Selected Works of Karl Marx

Natural science and history.There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.[Marginal note by Marx:] To the ‘community’ as it appears in the ancient state, in feudalism andin the absolute monarchy, to this bond correspond especially the religious conceptions.Why the ideologists turn everything upside-down.Clerics, jurists, politicians.jurists, politicians (statesmen in general), moralists, clerics.For this ideological subdivision within a class: 1) The occupation assumes an independentexistence owing to division of labour. Everyone believes his craft to be the true one. Illusionsregarding the connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be cherished bythem because of the very nature of the craft. In consciousness - in jurisprudence, politics, etc. -relations become concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of therelations also become fixed concepts in their mind. The judge, for example, applies the code, hetherefore regards legislation as the real, active driving force. Respect for their goods, becausetheir craft deals with general matters.Idea of law. Idea of state. The matter is turned upside-down in ordinary consciousness.Religion is from the outset consciousness of the transcendental arising from actually existingforces.This more popularly.Tradition, with regard to law, religion, etc.Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from themselves. Their relations are therelations of their real life-process. How does it happen that their relations assume anindependent existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life become superiorto them?In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the development of the productivepower at any particular time.Landed property. Communal property. Feudal. Modern.Estate property. Manufacturing property. Industrial capital.D. Proletarians and CommunismIndividuals, Class, and CommunityIn the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to unite against the landed nobilityto save their skins. The extension of trade, the establishment of communications, led theseparate towns to get to know other towns, which had asserted the same interests in the strugglewith the same antagonist. Out of the many local corporations of burghers there arose onlygradually the burgher class. The conditions of life of the individual burghers became, onaccount of their contradiction to the existing relationships and of the mode of labour determinedby these, conditions which were common to them all and independent of each individual. Theburghers had created the conditions insofar as they had torn themselves free from feudal ties,and were created by them insofar as they were determined by their antagonism to the feudalsystem which they found in existence. When the individual towns began to enter intoassociations, these common conditions developed into class conditions. The same conditions,the same contradiction, the same interests necessarily called forth on the whole similar customseverywhere. The bourgeoisie itself with its conditions, develops only gradually, splits accordingto the division of labour into various fractions and finally absorbs all propertied classes it findsin existence [Marginal note by Marx: To begin with it absorbs the branches of labour directlybelonging to the State and then all ±[more or less] ideological estates]. (while it develops themajority of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied classes into a new class,the proletariat) in the measure to which all property found in existence is transformed intoindustrial or commercial capital. The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they haveto carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with eachother as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence