All struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc. etc. are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another. (p. 54) A large part of The German Ideology is devoted to giving an account of European history
that concretely illustrates these general ideas. In particular, Marx and Engels describe the way in which feudal society developed, and how tensions between the productive forces and the form of intercourse eventually led to the emergence of capitalism and the triumph of the bourgeoisie.
This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse, which…has occurred several times in past history, without, however, endangering the basis, necessarily on each occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of various classes, contradiction of consciousness, battle of ideas, etc., political conflict, etc. From a narrow point of view one may isolate one of these subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these revolutions; and this is all the more easy as the individuals who started the revolutions had illusions about their own activity according to their degree of culture and the stage of historical development.
Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse. (pp. 88—9)
Just as such contradictions emerged as feudalism developed, Marx and Engels argue that they will inevitably appear in capitalism as well. It is for this reason that they claim that communist revolution is not a utopian ideal, but something that will be produced by actual material conditions, when circumstances \‘propertyless,’ and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an
existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.\abolished, and the result of revolution would be that \made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all
the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced.\addition, in a world of \are part of a single economic system, revolution cannot survive in a single country, since \communism.\explanation applicable to the failure of the Russian Revolution–isolated in an
economically backward country–more than 70 years later. They continue:
The mass of propertyless workers–the utterly precarious position of labor-power on a
mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life–presupposes
the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-
historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a \
The conditions for successful communist revolution thus presuppose an integrated world economy in which the mass of the population finds it increasingly difficult to secure a decent life–not a bad summary of the effects of globalization at the start of the 21st century.
Having set out their conception of history, Marx and Engels draw four further conclusions about the possibility and nature of communist revolution.
(1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other
classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class; (2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the State; and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class, which till then has been in power;
(3) In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labor to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labor, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the
classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present society; and (4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this
revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a
revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. (pp. 94—5)
Marx and Engels argue that the working class under capitalism occupies a unique position. Unlike the bourgeoisie under feudalism, for example, workers do not have their own form of private property to protect. In this sense, it is a \in society\–a class which, when it moves into activity, will not fight just for its own interests, but for the interests of humanity as a whole. As the forces of production come into conflict with capitalist relations of production, the crisis can only be permanently resolved by the abolition of private property and its replacement by communal control of the economy, creating a society in which individual lives are no longer at the mercy of impersonal market forces, and in which true freedom therefore becomes possible. But such a transformation requires \alteration of men on a mass scale,\in the course of struggle itself, culminating in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society. It is the material situation itself that leads workers to fight to protect their interests, but in the course of doing so their consciousness changes both to see the need to replace the whole system and to give them the confidence and vision to do so.
The German Ideology was never published in Marx and Engels’ lifetimes. Several publishers, who either objected to its critique of the Young Hegelians or feared that its radical ideas would attract the wrath of the Prussian censors, turned it down, and it was eventually abandoned, as Marx put it, \Fortunately, the manuscript survived, and it remains today a classic introduction to the materialist understanding of history, capitalism and revolution.
1 Germany was not united as a single country until much later in the 19th century. At this time, the German population was still divided between dozens of small states, Prussia being by far the largest.
2 Robert C. Tucker (ed.), \Philosophy of Right: Introduction,\edition (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 59.
3 Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume I: State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977) p. 31.
4 Tucker, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 3.
5 The German Ideology is a long work, divided into several sections, but only part one, \Idealist Outlook,\Ideology in this article are from the edition edited by C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970).
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