The German Ideology
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The German Ideology (German: Die Deutsche Ideologie) was a book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1845. Marx and Engels didn't find a publisher. However, the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
The multi-part book consists of many satirically written polemics against Bruno Bauer, other Young Hegelians, and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844). Part I, however, is a work of exposition giving the appearance of being the work for which the "Theses on Feuerbach" served as an outline. The work is a restatement of the theory of history Marx was beginning to call the "materialist conception of history".
Since its first publication, Marxist scholars have found the work particularly valuable since it is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of Marx's theory of history stated at such length and detail.
General outline
Marx and Engels argue that men distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence; what individuals are coincides with their production in both, how and what they produce. The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.
How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown by the degree to which the division of labor has been carried. Also, there is a direct link between division of labor and forms of ownership.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer retain the semblance of independence; they have no history and no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter,along with their real existence, their thinking and the product of their thinking.
This approach allows to cease understanding history as a collection of dead facts or an imagined activity of subjects.
See also
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