that nothing is to be gained by exchanging the cult of abstract humanity for an equally abstract cult of revolution or revolutionary practice, and that by doing so one may indeed be running the risk of an even more perverse domination.
It is certain that Marx and Engels could not sidestep this objection, for they aspired to be critics both of the idealism and essentialism of the philosophers and of the communists (more precisely the humanist communists). We have seen that this dual perspective was at the heart of the category which had just emerged for Marx as the ‘solution’ to the enigmas of philosophy: revolutionary practice. How, then, did he respond to this challenge? By transforming his symbolic notion of ‘praxis’ into a historical and sociological concept of production and by posing a question unprecedented in philosophy (even if the term was not absolutely new) – the question of ideology.
(The) German Ideology
These two moves are, of course, closely interlinked. The one constantly presupposes the other and this is what gives The German Ideology its coherence, despite its unfinished and unbalanced composition (Chapter 3 on Stirner, ‘Saint Max’, alone occupies almost two-thirds of the work and largely consists in verbal jousting with the typically ‘ironic’ argumentation of The Ego and its Own, the outcome of which, from the strictly rhetorical point of view, is rather inconclusive). The work is entirely organized around the notion of production, taken here in a general sense to refer to any human activity of formation and transformation of nature. It is no exaggeration to say that, after the ‘ontology of praxis’ heralded in the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology sets out an ‘ontology of production’ since, as Marx himself tells us, it is production which shapes man’s being (his Sein, to which he will oppose his consciousness: Bewusst-sein, literally, his ‘being conscious’). It is, more exactly, the production of his own means of existence, an activity at once personal and collective (transindividual) which transforms him at the same time as it irreversibly transforms nature and which, in this way, constitutes ‘history’.
Conversely, however, Marx will show that ideology is itself produced, before constituting itself as an autonomous structure of production (the ‘products’ of which are ideas, collective consciousness: this is the object of the theory of intellectual labour). The critique of ideology is the necessary precondition for a knowledge of social being as development of production: from its immediate forms, linked to the subsistence of individuals, to its most mediated forms, which play only an indirect role in the reproduction of human life. To gain access to this guiding thread of the whole of history, it is not enough to contemplate the facts; one can only get to it through the critique of the dominant ideology, because this latter is both an inversion of reality and an autonomization of the ‘intellectual products’ in which the trace of the real origin of ideas has been lost and which denies the very existence of that origin.
This is why I spoke above of a reciprocal presupposition. At the same time, however, Stirner’s objection can be rejected, because the point is no longer to denounce the abstraction of ‘universals’, of ‘generalities’, of ‘idealities’, by showing that that abstraction substitutes itself for real individuals; it now becomes possible to study the genesis of those abstractions, their production by individuals, as a function of the collective or social conditions in which they think and relate to one another. And, as a result, instead of being endlessly faced with an all-or-nothing choice (either accepting or rejecting all abstractions en bloc), one has a criterion by which it is possible to discriminate between those abstractions which represent real knowledge and those which merely have a function of misrecognition or mystification; and, even better, to discriminate between circumstances in which the use of abstractions is mystificatory and those in which it is not. The nihilism inherent in Stirner’s position is thus averted at a fundamental level, without the need for a radical critique of the dominant ideas being contested. Indeed, that need is clearly recognized.
The revolutionary overturning of history
The German Ideology takes the form, then, of an account of the genesis, both logical and historical, of social forms, the guiding thread of which is the development of the division of labour. Each new stage in the division of labour characterizes a certain mode of production and exchange – hence a periodization which is, inevitably, very reminiscent of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Rather than a mere narrative of the stages of universal history, what we have here in fact (as in Hegel) are the typical moments of the process by which history became universalized, became the history of humanity. However, the content of the exposition is as far removed as can be from the Hegelian objective spirit. For that universalization does not consist in the formation of a Rechtstaat rationally extending its powers over the whole of society and ‘totalizing’ the activities of that society. On the contrary, such a juridico-statist universality seemed to Marx the ideological inversion par excellence of social relations. The point is, rather, that history has become the interaction, the interdependence of all the individuals and all the groups belonging to humanity.
Marx’s erudition, already great, was mobilized to demonstrate that the counterpart to the division of labour was the development of forms of ownership (from communal or State ownership to private ownership formally open to all). Each mode of production implies a historical form of appropriation and ownership, which is merely another way of looking at the question. Consequently, it is precisely the division of labour which governs the constitution and dissolution of the larger and larger, less and less ‘natural’ social groups, from primitive communities to classes, by way of the various guilds, orders or estates (Stände) … Each of these groups, ‘dominant’ or ‘dominated’, must be understood, all in all, as a two-sided, contradictory reality: both as a form of relative universalization and as a form of limitation or particularization of human relations. Their series is therefore merely the great process of negation of particularity and particularism, but a negation through the experience and complete realization of their forms.
The starting-point of this development was the productive activity of human beings contending with nature: what Marx calls the real premiss (wirkliche Voraussetzung), which he stresses at length, against the illusions of a philosophy ‘devoid of premises’.18 As for its end point, that is ‘bourgeois/civil’ society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), which is founded on the different forms of ‘intercourse’ (Verkehr: which might also be translated as communication) between competing private owners. Or rather, the end point is the contradiction such a society harbours within it. For individuality, considered as an absolute, amounts in practice for the masses to an absolute precariousness or ‘contingency’ of the conditions of existence, just as ownership (of oneself, of objects) amounts to a generalized dispossession.
One of the great theses of The German Ideology, taken directly from the liberal tradition but turned against it, is that ‘bourgeois’ society is irreversibly established once class differences prevail over all others and in practice sweep them away. The State itself, no matter how overgrown it may seem, is now merely a function of those differences. It is at this point that the contradiction between particularism and universality, cultivation and brutishness, openness and exclusion is at its most acute, and that between wealth and poverty, the universal circulation of goods and the restriction of access to them, the apparently unlimited productivity of labour and the worker’s confinement in a narrow specialism becomes explosive. Each individual, wretched as he or she may be, has become potentially a representative of humankind, and the function of each group is defined on a world scale. History is then on the point of emerging from its own ‘prehistory’.
The whole argument of The German Ideology tends in fact to demonstrate that this situation is as such intolerable but that, by the development of its own logic, it contains the premisses of a revolutionary overturning (Umwälzung) which would amount, quite simply, to the substitution of communism for bourgeois/civil society. The transition to communism is therefore imminent once the forms and contradictions of bourgeois/civil society are completely
