The German Ideology

Marx and Engels

Written 1845 but not published until 1932.

Notes:
 * Hegelians have taken it for granted that there is a universal principle and religion is part of defining it.
 * The first premise to Human History is living human individuals. History is modified throughout time by the action of men.
 * "By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." Materiality is the creation of life, in a way.
 * What our lives are are dictated by what and how we produce. "The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their productioon." - in this way different historical structures produce different human beings.
 * We see nation's being productive by the degree with which their labor is divided. The first division is generally agriculture from industrial and commercial, or town and country
 * "The various stages of development in the division of labour are ;just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor."
 * The first form of ownership is tribal ownership- corresponding to the undeveloped stage of production (hunting and fishing to agriculture.)
 * The second form of ownership is ancient communal and state ownership which proceeds union of several tribes into a city by agreement or conquest.
 * Third type of ownership is feudal or estate property.  Like tribal and communal owndership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, bu tthe enserfed small peasantry.
 * "Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, thisk phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. " How we record life is not just a factor in how we see it, but also partially dictates that life as a whole. "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness... It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-pro cess is described, history ceases to bea. collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists, or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the diealists.
 * "When reality is depicted philosophy as an independent branch of kjnowledge loses its medium of existence. "
 * The three historical acts:
 * 1) production of means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.
 * 2) the second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act.
 * 3) the third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family.
 * "The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship."
 * Consciousness:
 * Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as longa s men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion)."
 * "From this moment onwards (division of labour) consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that.it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of 'pure' theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc."
 * "The division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another... " this labour that appears to be in one's own interest also ends up enslaving them. "For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activitiy..." society dictates it is impossible to do one thing today and a different tomorrow.
 * "It shows that history does not end by being resolved into 'self-consciousness' as ;'spirit of the spirit,' but that in it at each stage there is founda. material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from it predecessor... modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes ifor it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances."