Two young men wrote this book and then let the mice eat it. Marx was twenty-seven, Engels twenty-five, and in the winter of 1845–46 they sat in Brussels — Marx newly expelled from Paris by the French government, Engels down from Barmen — and set out to settle accounts with the philosophy they had grown up inside. The manuscript they produced was never published in their lifetime. No publisher in Germany would touch it; the police made sure of some of that, and the trends it attacked made sure of the rest. Years later Marx remembered the decision to abandon it almost cheerfully: they had achieved their main purpose, which was to clear their own heads, and they left the pages "to the gnawing criticism of the mice" all the more willingly for that. The German Ideology is, in other words, a book its authors thought they could afford to lose. The strange fate of Marxism in the twentieth century is that this discarded settling of accounts became one of its founding scriptures — and that the state which canonised it as scripture was, in the exact sense the book invented, a machine for producing ideology.
That is the paradox to hold in mind while reading. The phrase in the title is a coinage and an insult. "The German ideology" is what Marx and Engels called the habit of German intellectuals of taking the ideas in their own heads for the moving forces of history — of imagining that if you changed people's thoughts about the world you would change the world. The book's whole polemical purpose is to puncture that illusion, and it does so with the most economical image in all of Marx's early writing. It opens, in the Preface, with a joke: "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." Knock the idea of gravity out of their heads, declares this fellow, and drowning will cease. That, say the authors, is precisely what the Young Hegelian philosophers propose to do about the real relations that oppress real people: fight them as ideas. The book is the antidote to that fantasy. It is worth remembering, when we reach the apparatus that framed it in Moscow, that a good deal of official "Marxism-Leninism" fought gravity for a living.
This edition, prepared by Progress Publishers in Moscow, is the standard English one, its text corresponding to Volume 5 of the Collected Works and translated from the German. It is generously equipped. It carries the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's long Introduction; both volumes of the work as Marx and Engels planned them; Engels's essay "The True Socialists", written as a continuation; four pieces of addenda, including the two versions of the celebrated "Theses on Feuerbach"; a hundred and fifty-six numbered notes; and four full indexes. It is a proper scholarly edition, and — as with any Moscow edition of a classic — its scholarship is exactly where the argument of this introduction has to be made.
What the book achieves is the materialist conception of history, stated for the first time as a connected whole. Before The German Ideology the idea exists in Marx in flashes; here it is set out as a method. Its premises, the authors insist, are not dogmas but "real individuals ... their activity and the material conditions under which they live"; and its governing reversal is stated in one sentence that a century of argument has not worn out: "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness." From this follows the analysis of the division of labour, the account of how successive forms of property arise from successive stages of production, and the compact, devastating proposition about culture and power that would echo through every later debate about the sociology of 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." Read that sentence, and then look again at the imprint page in front of you. The book hands you the instrument for reading it.
Two further things the book does supremely. It gives the most human picture of communism Marx ever drew — the passage, mocked and loved in equal measure, in which the abolition of the fixed division of labour would make 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." And it gives the definition of communism that matters most for judging what was later done in its name: "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." Communism is a movement, not a condition; a direction of travel, not a destination one can announce has been reached. Keep that sentence. We will need it.
Where does the book thin out? First, in its sheer bulk. The section called "Saint Max" — the demolition of Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Unique and His Property, better known in English as The Ego and Its Own) — runs to some three hundred pages, longer than everything else combined, and it is a line-by-line pursuit of a book almost no one now reads. There is brilliant matter buried in it, but it is buried, and the reader who wants the living Marx should go first to the Feuerbach chapter and the Preface and treat the rest as a quarry. Second, the theory itself sometimes leans harder on the "productive forces" than the authors' own practice warrants, so that history can look as though it is pushed from behind by technology rather than fought out by classes — a tilt that later, in less careful hands, would harden into a fatalism the mature Marx never held. And third — most important for what follows — the great Feuerbach chapter was never finished. It survives as a bundle of drafts, some in Marx's hand and some in Engels's, without a settled order. That unfinished state is not a footnote. It is the thing the Soviet apparatus had to do something about, and what it did is the heart of this book's later history.
Turn to the Publishers' Note at the front of this very volume and you will find an admission made in the flat voice of routine. "The text of Chapter I, in particular, has been rearranged," it says, "so as to make it correspond as nearly as possible to the original manuscript"; and "the arrangement of this chapter follows that of the Russian edition published in 1965 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the CPSU." Read slowly, that is a remarkable sentence. The Feuerbach chapter — the most important forty pages Marx and Engels wrote in the 1840s, the fountainhead of historical materialism — reaches the reader in an order chosen by a committee in Moscow in 1965. There was an earlier order, the one David Ryazanov used when he first gave the chapter to the world in the 1920s; there was another in the 1932 collected edition; there is this one. The manuscript itself dictates none of them cleanly. This is not a scandal — an unfinished text has to be arranged somehow, and honest editors say so, as this note half-does. It is, rather, the perfect emblem of the whole relationship. The state that presented itself as the custodian of an unaltered, authoritative Marx was in fact, and unavoidably, arranging him; and it arranged him without ever inviting the reader to notice that the arrangement was a choice.
The deeper irony is reflexive, and it is the point of reading this book today. The German Ideology is the founding text of the critique of ideology — of the claim that a ruling class projects its own interests as universal truths and teaches them as the natural order of things. In the Soviet Union that critique was turned into its own opposite. "Marxism-Leninism" became a state doctrine, taught by rote, policed for deviation, printed in millions of copies in every language, and enforced as the settled framework within which all thought had to move. It was, precisely, a ruling idea of a ruling stratum: the intellectual force of the bureaucracy that had raised itself above Soviet society and needed a universal justification for its rule. The book that coined "the German ideology" as a term of abuse was made the cornerstone of a Soviet ideology in the identical sense — a set of ideas mistaken for, and imposed as, reality. The valiant fellow fighting the idea of gravity found his twentieth-century heir in a state that denounced "bourgeois ideology" from within a doctrine that had itself frozen solid.
And measure the state against the two sentences we were told to keep. Communism, the book says, is "not a state of affairs which is to be established" but "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." In 1936 the Soviet constitution announced that socialism had been established — a state of affairs, achieved, complete, to be defended rather than moved through. The book looks forward to the abolition of the division of labour and, elsewhere in Marx and Engels, to the withering away of the state; the Soviet state entrenched the division of labour as a hierarchy of privilege and swelled the state into the most powerful apparatus on earth. On every count where the young Marx pointed one way, the mature bureaucracy went the other, and printed the young Marx while it did so.
None of this is an argument against Marx, and it is emphatically not the liberal argument that the doctrine contained the tyranny in embryo. The men who wrote this book were revolutionaries, and the first workers' state was born into a catastrophe — civil war, foreign invasion, blockade, famine, the physical destruction of the very working class that had made the revolution — and left isolated when the revolution it counted on in Germany failed. The degeneration has objective roots in that isolation and backwardness, and a subjective author in the bureaucratic caste that, under Stalin, usurped the revolution and rewrote its meaning. The proof is written into the history of this very text. The scholar who first rescued The German Ideology from the mice and gave it to the world was David Ryazanov, founder of the Marx-Engels Institute and the greatest editor the movement has produced. In 1931 he was arrested, expelled from the Party, and exiled; in 1938 he was shot. The man who published the critique of ideology was destroyed by the ideology-state, and Trotsky, who defended him, understood exactly what the murder meant. The canonised text is not the cause of the betrayal. It is the measure of it.
The value of The German Ideology now is that it is the best weapon ever forged against the thing it was made to serve. Its critique of ideology cuts most sharply when it is turned on "Marxism-Leninism" itself: apply the book's own test — whose material interests does this ruling idea universalise? — and the embalmed doctrine dissolves into what it always was, the self-justification of a privileged stratum. Its definition of communism as a real movement, not an established state, is the standing refutation of every regime that declared the future already present and demanded to be defended rather than surpassed. Its horizon — the abolition of the division of labour, the reunion of the many-sided human being scattered by class society — remains the most radical thing anyone has said about work, and it has lost none of its force in an age that divides labour more minutely than Marx could have imagined. And its method, used as Marx used it, is an invitation to inquiry that must earn its results, not a set of results announced in advance and defended with a truncheon.
That living, restless, anti-dogmatic Marxism was kept alive, against the embalmed one, by the tradition that runs from Trotsky's insistence that the revolution had been betrayed rather than fulfilled through to Ernest Mandel's patient reconstruction of Marx's method. Read against its Stalinist ossification, The German Ideology is not a monument but a workshop — two young men clearing their heads in public, leaving us the tools and, in the fate of the state that printed them, the sharpest possible lesson in how to use them. The book that its authors abandoned to the mice turns out to be the one that best explains what devoured the revolution made in its name, and the one that still, page for page, points past it.