## Preface

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false
conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what
they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships
according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. 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. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach
men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which
correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical
attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and --
existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern
Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German
public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes
with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and
criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the
aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for
wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic
form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of
these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the
real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the
philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the
dreamy and muddled German nation.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were
drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of
gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by
stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be
sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he
fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all
statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was
the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

## Part I: Feuerbach.

Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook

### A. Idealism and Materialism

### The Illusions of German Ideology

As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few
years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The
decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy, which began with
Strauss, has developed into a universal ferment into which all the
“powers of the past” are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires
have arisen only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged
momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity by bolder and stronger
rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was
child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi
[successors of Alexander the Great] appear insignificant. Principles
ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with
unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45 more of the past
was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries.

All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought.

Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the
putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had
failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to
decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances.
The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the
exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new
combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his
apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to
start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later
when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all
efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled
in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production,
deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of
labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of
any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is
now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world
significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and
achievements.

If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which
awakens even in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of
national pride, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial
narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular
the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their
achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at
the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany.

[In the first version of the clean copy there follows a passage, which is crossed out:] |p. 21|

We preface therefore the specific criticism of individual representatives of this movement with a few general observations, elucidating the ideological premises common to all of them. These remarks will suffice to indicate the standpoint of our criticism insofar as it is required for the understanding and the motivation of the subsequent individual criticisms. We oppose these remarks |p. 3| to Feuerbach in particular because he is the only one who has at least made some progress and whose works can be examined de bonne foi.

### 1. Ideology in General, and Especially German Philosophy

A. We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.

[There follows a passage dealing with the premises of the materialist conception of history. It is not crossed out and in this volume it is reproduced as Section 2; see pp. 31-32]

### Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular

German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the
realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic
premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the
soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their
answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This
dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics
has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system,
however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their
polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this –
each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the
whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To
begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as
“substance” and “self-consciousness,” later they desecrated these
categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique,”
“Man,” etc.

The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to
Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these philosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness
and a religious conception really meant was determined
variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the
allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other
conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and
similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as
religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man – “man” in
the last resort – as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for
granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a
religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of
the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief
in dogmas. The world was sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at
last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all.

The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was
reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised
everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it
a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old
Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal
principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion
as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate.

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in
fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an
independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old
Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident
that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of
consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of
men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of
their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral
postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical
or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This
demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret
reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation.
The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering"
statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most
recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when
they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget,
however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other
phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world
when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only
results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at
that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of
view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further
embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant
elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into
the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation
of their criticism to their own material surroundings.

### First Premises of Materialist Method

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 verified 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 organisation 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, hydrographical, 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 men.

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

This production only makes its appearance with the increase of
population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of
individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again
determined by production.

### [3. Production and Intercourse. Division of Labour and Forms of Property – Tribal, Ancient, Feudal]

The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the
extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of
labour and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognised.
But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole
internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of
development reached by its production and its internal and external
intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is
shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has
been carried. Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a
quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance
the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development
of the division of labour.

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation
of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the
separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its
further development leads to the separation of commercial from
industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour inside
these various branches there develop various divisions among the
individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position
of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in
agriculture, industry and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates,
classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed
intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so
many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division
of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with
reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.

The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership. It
corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people
lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest
stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of
uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still
very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural
division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore,
limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below
them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the
family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the
growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of
war and of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership
which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by
agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery.
Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also
immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form
subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their
labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone,
therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the
communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain
in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their
slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this
communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the
same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The
division of labour is already more developed. We already find the
antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those
states which represent town interests and those which represent country
interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between
industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens
and slaves is now completely developed.

With the development of private property, we find here for the first
time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more
extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the
concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as
the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly from the
time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other
hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small
peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate
position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an
independent development.

The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity
started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started
out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the
sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a
large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In
contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset,
therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman
conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The
last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the
barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had
declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out
or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had
decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the
conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the
influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and
communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly
producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the
ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As
soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the
towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed
bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the
serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient
communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing
class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers
were different because of the different conditions of production.

This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns
in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades.
Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person.
The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the
need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist
was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the
escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the
whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually
accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable
numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of
journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a
hierarchy similar to that in the country.

Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on
the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on
the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding
the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by
the restricted conditions of production – the small-scale and primitive
cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little
division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself
the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly
strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility,
clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen,
apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns,
no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered
difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the
peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of
labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between
them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in
existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the
towns entered into mutual relations.

The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a
necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the
ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its
head.

### [4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History. Social Being and Social Consciousness]

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively
active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political
relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out
empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the
connection of the social and political structure with production. The
social structure and the State are continually evolving 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;
i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under
definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of
their will.

[The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The ideas which these
individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about
their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious
expression – real or illusory – of their real relations and activities, of their production,
of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption
is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals
a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relations
of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in
its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social
relations arising from it.

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. Conceiving, 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 politics, laws, morality, religion,
metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their
conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a
definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.
Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of
men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their
circumstances appear upside-down 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 physical life-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 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 and their corresponding
forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain 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 method,
which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves,
and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from
the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its
premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their
actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite
conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history
ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists
(themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects,
as with the idealists.

Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science
begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical
process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases,
and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted,
philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of
existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of
the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation
of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history,
these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can
only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate
the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe
or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of
history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about
the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our
historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The
removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite
impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process
and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make
evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use
in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by
historical examples.

### History: Fundamental Conditions

Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we
must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and,
therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a
position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves
before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and
many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the
means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And
indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history,
which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be
fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous
world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer],
it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any
interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental
fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due
importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and
they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and
consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if
they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in
an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in
the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts
to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to
write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.

The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action
of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been
acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the
first historical act. Here we recognise immediately the spiritual ancestry
of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they run out of
positive material and when they can serve up neither theological nor
political nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the
“prehistoric era.” They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we
proceed from this nonsensical “prehistory” to history proper; although,
on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this
“prehistory” with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves
safe there from interference on the part of “crude facts,” and, at the
same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative
impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.

The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into
historical development, is that men, who daily remake their own life,
begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between
man and woman, parents and children, the family. The family, which to
begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased
needs create new social relations and the increased population new
needs, a subordinate one (except in Germany), and must then be treated
and analysed according to the existing empirical data, not according to
“the concept of the family,” as is the custom in Germany.
These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as
three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear to the
Germans, three “moments,” which have existed simultaneously since the
dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in
history today.

The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in
procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a
natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand
the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions,
in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain
mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a
certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation
is itself a “productive force.” Further, that the multitude of
productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society,
hence, that the “history of humanity” must always be studied and
treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. But it is also
clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history,
because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of
comprehension and the material but also the “evidence of their senses,”
for across the Rhine you cannot have any experience of these things
since history has stopped happening. Thus it is quite obvious from the
start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one
another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of
production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is
ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of
the existence of any political or religious nonsense which in addition
may hold men together.

Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the
primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses
“consciousness,” but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness.
From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened”
with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated
layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as
consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for
other men,[A] and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as
well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the
necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a
relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations”
with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal,
its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is,
therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as
long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely
consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and
consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things
outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it
is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely
alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations
are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus
a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because
nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately:
this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is
determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere,
the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted
relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one
another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s
restricted relation to nature.) On the other hand, man’s consciousness of
the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the
beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This
beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere
herd-consciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep
by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or
that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like or tribal
consciousness receives its further development and extension through
increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental
to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops
the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of
labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops
spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g.
physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labour only
becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and
mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is
concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter
itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice,
that it really represents something without representing something real;
from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the
world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology,
philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this theory, theology, philosophy,
ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can
only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction
with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a
particular national sphere of relations through the appearance of the
contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national
consciousness and the practice of other nations, i.e. between the
national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in
Germany).

Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on
its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these
three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and
consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another,
because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact that
intellectual and material activity – enjoyment and labour, production and
consumption – devolve on different individuals, and that the only
possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its
turn of the division of labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that
“spectres,” “bonds,” “the higher being,” “concept,” “scruple,” are merely
the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the
isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations,
within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse
coupled with it move.

### Private Property and Communism

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit,
and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the
family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to
one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the
unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its
products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the
family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This
latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property,
but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of
modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power
of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover,
identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with
reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the
product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the
interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the
communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one
another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the
imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the
mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is
divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how,
as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage
exists between the particular and the common interest, as long,
therefore, 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. For as soon as the distribution of
labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of
activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He
is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must
remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in
communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity
but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do
one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I
have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or
critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves
produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control,
thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of
the chief factors in historical development up till now.

The social power,
i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation
of different individuals as it is determined by the division of
labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not
voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power,
but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of
which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the
contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages
independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime
governor of these.

How otherwise could, for instance, property have had a history at all,
have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example,
according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from
parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few, in England from
centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the
case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing
more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries,
rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand – a
relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like
the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and
misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes
nations to rise and to disappear – while with the abolition of the basis of
private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and,
implicit in this, 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?

### History as a Continuous Process

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that
separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into
world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power
alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick
on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has
become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to
be the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the
overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of
which more below) and the abolition of private property which is
identical with it, this power, which so baffles the German theoreticians,
will be dissolved; and that then the liberation of each single individual
will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes
transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real
intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his
real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated
from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical
connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole
world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided
production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round
dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of
individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the
control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the
action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed
men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be
expressed again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as “self-generation
of the species” (“society as the subject”), and thereby the
consecutive series of interrelated individuals connected with each other
can be conceived as a single individual, which accomplishes the mystery
of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly make one
another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.

### [5. Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism]

This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the
philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical
premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against
which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the
great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time,
the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of
which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a
high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this
development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual
empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local,
being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it
want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for
necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be
reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal
development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men
established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the
phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes
each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has
put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local
ones. Without this, (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
conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of
intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is
only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and
simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of
productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.
Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious
position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from
even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily
deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world
market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically,
just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical”
existence. World-historical existence of individuals means
existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs 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. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in
existence.

In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the reshaping of nature by men. The other aspect, the reshaping of men by men ... [Intercourse and productive power]

Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society. ...

Footnotes

Contradiction between Individuals and their conditions of life

1.
The building of houses. With savages each family has as a matter of course its
own cave or hut like the separate family tent of the nomads. This separate
domestic economy is made only the more necessary by the further development
of private property. With the agricultural peoples a communal domestic
economy is just as impossible as a communal cultivation of the soil. A great
advance was the building of towns. In all previous periods, however, the
abolition of individual economy, which is inseparable from the abolition of
private property, was impossible for the simple reason that the material
conditions governing it were not present. The setting-up of a communal
domestic economy presupposes the development of machinery, of the use of
natural forces and of many other productive forces – e.g. of water-supplies, of
gas-lighting, steam-heating, etc., the removal [of the antagonism] of town and
country. Without these conditions a communal economy would not in itself form
a new productive force; lacking any material basis and resting on a purely
theoretical foundation, it would be a mere freak and would end in nothing more
than a monastic economy – What was possible can be seen in the towns
brought about by condensation and the erection of communal buildings for
various definite purposes (prisons, barracks, etc.). That the abolition of
individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident.

2. [This paragraph appears as a marginal note in the manuscript – Ed.]
And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the
individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent
form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and
community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always
based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal
conglomeration – such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour
on a larger scale, and other interests – and especially, as we shall enlarge
upon later, on the classes, already determined by the division of labour,
which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one
dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles within the
State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the
struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in
which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among
one another (of this the German theoreticians have not the faintest
inkling, although they have received a sufficient introduction to the
subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and Die heilige
Familie). Further, it follows that every class which is struggling for
mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat,
postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of
domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to
represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first
moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general
is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them
as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them as in its turn a
particular, peculiar “general” interest; or they themselves must remain
within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the
practical struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really
run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes
practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory
“general” interest in the form of the State.

A. Marx struck out: “Mein Verhältnis zu meiner Umgebung ist mein Bewußtsein,” My relation to my environment is my consciousness. – See MEGA1 I.5 S. 571, Textvarianten 20.

### B. The Illusion of the Epoch

### Civil Society and the Conception of History

The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at
all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil
society. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its
premises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called
tribe, the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated in
our remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the true
source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of
history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines
itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals
within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It
embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and,
insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand
again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and
inwardly must organise itself as State. The word “civil society”
[bürgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the eighteenth century, when
property relationships had already extricated themselves from the
ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only
develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly
out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of
the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however,
always been designated by the same name.

### Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations,
each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive
forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the
one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed
circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a
completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that
later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to
the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French
Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes
“a person rating with other persons” (to wit: “Self-Consciousness,
Criticism, the Unique,” etc.), while what is designated with the words
“destiny,” “goal,” “germ,” or “idea” of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence
which earlier history exercises on later history.

The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another,
extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation
of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of
production and intercourse and the division of labour between various
nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world
history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which
deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns
the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a
world-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee which
have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century
by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the
Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against
Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of
liberation of 1813. From this it follows that this transformation of history
into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the
“self-consciousness,” the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical
spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof
of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks
and clothes himself.

### [7. Summary of the Materialist Conception of History]

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real
process of production, starting out from the material production of life
itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this
and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various
stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State,
to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of
consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their
origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the
whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the
reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like
the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but
remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain
practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material
practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and
products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by
resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,”
“spectres,” “fancies,” etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the
actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not
criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of
philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not
end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,” but
that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of
productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature
and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its
predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions,
which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but
also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a
definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances
make men just as much as men make circumstances.

This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of
intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as
something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have
conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have
deified and attacked; a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in
its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that
these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the
“Unique.” These 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
the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete
revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing
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 revolution has been
expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism
proves.

### [8. The Inconsistency of the Idealist Conception of History in General, and of German Post-Hegelian Philosophy in Particular]

In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of
history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor
matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore,
always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real
production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical
appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial.
With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from
history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The
exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able
to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and
all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical
epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an
epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious”
motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its true
motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The “idea,” the “conception”
of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into
the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their
practice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appears
with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State
and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power
which has produced this crude social form.

While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close
to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the “pure spirit,” and make
religious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of
history is the last consequence, reduced to its “finest expression,” of all
this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor
even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently
must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of “thoughts” that devour one
another and are finally swallowed up in “self-consciousness.”
—

Marginal note by Marx: So-called objective historiography [23] consisted precisely, in treating the historical relations separately from activity. Reactionary character.

— and even more consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere “tale of knights, robbers and ghosts,”[24] from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by “unholiness”. This conception is truly religious: it postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of history, and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself.

This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for instance the important question which has been under discussion in recent times: how exactly one “passes from the realm of God to the realm of Man” [Ludwig Feuerbach, Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums] – as if this “realm of God” had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the “realm of Man” to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense they find into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances.

The purely national character of these questions and solutions is moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like “the God-Man,” “Man,” etc., have presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that only “criticism and critics have made history,” [Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs] and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from “Mongolism” [Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] to history “with meaningful content,” that is to say, to the history, of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher and the dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of “criticism,” [Bruno Bauer] “man,” [Ludwig Feuerbach] and “the unique”. [Max Stirner] If for once these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century. [Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts] These pompous and arrogant hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany 1281 and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song [25] into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany.

### Feuerbach: Philosophic, and Real, Liberation

[...] It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is
deceiving himself when (Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2) by
virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a
communist,[26]
transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby
thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real
world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere
category. Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of
men to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need and
always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of
this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a
correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real
communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.
We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to
produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist
possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher...

As an example of Feuerbach’s acceptance and at the same time
misunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with our
opponents, we recall the passage in the Philosophie der Zukunft where
he develops the view that the existence of a thing or a man is at the
same time its or his essence, that the conditions of existence, the mode
of life and activity of an animal or human individual are those in which
its “essence” feels itself satisfied. Here every exception is expressly
conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot be
altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with
their living conditions, if their “existence” does not in the least
correspond to their “essence,” then, according to the passage quoted,
this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The
millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and
will prove this in time, when they bring their “existence” into harmony
with their “essence” in a practical way, by means of a revolution.
Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such cases,
but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in nature
which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, every
advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, so
that the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachian
propositions is steadily shrinking.

The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water – to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which Saint Max Stirner offers to the discontented, saving that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon then, should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as little from Saint Bruno’s allegation that these unfortunate circumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the muck of “substance,” have not advanced to “absolute self-consciousness and do not realise that these adverse conditions are spirit of their spirit.

### [II. 1. Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man]

[...] We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise
philosophers by explaining to them that the “liberation” of man is not
advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and
all the trash to “self-consciousness” and by liberating man from the
domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor
will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation
in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be
abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny,
serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in
general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain
food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
“Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about
by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce,
agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the manuscript]

In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is
taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective
trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical
development, and they take root and have to be combated. But this fight
is of local importance.

### [2. Feuerbach’s Contemplative and Inconsistent Materialism]

In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a
question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and
changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with
Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much
too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as
anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’s
conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere
contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man”
instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights
on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb
the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous
world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he
must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only
perceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which
perceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuous
world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining
ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society;
and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the
activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the
shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its
intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs.
Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him
through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The
cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few
centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore
only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become
“sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.

Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are and
happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be
seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For
instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno
[Bauer] goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and history”
(p. 110), as though these were two separate “things” and man did not
always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of
which all the “unfathomably lofty works” on “substance” and “self-consciousness” were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that
the celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in industry
and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser
or greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” of man with
nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a
corresponding basis. Industry and commerce, production and the
exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution,
the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined
by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that
in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and
machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and
weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds
only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would
have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists.
Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he
mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and
chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and
commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as
with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous
activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour
and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as
it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would
not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very
soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty,
nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of
external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the
original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation
has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from
nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history,
is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature
which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few
Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not
exist for Feuerbach.

Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure”
materialists in that he realises how man too is an “object of the senses.”
But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an “object of the
senses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realm
of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not
under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they
are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the
abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognising “the true,
individual, corporeal man,” emotionally, i.e. he knows no other “human
relationships” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then
idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he
never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living
sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when,
for example, he 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.

As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history,
and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him
materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is
already obvious from what has been said.

### Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas

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. The class which has the means of material
production 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 consciousness, and
therefore think. Insofar, 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
its 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 already 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
reality 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 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
presupposes 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 at a given time, without bothering ourselves
about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if
we thus 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, etc. 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, i.e.
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, that is, expressed in
ideal form: it has to 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, if only because it is opposed to a
class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it
appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.
—

Marginal note by Marx: Universality corresponds to (1) the class versus the estate, (2) the competition, world-wide intercourse, etc., (3) the great numerical strength of the ruling class, (4) the illusion of the common interests (in the beginning this illusion is true), (5) the delusion of the ideologists and the division of labour.

— It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected
with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under
the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been
able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory,
therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are
not winning a dominant position, but only insofar 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 insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class,
therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the
class ruling previously, whereas 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 turn, aims at a more decided
and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all
previous classes which sought to rule.

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 class rule
in general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, 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.

Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals
and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of
the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been
reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to
abstract from these various ideas “the idea,” the notion, etc. as the
dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate
ideas and concepts as “forms of self-determination” on the part of the
concept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all the
relationships of men can be derived from the concept of man, man as
conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by the
speculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the
Geschichtsphilosophie that he “has considered the progress of the
concept only” and has represented in history the “true theodicy.”
(p.446.) Now one can go back again to the producers of the “concept,”
to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes then to the
conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all times
been dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see[27], already expressed by
Hegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history
(hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three efforts.

No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical
reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from
these actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in
history.

No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a
mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is
managed by understanding them as “acts of self-determination on the
part of the concept” (this is possible because by virtue of their empirical
basis these ideas are really connected with one another and because,
conceived as mere ideas, they become self-distinctions, distinctions
made by thought).

No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this “self-determining
concept” it is changed into a person – “Self-Consciousness” – or, to
appear thoroughly materialistic, into a series of persons, who represent
the “concept” in history, into the “thinkers,” the “philosophers,” the
ideologists, who again are understood as the manufacturers of history,
as the “council of guardians,” as the rulers. Thus the whole body of
materialistic elements has been removed from history and now full rein
can be given to the speculative steed.

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. They take
every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines
about itself is true.

This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the
reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of
ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the
practical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings
and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from
their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.

### C. The Real Basis of Ideology

### Division of Labour: Town and Country

[...] [1] From the first there follows the premise of a highly developed
division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the second, the
locality. In the first case the individuals must be brought together; in the
second they find themselves alongside the given instrument of
production as instruments of production themselves. Here, therefore,
arises the difference between natural instruments of production and
those created by civilisation. The field (water, etc.) can be regarded as a
natural instrument of production. In the first case, that of the natural
instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the
second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, property
(landed property) appears as direct natural domination, in the second, as
domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The
first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond:
family, tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent
of one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first case,
what is involved is chiefly an exchange between men and nature in
which the labour of the former is exchanged for the products of the
latter; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men among
themselves. In the first case, average, human common sense is
adequate — physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity;
in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must
already be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the
proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship,
on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material
shape in a third party - money. In the first case, small industry exists, but
determined by the utilisation of the natural instrument of production and
therefore without the distribution of labour among various individuals; in
the second, industry exists only in and through the division of labour.

### [2. The Division of Material and Mental Labour. Separation of Town and Country, The Guild System]

The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation
of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins
with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State,
from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation
to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law League).

The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of
administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus
of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the
population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division
of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in
actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of
production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country
demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The
antagonism between town and country can only exist within the
framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the
subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite
activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a
restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and
daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here
again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter
exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism
between town and country is one of the first conditions of communal
life, a condition which again depends on a mass of material premises
and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the
first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) 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 labour and exchange.

In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made
from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had
become free, each man's own particular labour was his only property
apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost
solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of serfs
constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the country
against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised municipal
military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of
labour, the necessity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a
time when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of
the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests
of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously
acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country:
these were the causes of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds.
We have not at this point to go further into the manifold modifications of
the guild-system, which arise through later historical developments. The
flight of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right
through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the
country, came separately into the towns, where they found an organised
community, against which they were powerless and in which they had
to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for
their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. These
workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power,
since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the
guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to
their interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and
therefore not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never
managed to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for
day-labourers in the towns created the rabble.

These towns were true "associations", called forth by the direct need,
the care of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying
the means of production and defence of the separate members. The
rabble of these towns was devoid of any power, composed as it was of
individuals strange to one another who had entered separately, and who
stood unorganised over against an organised power, armed for war, and
jealously watching over them. The journeymen and apprentices were
organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The
patriarchal relationship existing between them and their masters gave
the latter a double power — on the one hand because of their influence
on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the
journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond
which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and
separated them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to
the existing order by their simple interest in becoming masters
themselves. While, therefore, the rabble at least carried out revolts
against the whole municipal order, revolts which remained completely
ineffective because of their powerlessness, the journeymen never got
further than small acts of insubordination within separate guilds, such as
belong to the very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of the
Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally
ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the
peasants.

In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was
as yet [quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds themselves, not at all
developed between the individual workers. Every workman had to be
versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that
was to be made with his tools. The limited commerce and the scanty
communication between the individual towns, the lack of population and
the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labour, and
therefore every man who wished to become a master had to be
proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval
craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which
was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason,
however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his
work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which
he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose
work is a matter of indifference to him.

Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consisting of a
house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers; and
not being realisable, on account of the backwardness of commerce and
the lack of circulation, it descended from father to son. Unlike modern
capital, which can be assessed in money and which may be indifferently
invested in this thing or that, this capital was directly connected with
the particular work of the owner, inseparable from it and to this extent
estate capital.

### Further Division of Labour

The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of
production and commerce, the formation of a special class of merchants;
a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a former period,
had been handed down (among other things with the Jews) and which
very soon appeared in the newly formed ones. With this there was given
the possibility of commercial communications transcending the
immediate neighbourhood, a possibility, the realisation of which
depended on the existing means of communication, the state of public
safety in the countryside, which was determined by political conditions
(during the whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants
travelled in armed caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced needs
(determined by the stage of culture attained) of the region accessible to
intercourse.

With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the
extension of trade through the merchants beyond the immediate
surroundings of the town, there immediately appears a reciprocal action
between production and commerce. The towns enter into relations with
one another, new tools are brought from one town into the other, and
the separation between production and commerce soon calls forth a new
division of production between the individual towns, each of which is
soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions
of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down.

It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the
productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for
later development or not. As long as there exists no commerce
transcending the immediate neighbourhood, every invention must be
made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions of
barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a country
with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start right over
again from the beginning. In primitive history every invention had to be
made daily anew and in each locality independently. How little highly
developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given
even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians,
whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come
through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by
Alexander and its consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting
in the Middle Ages. Only when commerce has become world
commerce and has as its basis large-scale industry, when all nations are
drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired
productive forces assured.

### The Rise of Manufacturing

The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the
various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of production
which had outgrown the guild-system. Manufactures first flourished, in
Italy and later in Flanders, under the historical premise of commerce
with foreign nations. In other countries, England and France for example,
manufactures were at first confined to the home market. Besides the
premises already mentioned manufactures depend on an already
advanced concentration of population, particularly in the countryside,
and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals,
partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among the
merchants.

That labour which from the first presupposed a machine, even of the
crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development.
Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the peasants as a
secondary occupation to procure their clothing, was the first labour to
receive an impetus and a further development through the extension of
commerce. Weaving was the first and remained the principal
manufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, consequent on
the growth of population, the growing accumulation and mobilisation of
natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries
called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual extension
of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus,
which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing.
Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, who continued, and
still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class of
weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the whole home
market and usually for foreign markets too.

Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and soon
splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted the
trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly in
villages and market-centres without guild organisation, which gradually
became towns, and indeed the most flourishing towns in each land.

With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly changed.
The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital was provided
by the rise of merchants whose capital was from the beginning movable,
capital in the modern sense as far as one can speak of it, given the
circumstances of those times. The second advance came with
manufacture, which again made mobile a mass of natural capital, and
altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against that of
natural capital.

At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants from
the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly, just as earlier the
guild-towns had [served] as a refuge for the peasants from [the
oppressive landed nobility].

Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a
period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of
retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to
serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture,
and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From
this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the
disintegration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we
find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and
permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that,
for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were
only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the
most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid
rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.

With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered into a
competitive relationship, the struggle for trade, which was fought out in
wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the nations,
insofar as they were connected at all, had carried on an inoffensive
exchange with each other. Trade had from now on a political
significance.

With the advent of manufacture the relationship between worker and
employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relationship between
journeyman and master continued to exist; in manufacture its place was
taken by the monetary relation between worker and capitalist — a
relationship which in the countryside and in small towns retained a
patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, the real manufacturing towns, quite
early lost almost all patriarchal complexion.

Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an
enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with
the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new
products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver
which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the
classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed
property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers,
colonisation; and above all the extension of markets into a world market,
which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and
more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into
which in general we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation
of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the nations
amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly greater
extension and animosity.

The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumulation
of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated
to extend their production, natural capital remained stationary or even
declined. Trade and manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the
guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was
dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to bow to the might of the
great merchants and manufacturers. Hence the decline of the guilds, as
soon as they came into contact with manufacture.

The intercourse of nations took on, in the epoch of which we have
been speaking, two different forms. At first the small quantity of gold
and silver in circulation involved the ban on the export of these metals;
and industry, for the most part imported from abroad and made
necessary by the need for employing the growing urban population,
could not do without those privileges which could be granted not only, of
course, against home competition, but chiefly against foreign. The local
guild privilege was in these original prohibitions extended over the whole
nation. Customs duties originated from the tributes which the feudal
lords exacted as protective levies against robbery from merchants
passing through their territories, tributes later imposed likewise by the
towns, and which, with the rise of the modern states, were the
Treasury's most obvious means of raising money.

The appearance of American gold and silver on the European
markets, the gradual development of industry, the rapid expansion of
trade and the consequent rise of the non-guild bourgeoisie and of
money, gave these measures another significance. The State, which was
daily less and less able to do without money, now retained the ban on
the export of gold and silver out of fiscal considerations; the bourgeois,
for whom these masses of money which were hurled onto the market
became the chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly content
with this; privileges established earlier became a source of income for
the government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation
there appeared the export duty, which, since it only [placed] a hindrance
in the way of industry, had a purely fiscal aim.

The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century
and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and navigation
had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which played a
secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable consumers;
and after long struggles the separate nations shared out the opening
world market among themselves. This period begins with the Navigation
Laws [2] and colonial monopolies. The competition of the nations among
themselves was excluded as far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and
treaties; and in the last resort the competitive struggle was carried on
and decided by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime
nation, the English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture.
Here, already, we find concentration in one country.

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the
home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as
much as possible by differential duties. The working-up of home-produced
material was encouraged (wool and linen in England, silk in
France), the export of home-produced raw material forbidden (wool in
England), and the [working-up] of imported material neglected or
suppressed (cotton in England). The nation dominant in sea trade and
colonial power naturally secured for itself also the greatest quantitative
and qualitative expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be
carried on without protection, since, if the slightest change takes place
in other countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably
favourable conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for
this very reason can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the
mode in which it is carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century, in
the countryside, it is to such an extent interwoven with the vital
relationships of a great mass of individuals, that no country dare
jeopardise its existence by permitting free competition. Insofar as it
manages to export, it therefore depends entirely on the extension or
restriction of commerce, and exercises a relatively very small reaction
[on the latter]. Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of
[the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants and
especially the shippers who more than anybody else pressed for State
protection and monopolies; the manufacturers also demanded and
indeed received protection, but all the time were inferior in political
importance to the merchants. The commercial towns, particularly the
maritime towns, became to some extent civilised and acquired the
outlook of the big bourgeoisie, but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois
outlook persisted. Cf Aikin, [3] etc.
The eighteenth century was the century of trade. Pinto says this
expressly: "Le commerce fait la marotte du siècle" ; and: "Depuis
quelque temps il n'est plus question que de commerce, de navigation
et de marine." ["Commerce is the rage of the century." "For some
time now people have been talking only about commerce, navigation
and the navy." - Ed.]

This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the
export of gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in money; by
banks, national debts, paper money; by speculation in stocks and shares
and stockjobbing in all articles; by the development of finance in
general. Again capital lost a great part of the natural character which
had still clung to it.

[4. Most Extensive Division of Labour.

Large-Scale Industry]

The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country, England,
developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradually created for
this country a relative world market, and thus a demand for the
manufactured products of this country, which could no longer be met by
the industrial productive forces hitherto existing. This demand,
outgrowing the productive forces, was the motive power which, by
producing big industry — the application of elemental forces to industrial
ends, machinery and the most complex division of labour — called into
existence the third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages.
There already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new
phase: freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of
theoretical mechanics, etc. (Indeed, the science of mechanics perfected
by Newton was altogether the most popular science in France and
England in the eighteenth century.) (Free competition inside the nation
itself had everywhere to be conquered by a revolution — 1640 and 1688
in England, 1789 in France.)

Competition soon compelled every country
that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by
renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good
against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under
protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in spite of these
protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only
a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means
of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to
itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced
the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the
centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals
to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible
ideology, religion, morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made
them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time,
insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of
them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world,
thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It
made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of
labour the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed natural
growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour exists, and
resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the place
of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities
which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed
the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of
the commercial town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the
automatic system. [Its development] produced a mass of productive
forces, for which private [property] became just as much a fetter as the
guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the
developing craft. These productive forces received under the system of
private property a one-sided development only, and became for the
majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces
could find no application at all within this system. Generally speaking,
big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes
of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various
nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still
retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which
in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already
dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same
time stands pitted against it. Big industry makes for the worker not only
the relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable.

It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level of
development in all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard
the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created
by big industry assume leadership of this movement and carry the whole
mass along with them, and because the workers excluded from big
industry are placed by it in a still worse situation than the workers in big
industry itself. The countries in which big industry is developed act in a
similar manner upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as
the latter are swept by universal commerce into the universal
competitive struggle. [4]

These different forms are just so many forms of the organisation of
labour, and hence of property. In each period a unification of the existing
productive forces takes place, insofar as this has been rendered
necessary by needs.

### The Relation of State and Law to Property

The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle Ages, is
tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war, with the
Germans by the rearing of cattle. In the case of the ancient peoples,
since several tribes live together in one town, the tribal property appears
as State property, and the right of the individual to it as mere
"possession" which, however, like tribal property as a whole, is confined
to landed property only. Real private property began with the ancients,
as with modern nations, with movable property. — (Slavery and
community) (dominium ex jure Quiritum [5]). In the case of the nations
which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through
various stages — feudal landed property, corporative movable property,
capital invested in manufacture — to modern capital, determined by big
industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has
cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the
State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern
private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased
gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen
entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has
become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of
property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of
State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class
and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no
longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean
average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the
community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside
civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which
the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes,
for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The
independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries
where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where
the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a
part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say,
in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over
the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect
example of the modern State is North America. The modern French,
English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists
only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into
the consciousness of the normal man.

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 epitomised, it follows that the State mediates in the formation
of all common institutions and that the 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, justice is in its
turn reduced to the actual laws.

Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the
disintegration of the natural community. With the Romans the
development of private property and civil law had no further industrial
and commercial consequences, because their whole mode of production
did not alter. (Usury!)

With modern peoples, where the feudal community was disintegrated
by industry and trade, there began with the rise of private property and
civil law a new phase, which was capable of further development. The
very first town which carried on an extensive maritime trade in the
Middle Ages, Amalfi, also developed maritime law. As soon as industry
and trade developed private property further, first in Italy and later in
other countries, the highly developed Roman civil law was immediately
adopted again and raised, to authority. When later the bourgeoisie had
acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in order to
overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie, there began
in all countries — in France in the sixteenth century — the real
development of law, which in all countries except England proceeded on
the basis of the Roman Codex. In England, too, Roman legal principles
had to be introduced to further the development of civil law (especially
in the case of movable property). (It must not be forgotten that law has
just as little an independent history as religion.)

In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the
result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi [6] itself asserts on
the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely
independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing. In practice, the abuti has very definite economic limitations for the owner of private property, if he does not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi pass into other hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with reference to his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true property in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which the philosophers call an idea). This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the mere will,
necessarily leads, in the further development of property relationships, to
the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing without really
having the thing. If, for instance, the income from a piece of land is lost
owing to competition, then the proprietor has certainly his legal title to it
along with the jus utendi et abutendi. But he can do nothing with it: he
owns nothing as a landed proprietor if in addition he has not enough
capital to cultivate his ground. This illusion of the jurists also explains
the fact that for them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that
individuals enter into relationships among themselves (e.g. contracts); it
explains why they consider that these relationships [can] be entered into
or not at will, and that their content rests purely on the individual [free]
will of the contracting parties.

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new
forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.),
the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of
acquiring property.

Notes, written by Marx, intended for further elaboration

12. FORMS OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The influence of the division of labour on science.

The role of repression with regard to the state, law, morality, etc.

It is precisely because the bourgeoisie rules as a class that in the law it must give itself a general expression.

Natural science and history.

There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.

[Marginal note by Marx:] To the “community” as it appears in the ancient state, in feudalism and in the absolute monarchy, to this bond correspond especially the religious conceptions.

Why the ideologists turn everything upside-down.

Clerics, jurists, politicians.

Jurists, politicians (statesmen in general), moralists, clerics.

For this ideological subdivision within a class: 1) The occupation assumes an independent existence owing to division of labour. Everyone believes his craft to be the true one. Illusions regarding the connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be cherished by them because of the very nature of the craft. In consciousness — in jurisprudence, politics, etc. — relations become concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of the relations also become fixed concepts in their mind. The judge, for example, applies the code, he therefore regards legislation as the real, active driving force. Respect for their goods, because their craft deals with general matters.

Idea of law. Idea of state. The matter is turned upside-down in ordinary consciousness.

Religion is from the outset consciousness of the transcendental arising from actually existing forces.

This more popularly.

Tradition, with regard to law, religion, etc.

Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life-process. How does it happen that their relations assume an independent existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life become superior to them?

In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the development of the productive power at any particular time.

Landed property. Communal property. Feudal. Modern.

Estate property. Manufacturing property. Industrial capital.

Footnotes

1. Four pages of the manuscript are missing here. - Ed.

2. Navigation Laws — a series of Acts passed in England from 1381 onwards to protect English shipping against foreign companies. The Navigation Laws were modified in the early nineteenth century and repealed in 1849 except for a reservation regarding coasting trade, which was revoked in 1854.

3. The movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still remained, however, relatively slow. The splitting-up of the world market into separate parts, each of which was exploited by a particular nation, the exclusion of competition among themselves on the part of the nations, the clumsiness of production itself and the fact that finance was only evolving from its early stages, greatly impeded circulation. The consequence of this was a haggling, mean and niggardly spirit which still clung to all merchants and to the whole mode of carrying on trade. Compared with the manufacturers, and above all with the craftsmen, they were certainly big bourgeois; compared with the merchants and industrialists of the next period they remain petty bourgeois. Cf. Adam Smith.

### [6. Competition of Individuals and the Formation of Classes]

4. Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite, apart from the fact that for the purposes of this union — if it is not to be merely local — the necessary means, the great industrial cities and cheap and quick communications, have first to be produced by big industry. Hence every organised power standing over against these isolated individuals, who live in relationships, daily reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history, or that the individuals should banish from their minds relationships over which in their isolation they have no control.

5. Ownership in accordance with the law applying to full Roman citizens. - Ed.

6. The right of using and consuming (also: abusing), i.e. of disposing of a thing at will. - Ed.

### D. Proletarians and Communism

### Individuals, Class, and Community

In the Middle Ages the citizens in each town were compelled to unite
against the landed nobility to save their skins. The extension of trade,
the establishment of communications, led the separate towns to get to
know other towns, which had asserted the same interests in the struggle
with the same antagonist. Out of the many local corporations of burghers
there arose only gradually the burgher class. The conditions of life of the
individual burghers became, on account of their contradiction to the
existing relationships and of the mode of labour determined by these,
conditions which were common to them all and independent of each
individual. The burghers had created the conditions insofar as they had
torn themselves free from feudal ties, and were created by them insofar
as they were determined by their antagonism to the feudal system which
they found in existence. When the individual towns began to enter into
associations, these common conditions developed into class conditions.
The same conditions, the same contradiction, the same interests
necessarily called forth on the whole similar customs everywhere. The
bourgeoisie itself with its conditions, develops only gradually, splits
according to the division of labour into various fractions and finally
absorbs all propertied classes it finds in existence [1] (while it develops the
majority of the earlier propertyless and a part of the hitherto propertied
classes into a new class, the proletariat) in the measure to which all
property found in existence is transformed into industrial or commercial
capital. The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have
to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on
hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the
class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the
individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence
predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal
development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under
it. This is the same phenomenon as the subjection of the separate
individuals to the division of labour and can only be removed by the
abolition of private property and of labour itself. We have already
indicated several times how this subsuming of individuals under the
class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc.

If from a philosophical point of view one considers this evolution of
individuals in the common conditions of existence of estates and
classes, which followed on one another, and in the accompanying
general conceptions forced upon them, it is certainly very easy to
imagine that in these individuals the species, or "Man", has evolved, or
that they evolved "Man" — and in this way one can give history some
hard clouts on the ear. [2] One can conceive these various estates and
classes to be specific terms of the general expression, subordinate
varieties of the species, or evolutionary phases of "Man".

This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be
abolished until a class has taken shape, which has no longer any
particular class interest to assert against the ruling class.

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal
powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by
dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be
abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to
themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible
without the community. Only in community [with others has each]
individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the
community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous
substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has
existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of
the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class.
The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined,
always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at
the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against
another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as
well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and
through their association.

Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on
themselves within their given historical conditions and relationships, not
on the "pure" individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course
of historical evolution, and precisely through the inevitable fact that
within the division of labour social relationships take on an independent
existence, there appears a division within the life of each individual,
insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch
of labour and the conditions pertaining to it. (We do not mean it to be
understood from this that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc.
cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined
by quite definite class relationships, and the division appears only in
their opposition to another class and, for themselves, only when they go
bankrupt.) In the estate (and even more in the tribe) this is as yet
concealed: for instance, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a
commoner always a commoner, apart from his other relationships, a
quality inseparable from his individuality. The division between the
personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions
of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class,
which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is
only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of
individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem
freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their
conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free,
because they are more subjected to the violence of things. The
difference from the estate comes out particularly in the antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the estate of the
urban burghers, the corporations, etc. emerged in opposition to the
landed nobility, their condition of existence — movable property and craft
labour, which had already existed latently before their separation from
the feudal ties — appeared as something positive, which was asserted
against feudal landed property, and, therefore, in its own way at first
took on a feudal form. Certainly the refugee serfs treated their previous
servitude as something accidental to their personality. But here they only
were doing what every class that is freeing itself from a fetter does; and
they did not free themselves as a class but separately. Moreover, they
did not rise above the system of estates, but only formed a new estate,
retaining their previous mode of labour even in their new situation, and
developing it further by freeing it from its earlier fetters, which no longer
corresponded to the development already attained. [3]

For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their
existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing
modern society, have become something accidental, something over
which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no
social organisation can give them control. The contradiction between the
individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life
forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed
from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving
at the conditions which would place him in the other class.

Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and
assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and
hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are
to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very
condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of
all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves
directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which
society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the
State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must
overthrow the State.

It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the
communal relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and
which was determined by their common interests over against a third
party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only
as average individuals, only insofar as they lived within the conditions of
existence of their class — a relationship in which they participated not as
individuals but as members of a class. With the community of
revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions
of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is
just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it.
It is just this combination of individuals (assuming the advanced stage of
modern productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions of the
free development and movement of individuals under their control —
conditions which were previously abandoned to chance and had won an
independent existence over against the separate individuals just because
of their separation as individuals, and because of the necessity of their
combination which had been determined by the division of labour, and
through their separation had become a bond alien to them. Combination
up till now (by no means an arbitrary one, such as is expounded for
example in the Contrat social, but a necessary one) was an agreement
upon these conditions, within which the individuals were free to enjoy
the freaks of fortune (compare, e.g., the formation of the North
American State and the South American republics). This right to the
undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance
has up till now been called personal freedom. These conditions of
existence are, of course, only the productive forces and forms of
intercourse at any particular time.

### Forms of Intercourse

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the
basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the
first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of
hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and
subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation
is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the
conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of
unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true
basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently
of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding
intercourse of individuals themselves. Thus the communists in practice
treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as
inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or
the destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without
believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating
them.

### Contradiction between individuals and their conditions of life as contradiction between productive forces and the form of intercourse

The difference between the individual as a person and what is
accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but an historical fact.
This distinction has a different significance at different times — e.g. the
estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth
century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have
to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among
the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not
according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life.

What appears accidental to the later age as opposed to the earlier — and
this applies also to the elements handed down by an earlier age — is a
form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite stage of
development of the productive forces. The relation of the productive
forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse
to the occupation or activity of the individuals. (The fundamental form of
this activity is, of course, material, on which depend all other forms - mental,
political, religious, etc. The various shaping of material life is, of
course, in every case dependent on the needs which are already
developed, and the production, as well as the satisfaction, of these
needs is an historical process, which is not found in the case of a sheep
or a dog (Stirner's refractory principal argument adversus hominem),
although sheep and dogs in their present form certainly, but malgré eux,
are products of an historical process.) The conditions under which
individuals have intercourse with each other, so long as the above-mentioned
contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their
individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these
definite individuals, living under definite relationships, can alone produce
their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions
of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. The definite
condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the
contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned
nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only
becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus
exists for the later individuals. Then this condition appears as an
accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to
the earlier age as well.

These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity,
later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a
coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists
in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become
a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed
productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity
of individuals - a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then
replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond at every stage to
the simultaneous development of the productive forces, their history is at
the same time the history of the evolving productive forces taken over by
each new generation, and is, therefore, the history of the development of
the forces of the individuals themselves.

Since this evolution takes place naturally, i.e. is not subordinated to a
general plan of freely combined individuals, it proceeds from various
localities, tribes, nations, branches of labour, etc. each of which to start
with develops independently of the others and only gradually enters into
relation with the others. Furthermore, it takes place only very slowly; the
various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only
subordinated to the prevailing interest and trail along beside the latter
for centuries afterwards. It follows from this that within a nation itself
the individuals, even apart from their pecuniary circumstances, have
quite different developments, and that an earlier interest, the peculiar
form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that belonging
to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in possession of a
traditional power in the illusory community (State, law), which has won
an existence independent of the individuals; a power which in the last
resort can only be broken by a revolution. This explains why, with
reference to individual points which allow of a more general summing-up,
consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the
contemporary empirical relationships, so that in the struggles of a later
epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities.

On the other hand, in countries which, like North America, begin in
an already advanced historical epoch, the development proceeds very
rapidly. Such countries have no other natural premises than the
individuals, who settled there and were led to do so because the forms
of intercourse of the old countries did not correspond to their wants.
Thus they begin with the most advanced individuals of the old countries,
and, therefore, with the correspondingly most advanced form of
intercourse, before this form of intercourse has been able to establish
itself in the old countries. This is the case with all colonies, insofar as
they are not mere military or trading stations. Carthage, the Greek
colonies, and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, provide
examples of this. A similar relationship issues from conquest, when a
form of intercourse which has evolved on another soil is brought over
complete to the conquered country: whereas in its home it was still
encumbered with interests and relationships left over from earlier
periods, here it can and must be established completely and without
hindrance, if only to assure the conquerors' lasting power. (England and
Naples after the Norman conquest, when they received the most perfect
form of feudal organisation.)

### [5. The Contradiction Between the Productive Forces and the Form of Intercourse as the Basis for Social Revolution]

This contradiction between the productive forces and the form of
intercourse, which, as we saw, has occurred several times in past
history, without, however, endangering the basis, necessarily on each
occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various
subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of various
classes, contradiction of consciousness, battle of ideas, etc., political
conflict, etc. From a narrow point of view one may isolate one of these
subsidiary forms and consider it as the basis of these revolutions; and
this is all the more easy as the individuals who started the revolutions
had illusions about their own activity according to their degree of culture
and the stage of historical development.

Thus all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view,
in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of
intercourse. Incidentally, to lead to collisions in a country, this
contradiction need not necessarily have reached its extreme limit in this
particular country. The competition with industrially more advanced
countries, brought about by the expansion of international intercourse, is
sufficient to produce a similar contradiction in countries with a backward
industry (e.g. the latent proletariat in Germany brought into view by view
by the competition of English industry).

### Conquest

This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the
fact of conquest. Up till now violence, war, pillage, murder and robbery,
etc. have been accepted as the driving force of history. Here we must
limit ourselves to the chief points and take, therefore, only the most
striking example — the destruction of an old civilisation by a barbarous
people and the resulting formation of an entirely new organisation of
society. (Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine
Empire and the Turks.)

With the conquering barbarian people war itself is still, as indicated
above, a regular form of intercourse, which is the more eagerly exploited
as the increase in population together with the traditional and, for it, the
only possible, crude mode of production gives rise to the need for new
means of production. In Italy, on the other hand, the concentration of
landed property (caused not only by buying-up and indebtedness but
also by inheritance, since loose living being rife and marriage rare, the
old families gradually died out and their possessions fell into the hands
of a few) and its conversion into grazing land (caused not only by the
usual economic forces still operative today but by the importation of
plundered and tribute-corn and the resultant lack of demand for Italian
corn) brought about the almost total disappearance of the free
population. The very slaves died out again and again, and had
constantly to be replaced by new ones. Slavery remained the basis of the
whole productive system. The plebeians, midway between freemen and
slaves, never succeeded in becoming more than a proletarian rabble.
Rome indeed never became more than a city; its connection with the
provinces was almost exclusively political and could, therefore, easily be
broken again by political events.

Nothing is more common than the notion that in history up till now it
has only been a question of taking. The barbarians take the Roman
Empire, and this fact of taking is made to explain the transition from the
old world to the feudal system. In this taking by barbarians, however,
the question is, whether the nation which is conquered has evolved
industrial productive forces, as is the case with modern peoples, or
whether their productive forces are based for the most part merely on
their association and on the community. Taking is further determined by
the object taken. A banker's fortune, consisting of paper, cannot be
taken at all, without the taker's submitting to the conditions of
production and intercourse of the country taken. Similarly the total
industrial capital of a modern industrial country. And finally, everywhere
there is very soon an end to taking, and when there is nothing more to
take, you have to set about producing. From this necessity of producing,
which very soon asserts itself, it follows that the form of community
adopted by the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of
development of the productive forces they find in existence; or, if this is
not the case from the start, it must change according to the productive
forces. By this, too, is explained the fact, which people profess to have
noticed everywhere in the period following the migration of the peoples,
namely, that the servant was master, and that the conquerors very soon
took over language, culture and manners from the conquered. The
feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but
had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial
organisation of the army during the actual conquest, and this only
evolved after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the
action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries. To
what an extent this form was determined by the productive forces is
shown by the abortive attempts to realise other forms derived from
reminiscences of ancient Rome (Charlemagne, etc.).

Contradictions of Big Industry: Revolution

Our investigation hitherto started from the instruments of production,
and it has already shown that private property was a necessity for
certain industrial stages. In industrie extractive private property still
coincides with labour; in small industry and all agriculture up till now
property is the necessary consequence of the existing instruments of
production; in big industry the contradiction between the instrument of
production and private property appears from the first time and is the
product of big industry; moreover, big industry must be highly developed
to produce this contradiction. And thus only with big industry does the
abolition of private property become possible.

[9. Contradiction Between the Productive Forces and the Form of Intercourse]

In big industry and competition the whole mass of conditions of
existence, limitations, biases of individuals, are fused together into the
two simplest forms: private property and labour. With money every form
of intercourse, and intercourse itself, is considered fortuitous for the
individuals. Thus money implies that all previous intercourse was only
intercourse of individuals under particular conditions, not of individuals
as individuals. These conditions are reduced to two: accumulated labour
or private property, and actual labour. If both or one of these ceases,
then intercourse comes to a standstill. The modern economists
themselves, e.g. Sismondi, Cherbuliez, etc., oppose "association of
individuals" to "association of capital." On the other hand, the
individuals themselves are entirely subordinated to the division of labour
and hence are brought into the most complete dependence on one
another. Private property, insofar as within labour itself it is opposed to
labour, evolves out of the necessity of accumulation, and has still, to
begin with, rather the form of the communality; but in its further
development it approaches more and more the modern form of private
property. The division of labour implies from the outset the division of
the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the splitting-up
of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the
division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property
itself. The more the division of labour develops and accumulation grows,
the sharper are the forms that this process of differentiation assumes.
Labour itself can only exist on the premise of this fragmentation.

Thus two facts are here revealed. First the productive forces appear
as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the
individuals, alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the
individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one
another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in
the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus, on the one
hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were,
taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces
of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals
only insofar as they are owners of private property themselves. Never, in
any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a form so
indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals, because their
intercourse itself was formerly a restricted one. On the other hand,
standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of
the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and
who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract
individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to
enter into relation with one another as individuals.

The only connection which still links them with the productive forces
and with their own existence — labour — has lost all semblance of self-activity
and only sustains their life by stunting it. While in the earlier
periods self-activity and the production of material life were separated,
in that they devolved on different persons, and while, on account of the
narrowness of the individuals themselves, the production of material life
was considered as a subordinate mode of self-activity, they now diverge
to such an extent that altogether material life appears as the end, and
what produces this material life, labour (which is now the only possible
but, as we see, negative form of self-activity), as the means.

[10. The Necessity, Preconditions and Consequences of the Abolition of Private Property]

Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must
appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve
self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This
appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the
productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which
only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone,
therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character
corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.

The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the
development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material
instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments
of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of
capacities in the individuals themselves.

This appropriation is further determined by the persons appropriating.
Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off
from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no
longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a
totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a
totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were
restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude
instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this
crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state
of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but
they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their
own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of
individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in
the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of
production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all.
Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore,
only when controlled by all.

This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it
must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the
character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and
through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier
mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is
overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal
character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution
cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself
of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.

Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which
corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals
and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour
into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited
intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the
appropriation of the total productive forces through united individuals,
private property comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a
particular condition always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of
individuals and the particular private gain of each man have themselves
become accidental.

The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of labour,
have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name
"Man". They have conceived the whole process which we have outlined
as the evolutionary process of "Man," so that at every historical stage
"Man" was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force
of history. The whole process was thus conceived as a process of the
self-estrangement of "Man," and this was essentially due to the fact that
the average individual of the later stage was always foisted on to the
earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals
of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract
image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of
history into an evolutionary process of consciousness.

The Necessity of the Communist Revolution

Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain
these further conclusions:

(1) In the development of productive forces
there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse
are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only
cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces
(machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth,
which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its
advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided
antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all
members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the
necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness,
which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the
contemplation of the situation of this class.

(2) The conditions under
which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the
rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its
property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form
of the State; and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed
against a class, which till then has been in power.

(3) In all revolutions
up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was
only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new
distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution
is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with
labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves,
because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a
class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the
expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within
present society; and

(4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this
communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the
alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can
only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is
necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it
can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages
and become fitted to found society anew.

Footnotes

1. [Marginal note by Marx:] To begin with it absorbs the branches of labour directly belonging to the State and then all ±[more or less] ideological estates.

2. The Statement which frequently occurs with Saint Max that each is all that he is through the State is fundamentally the same as the statement that bourgeois is only a specimen of the bourgeois species; a statement which presupposes that the class of bourgeois existed before the individuals constituting it. [Marginal note by Marx to this sentence:] With the philosophers pre-existence of the class.

3. N.B. — It must not be forgotten that the serf's very need of existing and the impossibility of a large-scale economy, which involved the distribution of the allotments among the serfs, very soon reduced the services of the serfs to their lord to an average of payments in kind and statute-labour. This made it possible for the serf to accumulate movable property and hence facilitated his escape out of the possession of his lord and gave him the prospect of making his way as an urban citizen; it also created gradations among the serfs, so that the runaway serfs were already half burghers. It is likewise obvious that the serfs who were masters of a craft had the best chance of acquiring movable property.

4. [Marginal note by Marx:] The people are interested in maintaining the present state of production.