Karl Marx

The Germany Ideology (with reference to some others works on occasions)

I do not have a summary for the Theses on Feuerback piece, it is only a three page paper listing 11 terse propositions so you should take two or three minutes to read it yourself. It's got "reference to some other works on occasions.." as this summary has originally been written for my own use for Prof. Riesebrodt's theory class for the 28th of April Marx session. So it's supposed to cover all the readings assigned for that day but it turned out that most of the contents in this summary is on The German Ideology, so I decided to present it in its entirety.

General Feature of the Articles

Both of Marx's most crucial theoretical formulations - one that came to have tremendous impact on the sociological analysis of history, and the other with great influence on the political development in the 20th century - come to be developed quite fully in these four selections. These are, the historical materialism approach as a means to analyze the human history, and the inevitability of the proletariat revolution to liberate humans from the fetters of capitalism that estrange men from their nature and establish the communist society.

Historical Materialism; Material Forces and Culture

In particular, the assertion of historical materialism as the proper means to analyze the course of human history is the central focus throughout these four essays. This idea is developed and materialized through the method of contrasting it to the idealist tradition that has characterized the German intellectual tradition which he often vehemently criticizes for failing to grasp the underlying power of forces of production and people's relation to that forces of production as the determining force of the structure of society. This opposition is vividly and aggressively asserted in the beginning of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in the Society and Economy in History, in which Marx criticizes the idealist ideas of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty, and in the beginning parts of the German Ideology again. Marx notes that whereas British and French have moved at least a step toward the realization of the importance of materialist forces, the problem of idealist notions coming to be estranged from the empirical, realistic conditions of history and treated as the a priori determining forces of social structure is particularly acute in Germany. Instead, for Marx the material forces are the determining factor of the course of the history and the shape and structure of the society. All notable conflicts that have led to the social change can be interpreted as ensuing from the conflict of the way forces of production are structured in any society and the social relations people in that society have to that forces of production.

On the other hand, while giving primary and utmost importance to the role of material concerns as the determining forces of the structure of society, Marx, in his typical fashion, also emphasizes the human being's natural capacity to form their own consciousness and create the objective world in a meaningful way. It is only that for him such mental activity, ideological concerns, which are the dimension stressed by idealist thinkers as the primary determining forces of the social structure, can only operate within the confines of materialist, and thus primary, factors. In fact, Marx notes of what might be called the ultimate danger of misconception through the idealist interpretation of the world history and the current social condition on pages 174 to 175, in which ideas are separated from the individuals who have created them and treated as the a priori concepts that determine the courses of history. Yet for Marx, the ideas of rulers, the ruling ideology, are the expression of the particular interests the ruling class holds - i.e., in the capitalist society, the interests of the bourgeois. The implication here is that the idealist conception of the social structure masks the issue of who are the ruling classes that dominate the society - and thus have the power to control the production of material goods, as well as the production of ideas. We should also note that this conception of the ruling classes controlling the production of ideas just as they control the industry and commerce particularly inspired the sociological theory of culture based on Marxism, such as the Frankfurt school and the Birmingham school.

The Analysis of History through Time

This is basically the backbone of the materialist analysis Marx develops in these four writings. When we look at more of the substantive details, it is apparent that especially in the German Ideology Marx gives a quite detailed exposition on his conception of the world history through the materialist analysis. In the process, such key terms as the division of labor and private property are dwelled upon. For Marx, private property is not just any privately owned or controlled property but stands for that particular type of property that has been extracted from another's labor yet comes to be controlled by certain individuals for the purpose of accumulation. Consequently, the division of labor and the development of private property go hand in hand in the historical development. Division of labor is what engenders the private property; the fundamental contradiction with division of labor for Marx is that it naturally leads to the contradiction of differential interests held between the specific individuals who do labor and the communal body for which individuals do labor. In short, this had been the nascent step taken in the course of human history that must have led to the alienation of human beings from his own products of labor - and the subsequent alienation from his own labor, his own nature, and his fellow men.

In the later part of the German Ideology, this analysis based on the development of division of labor is extended from the individual/communal level of the primitive society analysis to the analysis of the development of inter-city division of labor in the European context - leading ultimately to the beginning of what Marx calls the "world history". Very briefly, this is a condition in which different localities of the world are so intertwined with each other through the division of labor in terms of commerce and industry, so that the course of the history at any locale can no longer have independent development. In his exposition about how this condition came to be, Marx starts out with what he regards as the greatest form of division of labor as the history moved from "barbarism to civilization" - that of town and country. This separation of town and country can only exist within the framework of private property, and marks the first point in history in which existence of the capital independent of the landed property emerged. By following the course of history starting from this separation of town and country, Marx then gives a sweeping if crude depiction of how then different people came to form "class" depending on their locations within the system of division of labor.

Eventual Proletariat Revolution; State as Bad Guys

Finally, in the Critique of Contribution... and the German Ideology, more political and ideological discourse on eventual proletariat revolution is also developed. While this formulation is more self-explanatory, the key concepts here are probably that of, again, the alienation of proletariat from his own labor and products of his own labor - thus leading to separation of his individuality from his own "human nature"; and that of the conception of the "state", that is seen to be representing single-handedly the interests of the dominant bourgeois class at the expense of the proletariat.

Critique and Relevance

Sure it's no greatest writing in the world, it's overly romantic (though in some sense that's the appeal, not the demerit, of Marx), it's not that well-organized, its empirical analysis part on the world's historical development is crude. In short, it's an ingenious but somewhat wild writing by a 27 year old. Anyhow, I'm pleasantly surprised that Marx does not posit that deterministic relationship between culture and material basis; he does not say that base rigidly determines the specific forms superstructure would adopt. Instead, he allows for a considerable leeway for the "human natural creativity" to form its own forms of cultural consciousness within the confines set by the material concerns. We should recall that making room for this "leeway" was one of the central point made by Williams, but perhaps it seems that Marx himself has never been that deterministic regarding the relationship between culture and material basis in the first place. Of course, we should not overlook the central insight of Marx in paying attention to this flexibility, that differential access to the control of material conditions in turn means differential distribution of power to control society's culture.