Roadmap:

- Thesis on Feuerback serves as a good reference for Marx’s materialism;

part of Feurerbach’s mistake is to not see that the essence of man
is the ensemble of social relations - that is, in one Marxian sense,
ideological.
- The German Ideology is Marx and Engels first real collaboration. In
Marx’s technological use of the term ideology, there is none;
Marxism is the overthrowing of ideology.
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Questions for discussion:

• Is the critique of ideology elitist in a derogatory sense?

• What lessons do Marx & Engels want us to draw here?

• Is this ‘ideology critique’ a form of the genetic fallacy?

On Feuerbach:
- The critical issue of all previous materialism is that the concrete thing is considered an
object; it is not considered subjective.
- That is why the active aspect of human productivity has been developed abstractly by
idealism.
- Feuerbach wants sensible objects that are distinct from thought objects, but he does not
understand that human activity itself is objective activity. Hence, in the Essence of
Christianity, he considers only theoretic activity to be truly human.
- Humans prove our truth, the actuality and power, the subjective aspect, through practical
means.
- Materialism considers society in two parts, one above the other.
- Once it is discovered that religion is anthropology, then the “earthly family” must be
nullified both in theory and in practice.
- The essence of man is not an abstraction inhering in isolated individuals, rather, it is an
actuality, it is the ensemble of social relations. Because Feuerbach does not undertake a
criticism of this actual essence, he is obliged to:
(1) to abstract from the process of history and to set religious dis- position off by itself, and to
assume an individual who is only abstractly - in isolation - human;
(2) to conceive of the human essence merely as 'species' , as an inner, dumb generality which
connects the many individuals in a merely natural way.
- Consequently, Feuerbach does not see that religious disposition is itself a social product.
- All social life is essentially practical.
- The highest point attained by perceptual materialism is the view of isolated individuals and
of bourgeois society.
- The standpoint of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the standpoint of the new is
human society or social humanity.
- Previous philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to
change it.
The German Ideology 135-148
- The actual spiritual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his actual
relationships. Only by these means are single individuals liberated from the various national
and local limitations, placed in a practical relation with the production of the entire world.
- The view of history, has as its object to analyse the actual process of production, starting
with the material production of daily life; and to grasp the form of commerce associated with
this process and generated by it.
- Not criticism, but revolution is the driving force of history and also of religion, philosophy,
and other theorising.
- The sum of productive forces, of capital, and of forms of social commerce that every
generation confronts as something given, is the real foundation of the essence of man.
- Relationship of men to nature is excluded from history.
- The 'essence' of the river fish is the water of a river. But this ceases to be its 'essence' and
becomes a medium of existence no longer suitable for the fish, as soon as the river is
harnessed by industry, as soon as it is polluted with dyes and other wastes and is used for
steamship traffic, as soon as its water is led into irrigation ditches in which the fish's medium
of existence can be withdrawn simply by draining it away. To proclaim that all those sorts of
contra- dictions are unavoidable anomalies is basically no different from the consolation that
Saint Max Stirner offers to the unsatisfied, when he tells them that this contradiction is their
own contradiction, this misfortune is their own misfortune, in which they can either resign
themselves, or keep their disgust to themselves, or rebel against it in some fantastic manner.
- He sees the perceptible world around him as the product of industry and of social conditions
- the result of the activity of a whole series of generations.
- Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist, history plays no role with him, and insofar as he
considers history, he is no materialist. With him materialism and history are mutually
exclusive.
- The class that is the dominant material power of society is, at the same time, its dominant
intellectual power.
- No. i. The ideas of the dominant individuals, who consist of mat- erial individuals under
empirical conditions and on empirical bases, must be separated from these dominant
individuals and the domin- ance of thoughts or illusions in history be recognised.
No. 2. Order must be brought to this dominance of thought, a mystical connection
demonstrated among the dominant thoughts that follow upon one another, which is
accomplished by construing them as 'self-determinations of the Concept'. (This is possible
because these thoughts are actually connected by the medium of their empir- ical foundation
<and because understood as pure thoughts they become self-differentiations, differentiations
effected by thinking).>

No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this 'self-determining Concept', it is transformed

into a person -'Self-consciousness' - or to appear really materialistic, into a series of persons
who represent 'the Concept' in history, 'the thinkers', the 'philosophers', <the ideo- logues,>*
who again are to be construed as the fabricators of history, as the 'the Council of Guardians',
as the dominant or governing ones. In so doing the various materialist elements are removed
from history and the speculative steed can be given free rein.

Lecture:
- Marx is trying to point out the fact that we are not individual atoms that you can describe
fully by just talking about them; you need to discuss their relations as well. Intrinsic
properties and relational properties. Our relational properties are essential to who we are.
- Materialism of this kind is a more politically progressive view than idealism (at the time).
- The German Ideology is an editor’s title.
- The lecturer thinks that Marx does not use ideology neutrally (to mean a system of belief),
since they do not believe there is a Marxist ideology. Instead, ideology is used in an
intrinsically negative way, and at least one part of it means to overthrow.
- Ideology is, then, a system of ideas of the ruling class designed to present themselves as
natural or inevitable.
- praxis is theory and praxis together.
- Marx says that these ideas turn out to be materially grounded things. This happens when the
imagination of some people concerning their real praxis is transformed into the sole
determining and active power.
- Ideology works because it appears autonomous and eternal. But this is an illusion to be
unmasked. Marx is in a line of thinkers who take themselves to have superseded Philosophy.
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