Karl Marx: The German Ideology

One of what Althusser terms the “Works of the Break,” Marx’s The Germany Ideology attacks the ideological illusions of philosophy while embracing an undeveloped form of empiricist historicism. The liquidation of philosophy clears a space for the installation of science, but, Althusser argues, the results of this break didn’t appear until much later. So, for the most part, Marx confronts the ideology of Man with the empirical reality of individuals, but primarily by placing “real,” “actual,” “concrete,” “material,” “empirical” in front of all his terms. The book opens with an attack on the Young Hegelians, who, staking different positions within the field opened up by the decomposition of Hegel’s philosophy, remain within the confines of Hegel’s idealism, and therefore confuse concepts and consciousness with reality. For the Young Hegelians, “The speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of philosophy. . . . Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilized to provide bodies for these ghosts.” Detached from the real movement of history, these petty bourgeois Germans can only imagine a revolution of consciousness. Echoing his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way.” Marx jokes that this is to imagine that freeing oneself from the concept of gravity would also free oneself from gravity’s effects. Or in another witty jibe (and it should be noted, this is a very funny and sarcastic book), Marx writes, “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.” Rather than the illusory abstractions of philosophy, Marx proposes to start from empirical reality. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstractions can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” He adds, “Empirical observation must on each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actually are.” For Marx, consciousness is produced alongside the production of men’s material, sensuous environment and their different social forms. “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process.” Historical, material conditions therefore determine the production of ideology, but ideology distorts, or rather inverts, the relation of ideas to reality. In a famous passage, Marx writes, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” It is a matter, then, “not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process, demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process.” Marx offers a short history of this “life-process,” of the development of the mode of production and forms of cooperation. A particularly important threshold is crossed when the evolution of the division of labor creates a separation of “material and mental labour” (what Balibar nicely terms “intellectual difference.”). From this point on, the production of ideology can continue in isolation from, and even in opposition to, empirical reality, and the petty bourgeois philosophers of Germany, sitting in their rooms, can convince themselves that their ideas dominate history. Marx writes, “Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards 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, morality, etc.” Unfortunately, this division of material and mental labor allows one class—the ruling class—to impose its ideas on the others. “The idea of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.” But, anticipating Gramsci, Marx seems to qualify this claim, arguing that the ruling class succeeds in imposing its ideas only by presenting its narrow, specific interest as the interest of all. Marx writes, “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Each revolution in history has widened the base of those pulled into believing that the interest of the ruling class is their own, but only a revolution of the proletariat, the universal class, would install a true universality. Such a communist revolution of course must be carried out in reality, not just in consciousness. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” In fact, during its course, the revolution, when carried out at a sufficient scale, would serve to sweep away the remnants of the ruling ideology and all estrangement of ideas from actual life. “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”