Money and Happiness (SOC Happiness)

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Journal Title: Four Sociological Traditions: Selected Readings

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Article Title: "Materialism and the theory of ideology''

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Month/Year: 1994

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Materialism and the Theory ofldeology [1846] 13

becomes e\ident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the exitence and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for. capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the la- bourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoi- sie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolu- tionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its mvn grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

MATERIAIJSM AND TIIE 'fHEORY OF IDEOLOGY . .

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 \·erified in a purely empirical 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 orga- nization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself-geological, orohydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of man.

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

Reprinted from Karl ~larx and Friedrich Engeh. The German Ideology (International Publishen, '947), 6-7, q-15, 39-41, reprinted with permission oflntemational Publishers. Originallr"ritten in 1846.

The Conflict Tradition

which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistent<: 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 they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction 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.

The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observa- tion must in each separate instance .bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political struc- ture with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolv- ing 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; that is, as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. ~nceiving, thinking, ·the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, and so on-real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corre- sponding to these, up to its furthest forms. ConsciousnesS can never be any- thing else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. lf in aU ideology men and their circumstances appear upside d<Mn as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physicallife-process. ·

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

Materialism and the Theory of Ideology [1846)

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 :tnd their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longenetain 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. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second it is the real living individuals themselves, as they are in actual life, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: that is, 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 produc-

tion 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; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class·possess among other things con- sciousness, and therefore think. In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and

determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in their whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an

age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law." The division of labour, which we saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part

appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who

make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in realitv the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and

hostility between the two parts, which. however, in the case of a practical

The Conflict Tradition

collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presup- poses the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above.

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the pro- ducers of these ideas, if we then ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, and so on, were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, that is ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, put in an ideal form; it will give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, merely because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whale of society; it appears as the whale mass of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all ather non-rul- ing classes, because under the pressure of conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory, there- fore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only in so far as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only in so far as they became bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, in return for which the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its tum, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule.

The Class Basis of Politics and Revolution [t8p]

This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as society ceases at last to be organized in the form of class-rule, that is to say as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or "the general interest" as ruling.

1HE CLASS BASIS OF POUTICS AND REVOLUTION

ON THE RECURRENCE OF REVOLUTIONS

France is the land where, more than anywhere else, the historical class' struggles were each time fought out to a decision, and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summarized have been stamped in the sharpest outlines. The centre of feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country of unified monar- chy, resting on estates, since the Renaissance, France demolished feudalism in the Great Revolution and established the unalloyed rule of the bourgeoisie in a classical purity unequalled by any other European land. And the struggle of the upward-striving proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere.

It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they pro- ceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological do- main, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in tum conditioned by the degree of development of their eco- nomic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange deter- mined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science--this law gave him , here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robes- pierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 fur the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the

From Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumail"l! of Louis Bonaparte (International Publishers, •¢3) fJIJ. '3-16, 18-19, 23-24. 46-51. 54-.)5. 61-tiz, u-;6. 103-105. 120>-131. &printed with permission of International Publishers. Originally published in 1852, The first two paragraphs al"l! from Engeli preface to the Third Gmnan Edition.