Rejecting Idealism: Philosophy from Earth to Heaven
The German Ideology, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, directly addresses what they perceived as pervasive idealism in contemporary philosophy. They criticized their fellow German philosophers, stating: “The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.” In this work, Marx and Engels would lay down their ideas of dialectical materialism and their historical materialist conception of history, taking philosophy out of its idealist phase and into a materialist one.
- Critique of Hegelianism: The authors directly respond to the philosopher Hegel and Hegelianism, which argued that ideology (the stuff in one’s head, such as concepts and thoughts) was the basis of social life. Marx and Engels would instead argue that social life is shaped by material circumstances (the world around us: economies, trees, grass, space, minerals). Forms of consciousness are determined by material changes. In essence, reality creates ideology; ideology does not create reality. In this way, they would subvert the Hegelian dialectic, turning it “on its head.”
- Critique of Religious Focus: Marx and Engels asserted that the biggest issue with those who tried to expand on Hegelianism was their tendency to reduce everything within society to a religious criticism, assuming religion was the inherent framework of human society.
- Philosophy Disconnected from Reality: Marx and Engels were very critical of the state of philosophy, arguing that because the Young Hegelians focused purely on ideology and interpreting the world—their worldview being ideology-first as the basis of the world—they were reduced to nothing more than a philosophy of critique disconnected from the real world.
- Ascending from Earth to Heaven: Historical materialism begins from the perspective of “the existence of living human individuals.” This starts from humanity and its relationship to its environment. As Marx and Engels say: “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 development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.”
- Therefore, all human ideology, religions, governments, and social relations are products of our material environment. This was in radical stark contrast to philosophers at the time who believed the reverse, and it is what makes Marxism so powerful as a tool for actually affecting material change in the world, regardless of Marx and Engels’ somewhat outdated anthropological conceptions.
Production, Division of Labor, and Human Nature
To Marx and Engels, humanity begins to distinguish itself from animals through the act of production of its own means of subsistence. What makes human beings special is that we produce our houses, food, amenities, etc.
- Productive Forces and Relations: Not only is the technological level of production (productive forces) important (e.g., are we producing with spears and arrows or factories?), but also the relations of production are crucial—how someone produces their means of subsistence in relation to other people (e.g., slave and master, feudal serf and nobleman, capitalist and worker).
- Human Nature as Socially Determined: These ultimately determine what we call human nature. If you take a person and raise them in a slave society, they will act like a slave or an owner; if you take a person and put them in a capitalist society, they will act like a worker or a capitalist; if you take a person and put them in a socialist society, they will act like a socialist. Our behavior is determined by the material society around us. This is how Marx and Engels inverted Hegelianism, which saw our behavior as something ephemeral, disconnected from the material world.
- Early Division of Labor: To Marx and Engels, the earliest division of labor within human society was “the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labor, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests.”
Historical Development: From Tribal to Capitalism
Marx and Engels then trace how humanity developed and how we got to our current situation of capitalism, treating human history almost like a science to analyze the present world and common repeatable human trends.
- Tribal Ownership: Before private property, the first form of ownership and human relations was tribal. This form of human society saw small groupings of families with very low technological development, with little to no classes and division of labor. However, as they developed agriculture, this would change.
- In the tribal form, there is some slavery through war and trade with other small tribes, but once several tribes get together, we see the formations of some of the earliest states, a more developed slavery, the first divisions between town and country, and the first private property through slaves. This comes from human population booms in the tribal period as it gets to the agricultural stage, which then necessitates things like division of labor, division of mental and physical labor, and the first forms of private property as the family—the basis of the tribe—grows to a point where early class divisions begin to appear, with some becoming slaves and the first crudest forms of private property.
- Alienation of Labor: The division of labor and private property lead to the earliest alienation of man from his labor. Because man is confined to a narrow field and forced to do work involuntarily, and because man no longer owns the product of his labor, he becomes alienated from his own daily tasks in the work that he does. “As activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”
- The State as a Product of Class: The state is birthed out of the division of labor and growing classes, with the minority of classes at the top of the new hierarchies needing to maintain their positions. Therefore, all states are reflections of class struggle, and what moves history forwards is the interaction of these various classes.
- Feudalism’s Rise and Fall: The slave system then collapsed into a feudal relation out of the ruins of the destroyed Roman Empire. Because the productive forces of the Roman Empire were destroyed, feudalism would see humanity retreat to the countryside in small feudal landholdings, with peasants tied to the land and a distinction between town and country. However, the separation of town and country would lead to the growth of a merchant class within the cities that would accumulate a tiny bit of capital through extensive trade, trade that was held back by the feudal relation.
- Human economies therefore went from: tribal → slave mode of production → feudalism → capitalism.
- Marx and Engels also highlight how the state and productive relations develop, seeing ideology as a product not of an ephemeral basis of reality, but of the world around humans, the economy, material world, and their interactions with other people.
- The Cell of Historical Materialism: Marx and Engels, to develop a materialist conception of history, start from the basic unit of human life and build up from there. For them, history and human ideology began with the first human actions, which were to satisfy the most basic human needs (clothing, housing, food). This is the “cell” of historical materialism, as it’s the most basic driving force of human production and interaction with the environment. After an individual’s basic needs are met, they suddenly need secondary needs (needs that aren’t immediate for survival). Finally, after producing, people spread their ideas and production through interaction with others. Marx and Engels identify the family structure as the first inkling of this social reproduction with other people as a basis for creating relations. Through this act of interaction with the physical world to satisfy primary and secondary needs, and with other human beings, human systems of relations emerge: productive forces and relations of production (e.g., horse plows and feudalism, factories and capitalism, slaves and agriculture, soldiers and javelins).
Revolution, Communism, and Critiques of “True Socialism”
The only way for humanity to free itself from estrangement and alienation is through revolution. For communist revolution to happen, Marx and Engels identify two needs:
- That capitalism drives the vast majority of people to a point of desperation and hopelessness.
- That the productive forces and intercourse of the world reach such a point that the entire world becomes interconnected.
- Otherwise, as they argued, “(1) Communism could only exist as a local event; (2) The forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred superstitious conditions; and (3) Each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism.”
- With the whole mass of people participating in the overthrow of private property and alienation (which under capitalism reached new extremes never before seen), we would see “the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again.”
- Abolition of Division of Labor: Marx and Engels then describe how under communism there will be a breakdown of divisions of labor, where people are not confined to one sphere of work and therefore are able to become fully realized individuals whose products of work are both not alien to them and who are able to be a fisherman, hunter, herder, and intellectual as needed.
- Communism as a Real Movement: Is this too idealistic and impossible? Marx and Engels clearly answer: “No!” “Communism is for us not a stable state which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement, which abolishes the present state of things.” This is because in industrialized, highly developed capitalist society, all the tools for building communism already exist; the only thing standing in the way is not the productive forces (technological advancement) but the relations of production (how human beings interact with each other).
- Marx and Engels are adamant that for communism (what we call full communism, meaning stateless and classless) to be achieved, it must happen on a world stage. Only then is humanity able to get rid of the existing order of things; otherwise, a stateless communist society in an individual area would be crushed by its opponents. That is why current communist countries themselves call their societies socialist, ruled by a communist party.
- For revolution to happen, “conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of all existing forms. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existence of productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but against the very ‘production of life’ till then, the ‘total activity’ on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the ‘idea’ of this evolution has been expressed a hundred times already; as the history of communism proves.”
- Critique of Idealist Historians: Marx and Engels criticize how historians previously viewed history, focusing on individuals like rulers and kings, or the ideals of epochs as the driving forces of history. This is something historians still do today, reducing the entire history of the USSR or China to the whims of Stalin or Mao, implying individuals rather than the material world, realities, economies, and environment drive history in most liberal society history courses.
- In doing so, they criticize Ludwig Feuerbach, a Hegelian who came close to materialism but failed at the last minute in his analysis and fell into idealism. As Marx and Engels say: “for example, he [Feuerbach] sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the ‘higher perception’ and in the ideal ‘compensation in the species,’ and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure.”
- Marx and Engels scoff at historians who think world-historical events like wars and revolutions happen because of idealism. They instead trace the events of history to their materialist conception, saying that world-historical events happen due to the conditions that produce them, such as new machines, technologies, and sudden disruptions in trade routes spurring wars and historical movements.
- Ideology as Expression of Material Relations: Marx and Engels explain that within every epoch of society, the ideology of the masses is simply just the expression of the dominant material relations; the economy and class relations of a society make up the ideology of the masses of people. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Revolutionary ideas therefore cannot come without a revolutionary class; you have to have the material basis of a class that has certain needs, wants, desires, and contradictions within a system that it needs met through revolution.
- Example: American Revolution: For example, the American Revolution did not happen because George Washington “loved freedom” but because the American bourgeoisie wanted to be separate from Britain to consolidate their rule and profits easier, which made them a revolutionary class. The reason we are told that the American Revolution happened because the Founding Fathers loved freedom, liberty, etc., is because revolutionary classes need the whole of society to be involved in their process, so when they become the ruling classes, they universalize their ideals and act as though history happened because of these grand universal ideals rather than concrete reality. Ultimately, idealism comes from this phenomenon: the ruling classes push the concept that ideas are the rulers of history because it benefits their positions at the top (idealist conceptions like liberalism, fascism, protect the rulers of society). Idealism focuses more on words than actual material policies. “Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight.”
Capital, Private Property, and the Role of the Proletariat
- Town and Country Division: One often not talked about thing that Marx and Engels highlight is that the separation between town and country, which implies a concentration of labor, capital, and resources within urban areas and the lack of them in rural areas, was to them the beginning of capital and private property that was no longer tied to the land. As they say: “The separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development of capital independent of landed property—the beginning of property having its basis only in labor and exchange.”
- Within the Middle Ages, as landless serfs came to urban centers to sell their labor power, Marx and Engels found the earliest forms of capital and accumulation. However, because trade networks were so underdeveloped, this capital was not easily exchangeable and usually existed in the form of a craftsman’s tools, local shops, etc. In addition, labor and peasants were isolated economically, so whenever they tried revolution, they were not going to get very far.
- However, within feudalism, as merchant classes began to grow and trade with other towns in vast networks, suddenly production became specialized within towns. Towns could specialize in producing certain commodities, and tools to produce things could be traded far and wide. It was out of this growing merchant class, interchange between towns, and the reproduction that capitalism and the bourgeoisie class was birthed, along with the proletariat. And through trade, productive forces of countries (which you need highly developed productive forces to transition to another kind of economy) were assured, as before, individual machines within isolated economies could have been destroyed forever. It was out of this that movable capital that could be reinvested and workers that sold their labor power came about—i.e., the seeds of capitalism were birthed out of the contradictions of feudalism. This baby capitalism that was being birthed out of a dying feudalism would have gasoline poured on it with the discovery of the Americas, which would create a world economy, trade wars, and in which the flood of gold and silver would disrupt almost every aspect of the old feudal relations. From this, we would get global capitalism as we know it, in addition to the global creation of classes like the bourgeoisie and proletariat, eroding national barriers, large industrial hubs as the urban centers won over the countrysides, and movable capital.
- The State as a Bourgeois Tool: The state, Marx and Engels contend, is a tool of class rule, with it being in the age of capitalism “the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.” And “Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized, it follows that in the formation of all communal institutions the State acts as intermediary, that these institutions receive a political form. Hence the illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the will divorced from its real basis—on free will. Similarly, the theory of law is in its turn reduced to the actual laws.” This is where libertarianism and anarcho-capitalists misunderstand the state, believing it to simply be a negative force on capitalism and not capitalism itself.
- Industrialization for Socialism: Highly developed productive forces are important for building socialism and communism, as “only with big industry does the abolition of private property become possible.” This is because only when you reach a level of highly developed productive forces does private property become concentrated and therefore also easily seized by the masses. The masses themselves are alienated under highly developed productive forces and therefore can only undo this alienation by seizing the means of production for themselves.
- The seeds of socialism and communism are already within the system of capitalism: through depriving the workers of ownership over their own labor, through concentrating private property not in slaves or land but in big industrial machines and making it easily accessible in a way that could have never been done before in history, and no longer having any isolated economies where a revolution might become isolated and defeated, socialism and communism wait to be birthed out of capitalism just like capitalism was birthed out of feudalism.
- Communism is one of the world’s first materialist movements; it no longer treats the new society as ordained by God or some magical ideological force but liberates the masses on a recognition of that it inherited the material conditions and contradictions of previous generations. “Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse.” That is, the basis of historical change lies in the difference between technological development and how it is laid out in class relations (e.g., a post-scarcity world still experiencing scarcity because capitalists own the means of production).
- The Proletariat’s Unique Revolutionary Role: Marx and Engels, tracing the history of class relations, finally arrived at the conclusion that the proletariat, unlike the classes before it which were somewhat entrenched within their systems, are the ultimate alienated creatures as a class. If the proletariat ever wishes to gain individuality over just being a mass blob within a class, they “will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto.” This both throws a wrench into arguments that Marxism is anti-individualistic, as Marxism seeks to return the individual to its proper place through class abolition, but also makes the proletariat a uniquely revolutionary class throughout history because all past classes such as serfs or slaves either had something to lose within the system (such as land) or had no political power. The proletariat, however, has both political power and is alienated in a form of private property to an extreme point never before reached. It’s only logical then, being materialists, that the inevitable conclusion would be revolution.
Critique of “True Socialists”
Marx and Engels then criticize French and British communists who also fell into idealism, who also, under the guise of being scientific, actually turn communism into nothing more than a systemic critique rather than a real movement meant to change the world.
- As they say: “They detach the communist systems, criticism and polemical writings from the real movement, of which they are but the expression, and force them into an arbitrary connection with German philosophy. They detach the consciousness of certain historically conditioned spheres of life from these spheres and evaluate it in terms of true, absolute, i.e., German, philosophical consciousness.”
- Even though these British and German ideologists called themselves “true socialists,” they were anything but, as Marx and Engels say: “‘True socialism,’ which claims to be based on ‘science,’ is in actual fact merely another esoteric science; its theoretical literature is only for the Few who are initiated into the mysteries of the ‘thinking mind…[it] has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind.’” This is reminiscent of many of today’s “left-wing communists” or other so-called Marxists who turn Marxism into the very idealistic “German ideology” meant to interpret the world and never change it, under the guise of them being the “true communists.”
- Marx and Engels identify these “true socialists” as rightfully petit bourgeois who are less interested in actually establishing socialism but in being intellectually superior to everyone else. This is what so many “true communists” are today: they’re more concerned with being right than actually helping people; they’re labor aristocrats or mentally petty bourgeoisie who became Marxists to feel superior, not to actually help people; they became Marxists for all the wrong reasons. Ultimately, Marx and Engels identify “true socialists” as what they are: idealists.
- The biggest issues with these so-called true socialists was that they once again used man’s brain and ideas as the basis for their analysis of the world instead of the material world around them. In fact, Marx and Engels would warn that the so-called “true socialists” with their concepts such as “true property” were actually helping the bourgeoisie and giving them fodder, not the workers. Therefore, they insist communism must always remain revolutionary and not fall into catchphrases of “true socialism” or “true property,” as “it is essential to resist all phrases which obscure and dilute still further the realization that communism is totally opposed to the existing world order.”
- Asserting the materialist framework against their German ideology, Marx and Engels make it clear that “it is self-evident that the consciousness will only be the mirror in which nature contemplates itself”—i.e., human thought itself is just a reflection of the material world around us.
- Analogy of the Plant: Distinguishing idealism from materialism, Marx and Engels use the example of a plant: “plant does not ‘demand’ of nature all the conditions of existence enumerated above; unless it finds them already present it never becomes a plant at all; it remains a grain of seed… Far from ‘demanding’ anything, the plant is seen to depend utterly upon the actual conditions of its existence.” As they state, human beings cannot will things into existence with our ideologies; we are reliant on the world around us and how it operates, and therefore our analysis has to be rooted in that.
- Idealism makes the mistake of basing society not on history and the concrete world and the complex webs of relations these entail, but instead on the individual person. This individualism is predominant in liberal and bourgeois idealist thinking. Marx and Engels reject all of this, instead seeing society as a whole as a means for the foundations of socialism and communism, not just individuals, their thoughts, etc. Individualism is therefore a remnant of idealism.
- Marx and Engels would even describe these idealists as people who sat and studied an idealist version of the world all day, ignoring the real-world issues around them. Speaking in a humorous tone, they told these idealists that they should “will present yourself at the Hôtel de Ville—and the bourgeoisie is a thing of the past. You will step up to the Palais Bourbon—and it collapses,” essentially highlighting that these idealists have no way to actually change and affect the real world because their analysis isn’t based on a material study of it.
- Writing of idealist historians and their inability to actually go beyond ideas, Marx and Engels would say that history “becomes a mere succession of ideas and events which are of less interest than the life of any peasant or speculator.” Quoting an idealist historian who believed that social systems were nothing more than “a cascade of thoughts,” Marx and Engels entirely ridiculed the so-called ‘true socialists’ and their unscientific ideas.
- In addition, they saw true socialists as engaging in abstract idealism that ignored material things such as history, class struggle, social relations. Ultimately, the true socialists held onto abstract ideals rather than a concrete analysis, which Marx and Engels had to correct. As Marx and Engels would say, “Or rather the important thing for the true socialists is to foist upon everyone thoughts about human essence and to transform the different stages of socialism into different philosophies of human essence.” “Human essence” being an abstraction that these Hegelian socialists would use to skirt a true concrete analysis of the world.
- Another excellent quote that highlights their materialism is: “Man must be viewed in his real historical activity and existence. What manner of man can possibly be deduced from the lobe of his own ear, or from some other feature which distinguishes him from the beasts? Such a man is contained in himself, like his own pimple. Of course, the discovery that human feeling is human and not animal not only makes all psychological experiment superfluous but also constitutes a critique of all psychology.”
- An example of materialism that Marx and Engels bring up is that in order to abolish marriage and gender relations, you have to abolish private property first; the “true socialists” didn’t understand that. “If one assumes religion and politics to be the basis of material living conditions, then it is only natural that everything should amount in the last instance to an investigation of human essence, i.e., of man’s consciousness of himself.”
- Idealism also served to protect current injustices because its framework was ideology-first, making the injustices of the time seem natural. Materialism, compared to idealism, is radical in that way as it doesn’t make any claims of naturalism to present society and sees it as a temporary relation that it is. As Marx and Engels say: “Herr Grün forgets, further, that the bread which is produced today by steam mills, was produced earlier by wind-mills and water-mills and earlier still by hand-mills; he forgets that these different methods of production are quite independent of the actual eating of the bread and that we are faced, therefore, with an historical development of the productive process. He has no inkling of the fact that these different stages of production involve different relations of production to consumption, different contradictions of the two; it does not occur to him that the particular mode of production, together with the whole set of social conditions based upon it, must be taken into account if we are to understand these contradictions; that they must be changed practically if we are to solve these contradictions.” The idealist philosophers’ inability to apply this historical materialism led them to justify injustice as natural.
- Idealism also falls into a “great man of history” theory where history is simply moved forward by these great figures who think the right thoughts and change the world as a result. “For the idealist, every movement of world importance exists only in the head of some chosen being, and the fate of the world depends on whether this head, which has made all wisdom its own private property, is or is not mortally wounded by some realistic stone before it has had time to make its revelation.”
- For Marx and Engels, these idealist philosophers were the “snake oil salesmen” of ideology, selling fake cures for real problems—in this case, empty ideological phrases and abstraction of the concrete world without any plans to ever change the concrete world itself. Marx and Engels’ great realization was that claims of divine rights of kings, claims such as “I’m rich and worked hard to get to this position,” were all ideological tools designed to mask the true material driving forces of class society; that in fact, there is nothing special about the people at the top nor did they ‘earn it’ as they claim—they were simply the results of class society which needs those at the top, like lottery winners.
- Stalin would summarize Marx and Engels’ points excellently saying: “Socialists were obliged for a long time to wander blindly before they reached Social Democratic consciousness (communism)—scientific socialism. Here, too, there were many socialists and there was a large labor movement, but they marched independently of each other, going separate ways: the socialists had no roots among the working population and, consequently, their activities were abstract, futile. The workers on the other hand lacked leaders, organizers and orderly revolts.”
- Even other materialists like Feuerbach, a Hegelian who vastly improved the fields’ idealist issues, would be condemned by Marx and Engels because Marx and Engels always emphasized that the point of materialism was to change the material world itself, not just simply analyze it. As they say: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it.” In addition, Feuerbach would fail to see religion as something connected with the material world, instead as something that was special, being unable to free his material analysis from a lingering idealism.
Source
- Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Marxists Internet Archive. 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.
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