Selected Works of Karl Marx

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[There follows a passage dealing with the premises of the materialist conception of history. It isnot crossed out and in this volume it is reproduced as Section 2; see pp. 31-32]Ideology in General, German Ideology in ParticularGerman criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Farfrom examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actuallysprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answersbut in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reasonwhy not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of theHegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemicsagainst Hegel and against one another are confined to this - each extracts one side of theHegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted bythe others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as ‘substance’and ‘self-consciousness,’ later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such asspecies ‘the Unique,’ ‘Man,’ etc.The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined tocriticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:]claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continuallyregarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to thesephilosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religiousconsciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they wentalong. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political,juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions;and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological,and the political, juridical, moral man - ‘man’ in the last resort - as religious. The dominance ofreligion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced areligious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On allsides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was sanctified to anever-increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc andthus dispose of it once for all.The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelianlogical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religiousconceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreementwith the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principlein the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the otherextols it as legitimate.Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products ofconsciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (justas the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the YoungHegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to theirfantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are productsof their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate ofexchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thusof removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand tointerpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. TheYoung-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are thestaunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for theiractivity when they declare they are only fighting against ‘phrases.’ They forget, however, that tothese phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no waycombating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at thatthoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; allthe rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, inthese unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.
It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of Germanphilosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own materialsurroundings.First Premises of Materialist MethodThe premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises fromwhich abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, theiractivity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find alreadyexisting and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purelyempirical way.The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and theirconsequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actualphysical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself - geological,hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from thesenatural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.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 producetheir means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. Byproducing 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 ofthe actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode ofproduction must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence ofthe individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form ofexpressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, sothey are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produceand with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditionsdetermining their production.This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn thispresupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of thisintercourse is again determined by production.[3. Production and Intercourse.Division of Labour and Forms of Property - Tribal, Ancient, Feudal]The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each hasdeveloped its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse. This statement isgenerally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the wholeinternal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by itsproduction and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nationare developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has beencarried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension ofproductive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causesa further development of the division of labour.The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial andcommercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to theconflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial fromindustrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside these various branchesthere 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 inagriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These sameconditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of differentnations to one another.The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms ofownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations ofindividuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.
Page 4: égime, which has been through its
Page 7: sins of all state forms. That this
Page 15 and 16: gradually accumulated small capital
Page 17 and 18: from this nonsensical ‘prehistory
Page 19 and 20: property: the nucleus, the first fo
Page 21 and 22: which produces in all nations simul
Page 23 and 24: [8. The Inconsistency of the Ideali
Page 25 and 26: The ‘essence’ of the fish is it
Page 27 and 28: hence of the relationships which ma
Page 29 and 30: labour. In the first case, therefor
Page 31 and 32: production and commerce soon calls
Page 33 and 34: period begins with the Navigation L
Page 35 and 36: more advanced countries, still have
Page 37 and 38: over against the individuals, so th
Page 39 and 40: eality is only a product of the pre
Page 41 and 42: never became more than a city; its
Page 43 and 44: Only at this stage does self-activi
Page 45 and 46: Modern industry has established the
Page 47 and 48: these crises, there breaks out an e
Page 49 and 50: Further, as we have already seen, e
Page 51 and 52: abolish that; the development of in
Page 53 and 54: For the rest, nothing is more ridic
Page 55 and 56: III. Socialist and Communist Litera
Page 57 and 58: conscious of having overcome “Fre
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The undeveloped state of the class
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The Paris CommuneAddress to the Int
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priests were sent back to the reces
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pregnant. In the full consciousness
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subjected Versailles and the rest o
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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bo
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For the rest, every fair observer,
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that here “bourgeois republic”
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Eternalization of historic relation
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and becomes a direct object and ser
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each supplies the other with its ob
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generally. The question evidently b
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is thus the only reality, the movem
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smudge over all historical differen
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elations. Thus e.g. the relation of
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a rise of wages, because every reac
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equally spent upon all articles of
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Apart from some years of failing ha
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enable a currency to adapt itself t
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Smith and his French predecessors h
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conditions of production, with a gi
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in a commodity constitutes its valu
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y working which the working man wou
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just seen that the surplus value co
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increased value of his labour, like
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altogether, is sure to have his wag
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theory, which consists in putting a
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Preface to A Contribution to the Cr
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Capital, Volume I (1867)From the Pr
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A use value, or useful article, the
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imposed necessity, without which th
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embodiments of one identical social
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abstract. The twofold social charac
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ased on the production of commoditi
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Capital Vol. III. Chapter 2. The Ra
Page 129 and 130:
specific relationship to surplus-va
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Selected Works of Karl Marx

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