Andrew's Wiki
My Marx Project

Shawna Ross
Spring 08 / Janet Lyon

The German Ideology, or,
How to Succeed by Denouncing Your Friends

Based on the two quotations located at the top of your handout, I think we can safely assume that if Fredric Jameson and Stephen Dedalus were to have coffee together, it would be weird �� and not just because one of them never actually existed. What would the clear-sighted, eyes-on-the-historical-prize Jameson have in common with Joyce’s dreamy, lovably self-absorbed poet? In short, although couplet �Marxism and modernism� doesn’t sound especially strange to us, perhaps it should. Marx’s own limited commentary on art qua art consists largely of crusty paeans devoted to the organic, natural authority of traditional form�enough to make Joyce turn over in his grave�and his relentless focus on social context is exactly what the modernists, through their representations of consciousness, were running from, and is exactly the target Virginia Woolf aims at in �Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.�

This tension did not go unnoticed, and in fact, one of the very first Marxist literary thinkers, Lukacs, comdemns modernism for precisely this reason. Lukacs (or, to quote Jeff Nealon, �that Stalinist stooge�) denounces modernism for its self-absorbed inward turn because it deliberately refuses to foreground sociopolitical formations. He blames modernists for abandoning realist principles and thus for being bad Marxists. But one of the most vocally Marxist of all the modernists, Brecht, had something to say in return: namely, that �modernism is our realism.� Brecht insisted that merely describing one’s milieu could make no changes in it, but modernism’s formal experimentation could indeed cause social change. The Frankfurt School original Adorno agreed that it was precisely modernism’s apparent aloofness that gave it the critical power Marxists swoon over; only modernism’s refuge from the workaday world could penetrate the thick walls of false consciousness.

Comfortably seated generations after these bitter fights, we can look at the Marxist-modernist complex through a simpler lens. Marshall Berman’s 1982 treatise on modernity, the aptly titled All That is Solid Melts into Air, provides a comprehensive introduction to the Marxism inside modernism. Because the new capitalist world Marx so accurately describes is the world the modernists found themselves in, both Marx and modernists share the same protagonist: the modern human grappling his way through the alienating forces of late capital. Also, Marx and the modernists share a highly ambivalent, manic-depressive attitude towards capitalism�excitement at the new opportunities afforded by the new technologies, products, and metropolises, and euphoria at capitalism’s power of releasing humans from the old ties like religion, family, and the state, yet tempered by the cynical, weary eye they cast towards the destruction that these changes entailed. Crisis, struggle, fragmentation, and uncertainty are all recurring themes in both Marx and modernism. As Berman explains,
“Marx lays out the polarities that will shape and animate the culture of Modernism in the century to come: the theme of insatiable desires and drives, permanent revolution, infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life, and its radical antithesis, the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, a shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horror.” (102)

Now that we have completed this brief tour into the Marxist-modernist complex, we can turn our attention to The German Ideology itself. Written in Brussels from 1845-7, but not published until 1932 (in Marx’s words, it was �left to the gnawing critique of mice�), and not available in English until 1938, The German Ideology is important not because John Q. Modernist fell in love with this specific text, but instead for two reasons: first, in this book Marx develops the ideas he was known for during the modernist period, and second, because the Manifesto, which was certainly available (having been translated into English in 1850), cribbed much of its material from the GI manuscript. The publication of this manuscript in 1932 did have significant effects�it gave readers a �new Marx,� according to Gareth Stedman Jones, �long-buried evidence of another Marx capable of voicing a more nuanced, humane, or even tragic sense of Man,� and second, it spurred the development of Frankfurt School�but what is imortant for us is that the Marx we all know makes his first appearance in GI.

In this text, Marx for the first time distinguishes himself from his contemporaries, brushing off the influence of former professors, friends, and philosophical heroes. When he and Engels write this book, Marx is no longer a law student out late at nights drinking with the Young Hegelians talking about how critique could make the Prussian State act more rationally. An exile from his birth-country, Marx has been chased out of Berlin and out of the academy for his radical ideas (he rode out of town on a donkey with his professor Bruno Bauer, who as you know shows up in GI). His radical newspaper has been shut down by the state. He no longer trusts Hegel, who in his later years turned toady for the government (in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel praised the bureaucratic state as the �organic society…. turning|? towards the unity of the individual with universal happiness…which is the reflection of social harmony�). Furthermore, Marx’s partnership with Friedrich Engels has begun, when, in the wake of the busted newspaper, he moved to Paris for the more tolerant abmosphere. Engels, having given Marx the manuscript of his Condition of the Working Class in England, turned Marx’s attention in two new directions: first to economic theory in general, and second to the lot of the industrial laboring class.

Due to these experiences, Marx, according to Althusser, experienced one of Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological breaks, turning him away �from philosophy to Marxist science.� The German Ideology is thus a transitional text, coming after his first dive into the world of social history in the form of the 1844 Manuscripts, but coming before mature works (Capital, Grudrisse). To reiterate: before the German Ideology, Marx had paid no attention to economics. Here, Marx becomes an economic scholar, thus turning away from the Young Hegelian absorption in religious philosophy and radical democracy. He abandons other Young Hegelian habits: significantly, he abandons his faith in Bauer’s idea of critique. Instead of trusting mere critique from within, Marx calls for revolution, a completely different social structure, therefore departing from the Hegelian politics of trust in civil society (representational bodies and bureaucracy). Also, Marx now abandons the Young Hegelian habit of ignoring sensuous, practical life, even when they give lip service to sensuous life (ie, �contemplative materialism�), thus turning Marx further towards historical facts and away from philosophical categories. Finally, Marx revisits his work as a law student, when he became familiar with the German Historical School of Law, a comparative approach to ancient politics. Developed after the translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall into German, this group discovered that most historical social formations were dominated by forms of communal property, not private property.

This interest in arcane legal history led him to formulate the single most important thesis in The German Ideology: the theory of historical materialism. Historical materialism (“material conception of history,” according to Marx, who never used the term �dialectical materialism�) is a theory of the progress of history driven by changes in the mode of production. The mode of production consists of two parts: the forces of production (labor plus machines plus natural forces such as air wind and steam) and the relations of production (the social relations put into place to organize the forces of production, such as classes, poverty, and property). All history, tangible and intangible, including politics, religion, and philosophy, proceed from a society’s mode of production. Consciousness is developed as a result of material relations, rather than ideas themselves driving history and creating societies (ie, no “spirit of the age”). This is what is referred to as Marx �turning Hegel on his head:� Marx says that Hegel stands on his head when he assumes that consciousness drives material experience, so Marx “turns Hegel on his head” by putting history right-side-up again. Existence precedes essence, and, as the Manifesto opens, “all history is the history of class struggle.” Although this doctrine sounds ridiculously specific and overgeneralized, for the rest of his life Marx insisted that historical materialism was only a guideline, not a master-key, to history, and that rigorous research was needed before one could put forth the tiniest thesis (hence the outburst on p 301 against Stirner’s �cheap virtuosity of thought which polishes off any subject-matter whatever before knowing anything about it�). And in response to others’ exaggerations of the power of his theory, Marx frequently said that he himself was not a Marxist!

With this materialist conception of history, Marx, we find, comes into his own intellectually with The German Ideology, having mapped out the boundaries of his own thought by railing against Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner, Hegel, and the �various socialists� mentioned in the complete title of the work. Considered an elaboration of the Theses on Feuerbach, GI is a series of intellectual potshots against his fellow Young Hegelians and against various European socialists, with the “aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class.� “aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class.� The work has a complicated structure: part one consists of three smaller sections: the first on Feuerbach, which is really just an elaboration of historical materialism. The final two sections�which are often left out of the various editions of GI�are snarky send-ups of Bauer and Stirner. These two send-ups are collectively named the Leipzig Council, a reference to the Inquisition (the official church �trial� procedure for prosecuting heretics). Marx thus parodies them to reveal their innate �holiness:� both men live in imagination, floating in heaven because Bauer’s faith in critique and Stirner’s belief in the power of conscious will are like waving philosophical swords in order to slay real human beings. The Cervantes intertext that you probably noticed in your reading comes into play at this logical juncture: by comparing Bauer and Stirner to Don Quixote and Sancho, Marx plays Cervantes. Just as Cervantes exposes the absurdity of the romance genre through farce, Marx, by his references to Don Quixote, exposes the absurd romanticism of the two Young Hegelians, who, like Don Quixote, live in an fictional world through their dependence upon the outdated philosophical mode of idealism.

Part two of GI is an exhaustive history of the fate of French and English socialism inside German borders. In trying to marry French politics and British economics with German philosophy, German socialists disobey the first law of historical materialism: they forget that each society home-grows its ideas, that eighteenth century French politics refer only to eighteen century France and nineteenth century British economics only to ninetheenth century Britain, so these ideas are therefore not applicable to Germany. In short, GI accuses all of its victims of not understanding the material, definite origins of ideas. By now, this historical-materialist mantra (existence before essence) sounds rote, boring, even repetitive, just another day in the life of Marx, great world thinker. But the admission of the primacy of things and perceptions had to be wrested from Marx basically on pain of death. Stirner’s critique of the Feuerbachian critique of religion took the wind from Marx’s sails. Before The Ego and I, Marx optimistically believed in the power of critique (that revealing the contradictions of society is the basis of social change). The extent of this belief we can probably measure by the intensity of the bitterness and sarcasm of Marx’s prose in GI. EXPLAIN THE CHART.

Marx had believed that Feuerbach’s critique of religion would leave humanity in a position to �overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being,� but when Stirner showed Feuerbach’s solution to be just another form of religion, Marx realized that all of his own ideas were in a sense a form of religion. Stirner’s accusation that communism was just another form of holiness (because it relied upon an idea of the Essence of Man) meant that Marx had to find an alternative way to achieve communism: instead of philosophic critique, it had to become an automatic, natural outgrowth of history itself.

Because of Stirner, Marx had to erase in his writings any whiff of transcendence or non-material thiking, and in his meditations he realized that this also involved giving up his faith in the power of philosophy to change real circumstances. Because real circumstances could only change real circumstances, Marx could not just happily perform a critique and �fix� capitalism. One had to wait for historical conditions to change, and just be ready to join the revolution when the time was right.

In his reevaluation of the place of mediation in history, Marx had to realize capitalism was not only a necessary step that some societies had to move through, but also that capitalism did in many ways represent real human progress, not just destruction and exploitation.This tempered understanding of capitalism meant that one could no longer just blame capitalism and be done with it, but instead that one must recognize its inescapable, undeniable, terrible, and wonderful position in world history.

Now we are in a position to understand Marx’s critique of capitalism, and especially in a characterization familiar to the modernists. As Jameson explains in Postmodernism, what we need to take from Marx is a particular attitude towards capitalism: “We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.�

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