Abstract
Reviewed by Warren S Goldstein , Center for Critical Research on Religion, USA
It has become accepted knowledge that Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The German Ideology marked their final break with the Left Hegelian critical theologians (Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner) and the establishment of historical materialism. Before that Marx was not a Marxist; he was either a Feuerbachian (Hook, 1962: 112) or a follower of Bruno Bauer (Rosen, 1977: 138–141). Yet, what we know of today in book form as The German Ideology was never published during Marx and Engels’ lifetimes. This did not occur until the 1920s and it was based on a collection of mostly unpublished manuscripts written between 1845 and 1846, while Marx and Engels were in exile in Brussels. They gave up on publishing it and even if they had done so, it certainly would not be in the form in which it exists today. Furthermore, Marx and Engels never used the term “historical materialism” in these manuscripts. It was Engels who first used the term “materialist conception of history” in 1888 and then “historical materialism” in 1892 (32).
Terrell Carver’s and Daniel Blank’s book meticulously examines the political history of the various editions of the manuscripts that have come to be known as The German Ideology. They explain that behind these editions were conflicts between different groups of interpreters of Marx and Engels: Orthodox Marxists and Revisionists, scholarly academics, and political ideologues.
Only three pieces of the German Ideology manuscripts were published during Marx and Engels’ lifetimes. Marx anonymously published parts of “II Sankt Bruno” in the journal Gesellschaftspiegel in January 1846. An article titled “Karl Beck: ‘Lieder vom armen Mann,’ oder die Poesie des wahren Sozialismus” was published anonymously (presumably by Engels) in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung in September 1847. The third, unsigned by Marx, was “Karl Grün: Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien (Darmstadt 1847) oder die Geschichtschreibung des wahren Sozialismus;” it was published in Das Westphälische Dampfboot in September 1847.
Carver and Blank explain “The Historical Origins of the 1845-46 Manuscripts” in a chapter with that title. Originally published as a note in Gesellschaftsspiegel in defense of their own ideas, it “grew longer and longer” (79). Marx and Engels wrote it during the winter of 1846 under the title of “Das Leipziger Konzil” and it was comprised of two parts: “Saint Bruno” and “Saint Max.” During this time, they also wrote “The True Socialists” (80). At some point, Marx paginated the manuscripts from 1 to 72 (80). Marx lost interest in the manuscripts because he could not find a publisher and because he started working on The Poverty of Philosophy (81).
Carver and Blank explain the context in which the manuscripts were written. First, they see the manuscripts as an intermediary step toward later publications (The Poverty of Philosophy and The Communist Manifesto) (140). Their work on the manuscripts began with Marx responding to criticisms of him by Bauer in Bauer’s article “Chararakteristik Ludwig Feuerbach” (144). They wrote a second article responding to Bauer (which was not published), but then realized that they were really dealing with the intellectual relationship between Feuerbach and Stirner (144–145). Their manuscript on Stirner grew longer than Stirner’s work (Das Einzige and das Eigentum) itself, which caused them to edit both it and the sections on the Leipzig Council and Saint Bruno (145–146). The section by Hess on “Dottore Graziano” was taken out of the Leipzig Council after Marx and Engels’ split with Hess as a result of them labeling him pejoratively as a “true socialist.” When Feuerbach published The Essence of Religion, they began writing the section on him (147). After Engels left Brussels for Paris in August 1846, both Marx and Engels lost interest in the manuscripts (148). According to Marx, they left the manuscripts “to the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’” (11).
After the death of Marx and Engels, Peter von Struve and Eduard Bernstein published the article on Karl Grün first in part and then in its entirety in Die Neue Zeit between 1896 and 1900. Bernstein published sections of “III. Sankt Max” in his Documente des Socialismus between 1903 and 1904 (8). Finally, he published a small section “Mein Selbstgenuß” in 1913 in the Arbeiter-Feuilleton and in Vorwärts (8–9).
The political history of The German Ideology began with the publication of parts of “The Leipzig Council” by Gustav Mayer, who was the first biographer of Engels, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik edited by Edgar Jaffé, Werner Sombart, Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter in August 1921 (9, 13). At that time, almost all of the manuscripts of the German Ideology were in the hands of the Eduard Bernstein, to whom Engels had entrusted them. Franz Mehring, who had been commissioned by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to publish the early writings of Marx and Engels, asked Bernstein to release all of the manuscripts but only received pieces of The Leipzig Council. This was due to political differences between Bernstein and Mehring; Bernstein was the leading revisionist of the party, whereas Mehring was more “orthodox” (10). In Mayer’s edition, he subordinated the section on Saint Bruno under that on the Leipzig Council making it look like it was a unified text (12).
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Marx-Engels Institute (MEI) was established in 1922 in Moscow and directed by David Ryazanov. It grew to 257 members. Ryazanov was a student of Carl Grünberg who was the first director of the Institute for Social Research (which later became known as the Frankfurt School). Mayer had previously been offered this position but turned it down (16, 26). The MEI created an archive of photographs of the original manuscripts (14). A conflict developed between Ryazanov and Mayer over the manuscripts; behind it was the split between Orthodox (Ryzanov) and Revisionist (Mayer) Marxism (15–17). The section of the manuscripts on Feuerbach was first published in the Marx-Engels-Archiv in 1926. Carver and Blank speculate that Ryazanov was interested in this piece because in it they explain their underlying historical methodology (19). Ryazanov also revealed that many pages of the original manuscripts were apparently lost (21).
Ryazonov was director of MEI for 10 years. With the rise of Stalin in 1924, he ended up aligned himself with Revisionists (like Kautsky), Mensheviks, and Trotskyists against the Bolsheviks. He considered himself a Marxist but not a Leninist (25–26). In 1931, he was arrested, accused of being a counterrevolutionary, and exiled for three years. Trotsky wrote articles in his defense (26–27, 30). As a result, he lost his position as director of MEI. Vladimir Adorataskii was appointed as his successor. Just as Ryazanov had accused Meyer of being a “bourgeois writer,” Adorataskii made similar accusations against Ryazanov (29). Nevertheless, the first “historical-critical” (Adoratskii) edition of The German Ideology was published as a book in volume I/5 of the MEGA1 Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe in 1932 and Ryzaznov had played a leading role in editing it (4–5, 23, 27).
Adoraatskii too saw the importance of the manuscripts (31). Basing himself on Engel’s later writings, he recognized it (in particular the Feuerbach section) as the first expression of the “materialistic conception of history” or “historical materialism.” The sections of the manuscripts, which became the Feuerbach chapter were an “‘incoherent’ mess” and rearranged by the editors to give it more coherence (33–35). Both the 1926 Ryazanov and 1932 Adoratskii editions are in essence “literary collages.” Marx had thought that the manuscripts would be “inaccessible to his readers” and instead saw it as an exercise in his and Engels’ “self-clarification” (36). Contrary to this, Adoratskii published them as an actual work by Marx and Engels (37).
Giving the title “The German Ideology” to the manuscript was based on a statement Marx made a year after Marx had completed the longest section of it (56–57). The name is taken from a subheading of a chapter (“A. Die Ideologie überhaupt, namlich die deutsche”) (127). The chapter structure of The German Ideology was imposed on the manuscripts. “I. Feuerbach” was never written as a chapter and is just “a collection of incoherent fragments” (81) There is no evidence that “I. Feuerbach,” “II. Saint Bruno” and “III. Saint Max” were thought of as chapters (81).
Carver and Blank take us through every single subsequent edition of The German Ideology. Some are more significant than others. There is the German Landshut and Mayer Edition of 1932 and then the West German Landshut Edition of 1953, which was one of the most popular in West Germany (45). Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was originally published in 1933–1934 but banned by the Nazis, brought further interest in The German Ideology which it cited (45–46). The West German Protestant Academies, which published Marxismusstudien and included contributors such as Ralf Dahrendorf, sought to reassess Marx in relationship to Christian values and thus was interested in The German Ideology (47–48).
Another edition of The German Ideology was published as Volume 3 in the Marx-Engels-Werke in 1958 (48–49). The Soviet editors of this volume, following Joseph Stalin (1940: 1) argued in the preface to this edition that while dialectical materialism has to do with the natural world, historical materialism is the application of dialectics to society. Borrowing from the natural sciences, they see the social world as following “objective laws of social development” (50–51). The editors of this editions pretended that Marx and Engels had left behind some instructions on how to publish the manuscripts as a complete work (54). The editors to the complete works complained in their foreword to this edition that Karl Kautsky had tampered with the manuscripts on the question of surplus value (55). The East German edition also excluded the section that Engels had written and which was included in earlier editions on “The True Socialists” (58). The reason why The German Ideology manuscripts obtained such significance is that they were used by the Soviets and East Germans as the basis for dialectical and historical materialism that sought to establish it as an objective science based on laws of history (82)
When the earliest editions of the manuscripts were published, there were several missing pages. Ryanov and Landhut inserted fragments into the gaps that did not necessarily belong there. In 1962, three of the missing pages were found in an envelope that had belonged to Bernstein and were published by Siegfrid Bahne in Volume VII of the International Review of Social History (61–63). Engels had most likely written this fragment since it is similar to his own essay on Feuerbach written in 1846 (65).
Translations of fragments from Saint Max were first published in English in Sidney Hook’s book From Hegel to Marx in 1936. Progress Publishers in Moscow published the first translation of the entire German Ideology in English in 1964. This edition perpetuated the myth that Marx and Engels had published this work as a book (67).
The fifth German language version of I. Feuerbach, which was a rehabilitation of the work of Ryazanov, was published by Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie in 1966. This edition identified the missing pages and the order of the manuscript fragments (68). Nevertheless, it still assumed that Marx and Engels wrote the Feuerbach fragments as a coherent chapter (70). Concurrently, an article by Helmut Seidel in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie titled “Vom praktischen und theoretischen Verhältnis der Menschen zur Wirklichkeit” opened up the “Praxis Discussion” in the East German Democratic Republic (73). Seidel was the first to question what was understood as the “materialist conception of history.” He warned that it was being turned into a rigid and lifeless formula – in particular the transference of dialectics from the social world onto the natural world and the emphasis on natural objective laws (75–76).
In 1958, discussions began about publishing MEGA 2 and continued in 1965 since earlier editions no longer met academic standards (100). The 1972 MEGA 2 “Probeband” Edition of The German Ideology was published; it was never sold on the market and only sent to a small group of specialists for comments (86). It was truer to the original manuscripts than to any other previous version. It attempted to place the pieces in more of a chronological order (91–92).
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and along with it the Institutes for Marxism-Leninism in Russia and East Germany, a new arrangement needed to be made about who would continue to publish MEGA 2 (99–100). The publishers of MEGA 2 changed their publisher from the left-wing Karl Dietz Verlag to the more mainstream Akademie-Verlag (103). The German Ideology manuscripts remained central to the project. Conferences were set up at the Karl-Marx-Haus in Trier discussing how to publish the MEGA 2 edition of The German Ideology. At the first of these conferences in 1990, Taubert presented a paper arguing for the importance of the Stirner section—whether it was written first and therefore necessary for understanding the sections on Bauer and Feuerbach (105–106) Around the same time Asian scholars such as Chung began to try to figure out which lines of the German Ideology were written by Marx, which by Engels, and which by both in collaboration with each other. The Hiramatsu and Sibuya editions showed precisely what was in Marx’s handwriting and what was in Engels’ (109–110). The 1996 conference in Trier discussed whether to include Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” and Engel’s piece on “The True Socialists” in the same volume. It also discussed the role that Moses Hess played in writing the manuscripts and whether to include him as well (114–117).
In the post-Communist era, the Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 was published and the editors decided to dedicate the first volume to the German Ideology (119). The publishers sought to distance Marx and Engels from Marxism-Leninism, to emphasize the endeavor as scientific and scholarly, to emphasize that in the text Marx and Engels never used the term “materialist conception of history,” and that they were publishing these texts in a new “post-ideological age.” Carver and Blank point out the irony in this since one of the main topics in the 1845–1846 manuscripts was an explanation behind the historical development of ideologies (120–122). In this edition, they published the fragments of the manuscripts in chronological order (122).
The German Ideology manuscripts were published in two different ways: the first was a “chronological” one emphasizing “scientific accuracy” and the second was in a more “logical” order and oriented toward a broader readership making them more accessible. Carver and Blank do not think there is a contradiction between the two (138, 141). They call for synthesis between them: a “contextual edition” (143).
In the “Methodological Excursus,” Carver and Blank point out that there are four steps in Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history as articulated in the manuscript. The first is that human beings interaction with nature to obtain their material needs. Second, in doing so, they transform nature and thereby themselves. Third, human beings reproduce themselves and therefore are in constant interaction with the past (with their own history). Finally, human beings interact with each other (167–168). What is important, especially concerning religion is that ideas are interwoven with these material conditions and as the conditions change and develop, so do the ideas along with them (169). While ideas may appear to be a driving force of history, they are very much connected with material conditions although here Carver and Blank could be more dialectical in explaining this relationship (170–172).
In the accompanying volume Marx and Engel’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” Carver and Blank do not provide the contextual edition which they proposed but rather a step towards it. The volume reproduces the original printer sheets (with right-hand and left-hand columns) in typeset from the manuscripts of the so-called Feuerbach chapter showing what was in Marx’s handwriting and what was in Engels’ with deletions and corrections. Their introduction analyses some of these passage with the attempt to understand the thought process in the production of these texts.
Carver and Blank conclude that “editions are interpretations, and editors are interpreters” (176). They identify four different generations of editors of the Marx and Engels works starting with Kautsky, Bebel, Bernstein, Mehring, and Ryzanov who knew them personally, to the editors of MEGA 1 and then to the first and second phases of MEGA 2 (179). One also needs to understand the editions of the German Ideology as a result of the Cold War conflict: West vs. East, Capitalist vs. Communist. They conclude, “the political history of the editions of The German Ideology is not a linear history of improvements, but a very complex history of editorial competition and political antagonism” (180).
Carver and Blanks’ fascinating study of the German Ideology Manuscripts reads somewhat like how biblical scholars approach ancient sacred texts. While the documents are more recent, they are still fragmented (although perhaps not as much as ancient papyruses). Carver and Blank dispel the myth that Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology as a book and that it is the first articulation of historical materialism. As we have seen, this was a construction by later scholars. In their demythologization, Carver and Blank reveal numerous unsolved problems—who wrote what and in what order. Even though the information surrounding the Manuscripts is more complete than what one finds with ancient texts, there is still a remarkable amount of mystery, which remains around them. While Carver and Blank do a splendid job in demystifying much of this, they are quick to point out many of the unsolved questions and thus they dispel the myth only to add a new layer of mystique to The German Ideology.