The German Ideology

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.

Incidentally, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all this trash we get only the one inference that these three moments, the productive forces, the state of society and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one and other, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact, that intellectual and material activity, that enjoyment and labour, production and consumption, devolve differently on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in negating in its turn the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that “spectres”, “bonds”, “the higher being”, “concept”, “scruple”, are merely idealist, speculative, mental expressions, the concepts apparently of the isolated individual, the mere images of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which move the mode of production of life, and the form of intercourse coupled with it.

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses 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.

The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself. The more the division of labour develops and accumulation grows, the further fragmentation develops. Labour itself an only exist on the premise of this fragmentation.

The first book, “A Man’s Life”, is also called the “Book of Genesis”, because it contains in embryo the entire domestic economy of the unique, because it gives us a prototype of the whole subsequent development up to the moment when the time comes for the end of the world. The entire unique history revolves round three stages: child, youth and man, who return “in various transformations” and in ever widening circles until, finally, the entire history of the world of things and the world of the spirit is reduced to “child, youth and man”.

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.

Hence, according to Jacques le bonhomme, people engage in politics because our newspapers are full of them! If a church father were to glance at the stock exchange reports of our newspapers, he could not judge differently from Saint Max and would have to say: these newspapers are full of stock exchange reports because they are in the grip of the delusion that man was created in order to engage in financial speculation. Thus, it is not the newspapers that possess whimsies, but whimsies that possess “Stirner.”

Stirner cannot eat without at the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire, and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea—which at the same time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions in fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho’s “revolt” against the fixation of desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he merely gives an ideologically high-sounding expression to the most trivial sentiments of the petty bourgeois.

One cannot demand of us that we should deal further with the rest of Saint Sancho’s fantasies about the state and property, e.g., that the state “tames” and “rewards” individuals by means of property, that out of special malice it has invented high stamp duties in order to ruin the citizens if they are not loyal, etc., etc., and in general with the petty-bourgeois German idea of the omnipotence of the state, an idea which was already current among the old German lawyers and is here presented in the form of grandiloquent assertions.

The identity of state and private property is apparently given a new turn. Political recognition of private property in law is declared to be the basis of private property.

“Private property lives by grace of right. It is guaranteed only in right—for possession is not yet property—it becomes mine only with the consent of right; it is not a fact, but a fiction, a thought. That is property by right, rightful property, guaranteed property; it is mine not thanks to me, but thanks to right.”

We already know what meaning “going beyond the framework of what exists” has. It is the old fancy that the state collapses of itself as soon as all its members leave it and that money loses its validity if all the workers refuse to accept it. Even in a hypothetical form, this proposition reveals all the fantasy and impotence of pious desire. It is the old illusion that changing existing relations depends only on the good will of people, and that existing relations are ideas. The alteration of consciousness divorced from actual relations—a pursuit followed by philosophers as a profession, i.e., as a business—is itself a product of existing relations and inseparable from them. This imaginary rising above the world is the ideological expression of the impotence of philosophers in the face of the world. Practical life every day gives the lie to their ideological bragging.

The power of money, the fact that the universal means of exchange becomes independent in relation both to society and to individuals, reveals most clearly that the relations of production and intercourse as a whole assume an independent existence.

Sancho has again chosen his example with his usual lack of skill. If all his nonsense about born poets, musicians, and philosophers is accepted, then this example only proves, on the one hand, that a born poet, etc., remains what he is from birth—namely a poet, etc.; and, on the other hand, that the born poet, etc., in so far as he becomes, develops, may, “owing to unfavorable circumstances”, not become what he could become. His example, therefore, on the one hand, proves nothing at all and, on the other hand, proves the opposite of what it was intended to prove; and taking both aspects together it proves that either from birth or owing to circumstances, Sancho belongs to “the most numerous class of mankind”. However, he shares the consolation of being a unique “blockhead” with this class and with his own blockheadedness.

Sancho’s old opinion that one has only to get a few ideas out of one’s head in order to abolish from the world the conditions which have given rise to these ideas, is reproduced here in the form that one has only to get out of one’s head the idea of man in order to put an end to the actually existing conditions which are today called inhuman—whether this predicate “inhuman” expresses the opinion of the individual in contradiction with his conditions or the opinion of the normal, ruling society about the abnormal, subjected class. In just the same way, a way taken from the ocean and put in the Kupfergraben, if it possessed consciousness, would declare this situation created by “unfavourable circumstances” to be unwhale-like, although Sancho could prove that it is whale-like, if only because it is its, the whale’s, own situation—that is precisely how people argue in certain circumstances.

What, at best, does Sancho’s sharpening of contradiction and abolition of the special amount to? To this, that the mutual relations of individuals should be their behaviour to one another, while their mutual differences should be their self-distinctions (as one empirical self distinguishes itself from another). Both of these are either, as with Sancho, an ideological paraphrase of what exists, for the relations of individuals under all circumstances can only be their mutual behaviour, while their differences can only be their self-distinctions. Or they are the pious wish that they should behave in such a way and differ from one another in such a way, that their behaviour does not acquire independent existence as a social relationship independent of them, and that their differences from one another should not assume the material character (independent of the person) which they have assumed and daily continue to assume.

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.

“Man’s struggle with nature is based upon the polar opposition of my particular life to, and its interaction with, the world of nature in general. When this struggle appears as conscious activity, it is termed labour.”

Is not, on the contrary, the idea of “polar opposition” based upon the observation of a struggle between men and nature? First of all, an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstraction. A very cheap method to produce the semblance of being profound and speculative in the German manner.

For example:

Fact: The cat eats the mouse.

Reflection: Cat—nature, mouse—nature, consumption of mouse by cat=consumption of nature by nature=self-consumption of nature.

Philosophic presentation of the fact: Devouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the self-consumption of nature.