Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 5, Marx and Engels 1845–1847

Chris George
37 min readOct 27, 2020

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Also known as “The Gang Writes The German Ideology.”

A page of the manuscript of The German Ideology. From the disputed chapter “Feuerbach”; discovered in the 1960s and containing doodles yet again.

I. Introduction

MECW V is the first of the collections so far to be made up entirely of a single work — The German Ideology, originally unpublished but later edited (and also translated and published) from manuscripts written by Marx and Engels. Or maybe that’s how it happened. Well, more on that in a moment. First, technically there are a few other entries in this Volume: Engels’ The True Socialists (“a direct continuation of the second volume of The German Ideology); two versions of the Theses On Feuerbach(very brief and thematically similar); more notes from Engels on Feuerbach “evidently intended” to be part of chapter 1 of The German Ideology; and “A Reply to Bruno Bauer’s Anti-Critique” (“roughly identical with a passage in Chapter II, Volume I of The German Ideology”.) Those are all short and connected to the main entry, so basically it’s one 660 page work once you add in the voluminous endnotes and index.

More than any of the previous entries, the question of authorship haunts this volume, and therefore over my introduction as well. Quoting Wikipedia will probably get you in trouble in a college class but I ain’t in school, so let’s start there: “The German Ideology is a set of manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher, but the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The first part of the book is an exposition of Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’, though recent research for the new Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) indicates that much of the ‘system’ in it was created afterwards by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the 1930s.”

The MECW Preface (intentionally or not — hard for me to say based on its 1976 release date) seemingly undersells the extent to which significant revisions/massive editing had to be made to create a final published work, especially of the key Feuerbach section:

The works contained in this volume have been translated from the original German text. The German Ideology, which forms the greater part of this volume, was never published in the authors’ lifetimes, except for one chapter, nor arranged by them for publication, and has come down to us incomplete. The text of The German Ideology has been re-checked and re-arranged in accordance with the researches of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with a view to presenting it in a form corresponding as closely as possible to the layout and content of the manuscript. In particular, Chapter 1, “Feuerbach”, which was not finished by the authors and has reached us only in the form of several separate manuscripts, is presented in accordance with the new arrangement and subdivision of the text prepared by Georgi Bagaturia and edited by Vladimir Brushlinsky (first published in English in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, Vol. 1, and also separately under the title Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks…1973).

Why does this authorship question even matter though? Can’t we just read it and get what we can from it even if sections were written in the Soviet Union almost 90 years later? Well yes, literally one can do that. But it is important to figure out what Marx and Engels actually wrote in the 1845–1847 period to help understand how to contextualize the work in that very specific time period as opposed to arguments that are beyond such specific time frames.

The brilliant MEGA-master Michael Heinrich explains:

First, we have to contextualise Marx’s theoretical achievements and writings. Capital is usually read as a contemporary book. Of course, it has relevance for the present age. But it is not a contemporary book. Many parts of Capital have a political context, where Marx directed his fire at his contemporaries. For example, in his analysis of value-form and money, in the first three chapters in Capital volume one, Marx presents a strictly anti-Proudhonist theory. Marx did this already in 1859, in ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Second, we have to see Marx as a person in a broader sense. When we read his texts, he is a theoretician for us. We usually focus on the logic of his theoretical arguments. But Marx also worked as a journalist for decades. He published hundreds of newspaper articles. And he was also a political activist, a militant in different degrees depending on the time. At certain times, he was very active, at others rather silent when there were limited possibilities for his activism. But the activism was still present for him. We have to bring together these three features: Marx the theorist, Marx the journalist, and Marx the militant. This was my main aim, namely, to contribute to a new view of Marx that brings these three parts together.”

Another relevance of authorship/editorship is the importance of analyzing the actual development of Marx and Engels’ ideology, as opposed to a retroactive reworking of their The German Ideology manuscript into an overly neat “missing link” between immature and mature phases. This does not mean you have to believe in a strict middle-era Althusser “epistemological break” — I ran across this great summary of Karl Korsch’s views on a maturing Marx:

Sorry for the “boomer screen shot”; this is behind an academic journal paywall.

The ability to learn more about the actual writing and editing process of the works of Marx and Engels is incredibly (to me at least) a very current and developing phenomenon. The continuing work of the MEGA project means that just in the last ten years, there have been many important essays by Heinrich and others on such critical topics as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (highly recommended!) that can now quote Marx and Engels’ unedited German manuscripts outside of the MECW’s “finalized product” approach. One such work is “Whose Hand is the Last Hand? The New MEGA Edition of ‘The German Ideology’” by Terrell Carver (thank you to Jen in Boston for getting me around the academic paywall.)

The article begins provocatively:

“There never was a book. ‘The German Ideology’ never was an authorial title. The manuscript ‘chapter-beginning’ for ‘I. Feuerbach’ is barely two pages long. The content of the posthumously published chapter ‘I. Feuerbach,’ as we know it, was not really about Feuerbach.

The one-page manuscript Preface, usually published at the beginning of the supposed chapter, is stirring stuff, but we do not know what exactly it was meant to precede. Other authors were involved in the projects of which the Marx-Engels papers of 1845–46 are a remainder. ‘The German Ideology’ as a titling-phrase occurs nowhere in any of these manuscript pages, within which we find no definitive chapter or other scheme to which all, or indeed any majority, of the pages belong authoritatively.”

The journal article deals with the MEGA especially, ultimately criticizing it for continuing to “smooth” the truly messy and sprawling manuscripts that have been combined in the past into The German Ideology yet again into a unified document:

“Like the Probeband of 1972, Jahrbuch 2003 was a prepublication taster for the present mega-weighty two-volume set of almost two thousand pages. This 2017 double-volume (one for the text, one for the apparatus criticus) reprises that scholarly work of 2003 on the supposed chapter ‘I. Feuerbach.’ MEGA I/5 of 2017 thus reproduces fairly closely the 2003 presentation of text-items. Together with what the editors, so one assumes, consider to be all further materials comprising ‘The German Ideology’ as a book, or at least something very like a book, which is what they say Marx and Engels intended to put their names to eventually.

The 2017 volume MEGA I/5 thus includes the very lengthy, mostly ‘fair copy’ draft materials for two ad hominem critiques, titled in various contemporary plans and correspondence ‘Saint Bruno [Bauer]’ and ‘Saint Max [Stirner].’ There are also further draft materials relating to a political clique of ‘True Socialists,’ together with critical comments on Karl Grün, another socialist writer, as well as similar items on similar themes. In the 1840s, the Marx-Engels joint political project was to generate communist activism among their confrères at home and abroad, negotiating at length with publishers, and also among themselves, in order to make this happen via edited, collective publications. So as we peruse the new MEGA I/5, we find items attributed to Joseph Weydemeyer, Moses Hess and Roland Daniels, who thus get some authorial credit as individuals and as collaborators.”

The history of the famous chapter of greatest controversy is explained in a helpful, straightforward manner:

“Since the first publication of the supposed chapter ‘I. Feuerbach’ in 1924, readers and scholars have had to confront the somewhat disorganized, and evidently discontinuous, character of the text.

However, the puzzle under scrutiny in this review is not the mysteries that Marx and Engels (and others who were apparently or putatively involved in the original publication projects) may have left for posterity in manuscripts now in the archival boxes. Rather the relevant puzzle derives from scholarly activity first undertaken in the early 1920s and continuing to 2017, which took place in defiance of previous assessments of these materials by those principals who had already examined them. Those manuscript materials had merited only occasional passing references by our major authors, and then in the 1880s with Engels in particular, very unflattering treatment. Rather similarly Franz Mehring, Marx’s first major-volume biographer, found those manuscripts of no serious interest, indeed embarrassing. Moreover Gustav Mayer, Engels’s first biographer, attributed the thoughts-in-draft to Engels, as his handwriting is predominant. Yet, Mayer chose for publication a few items well outside the now famous and much studied chapter ‘I. Feuerbach,’ as later constructed by D.B. Ryazanov in 1923–24.”

Out of the blue Ryazanov, director of the newly established Marx-Engels-Institute in Moscow, took the very surprising view that among those otherwise abjected manuscript materials there was a draft chapter ‘I. Feuerbach’ revealing — no less — the truths of ‘the materialist interpretation of history.’ That phrase was actually Engels’s coinage of 1859, and much deployed after Marx’s death, indeed something of a synecdoche for Marxism. Ryazanov’s self-styled discovery was good news for the fledgling institute, and bad news for Mayer, who rubbished it. Indeed, Ryazanov’s canonical project was bad news for anyone trying to read the published book ‘The German Ideology’ during the ensuing nine decades. Or rather if you want something to puzzle over, the materialist interpretation of history is a good choice, and the location of the resolution was for Ryazanov (if not for anyone else) hidden in plain sight. Confronting him was a pile of nearly unreadable, unsorted, context-less pages, sometimes numbered in two different ways, discontinuous at various points and clearly, as Marx had said, abandoned. What better place to make a discovery!

There is much more from Carver critiquing the approach of the MEGA, but this is what is key for what I wanted to understand:

“However, historical research from the 1980s, which the MEGA I/5 editors acknowledge and reproduce, shows conclusively that the draft materials for the chapter ‘I. Feuerbach’ were in fact three discontinuous sets of extractions from political critiques of Bauer and Stirner successively. Regarding the content of those extremely messy pages, Marx and Engels’s references to Feuerbach are a stick with which to beat their two opponents, Bauer and Stirner. Thus, Marx and Engels in their drafts argue that Feuerbach is better than Bauer and Stirner think they are, but not as good as Marx and Engels think they are themselves, hence Bauer and Stirner are the bottom of the pile. Marx and Engels are not confronting Feuerbach, yet, and do not appear to be drafting a critique ‘Saint Ludwig.’”

And later:

“Unlike Bauer (hardly remembered at all as a philosopher) and Stirner (rather better known but still a minor figure), Feuerbach has survived as a read-worthy philosopher and, much less famously, as a sometime political actor. Some of that canonization of Feuerbach is due to Engels, writing in the 1880s, though that certainly does not account for his entire reception today. But — as I have outlined above — that was not the way it was when Marx and Engels were working on these various rough-draft manuscripts. These were ad hominem critiques of writers whom they regarded as politically important, precisely because they were wrongheaded and influential at the time. Or, slightly paraphrasing a Marx-Engels remark from ‘Saint Max,’ their political point was that philosophers are wankers.”

Wrapping up my introduction, let us return to the MECW, this time to the endnotes. Frankly, how much of this is accurate, and how much is driven by Soviet preferences in the 1970's, I do not know. But it is worth reading this and comparing/contrasting what was stated then with what we may know about The German Ideology now:

“The manuscript is in a rather poor condition, the paper has turned yellow and is damaged in places. ‘The gnawing criticism of the mice’, as Marx wrote later in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, has left its mark on a number of pages, other pages are missing. The Preface to The German Ideology and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx’s hand; the bulk of the manuscript, however, is in Engels’ hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages in Chapter III of Volume I. which are in Joseph Weydemeyer’s hand. As a rule, the pages are divided into two parts: the main text is on the left side while additions and changes are on the right. A number of passages were crossed out by the authors, and a few more passages were crossed out by Eduard Bernstein…

Words and passages which have become unreadable have been reconstructed on the basis of the unimpaired parts whenever possible; they are enclosed in square brackets. Wherever it was necessary to insert a few words to clarify the meaning, they are likewise printed in square brackets. Gaps in the manuscript are indicated in footnotes. Marginal notes as well as the most important of the crossed-out passages are given in footnotes which are indicated by asterisks, whereas the editors’ footnotes are indicated by index letters. Passages crossed out by Bernstein, wherever it was possible to decipher them, have been restored.”

Now on to this book itself, as it is published in the MECW — where the most interesting and historically influential section was apparently not mostly written by Marx and Engels as such to begin with. Thank you Comrade Riazanov and revisionist par excellence Eduard Bernstein?

II. The German Ideology

As mentioned above, before the formal The German Ideology, this volume publishes the 11 “Theses on Feuerbach.” First is Marx’s original notes (likely intended for himself), the second is printed Engels’ edited-for-ease-of-reading versions. The most famous?

The most famous of the theses: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” That is the official MECW translation of the Marx version edited slightly by Engels.

But maybe the most critical of the immediate criticism for this Volume as a whole?

“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

Then after another brief anti-Bauer essay by Engels, we get to the core book.

The Preface of MECW V states “Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology occupies a special place in the work as a whole. Unlike the other chapters, which are mainly polemical, it was conceived as a general introduction expounding the materialist conception of history. The basic theoretical content of the whole work is indeed concentrated in this chapter.” Of course that history can be questioned (see above), but it would be accurate in a textualist reading and a good way to emphasize the special importance of the first section.

We do have a “Preface” to Chapter I in Marx’s handwriting at least:

Neater hand writing, less doodles than Engels, not chewed on by rats either

The first section is the aforementioned “Feuerbach” (subtitled “Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook.”) Despite authorship questions, or perhaps more likely because of them, this is the most advanced, lucid, and straight forward example of “historical materialism” in the volume.

First, the preface, laying out the entire next 500 or so pages quickly:

“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. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one [a reference to Feuerbach], to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says another [Bauer], to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third [Stirner], to knock them out of their heads; and — existing reality will collapseThese innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy”

And then a colorful metaphor reiterate the core criticism and end the preface: “Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.” [Side note, I think it was Žižek who mentioned a similar concept, observing that Wile E. Coyote could float effortlessly off the edge of a cliff in midair — but would immediately fall if he looked down.]

After the preface comes “Idealism and materialism” and first sub-section “The Illusions of German Ideology” which argues much the same as the preface. Then sub-section “Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular” goes back to the Hegelian roots first: “German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel.”

Next is the “Premises of the Materialist Conception of History” and “Production and Intercourse. Division of Labour and Forms of Property — [Tribal, Ancient, Feudal]”, which began a more formulaic approach: “The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse*. This statement is generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried.”

*”Intercourse” is a translation issue of note throughout the entire volume worth addressing itself: “In The German Ideology the term “ Verkehr” (“intercourse”) is used in a very broad sense. It comprises both the material and spiritual intercourse of individuals, social groups and whole countries. Marx and Engels show that material intercourse, and above all the intercourse of men in the process of production, is the basis of all other forms of intercourse. The terms Verkehrsform (form of intercourse), Verkehrsweise (mode of intercourse), Verkehrsverhältnisse (relations of intercourse) and Produktions- und Verkehrsverhältnisse (relations of production and intercourse) are used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology to express the concept ‘relations of production’, which at that time was taking shape in their minds.”

Continuing, “The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.”

Then these stages are briefly elaborated, in succession:

  • “Tribal” ownership — hunting and fishing, animal husbandry, mass uncultivated land, with less division of labor. The division of labor that did exist was focused more among within the patriarchal family, and slaves below the tribes.
  • “Ancient communal” and “State ownership”, which “proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery.” Division of labour is now more developed. Antagonism is now between states; and between town and country within states; and even between industry and maritime commerce within a town-oriented state.
  • Feudal or estate property. “If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the countryThis feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country…Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production — the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country…”

“History as a Continuous Process” heads up another sub-section, including “Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism”. This contains one of the more famous quotes of this period for Marx and Engels: “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. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

But the notes here are incomplete thoughts, provocative as they are: “In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the reshaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the reshaping of men by men … [Intercourse and productive power]

Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society. …”

Then back to the edited text, under sub-section “Summary of the Materialist Conception of History”: “This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).”

Then the authors take aim at “The Inconsistency of the Idealist Conception of History in General, and of German Post-Hegelian Philosophy in Particular”: “When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this crude social form.

While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the ‘pure spirit,’ and make religious illusion the driving force of history.”

Then sub-section “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas”, with an articulation towards what is summarized often as the base and superstructures:

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. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’”

Pages 63–94 complete the synthesis of this historical materialist theory, in 12 more sub-sections: (I believe each is worth reading even if one doesn’t decide to become a full The German Ideology reader)

  1. Instruments of Production and Forms of Property, Contradictions of Big Industry
  2. The Division of Material and Mental Labour. Separation of Town and Country. The Guild-System
  3. Further Division of Labour. Separation of Commerce and Industry. Division of Labour between the Various Towns. Manufacture
  4. Most Extensive Division of Labour. Large-Scale Industry
  5. The Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of Intercourse as the Basis of Social Revolution
  6. Competition of Individuals and the Formation of Classes. Contradiction between Individuals and Their Conditions of Life. The Illusory Community of Individuals in Bourgeois Society and the Real Union of Individuals under Communism. Subordination of the Social Conditions of Life to the Power of the United Individuals
  7. Contradiction between Individuals and Their Conditions of Life as Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of Intercourse. Development of the Productive Forces and the Changing Forms of Intercourse
  8. The Role of Violence (Conquest) in History
  9. Contradiction between the Productive Forces and the Form of Intercourse under the Conditions of Large-Scale Industry and Free Competition. Contradiction between Labour and Capital
  10. The Necessity, Preconditions and Consequences of the Abolition of Private Property, Civil Society
  11. The Relation of State and Law to Property
  12. Forms of Social Consciousness

As I read the MECW, I usually write a page number of particular note I want to go back to for these Medium entries. For this section, I wrote every page from 64–94. It is filled with useful historical notes (e.g. vagabondage in the era of Henry VIII; the necessity of the French revolution overturning internal barriers to free trade between provinces; the 468+ year life of the Navigation Acts.) Also, quite an observation on the bourgeoise state and North America, though I wonder if this was a Lenin-era addition?: “Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man.”

Unfortunately, the first four pages of this section of the manuscript are missing.

The next major section is again on Bruno Bauer.

I found this much less useful. Again at times it is too “baroque”, repeating some of The Holy Family in content and form in the continued, often ad hominem attacks. It is only 20 pages long.

I am sure there are some serious points in here but I was distracted by the multiple mentions of Bauer talking about his…”sex organs”? Bauer claimed “As though my ego does not also possess just this particular sex, unique, compared with all others, and these particular, unique sex organs.” Marx replies, “Besides his ‘unique sex organs’, this noble-minded man also possesses a special ‘unique sex’!” I read the references multiple times and frankly have no clue what Bauer or Marx was trying to imply. Was Bauer an intersex person? Google was not helpful.

Anyway, we do get to read one of Bauer’s attacks on Marx, as opposed to the other way around: “Finally on page 143 Saint Bruno presents Marx as an ‘amusing comedian’, here again following his Westphalian model, who resolved the ‘world-historic drama of critical criticism’, on page 213, into a ‘most amusing comedy’.”

Marx/Engels also are accused by Bauer of failing to criticize Max Stiner, something they then replied would have been impossible to have done when they wrote The Holy Family considering Stirner had not yet even been published! Indeed, I learned in the end notes that Engels was given an advance copy of Stirner’s book, and was among the first people to ever read it (then spend hundreds of pages criticizing it.)

There may be some more relevant intellectual development in this section, but I couldn’t find it. It is very much of its time and disputes. And if anything, that teaches me of the importance of reading biography (I plan on reading each of Heinrich’s as they come out) along side original texts and manuscripts on their own to better understand what was actually intended.

The longest section is the next, on Max Stirner. And I do mean long: “the number of pages Marx and Engels devote to attacking Stirner in the unexpurgated text of The German Ideology exceeds the total of Stirner’s written works[!]”

Engels’ doodle of Stirner

First off, throughout this section, Marx and Engels refer to Stirner mockingly either as “Saint Stirner”, or as “Sancho” (as in Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza), or occasionally just as “‘Stirner’”. The double quotes here are intentional, as to indicate I am quoting Marx and Engels using these quotes. This seems to put his name in “scare quotes”, as if to mock it as not being real? I don’t really understand what the concept is here.

Even the division of this large section into chapters itself is a meta-attack, mocking the structure of Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own and continuing The Holy Family’s Biblical approach by dividing criticisms into “The Old Testament: Man” and “The New Testament: Ego”. The end notes do explain this generally, but not every particular joke: “In the subheadings Marx and Engels also use the names of chapters and sections of Stirner’s book, in many cases giving them an ironical twist.”

Marx and/or Engels summarize “Saint Max’s” theories as related to the “German” philosophy: “We spoke above of the German philosophical conception of history. Here, in Saint Max, we find a brilliant example of it. The speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of philosophy. But even the latter is not conceived as, according to existing sources, it actually took place — not to mention how it evolved under the influence of real historical relations — but as it was understood and described by recent German philosophers, in particular Hegel and Feuerbach. And from these descriptions again only that was selected which could be adapted to the given end, and which came into the hands of our saint by tradition. 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 utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality. In making this experiment our saint frequently forgets his role and writes an undisguised ghost-story.

In his case we find this method of making history in its most naive, most classic simplicity. Three simple categories — realism, idealism and absolute negativity (here named “egoism”) as the unity of the two — which we have already encountered in the shape of the child, youth and man, are made the basis of all history and are embellished with various historical signboards; together with their modest suite of auxiliary categories they form the content of all the allegedly historical phases which are trotted out. Saint Max once again reveals here his boundless faith by pushing to greater extremes than any of his predecessors faith in the speculative content of history dished up by German philosophers.”

This basic formula of Stirner (now mocked as “Dottore Graziano — a fourth insult name”) is explained as follows:

I. Realism.
II. Idealism.
III. The negative unity of the two. “One”

First nomenclature:

I.. Child, dependent on things (realism).
II.
Youth, dependent on ideas (idealism).
III.
Man — (as the negative unity)
expressed positively:
the owner of ideas and things (egoism)
expressed negatively:
free from ideas and things

Second, historical nomenclature:

I. Negro (realism, child).
II.
Mongol (Idealism, youth).
III.
Caucasian (negative unity of realism and idealism, man).

Third, most general nomenclature:

I. Realistic egoist (egoist in the ordinary sense) — child, Negro.
II. Idealist egoist (devotee) — youth, Mongol.
III. True egoist (the unique) — man, Caucasian.

Then Fourth, historical nomenclature, a “Repetition of the preceding stages
within the category of the Caucasian” (pagans, English philosophy, French philosophy, and so on.) The combinations of Stirner’s logic gets really odd quickly:
The Hierarchy — negative unity of the two within the Mongoloid-Caucasian point of view.”

This splits out further:

“A. The “uneducated”, (evil ones, bourgeois, egoists in the ordinary sense)=Negroes, children, Catholics, realists, etc.”

B. The “educated” (good ones, citoyens, devotees, priests, etc.) = Mongols, youths, Protestants, idealists.”

Then the Stirner logical process continues through “political realism” (which is dependent on things, independent of persons), “social liberalism” (independent of things, dependent on the spirit, without object), and “humane liberalism” (“masterless and propertyless, that is godless, for God is simultaneously the supreme master and the supreme possession, hierarchy — negative unity in the sphere of liberalism and, as such, domination over the world of things and thoughts; at the same time the perfect egoist in the abolition of egoism — the perfect hierarchy.”)

Eventually Stirner-ism leads you to the perfect individual, “the Caucasian Caucasian and true egoist”, a true Hegelian, and a humane liberal.

Marx and/or Engels return to these bizarre concepts again in “eight historical reflections”, repeating many of the criticisms of Stirner’s historical system as a clumsy copy of Hegel.

And THAT criticism is repeated again after again revisiting Stirner’s pyramid of racism and egoism by way of a quite direct criticism of Hegelianism: Hegel, for whom the modern world was also resolved into the world of abstract ideas, defines the task of the modern philosopher, in contrast to that of the ancient, as consisting in the following: instead of, like the ancients, freeing himself from ‘natural consciousness’ and ‘purging the individual of the immediate, sensuous method and making him into conceived and thinking substance’ (into spirit), the modern philosopher should ‘abolish firm, definite, fixed ideas’. This, he adds, is accomplished by ‘dialectics’…The difference between “Stirner” and Hegel is that the former achieves the same thing without the help of dialectics.”

Immediately the authors move to a different tact, a harsh criticism of the German bourgeoisie since the time of the French Revolution: “While the French bourgeoisie, by means of the most colossal revolution that history has ever known, was achieving domination and conquering the Continent of Europe, while the already politically emancipated English bourgeoisie was revolutionising industry and subjugating India politically, and all the rest of the world commercially, the impotent German burghers did not get any further than ‘good will’.”

“The old feudal aristocracy was, for the most part, annihilated in the peasant wars; what remained of it were either imperial petty princes who gradually achieved a certain independence and aped the absolute monarchy on a minute, provincial scale, or lesser landowners who partly squandered their little bit of property at the tiny courts, and then gained their livelihood from petty positions in the small armies and government offices — or, finally, Junkers from the backwoods, who lived a life of which even the most modest English squire or French gentilhomme de province would have been ashamed. Agriculture was carried on by a method which was neither parcellation nor large-scale production…[and] never drove the peasants to seek emancipation, both because this method of farming did not allow the emergence of any active revolutionary class and because of the absence of the revolutionary bourgeoisie corresponding to such a peasant class.”

Our authors also use this historical summary to also condemn Kant; and to mock the German bourgeoise for falling behind that of even little Holland; and for the political backwardness in acting as “mercenaries” for Britain against Napoleon who had “rendered them the greatest services by cleaning out Germany’s Augean stables and establishing civilised means of communication.”

Ultimately this all circles back to Bruno, and then Stirner’s book (and his ass):

“On page 150 all the evil of the existing social relations is reduced to the fact that ‘burghers and workers believe in the ‘truth’ of money”. Jacques le bonhomme [a fifth insulting name] imagines that it is in the power of the ‘burghers’ and ‘workers’, who are scattered among all civilised states of the world, suddenly, one fine day, to put on record their ‘disbelief’ in the ‘truth of money’; he even believes that if this nonsense were possible, something would be achieved by it. He believes that any, Berlin writer could abolish the ‘truth of money’ with the same ease as he abolishes in his mind the ‘truth’ of God or of Hegelian philosophy. That money is a necessary product of definite relations of production and intercourse and remains a ‘truth’ so long as these relations exist — this, of course, is of no concern to a holy man like Saint Max, who raises his eyes towards heaven and turns his profane backside to the profane world.”

Again, the Wile E. Coyote thinking: if I never look down, I will not fall…or if we simply realize that money is a fiction, we won’t have to use it. And Stirner comes from this flawed German bourgeoise and it has infected his magical thinking.

Stirner is also accused of creating his own concept of the proletariat, “rogues, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and murderers, gamblers, propertyless people with no occupation and frivolous individuals”, amounting to “individual shouters”. Marx Engels disagree, noting that sort of pauperism “is the position only of the ruined proletariat”. So here is the earliest mention I have noticed so far of “the lumpen-proletariat” by Marx and Engels. To be fair, sometimes especially in the Roman context, it seems the translation is to “ragamuffin”. Later in the Communist Manifesto, The Peasant War in Germany, and in articles of Neue Rheinische Zeitung we’ll hear more detailed takes on the lumpen, though it was a nice surprise to run into them by way of Stirner’s flawed class anaylsis.

Fast forwarding a bit, we get to “free labor” and “communism”, where Marx and Engels draw some more useful distinctions between themselves and Stirner: “Labour is free in all civilised countries*; it is not a matter of freeing labour but of abolishing it.” [*Were they excluding the USA?]

Along the same lines, Stirner is accused of a grammatical trick to avoid the abolition of private property: “Above ‘Stirner’ refuted the communist abolition of private property by first transforming private property into ‘having’ and then declaring the verb ‘to have’ an indispensable word, an eternal truth, because even in communist society it could happen that Stirner will ‘have’ a stomach-ache. In exactly the same way here his arguments regarding the impossibility of abolishing private property depend on his transforming private property into the concept of property, on exploiting the etymological connection between the words Eigentum and eigen and declaring the word eigen an eternal truth, because even under the communist system it could happen that a stomach-ache will be eigen to him. All this theoretical nonsense, which seeks refuge in etymology, would be impossible if the actual private property that the communists want to abolish had not been transformed into the abstract notion of ‘property’.”

And in an early anticipation of the great Capital topic of coat-value, we are told “My frock-coat is private property for me only so long as I can barter, pawn or sell it, so long [as it] is [marketable]. If it loses that feature, if it becomes tattered, it can still have a number of features which make it valuable for me, it may even become a feature of me and turn me into a tatterdemalion. But no economist would think of classing it as my private property, since it does not enable me to command any, even the smallest, amount of other people’s labour.”

Much later we get to Stirner’s “favourite equations” about the state and right under the sub-section “Society as Bourgeois Society”, and then his flawed conception of the history of property relations: Marx and/or Engels quip: “All these things are deduced from holy property and the equation: bourgeois property = respect for the holy.”

Thus begins the first of three arguments on property against Stirner’s first of -three treatises:

  1. “Here, therefore, first of all the whole development of parcellation, about which Saint Sancho knows only that it is the holy, is explained from a mere idea which ‘the politicians’ ‘have got into their heads’.” Marx and Engels argue against this by mentioning the French revolution; the lack of cultivation in Wales and Ireland due to a lack of capital and other conditions; and that as soon as the bourgeoisie gains power, it must carry out a conversion via abolition of land rents that exceed profit and by parcellation.
  2. That “Sancho’s horizon again does not go beyond the Pomeranian Landtag and the Saxon Chamber of Deputies” in terms of restoring German feudal obligations to make “good burghers and free men.”
  3. That the “buying-up” of small landed property by the “large landowners” takes place, according to Sancho, because in practice “respect for property” does not occur. As you could imagine, Marx and/or Engels have fun attacking this nonsense.

But #3 also leads to an interesting side argument of Marxism that has been debated much later: “Disregarding this nonsense of his, it was not possible for these peasants to organise themselves communistically, since they lacked all the means necessary for bringing about the first condition of communist association, namely collective husbandry, and since, on the contrary, parcellation was only one of the conditions which subsequently evoked the need for such an association. In general, a communist movement can never originate from the countryside, but only from the towns.”

Stirner’s treatise #2 and #3 are dealt with with as well, though pages of the manuscript are missing, I found them less interesting, and for the sake of space I will skip them.

What I did find interesting is then a return to a historical analysis and a contrasting of Stirner to Prodhoun:

“For recent investigations into the history of right have established that both in Rome and among the German, Celtic and Slav peoples the development of property had as its starting-point communal or tribal property and that private property strictly speaking arose everywhere by usurpation; Saint Sancho could of course not extract this from the profound idea that the concept of right is a concept. In relation to the legal dogmatists, Proudhon was perfectly right when he stressed this fact and in general combated them by means of their own premises. ‘That is where one can get with the spectre’ of the concept of right as a concept. Proudhon could only have been attacked on account of his proposition quoted above if he had defended the earlier and cruder form of property against the private property that had developed out of this primitive communal system. Sancho sums up his criticism of Proudhon in the arrogant question:

‘Why such a sentimental appeal for sympathy as if he were a poor victim of robbery?’

Sentimentality, of which, incidentally, not a trace is to be found in Proudhon, is only permitted towards Maritornes. Sancho really imagines that he is a ‘whole fellow’ compared with such a believer in apparitions as Proudhon. He considers his inflated bureaucratic style, of which even Frederick William IV would be ashamed, to be revolutionary. ‘Blessed are those that believe.’”

Marx and Engels continue to make an argument that one could overhear a version of today between Marxists and certain anarchists:

“It is characteristic of our petty bourgeois that he here recommends to his fellow-philistines, in place of competition, an institution like public bakeries, which existed in many places under the guild-system and which were put an end to by the cheaper competitive mode of production. That is to say, he recommends an institution of a local nature, which could only persist under narrowly restricted conditions and was inevitably bound to perish with the rise of competition, which abolished local narrowness. He has not even learned from competition that the ‘need’ of bread, for example, differs from day to day, that it does not at all depend on him whether tomorrow bread will still be ‘his business’ or whether others will still regard his need as their business, and that within the framework of competition the price of bread is determined by the costs of production and not by the whim of the bakers. He ignores all those relations which were brought about by competition: the abolition of local narrowness, the establishment of means of communication, highly developed division of labour, world intercourse, the proletariat, machinery, etc., and regretfully looks back to medieval philistinism. All he knows about competition is that it is ‘contention, rivalry and attempts to outstrip one another’; he is not concerned about its connection with division of labour, the relation between supply and demand, etc. That the bourgeois, whenever their interests demanded it (and they are better judges of this than Saint Sancho), always ‘came to an understanding’ insofar as this was possible in the framework of competition and private property, is proved by the joint-stock companies, which came into being with the rise of sea-borne trade and manufacture and took possession of all the branches of industry and commerce accessible to them. Such ‘agreements’, which led among other things to the conquest of an empire in the East Indies, are of course a small matter compared with the well-meaning fantasy about public bakeries…”

I should also mention some of the more interesting elements “crossed out” (allegedly?) in the manuscript have survived into the MECW. For example, this quotation here is printed despite having lines drawn through it: “In the Middle Ages the pleasures were strictly classified; each estate had its own distinct forms of pleasure and its distinct manner of enjoyment. The nobility was the estate privileged to devote itself exclusively to pleasure, while the separation of work and enjoyment already existed for the bourgeoisie and pleasure was subordinated to work. The serfs, the class destined exclusively to labour, had only extremely few and restricted. pleasures, which came their way mostly by chance, depended on the whim of their masters and other contingencies, and are hardly worth considering.

Under the rule of the bourgeoisie the nature of the pleasures depended on the classes of society. The pleasures of the bourgeoisie are determined by the material brought forth by this class at various stages of its development and they have acquired the tedious character which they still retain from the individuals and from the continuous subordination of pleasure to money-making. The present crude form of proletarian pleasure is due, on the one hand, to the long working hours, which led to the utmost intensification of the need for enjoyment, and, on the other hand, to the restriction -both qualitative and quantitative — of the means of pleasure accessible to the proletarian.

In general, the pleasures of all hitherto existing estates and classes had to be either childish, exhausting or crude, because they were always completely divorced from the vital activity, the real content of the life of the individuals. and more or less reduced to imparting an illusory content to a meaningless activity. The hitherto existing forms of enjoyment could, of course, only be criticised when the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had developed to such an extent that the existing mode of production and intercourse could be criticised as well.”

Getting towards the end, there is against a glimpse into a developing historical materialism: “Thus, society has hitherto always developed within the framework of a contradiction — in antiquity the contradiction between free men and slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility and serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This explains, on the one hand, the abnormal, ‘inhuman’ way in which the oppressed class satisfies its needs, and, on the other hand, the narrow limits within which intercourse, and with it the whole ruling class, develops. Hence this restricted character of development consists not only in the exclusion of one class from development, but also in the narrow-mindedness of the excluding class, and the ‘inhuman’ is to be found also within the ruling class.”

In conclusion, Stirner is again criticized for his liberal individualism and Wile E Coyote thinking:

“ Sancho wants, or rather believes he wants, that intercourse between individuals should be purely personal, that their intercourse should not be mediated through some third thing (cf. competition)…

Sancho does not want, for example, two individuals to be in ‘contradiction’ to one another as bourgeois and proletarian; he protests against the ‘special’ which forms the ‘advantage’ of the bourgeois over the proletarian; he would like to have them enter into a purely personal relation, to associate with one another merely as individuals. He does not take into consideration that in the framework of division of labour personal relations necessarily and inevitably develop into class relations and become fixed as such and that, therefore, all his talk amounts simply to a pious wish, which he expects to realise by exhorting the individuals of these classes to get out of their heads the idea of their ‘contradiction’ and their ‘special’ ‘privilege’. In the passages from Sancho quoted above, everything turns only on people’s opinion of themselves, and his opinion of them, what they want and what he wants. ‘Contradiction’ and the ‘special’ are abolished by a change of ‘opinion and ‘wanting.”

III. Conclusion

The last sections are much shorter, miscellaneous criticisms aimed at “True Socialism” (especially Karl Grün), Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, and Proudhon. I will address this more in the next entry, which includes The Poverty of Philosophy.

MECW V5 is a fairly large and challenging tome. One cannot blame our authors too much for the repetition/length especially of the Stirner section considering it was an unedited and unpublished work (something Gramsci ironically mentioned in his own famous unedited and unpublished work, Prison Notebooks I believe?)

Spending only two pages on the more substantial and ultimately influential Proudhon or nine pages on Fourier — while taking 333 dense pages to attack Stirner (500 pages in other formats) — seems indicative of the unedited manuscript form, especially since rats apparently ate many of the pages. But if you treat it as such, continue reading through the rough patches (inevitably you’re going to have the arguments repeated anyway), there is plenty of useful material in here. And if Riazanov did much of the work previously attributed to Marx and Engels, he did so very competently in “I. Feuerbach.”

When the attacks are not about exposing hypocrisy or errors in their targets but instead about contrasting these other thinkers’ views with their own, The German Ideology does show even in the Stirner section an evolution of Marx and Engels’ politics — helping to “set up” the important works they were able to get published shortly after. And even when on the attack, the sort of Marx&Engels>Feuerbach>(Hegel?)>Stirner>Bauer approach the authors take do at least point more strongly in the direction of a materialism to change the world instead of merely interpret it. In fact, because that approach is effective, a better order for a final book would have been like this pyramid of increasingly challenging antagonists:

  • Chapter 1, on Bauer (or frankly, just skip him for once!)
  • Chapter 2, on Stirner (except edited)
  • Chapter 3, on “the True Socialists” (but more elaborated)
  • Chapter 4, on Feuerbach, Hegel, and a materialist theory of history vis a vis modes of production

Instead, you end up in a situation where if you read the whole volume in order, you probably will have to go back to “Chapter I. Feuerbach” again at the end to remember its salient points and wash your eyes of hundreds of pages on the problems of Stirner’s ego-unions and Bauer’s sex organs.

Oh and as for Stirner’s end? Though his ideas gained some cachet among various proto-fascists, post-structuralists, nudists, and post-left anarchists, Saint-Sancho-Stirner “died in 1856 in Berlin from an infected insect bite and it is said that Bruno Bauer was the only Young Hegelian present at his funeral.”

All my rowdy friends are here on Monday night

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