 Hello, you are with NewsClick and Leftward Books. This is a series called Talking about Marx's Political Text with Ajaz Ahmed. Today we are going to talk not about a whole text, but about what appears in the German ideology published in 1932 first, but written between 1845 and 1846. The first part of the text which appears as it did in 1932 is on Führbach and that's the section we're going to talk about today. Ajaz, welcome to this great series. Thank you very much for initiating. Well, this is an interesting text. It was published first in 1932. Marx and Engels put this together a year into their friendship. I mean, they meet in August 1844. They start working on their criticism of their friends, the young Hegelians published in a book called The Holy Family. Then they get to work on a large sprawling manuscript. It turns out most of this book is on Max Turner, a pseudonym for a friend of theirs who's very critical of the young Hegelians. That goes on for a very long part of this text. Scholars who look at this text surmise that the section on Führbach was probably written last. I'm sure we'll come back to that. But what's important, I think, is that while Marx and Engels are writing The Holy Family, they travel to Manchester. Marx for the first time really gets to see an industrial city and it's in that context that he and Engels start to develop their critique and so on. We'll get to all that. That's published then or written then 1845-46 into this text, which again later in 1932 is given the title, the German ideology. Lots of people have lots of ideas about this book. They say this is a big break between an early Marx and the later Marx or the mature Marx. I'm sure we'll get into that as well. Well, the publishers in 1846 didn't think much of it, didn't publish it. And then when Marx comes to write the contribution to the critique of political economy in the preface of this text, he writes, I think humorously a phrase or a sentence many people have heard. He says, we abandoned the manuscript to the annoying criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose, self-clarification. This is the text they say of self-clarification. Ajaz, why did you want to talk about the section on Fjordbach by itself? Why was that itself significant? For me, because that is where a very synoptic statement of what became the theory of historical materialism actually is produced. In other words, there are a series of steps Marx has taken towards this. But this is a turning point because until then, for Marx particularly, this is a whole process of coming to terms with his erstwhile philosophical conscience. And he is developing his entirely new philosophy of history in contestation with, first of all, with Hegel. And Fjordbach becomes a source of strength for him in terms of talking about idealism and materialism and so on. So there is a phase in which, short phase, in which there is a lot of Fjordbach in his writings. His early statements on religion, for example, are almost completely taken from Fjordbach. It is not Marxist view of religion, it is view of Fjordbach, view of religion and so on. It is a critical view, but his own view I think is quite different. So for a while, it becomes a source of strength for him. And then he wants to become independent of that kind of a historical materialism, which is much closer to a very static kind of empiricism. And so then he begins to develop a critique of Fjordbach in that again, that little piece, 11th he sees as Engels called them. And I mean, the story of it is that Engels found in his papers, in Marxist papers, a sort of a couple of pages in which he is scribbling some thoughts. And Engels thought that was very interesting and gave it the title Theses on Fjordbach and published in 1896 or something like that. That is I think a text working towards what he says about Fjordbach. Now in there, the epistemology of that governs those formulations of Fjordbach, central to that epistemology is the idea of praxis. Historical action to change the world, being the process through which you come to know the world, knowing the world without acting upon it, to change it, is pure ideals. It is through acting in history and upon history. So praxis is the epistemology at the center of epistemology. But then he shifts very quickly when he comes to German ideology. We had the central epistemological category is production. And begins then this whole idea of how history has actually progressed from the beginning. The history is really a history of production. Human beings producing themselves and producing their world. And it is through changes in the modes of production, starting from the first division of labor he says, which is a sexual act, which then produces humanity. And the family is the first form of slavery in which male member of the family is the slave owner and the wife and the children are slaves and so on. And it's very interesting for me, by the way, that what the word slavery means to Marx, it fundamentally means appropriation of other people's labor. Therefore, later he will talk of wage slavery, etc. But anyway, that shift from praxis to production, a certain narrative of history, successive modes of production, which gives, which again, it's again, he's still fighting favor, that it is not the spirit that advances from one stage to the higher stage to the higher stage, so on. And contradiction is not contradiction in thought. Contradiction in thought actually arises out of contradiction actual society. So he takes up the whole idea of progression in history through contradiction. But what is the contradiction? The contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and so on. So giving, you know, what he elsewhere talks about of putting Hegel, Hegelian dialectic on its feet, inversion. The inversion is from idealism to historical materialism, to historical materialism, not materialism. And so on. And in that he actually, in my view, accepts many of the premises of idealism, as we find it in Hegel, Kant, etc. So it seems to me that it's a text sort of in the progression of Marxist thought. It's a fairly central text before the before the communist manifesto. And here, what it seems to be very tentative that narrative of modes of production, again, gets very summarized and clarified. And again, even more synoptic version you find in the in the manifesto. So it is, for one thing, it's a moment in the progression of Marxist thought. It is the moment in which not only the history of the modes of production is elaborated in that this particular way. But the whole question of relationship between human practice and human consciousness. Again, it is again dealing with Hegelian categories, what is the relationship between being and existence, between material activity and thought. Before we get into the part about being and consciousness, which is so central to Marx and Engels in this text on Feuerbach, let's go back to a distinction you made, which I think is quite important. You made a distinction between idealism, the tradition that comes from Hegel and that sort of leaks into the young Hegelians. You made a distinction between idealism. Then you said that Marx and Engels develop something that they will call historical materialism. And you said that that historical materialism is different from materialism as such. So could you just clarify, get idealism, could you clarify the distinction between historical materialism and materialism? Yeah, let me first actually say something to preface the discussion of materialism. You see, German idealism as you find it in Kant and Hegel in particular is at the heart of it, is the French Revolution. It's a reflection, a lot of it is a reflection on French Revolution. For example, his Hegel's whole treatise on his doctrine of right, for example, is a reflection on the declaration of rights of man and citizen. And for Marx the problem is that what is material and historical is apprehended in that thought in abstraction as philosophy, which means then that you are in the world of essences, you're not in the world of actual analysis of real movements of history and so on. But it is not that idealism has nothing to do with material history. It is that it inverts it into philosophical categories. So that's one and that is what is attractive for Marx about Hegel and he, all his life he kept saying all kinds of wonderful things, how Hegel was one of his great masters and so on and so forth. He's always struggling with Hegel and because of Hegel himself is struggling with the actual motions of history, which he comprehends in philosophical terms. So that's the quarrel with ideas. That's at the center of the quarrel. What the materialism of people like Führbach does is that it recognizes the substantive nature of material reality, but it comprehends it a-historically. Nature is nature. Social relations which are specific to the capitalist mode of production are human relations. So it does not understand that nature itself is historically produced. The nature as we know it, we do not know physical nature in the way and shape in which physical nature existed before human being started acting upon it. And that nature itself has history. Social relations themselves have history and they cannot be comprehended in a way that freezes them in a moment of history as if they were returned. The fundamental category is the historical production of all of these categories matter itself. Matter is not independent of human action upon it. So it is simply saying you are fighting abstractions with abstractions. He says somewhere you know you're fighting phrases with phrases. And when you say that earlier philosophy is wrong this way, that way, that way, you just want to replace them with other categories which are also speculative in nature. It is the historicizing of matter itself that I think is the fundamental distinction between that kind of materialism and Marxist understanding materialism. I would go further and say that you see young Hegelians, whatever transformations that they made in the inherited philosophy, they're also stuck in the terrain of speculative philosophy. Marx is on his way out of speculative philosophy altogether. And by speculative philosophy then that is what one means by philosophy in that period of time where philosophy is Hegel. What Marx is producing is actually something that Balibar, for example, says he's producing an anti-philosophic. After these, you know, German ideology and holy family and text of this kind, the text that he produced before the communist evolution, he'll never again write a philosophical text. There'll be enormous, enormous body of writing in the Grundrisse and capital and so on with philosophical implications. But he will never do philosophical categories. For example, that chapter in capital on commodity fetishes is the most brilliant, historically decisive sort of reflection on the category of consciousness in capitalist society, which would then generate history and trust consciousness and so on and so forth. But that is not history in the Hegelian sense. That is not consciousness as philosophy understands consciousness. I think this is a good place to reflect on the other two categories which you distinguished earlier. You talked about how there's a move from praxis to production. And I think this might be helped by what you just said about historical materialism and of course the historicizing of different modes of production and their relationship to the way in which people made and lived their world. So could you reflect a little bit on that shift in thought between the centrality of praxis to the question of production? Yeah, you see centrality of praxis in Theses and Herbach is first of all central category of epistemology. How do you understand the world around it? Do you understand it by reading more books? Do you understand it through logic? Do you speculative philosophy categories? How do you understand the world? And the category there is the category of praxis. You not only that you have to comprehend the world, the world of objects as sensuous objects produced in human activity. But you can understand the world only through praxis. Therefore that 11th thesis which is usually misunderstood that philosophers have only understood the world. The point is to change the world. It's not that you don't need to understand the world in order to change. It's quite the opposite which is that it is only in the act of changing the world that you understand the world. So that's what I mean by praxis is epistemological. It is by acting on the word that human beings actually understand the world. But what is this word on which you are going to act? That remains content, yes. It is still being thought of in speculative generalizations, that language of speculative philosophy. It's still trapped there. And by the time you get to German ideology and the writings that come thereafter, German ideologies also, it's not only that some publishers did publish it. It is very much in the form of notes. It jumps from one paragraph to another and so on. In order to summarize this thought that is racing through his brain much faster than they can actually comprehend the thought itself in my view. So that's what I would say that again production is again in terms of philosophy. It is the epistemological category of production which makes the world intelligible. Creation of needs is the first historical act and history produces, progresses through production of new needs and therefore systems of production to meet those new needs etc. It's a history. History of human beings is a history of production. Production itself is at its heart the act of human beings on nature. External nature, the relationship between internal nature and external nature is condensed in the act of production. And so in that what happens under capitalism is that that particular relation between internal nature and external nature is torn asunder. So therefore human beings enter into a very different kind of imagination even from their own act of production. They enter into as he says definitive social relations and those definitive social relations have a marked impact on how people can see the world and so on and then there are constraints and this produces a set of almost aphoristic statements which go from the German ideology out to a contribution to the critique, the famous preface where again we have this you know this theme about social being and social consciousness. In the German ideology he says consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product. That's an interesting departure it seems to me from the Hegelians and the young Hegelians and a doorway into what I think we'll get to which is social being, social consciousness. Could you say a few things about this idea of consciousness being a social product? He puts it in quite different ways. Consciousness is always practical consciousness. Practice is always both individual and social simultaneous. There is no such thing as production that is purely individual. And if consciousness, if production is itself, not simply individual but social and collective, then there's no such thing as a consciousness which is monadic in character. Where the individual separates himself out from the, he sometimes used the word collective, communal, different kinds of uses. But if production itself is not individual, if we understand production in that sense, not in the sense of manufacturing of this and manufacturing that, but the very way of human beings reproducing themselves through their action, which is always cooperative and communal. Therefore consciousness is again, this is again refutation of the whole liberal tradition in which the locus of reason, of rights, of consciousness is the individual. It is again a refutation of all of that, that neither rights nor reason nor consciousness is located in any one of us. It is a consciousness comes out of the kind of collective world in which we live. Yes, because they spend a lot of time in the book going after Max Stirner, again, important figure of his day, forgotten now, who had published a book a few years before then called The Ego and its Own. And it sort of went from idealism to in a way individualism. And this was a refutation of that considerable reputation. So having established, let's say that consciousness is both individual and social, I think that's an advance over people around them who are making different kinds of arguments, then they will eventually end up at this very interesting idea, this very interesting set of ideas around the limits of consciousness and social being and so on. It's not fully developed in the German ideology, it will be developed later. But I wonder if you could walk us a little ways into how they are thinking about consciousness and the limits of consciousness. In other words, that it's not the Hegelian spirit that produces historical advances, but it's something other than that. Isn't that what they are struggling with, at least in this section called Führbach, where Mr. Ludwig Führbach doesn't make much of an appearance. He comes in abruptly in the text. You're quite right. It's like notes because they don't even introduce Führbach. He just sort of appears abruptly in the middle. He comes in parenthetically here and there. He's not a central character. They don't go through his work. There's no real critique of Führbach. That's reserved for Engels after Marx dies in the text where he prints the thesis on Führbach. That's his great book on Ludwig Führbach and on classical German philosophy. That's 1888. But here they don't actually sustain a critique of Führbach. Nonetheless, there is something here they're trying to suggest about, I don't know what to call it, the motor of history. It's not the spirit that drives history forward. They seem to have started to work this out. What are the ways in which history advances? Yeah, but that is what I was saying that in Hegel, there's no reflection on the real world or explanation of the real world. In fact, it is a reflection on their own time. Here, that's what I was saying that for them what drives history is production, relations of production, which are never individual. There was some moment, prehistoric moment, pre anthropological moment, when there was some human being who assembled the first family. But that's an ideal moment, one imagines such a moment. But that human existence has always been collective. And the driving force in history is production and relations of production. In here, in German ideology, there's a certain kind of, how do I put it? Consciousness seems to be a direct reflection of social relations. So there's a kind of reflection of what will develop in later Marxist theory. You referred to that preface, 1839 preface earlier. In that preface, for example, what will develop in Marx then is a certain gap between economic determination and ideology. Here, he says that the economic science can be, economic factors in life can be determined with the precision of scientific precision. But it is in the name again, the whole range of politics, religion, arts, law in short, in ideology that human beings become conscious of their reality and fight it out. So there's a certain gap between reality and ideological comprehension between economic factors, the determination, economic determination, and the ideological. That will come later in Marx. In this early text, this seems to be a direct reflection of economic factors, production and consciousness. Certain sort of identity between again, between being and existence, between the material facts and the mental facts, intellectual facts, between consciousness and practice. There's a very interesting section and I think we can put this in as our final thoughts. I'd like you to reflect on this because I've often found this both encouraging as an idea and also this is a door for at least the way I read the text on Fjordbach in 1845-46. This is a door into most of Marx's subsequent work. I personally don't believe that there's a need to have early Marx, later Marx and so on. Everybody develops in their thinking and maybe there might have been a great break in the thought and so on but I think a lot of this is an argument that's not that necessary. Nonetheless, there's a very interesting section where he talks about communism in the Fjordbach section and I just want to read these sentence out because I think they're quite instructive. They write, 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. Of course, I'm tempted to keep going but I just want to repeat these two sentences just for clarity. 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. Yeah, I think, I think, I don't know whether it's really quite simple but Marx is struggling with the word communism since it's the economic and philosophical manuscripts to make it more and more concrete. In his earlier texts it is really not connected with any political project as such which is related to the motions of history. Communism is the alternative to all the state of things that exists and that's it. Here what he's saying is precisely the logic that he has been following up to this point that communism is not an ideal, it is not outside the motions of history. Communism is something that arises out of the motions of history. This motion of history that we have described as a history of modes of production of greater and greater human collectivity and more and more human control over both external nature and the forces of production that human beings themselves are produced through that. So, communism arises as a logical elaboration of a future that arises out of the contradictions of capitalism itself. This is what will come in the communist manifesto. That then it is the contradictions between relations of production and forces of production which creates the very crises which need to fall a general reorganization of the forces relations of production, supersession of it and communism arises out of that. Capitalism as they would say in the manifesto, capitalism is digging, is creating its own grave diggers. So, communism is not something that and again they're saying it is not by working out a plan. This is what good society would be like. It is not a question of educating people to the real thing that needs to be achieved. It is something that arises logically, historically, out of these motions of history. That's essentially the movement here, movement of thought. And it is this thought that communism is actually the highest stage of mode of production that you can, that history is tending towards which should then, you know, after the manifesto, particularly in the beginning, more and more talking about the kind of political organizations you need, the kind and so on. So political practice comes out of there or political practice would actually correspond to this real movement of history. That's I think we are there going. I think this is a very interesting point because from this of course comes the period of the manifesto and then as we move along, at least in these conversations, we're going to go next to Civil War in France, which is Marx's great text on the Paris Commune. And so here we have it, you know, there is this motion that tends towards the producers having a greater and greater role in the construction of their own society and so on. It actually flows very well that we leave the critique of Fjordbark and then what emerges is those grave diggers that stamped around the streets of Paris trying to create their own society 150 years ago. Ajaz, thanks a lot and we'll come back with Civil War in France. Thank you. Thanks.