Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 13
What Is Retained
The text opens programmatically: the premises are not arbitrary, not dogmas, but real premises, from which one can abstract only in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their action, and their material conditions of life. This sounds like a break. Yet Hegel too had dealt with real individuals: the person in abstract right, the moral subject, the members of the family, the citizens of civil society. The difference lies not in the fact that individuals are being discussed, but in the determination under which they stand—for Marx, productive activity. This too is found in Hegel, in the system of needs, where labor, production, and exchange are treated.
The demand that all historiography must proceed from the natural foundations and their modification through human action likewise breaks no new ground. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel had included a section on the geographical basis of world history, distinguishing three types and their effect on the way of life of peoples: “1. the waterless highland with its great steppes and plains, 2. the valley plains (the land of transition), which are cut through and watered by great rivers”—and third, the coastal land, whose task is “to represent and maintain the connection with the world” (TWA 12, 115 f.). The concept comes from Carl Ritter, Hegel’s colleague in Berlin, who had founded human geography, as distinct from Alexander von Humboldt’s natural-scientific geography. Ritter’s geography treats the earth as the dwelling place of humankind. Hegel’s library contained Ritter’s work; the inventory of his estate, drawn up for the sale of his books, lists it. Hegel does not explicitly cite him in the lectures, but the concept is recognizably the same.
Marx and Engels are thus demanding here what Hegel had already done—and what Hegel himself had taken over from the state of human geography at the time. The placement is also the same: in Hegel, the section stands at the beginning; the word “foundation” already says that something rests upon it.
The difference lies in the scope of what is meant to follow from it. In Hegel, the geographical foundation determines the conditions under which peoples live, but it does not determine what they make of them; the further determinations are not derived from it but stand alongside it. In Marx and Engels, the claim is cast more broadly—the material conditions of life are supposed to explain what arises upon them. Whether this broader claim is actually fulfilled is a separate question; the methodological passages that raise it do not carry it through.
Also retained is the category of civil society, and explicitly so. It is said to encompass the entire material intercourse of individuals at a given stage of the productive forces and to have been designated by the same name in all periods. Added to this is the determination that it is the basis of the state and the rest of the superstructure—the famous metaphor. But the content of the concept—production, division of labor, exchange, the satisfaction of needs—is the same as in Hegel.
The sequence of forms of property as well—tribal property, ancient communal and state property, feudal property—has its counterpart in Hegel’s shapes of ethical life and the succession of historical worlds. Marx grasps the stages economically, Hegel according to the consciousness of freedom; the form of a developmental logic is the same. And the movement toward world history that arises when the self-containment of individual nations breaks down through production and commerce is, in substance, Hegel’s determination of how the connection of local cultures becomes the world.
The Critique of the Young Hegelians
The critique of the three opponents has a common form, and it is Hegelian. Feuerbach had criticized religion as a projection of human qualities and had stopped short at the abstract species-being; Bauer had elevated critique itself to a principle; Stirner had set absolute singularity against all general structures. In all three cases Marx shows that a single moment was isolated and made absolute. Against Feuerbach: the universal is not an abstract species but historically concrete. Against Bauer: negation is not mere destruction but determinate negation, which builds something up. Against Stirner: the singular is not isolated but mediated.
This is the very figure with which Hegel criticizes the understanding that fixes determinations instead of grasping them in their mediation. Marx applies it to Hegel’s own students, and it works.
The critique of Feuerbach is here the sharpest and at the same time the most Hegelian. Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not appear in his work; and insofar as he considers history, he is no materialist. Feuerbach sees the cherry tree as immediately given and fails to notice that it was brought into this zone by trade only a few centuries ago. That the human being must be grasped not abstractly but in his historical determinateness is Hegel’s fundamental insight against the abstract anthropology of the Enlightenment.
What Comes of It
The German Ideology is thus not a fundamental critique of Hegel but a translation of Hegelian categories into the language of social science, joined to a political turn. From the history of spirit to the history of production, from conceptual reconciliation to practical transformation—the accent shifts, the structure remains: developmental logic, sequence of stages, world history, mediation of the particular and the universal.
Two shifts, however, are more than mere accents. One is the base-superstructure metaphor, which turns reciprocal mediation into a one-sided relation of causation. The other is the determination of consciousness as an expression of relations. Both belong to the methodological passages, and these deserve attention in their own right.
The Premises That Are Not Supposed to Be Dogmas
The text begins with a rejection of presuppositionlessness:
“The premises with 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 action, and their material conditions of life” (MEW 3, 20).
And the first of these premises is the body: “The first fact to be established is thus the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. […] All historiography must proceed from these natural foundations and their modification in the course of history through the action of human beings” (MEW 3, 21).
What is Hegelian about this is the refusal to begin with an abstraction. Hegel had objected to Fichte and Schelling that a system must not begin with a posited presupposition. Marx turns the same objection against the Young Hegelians—and against Hegel himself, insofar as his own beginning with pure being still seems too abstract to Marx.
And what is new is the determination of what distinguishes human beings from animals. “Men themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence” (MEW 3, 21). Not consciousness, not religion, not reason—production.
This is a genuine shift. Hegel had sought the distinction in thought; Marx seeks it in an activity. Yet production, too, is purposive, and to that extent the framework remains the same.
The Division of Labor as Key Concept
Here stands the sentence on which the whole conception of history hangs:
“The various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor” (MEW 3, 22).
What this accomplishes: it turns property into a relation between persons, not a relation between a person and a thing. This is exactly what Hegel had prepared in the Philosophy of Right, where property attains its actuality only in contract—that is, in relation to others.
And what goes beyond this: Marx makes the division of labor the explanatory instance. It is not the concept of the person that produces the forms of property, but the stage of the division of labor.
Consciousness and Its Relation to Life
The text’s most famous sentence stands in a context that makes it more precise than it sounds on its own:
“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. […] Even the phantoms formed in the human brain are necessary sublimates of their material, empirically verifiable life process, bound to material premises” (MEW 3, 26).
And then: “It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness” (MEW 3, 27).
The sentence is less radical than it sounds. It does not claim that thought is a mere by-product—“sublimate” means that something rises and takes on a form of its own. The camera obscura, the image immediately preceding it, is more precise: the image is upside down, but it is the image of the real thing.
And it can be read in Hegelian terms. Hegel had said that spirit is the result of its own activity—not a faculty preceding the activity. Marx determines this activity as material production. This is a determination of the mode of realization, not a denial of spirit.
Civil Society as the Hearth of History
The concept comes from Hegel, and Marx states what it accomplishes in Hegel’s hands and what it does not:
“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” (MEW 3, 36).
And the conclusion, directed against Hegel: “that this civil society is the true hearth and stage of all history, and how absurd is the previous view of history, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states” (ibid.).
This is the reversal from the Kreuznach manuscript, put into practice. There Marx had shown that Hegel turns family and civil society into moments of the state, although they are its presuppositions. Here he draws the consequence for historiography.
The Ruling Ideas
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas […] The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations” (MEW 3, 46).
The addition that is usually overlooked turns this into a theory rather than a mere assertion: within the ruling class, “one part appears as the thinkers of this 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 behave “more passively and receptively” (MEW 3, 46).
This explains how the ideas arise, rather than merely asserting that they rule. And Marx adds that the split “vanishes of itself” whenever any practical collision occurs in which the class itself is endangered (ibid.).
The Critique of Feuerbach
It is sharper here than in the Theses, and it has a point that sums up the whole text:
“Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not appear in his work; and insofar as he considers history, he is no materialist. In him, materialism and history diverge completely” (MEW 3, 45).
The example given is the cherry tree: it was, “like almost all fruit trees, transplanted into our zone only a few centuries ago by trade, and hence it was only through this action of a particular society at a particular time that it was given to Feuerbach’s ‘sensuous certainty’” (MEW 3, 43).
“Sensuous certainty” is Hegel’s term—the first shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology. Marx uses it against Feuerbach and thereby shows where he got his tool.
World History as an Empirical Process
At the end stands a determination meant to replace Hegel’s world spirit:
“The more, in the course of this development, the individual circles that act upon one another expand […] the more history becomes world history” (MEW 3, 45).
With examples showing what is meant: a machine invented in England throws workers out of bread in India and China; the shortage of sugar and coffee produced by the Continental Blockade drives the Germans to rise up against Napoleon.
And the conclusion: this transformation is “not, say, a mere abstract act of ‘self-consciousness,’ world spirit, or any other metaphysical specter […], but a wholly material, empirically demonstrable act” (ibid.).
This is, in substance, Hegel’s determination of how the connection of local cultures becomes the world—only with a different sign. Hegel had conceived the world spirit as the subject that realizes itself; Marx conceives the same process as the result of trade and industry. What both share is the view that world history is not an aggregate of national histories but a connection that first has to be brought about.