The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach (Great Books in Philosophy)

A horror. Not published for almost 100 years because Marx revealed the truth and horror of Marxism. The chapter, The Economy of the Old Testament is why this work was suppressed because it reveals Materialist Communism is a theological Jewish Old Testament creation. Marx was a racist monster who would have been assassinated had this been published in 1845 sparing the millions who died in the two world wars and Depression of 1929. People are waking up.

Book arrived quickly and as advertised. Building my historical library and knowledge.

Solid print with lots of removed content. Non-standard headings though, which made the reading group a pain.

The German Ideology indexes Marx's 'break' from a philosophical humanism to a period of revolutionary materialism. This extraordinary book attacks the 'materialisms' of Feuerbach, Stirner, and Bauer in turn, and attempts to formulate a new conception of man as framed in terms of his alienation from the sum of productive forces. Marx's theses on Feuerbach are obviously the most read and oft quoted, and they are true landmarks in the history of political consciousness. Marx is clearly carving out a new space of empirical inquiry, a space which would give rise to a scientific analysis of the material conditions of reality-and to propose a radical political program of revolutionary change. His discussion of Stirner is laborious and painstaking; it is clearly less read and considered than it should be. It's too bad that this text is in such a poor edition-the footnotes do not lead anywhere and no one will take responsibility for the bad translation. Hopefully someone will put together a better edition in the future.

The start of historical materialism

School. Learn. Stuff.

Structural Marxists and others inclined to see a sharp epistemological break between the young Marx, still a social philosopher, and the mature Marx, a scientist with a genuinely new method, historical materialism, often point to The German Ideology (1847) as marking the rupture between the two views. Specific individuals are of little or no interest. The emphasis is on entire social systems and the ways that individuals fit into them.As one reads The German Ideology it is clear that class is a characteristic of an entire society, rather than a characteristic of individuals. A society may be organized into classes, but these are structured arrangements of positions to be filled by people. The positions, organized into objectively conflicting sets, are the classes. It makes little difference who occupies the positions, because human beings' historically specific nature and their life course and prospects will be determined by their class location, the role they are assigned in the process of material production.From this vantage point, it is also useful to think of class as a societal-level relational phenomenon: capital and labor are engaged in a struggle across a broad range of fronts. Capital dominates and exploits because capital owns and controls the means of material production. Labor has nothing to offer but labor, or as Marx referred to it from The German Ideology on, labor power. The latter usage emphasizes the one-dimensional character of interchangeable laboring people in a capitalist society: they are the work they can do; that work can be assigned a dollar value; and that is their only valuable characteristic. In this way, labor power is clearly transformed into a commodity, exchangeable for other commodities, whatever they may be.In effect, labor power is reduced to the status of a thing to be bought, sold, and used in ways that maximize productivity, minimize costs, and further exaggerate the difference between the value produced by labor power and the compensation labor receives. In this context, laboring people survive economically only at the sufferance of capital.Again, this is all very impersonal. In the preface to the first edition of the first volume of capital Marx notes that, as a social theorist, he dealt with individual human beings only insofar as they were "personifications of economic categories, embodiments of class relations and class interests."From The German Ideology on a heavy emphasis on determinism is quite consistent with Marx's view. Abstract dehumanization, moreover, applies to capitalists as well as to laborers. In The German Ideology Marx characterizes the 16th century forerunners of contemporary capitalists as functioning in precarious circumstances fraught with uncertainty as to the nature and stability of the emergent markets in which they participated. The high level of risk that pervaded their social and economic environment imbued them with a "haggardly, mean, and niggardly spirit." They were not born haggardly, mean, and niggardly, nor did they choose to develop these characteristics. Instead the contextually determined nature of their lives determined that they would acquire these unappealing traits.As with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology remained unpublished during Marx's lifetime. Now that both are available, evidence of Marx's theoretical development is evident as we move from one to the other. However, reading one after the other reveals nothing contradictory in Marx's developing thought about capitalism and the historically specific nature of human beings. Instead, the two documents seem complementary rather than inconsistent. In the Manuscripts, Marx devoted a good deal of attention to discrediting the academic economics of his day. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels did much the same thing for academic philosophy and history. I see ongoing theoretical development, but no epistemological break.Read the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. There is a good deal of overlap, but I benefited from both.

this book contains all the contradictions that Marx faced during his early days in the International. Moreover, the best thing about this book is that it offers a wider view on how to treat communism as a possible political and economic set up.