Marx - The German Ideology

"Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc…. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations…. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts."

Here is the pivotal point that lies at the heart of social scientific thought. The key is that the majority of conventional and received knowledge about the nature and structure of society is empirically untested – at best – or, more simply, empirically wrong - APR

"The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones… They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity."

Marx’s argument is that the premises of social thought ought to be contemporary or historical empirical information about real people with real material relationships to the world and each other… you can see how this continues the earlier theme. - APR

"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation."

Here, Marx begins to lay the foundation for his wider theoretical agenda. The key is that humans began to be human when we began to produce subsistence goods for ourselves… Rather than have our subsistence (our existence) provided (capriciously) by nature, human beings became human as they started to provide for their existence socially. - APR

"This mode of production… is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production."

The crux of the matter is, then, that our modes of life, our modes of production, are expressions rooted in the social and material conditions of and for our (re)production of ourselves… and – looking below – the social and material conditions of and for our (re)production of ourselves is part and parcel of the production of ideas, concepts and consciousness. If you change the mode of life you change the production of ideas. Marx is arguing that our ideas are products of the material conditions of social life… not the predicate of those conditions. - APR

"The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life…. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – 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."

"The ideas 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, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance."

This is easier to think of relative to other societies than our own, but in a class-based society, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of the society. As above, if ideas are the product – more than the predicate – of real, material relationships, then those who tend to control those real, material relationships probably control the production, selection and development of ideas. This is true in a number of ways. On the one hand, certain members of ruling elites consciously generate ideas legitimating the dominance of those elites. On the other hand, in a society like ours where the majority of folks are moderately well-educated, our unconscious embrace of dominant ideas means that we tend to produce new ideas that reproduce society as we know it and fit within the range of social legitimacy. - APR

"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 represent 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 represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones."

Here, things get very interesting. Marx argues that the succession of classes necessitates that the emergent class must represent its ideas as associated with a genuine common interest relative to that of the minority elites who dominate existing, or the earlier state of, society. - APR

"This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organized…"

On the one hand, dominant powers treat the ideas that legitimate their rule as if they were transcendent, universal, natural, or godly. as a means of veiling the material, particular, social and worldly roots of their power. This process, Marx argues, will come to an end with the end of class society… - APR