A Paraphrase of Marx's German Ideology

159, p. 1 – Marx first critically reviewed Hegelian philosophy of law in 1844 in Paris, his results were published in the newspaper Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher. His review of Hegelian philosophy led him to realize that laws aren't to be understood as coming into being by their own accord or as the development of the human mind in general (Hegel's Geist or absolute spirit), but laws have their basis in real life, the material conditions of life. Hegel, following the 18^th century French and English economists, called this “civil society.” The structure of civil society, for Marx, is to be found by examining political economy, or economics. Marx was forced into exile by the French statesman Guizot, and had to continue his studies in Brussels, where he ended up arriving at the general thrust of his critique, which became the guiding idea of his work. The main thrust is that when it comes to social production, humans  enter into predetermined relations that aren't of their choosing. The relations reflect the development of the material economic forces at a given stage of production. The totality of these relations of production is the economic structure, the basis, of society. On this economic basis arises the “super structure,” that is, things like laws, morality, ideologies, etc.

160 – It's the economic system which shapes social and political attitudes, philosophies, theories, and ideologies, etc. of man. It's not man's attitudes or consciousness that decides what kind of existence he'll have. It's not man's ideas about the world that determines how the world is, but the world and man's social existence in it, that determines the way man thinks about the world. At certain stages, economic productive forces outgrow the legal frame works which legitimized those very productive forces and the relations which correspond to them. Thus laws which at one time allowed productive forces to develop and benefit humanity, now become chains holding back the development of the productive forces of society. It's at this time that economic tensions become unbearable and revolutions happen, thus leading to the reorganization of the economic foundations of life, and consequently the ideas, etc. of a society. There is a distinction between the material transformation of the economic context of production (the root, basis, or actual framework of society), which Marx thinks can be understood scientifically, and the superstructural (the legal, political, ideological, philosophical, religious, aesthetics, etc.) aspects of society, which is where economic tensions and contradictions find expression and are fought out.

161 – To look at history very broadly, there are the Asiatic, Ancient, Feudal, and Bourgeois modes of production. Each epoch was progressive at one time, but eventually turning into its opposite (reactionary) necessitated revolution. History has been a progressive development, where the contradictions of each society have become more and more simplified with the development of each higher epoch. Now, today, with the bourgeois epoch there exist the actual material foundations to get rid of the economic contradictions that marred all past epochs. For Marx, all history up until now has been brutish; it has merely been man's prehistory.

p. 2 – Marx and Engels arrived at very similar conclusions, and decided to work together in order to clarify their own views. They ended up going over and critiquing German philosophy (in particular, Young Hegelian philosophy). They ended up writing two books, but basically the books were never published and were thrown in a chest in some dingy basement (until they were recovered in the 1930s posthumously and published as the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, and the German Ideology). Marx and Engels weren't too concerned that their book wasn't published because they were just trying to clear things up for themselves.

169 – Ideas (consciousness) and concepts are at the beginning stages directly interconnected with material economic activity between people. At this stage, ideas seem to directly flow from material behavior (for instance, in hunter gather societies, most myths and stories reflect the organization of that society, thus we get stories about wolf-gods, and whatnot). It's real men – historically situated in definite economic modes of production – who make their ideas. At a certain point, ideologies flip this relation, making it seem as if ideas made man (God, for instance).

p. 2 – Marx's method is opposed to German philosophy (specifically, German idealism), which begins a priori (descending from heaven to earth), believing thinking determines reality, as opposed to reality determining thinking. Marx's method is materialist, that is, it starts from real life, which ideas develop out of. Thus Marx's starting point is a posterori, but he is different than the empiricists, because his thinking is dialectical, it grasps the developmental and fluid nature of reality, as opposed to empiricism, which makes dead, static abstractions from “facts about reality.”

170 – Thus, there is no longer a chasm between forms of thinking (ideology, philosophy, consciousness, etc.) and empirical reality. Both are dialectically connected, the ideological arising out of the material. Thus material reality is primary.

p. 2 – Marx's method does not try to start out from pure, abstract thought emptied of all particular content, but from the real premises of material reality: of men as they actually exist, not in abstract isolation or definition, but from the real conditions men are born into. Marx's method is a synthesis of empiricism and idealism, an aufhebung, if you will.

p. 3 – German idealism is a lot of hot air about ideas and concepts that have no actual existence outside of the minds of a handful of philosophers. We should be looking at real history, and our abstractions should be drawn from this material. When we do this though, philosophy no longer becomes an independent branch cut off from reality. Abstract systems of thought in themselves have no value. It's only when thought is capable of actually grasping reality, and changing it, that it becomes useful.

171 – German philosophers like Kant and Hegel wanted pure, a priori philosophy, and thus don't postulate starting premises about human existence. Marx thinks this is absurd. Before man can make history, or think up elaborate philosophies, he must meet his material needs: eating, drinking, gaining access to clothing, shelter, and sexual reproduction, etc. Thus, the first premise for Marx is a historical one. Man must first meet his material needs before there can be history as such, and thus the production of material life is a fundamental condition of history. This is the most basic and fundamental fact about human history; it is extremely significant, and from it flows a number of implications. The German idealists have failed to grasp the significance of this presupposition of human existence. The French and English philosophers and political economists grasped it, but in a one-sided, and limited manner.

172 – The second fundamental point is that after needs are met on a stable basis, new needs arise. The German's ended up making up a bunch of rubbish about prehistory, in order to speculate about human nature and knock down straw man arguments.

p. 2 – The third circumstance, at the very bottom of history, is that mankind needs to reproduce itself sexually. Thus humans necessarily enter into definite social relations (family, tribes, etc.), if they did not then the human race would not exist. (This pulls the rug out from solipsistic theories of individual, self-sufficient men). Marx is going to base his analysis off actual empirical data about the way people have existed, not “the concept of the family.”

173 – The above outlined three circumstances necessary for human history are not to be taken alone in isolation, but together as three aspects of a whole. All are necessary for humans to even exist throughout time.

p. 2 – The production of life (sexually and through labor) has a double relationship: it is both natural and social. Man cannot exist in isolation; he is a social creature by necessity under all conditions; fables about isolated individuals on deserted islands have absolutely no basis in reality; they're merely idiotic fancies used to justify the narrow, unenlightened self-interest of competition found in definite forms of society. From this it follows that all modes of production are various forms of social co-operation. When studying history, we must always examine the economic and material ground upon which the higher forms of consciousness, ideologies, philosophies, religions, arts, etc. rest. It is not merely enough to only examine the economic ground, the superstructure too must be analyzed, lest analysis will make the same mistakes of the one-sided empiricists.