in the form in which Saint Max imagines it according to Hegel and Feuerbach.

But in addition true socialism has in fact enabled a host of Young-German literary men, quacks and other literati to exploit the social movement. Even the social movement was at first a merely literary one because of the lack of real, passionate, practical struggles in Germany. True socialism is a perfect example of a social literary movement that has come into being without any real party interests and now, after the formation of the communist party, it intends to persist in spite of it. It is obvious that since the appearance of a real communist party in Germany, the public of the true socialists will be more and more limited to the petty bourgeoisie and the sterile and broken-down literati who represent it.