This is going to be super long. I am old and just starting to use the internet
for more than communication and research, so I don't know how to attach this in
a better way. That Said, I did not find this on a website, per se. This is a
reading assigned this week for my Politics and Culture class: Karl Marx "The
German Ideology."
As I was reading I reflected a bit on what Lane said about the geography of
religion. While the subject in this article is really on politics, capitalism
and ruling parties, it seemed it could also be applied to religions of the
world.
This country uses religion as a tool quite a bit. Even though there is supposed
to be a separation of church and state, the law makers don't abide entirely to
this. Here, we are Christ-based (yes, I meant to make that a lower cased 'c')
and in developing this country and ruling it now, people tend to resort to that
ideology when stuck on what policies to pass through. How our country blends
capitalism and Christianity is super interesting to me. It is like a split
personality.
The U.S. is, of course, not the only country that rules with religion in it's
pocket. We see examples of this EVERYWHERE. So as you put on your sneakers and
walk across the globe, look for examples of the intertwining of the two.
I highlighted some sections that really stuck out to me, cause the
language is super, well..... blegh, but it wouldn't let me.
EnJoy
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The German Ideology,
in Collected Works, vol.5 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1976),
J3J. 35—7,59—61
Karl Marx (1818—1883) was born into a middle class family in Trier in Germany
and educated in Bonn and Berlin. A radical journalist, he became a communist
from 1843, arguing for the central role of economic structure in understanding
politics and history. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), which he
wrote with Engels, he viewed history as a process of struggle among social
classes, which would culminate in the triumph of working class and the abolition
of capitalism. Exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848, he concentrated
his
intellectual efforts on political economy although only the first volume of his
principal study Capital (1867) was published in his lifetime. He had a leading
role in the International Working Men's Association, but only after his death.
did his theoretical ideas became central to working class parties in Europe.
Marx was invoked in support of a range of dictatorial communist movements in
Russia, China, and elsewhere in the twentieth century, usually with little
regard for niceties of what Marx actually thought.
Friedrich Engels (1820—1895) was born into a wealthy family of factory owners in
the Rhineland in Germany. He went to work for his family but was appalled at the
factory conditions that he encountered. He collaborated with Marx on The Holy
Family (1844), a scathing attack on German philosophy, and on subsequent works
up to Marx's move to England. After Marx's death, he became the literary
executor and interpreter of Marxism for the European Marxist political parties.
The German Ideology was posthumously published in 1932.
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, however,
of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's
imagination, but as they actually are, i.e., as they act, produce materially,
and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and
conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven
with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of
real life.
Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage stifi appear
as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental
productions expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality; religion,
metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc., that is, 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 [das Bewusstsein] can never be
anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Semi,] and the being of men is
their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations 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 it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of
setting 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; but
setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process
demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this
life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily,
sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and
bound to material premises. Morality; religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of
ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, 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 actual world, also their thinking and
the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life,
but life that determines consciousness. For the first manner of approach the
starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second
manner of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living
individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their
consciousness.
This manner 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 fIexity, 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 stifi abstract),or an imagined
activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.
Where speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently begins
real, positive science, the expounding of the practical activity, of the
practical process of development of men. Empty phrases about consciousness end,
and real knowledge has to take their
place. When the reality is described, a self-sufficient philosophy [die
selbstandige Philosoptie] 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 are derived from the observation of the historical development of men.
These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have 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, the difficulties begin only when one sets about the
examination and arrangement of the material—whether of a past epoch or of the
present—and its actual presentation. The removal of these difficulties is
governed by premises which certainly cannot be stated here, but which only the
study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each
epoch will make evident.
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, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so
that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole
subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of
the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations
grasped as ideas; hence of the relations 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. In so far,
therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an
historical 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 domination and
where, therefore, domination 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 formation of the illusions of the class about itself their chief source
of livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and effusions is more
passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this
class and have less time to make up effusions and ideas about themselves. Within
this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and
hostility between the two parts, but whenever a practical coffision occurs in
which the class itself is endangered they automatically vanish, in which case
there also vanishes the appearance of the ruling ideas being not the ideas of
the ruling class and having 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 of 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, then we can say, for
instance, that during the time 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, which necessarily come up against the phenomenon
that ever more 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 present 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 present them as the only rational,
universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes forward 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, as the whole mass of society confronting
the one ruling class. It can do this because initially its interest really is as
yet mostly 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 other classes which are
not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now enables these
individuals to raise themselves into the ruling class. When the French
bourgeoisie overthrew the rule of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible
for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only
insofar as they became bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves
domination only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on
the other hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class
then develops all the more sharply and profoundity. Both these things determine
the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its
turn, has as its aim a more decisive and more radical negation of the previous
conditions of society than all previous classes which sought to rule could have.
This whole appearance, 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.
