Ideology was written, which was intended to be both a final settling of accounts with the Young Hegelians and, more importantly, an exposition of Marx and Engels’ own views on materialism, revolution and communism. Although much of the book is concerned with the first of these tasks, it is the second that remains of much 5 greater interest.
The main criticism of the Young Hegelians is that they wrongly hold that human progress is held back primarily by illusions, mistaken ideas and false consciousness. In fact, this view, minus the fancy philosophical underpinnings, is still popular–for instance, among
those who think the solution to the environmental crisis is for individuals to adopt simpler lifestyles, or in a more extreme form by those post-modernists who hold that reality is created by \In response, Marx and Engels argue that This demand to change
consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognize it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly \statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against \
however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. (p. 41)
Instead of starting with ideas, society can only be understood and ultimately changed, by examining the material realities on which it is based.
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. 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. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. (p. 42)
The fundamental fact about real individuals is that they must engage in production in order to survive, and this shapes every other aspect of their lives.
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 organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it 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. (p. 42) The material conditions of production include both the forces of production–the methods
and technology used in production–and what Marx and Engels call here the \
intercourse\the \labor within production, which at a certain point in history gives rise to distinct social classes with their own antagonistic interests. On this basis develops the whole of the rest of society, including culture, social structures and the institutions of the state. This is the starting point of Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history–\relation to the history of industry and exchange.\
The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially,
and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will….
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of
independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (pp. 46—7)
But the ideas to be found in any given society are not simply the result of material conditions in general, they are also a reflection of the interests of the dominant class.
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. (p. 64)
In arguing that the ideas in people’s heads have to be explained in terms of the material
conditions of their lives, Marx and Engels were following in the footsteps of Feuerbach, but they also criticize Feuerbach for ignoring the way in which over time human activity changes those conditions and gives rise to new ones, leading to profound changes in the rest of society. \history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely.\contrast to Feuerbach’s static conception, Marx and
Engels point to the deep tensions that exist within societies that are divided into antagonistic classes, and which drive history forward:
The forces of production, the state of society and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another,
because…intellectual and material activity–enjoyment and labor, production and consumption–devolve on different individuals,
and…the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation [i.e.
abolition] in its turn of the division of labor. (p. 52)
德意志意识形态英文
