Friedrich Engels - The German ideology : including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to The critique of political economy

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Introduction copyright Tom Whyman 2022

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ISBN: 9781913462956

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by Tom Whyman

There are two stories that you might have heard about what The German Ideology is.

The first is that The German Ideology is the name of a text written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in around 1846, when they were living in Brussels: the pairs final reckoning with the philosophical tradition, before they overcame philosophy decisively first with The Communist Manifesto (1848), then with Marxs crowning opus Capital, Vol. 1 (1867). But, as with so many of Marx and Engelss writings, The German Ideology was never published in the lifetime of either. After an agreement they had to publish the manuscript collapsed, the authors simply shrugged their shoulders, decided the thing was mostly valuable as a work of self-clarification anyway, and as Marx would later relate in his Preface to A Critique of Political Economy abandoned it perfectly willingly to the gnawing criticism of the mice.

Luckily, however, the manuscript wasnt literally eaten by mice (although some pages of the real, physical thing do apparently feature a few marks which look suspiciously like mice-bites) as, in the wake of the Soviet revolution, it was rediscovered by researchers at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, led by David Riazanov, who managed to prepare an edition for publication though Riazanov himself fell victim to Stalins purges in 1931. Upon its emergence, it became clear that The German Ideology had been a genuinely ground-breaking work, in which Marx and Engels had outlined their materialist theory of history not only for the first time, but also more lucidly than they would ever manage again. This was no mere work of private self-clarification: it was a genuinely invaluable edition to the Marxist indeed, the philosophical canon. This text typically remains the focus of undergraduate philosophy courses on Marx to this day (much more so than Capital, for instance which can, understandably, feel a bit too much like economics).

The second story goes a bit differently. According to this story, Marx and Engels did indeed set out to write a grand work called The German Ideology, which would have represented their final confrontation not only with the idealist philosophy of their day, but also the philosophical pretensions of various other socialist authors. But it was never finished, was not even exclusively written by Marx and Engels bits of the work were contributed by the pairs Brussels socialist friends Joseph Weydemeyer and Moses Hess and was later carved up by the authors for all sorts of different purposes. Parts of the manuscript such as the chapter on one of the leaders of the Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer were published in obscure socialist journals while Marx and Engels were still alive, while the alleged chapter on the post-Hegelian materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, which had been held up as the most important part of the work, was in fact no such thing at all it had rather been constructed, by Riazanov and his colleagues, out of various fragmentary notes. A compelling case for this second story is presented by Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank in two books from 2014 A Political History of Marx and Engelss German Ideology Manuscripts and Marx and Engelss German Ideology Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the Feuerbach Chapter. It has also informed the production of a new German-language edition of the text, which was published as part of the MEGA2 (that is, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe 2) project in 2017.

Of course, you might quite understandably be thinking: in the light of that second story, why have I even bothered to tell you the first one at all? Here we have two tales. One of them the second is, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, the truth, while the first is really just a nice little fantasy, which we now know, almost certainly, to be wrong. Its like a fairy tale. The German Ideology, as we tend to think we know it at any rate, is somehow unreal. Carver and Blank compare it to The Will to Power, Nietzsches alleged magnum opus, which was in fact collated from some leftover notes by his proto-Nazi sister.

But this idea that The German Ideology, and in particular the chapter on Feuerbach, does not really exist, and thus has an at best dubious scholarly validity is one that I find troubling in the extreme. For The German Ideology is a text of rare power: the rare sort of philosophical tract that, when you read it, can make you feel ecstatic with the rush of thinking, the bright brilliant naming and unlocking of the reality which is otherwise stuck inchoate all around you. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels diagnose the philosophy of Hegel and his successors as being ultimately in some sense the product of their mistaken identification of ruling-class ideology with objective reality a mistake which will inevitably turn even the most ostensibly radical thought into reactionary tilting at windmills. The remedy to this is a thought which proceeds not moralistically treating human beings as we, nowadays, think they should be but materially: taking them as they actually, practically are. This way of seeing brings communism into view, as the name of the real movement that abolishes the present state of things: the movement, that is, through which the urban working classes the proletariat will soon find themselves powerful enough not only to overcome the rule of their bourgeois masters, but also both in and through this overcoming to abolish the premises on which their own identity, as proletarians, rests. The end result if this even counts, formally, as any sort of end at all will be the liberation of everyone, into a really and fully human way of being.

Invalidating The German Ideology as having merely been constructed by Riazanov, then, might possibly get us closer to the truth as considered from the perspective of Marx-Engels scholarship. But it risks taking us further from the truth as such the truth of who we are, and the world that we live in; the truth, in short, as it might matter to people who are not Marx scholars (indeed one would hope that the truth in this sense matters a great deal to Marx scholars as well!). In light of this, a better comparison than to the