德意志意识形态英文
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International Socialist Review Issue 33, January–February 2004 THE CLASSICS OF MARXISM The German Ideology By Phil Gasper
Phil Gasper is a philosophy professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in northern California. This is the first in a series on Marxist Classics.
THE GERMAN Ideology was the first work in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sketched out the framework for understanding history and society that was to guide their theoretical and practical activities for the rest of their lives. The book was written in 1845—46 when the authors were in their mid-twenties. Both Marx and Engels were born in small towns in the German Rhineland–Marx in Trier in 1818 and Engels in Barmen two
years later. Although the Rhineland was a province of Prussia, Napoleon’s armies had
occupied it until 1814, and its intellectual life had thus been deeply affected by the ideas of the French Revolution. These ideas were very much in the air as Marx and Engels grew up.
Because of Germany’s economic and political backwardness, what had been acted out in 1practice in France came to be reflected in philosophy in Marx and Engels’ homeland. As
Marx later put it, \nations have 2done.\Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with its emphasis on change–in particular historical change–had become dominant in Germany.
Hegel believed that history was to be explained in terms of the development of ideas, indeed that history was merely a series of stages in the development of World Spirit or Absolute Mind. But Hegel’s writing was highly obscure and open to different interpretations. Conservatives interpreted him as saying that the emergence of the highly authoritarian Prussian state represented the culmination of world history. After Hegel’s death in 1831, the radical Young Hegelians rejected this conclusion as absurd and instead used his emphasis on change as a justification for the democratic transformation of society. They rejected the notion of Absolute Mind as a metaphysical extravagance, but remained idealists in the sense that they held that historical progress was the result of humanity achieving self-understanding.
Both Marx and Engels were members of the Young Hegelian movement in Berlin for a time–Marx when he was a student at the University of Berlin and Engels while he was stationed in the city for his military service. Unlike Marx, who completed a doctorate in philosophy, Engels did not pursue formal schooling very far, but he was a fine writer and
had a thorough grasp of the latest philosophical ideas. Between 1839 and 1842, Engels published nearly 50 articles, including two acclaimed anonymous pamphlets in which he defended the ideas of the Young Hegelians against the reactionary philosophy of Hegel’s contemporary, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.
But Marx and Engels were soon to break with the Young Hegelians. Initially, and independently, they were strongly influenced by the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who rejected the idealism of the other Young Hegelians and offered a materialist analysis of religion. But even more importantly, events took both Marx and Engels away from the abstract discussion of ideas detached from the real world. Marx received his PhD in 1841, but an academic career was ruled out as a new period of political reaction began in Prussia and the Young Hegelians were denied university positions. Instead, Marx became the editor of a radical liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was this experience
that led him to settle accounts with all varieties of Hegelianism. As one commentator put it, the
young Marx is often portrayed as having come to a revolutionary understanding of society through a critique of Hegel’s texts on the state and society. The biographical fact, however, is that he came to the content of his critique of the Hegelian view of the state
through a year and a half of rubbing his nose against the social and political facts of life, which he encountered as the crusading editor of the most extreme leftist democratic 3newspaper in pre-1848 Germany.
Marx himself later commented on this period of his life saying, \experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material 4interests.\following the debates in the Prussian parliament, he rejected the Hegelian idea that the state was–or could be–above classes.
By 1843, Marx was beginning to recognize that the ideals of the French Revolution, with its call for liberty and democracy, could never be achieved in a society based on material inequality. Formal freedom and democracy might exist in such a society, but they would be subverted to the interests of those who controlled the wealth. Real freedom was impossible in a society divided into exploiters and exploited. What was needed, Marx concluded, was not formal equality before the law, but a society of genuine equality in which economic power was not in the hands of a privileged minority. What was needed, in other words, was the abolition of private property. Thus, Marx’s commitment to
radical democracy and human liberation led him to communism. Marx had already reached the materialist conclusion that the
starting point for understanding human society is not the realm of ideas, but actual human beings and the material conditions in which they live. But he had not yet come to the view that the working class was central to the project of transforming society. Two things finally brought him to this conclusion. The first was his move to Paris in late 1843 after the censors closed the Rheinische Zeitung. France was economically and politically far more
advanced than Germany and Marx came into contact for the first time with an organized working-class movement. The second factor was the influence of Engels.
Marx and Engels had met briefly in 1842, but had not got on very well. Shortly afterwards, Engels left for England to work in his father’s business in Manchester. By this time, Engels already regarded himself as a communist (a year earlier than Marx) and he immediately became involved in the British working-class movement and began the research that was to culminate in his path-breaking study The Condition of the Working
Class in England, eventually published in 1845. In late 1842, Engels also wrote an important article, \Economy\were later to develop in greater detail. Engels’ article had a great influence on Marx, turning him towards the study of political economy. It was this that led Marx to understand the revolutionary role of the working class in terms of its role in the system of production and its ability to shut it down. When Marx and Engels met again in 1844, they found themselves in complete political agreement and began their lifelong partnership. They collaborated first on The Holy
Family, a long critique of some of the Young Hegelians, who they had come to see as pompous windbags who refused to participate in real political activity. Shortly afterwards, Marx was expelled from Paris by the authorities and moved to Brussels. It was here that The German
德意志意识形态英文
