Marx and Engels were two of the most important philosophers in history. Their influence is widely spread around the world to this day. Marx and Engels are deeply critical of the system of life that has arisen in "modern" times, that is, since roughly the 16th and 17th centuries, called capitalism. Under capitalism, life is always at the mercy of the wealthy, that is, the ruling class, who are always a tiny minority of the population of any society. The wealthy own the means for producing the necessities of life and this allows them to, essentially blackmail the vast majority of humanity into working for them for low wages. The workers are the ones who produce all the goods and services that there are, but the capitalists — the ruling class — capture the wealth that thereby comes about. Workers stay in their low position or move lower in general (very few move up an economic notch, and when they do, generally, about as many move down a notch, so the net result is pretty static social and economic mobility), while the wealthy get wealthier and wealthier. Workers, Marx and Engels argued, must take control of their lives. To do so would be to create a democratic society (since workers make up the vast majority of humanity). Capitalists fight tooth and nail against this. Among the capitalists' most important tools for fighting against the working class becoming the dominant political and economic force in society, the capitalists use their enormous wealth to pay people to come up with ideas that twist things around so that the exploitative nature of capitalist society looks like it is the most natural state of affairs, or even a god-given state of affairs, so that the workers will be duped into not struggling for control over their lives. Since most 289 290 CHAPTER 13. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS, AND CLASS workers are overworked and don't spend much time studying real knowledge in their spare time, but watching television, playing video games, or any number of the other distractions capitalist society prepares for them, it is fairly easy to lull the workers into accepting their situation as inevitable instead of seeing that they are actual can change society into a equitable one if they organized themselves to create new forms of life that put cooperation between people rather than a possessive individual at the forefront of our concerns. 

The following excerpts are about the construction of ideology generally, as well as the specific ideology of possessive individualism that capitalism seeks to convince whoever is willing to be convinced is the "natural" way of the world. In discussing the construction of ideology, Marx and Engels talk about how because the capitalist class controls society's wealth, they also control the means of creating ideas and spreading them, such as the schools and the media, primarily. Thus, they can push capitalist ideology and squash any thoughts that would challenge the system of power that keeps the capitalist class at the top of the power hierarchy. So, you never hear certain ideas for most of your life unless you know someone personally who is into them and can talk to you about them. And, ideas that you don't know, you don't think. Even if there is an abstract logical possibility that a single individual might come up with thoughts that are not generally talked about, the probability is so low that for practical purposes, it does not exist. And, even if that single individual somehow did, for those rare thoughts and ideas to spread and become effective is almost impossible since working-class individuals have no access to teaching jobs for the most part (to become a teacher you have to go through years of training in which you learn not to talk about such things, and very few do talk about such things), and no access to media outlets where they can spread ideas as easily as capitalists can. 

Workers must create their own organizations which educate themselves and their children about society and the way things are. That is not easy to do, but if it is not done, workers will stay in the lowly position they are in now until global climate change causes humans to go extinct (which is not far off, and it is important to remember that global climate change is fundamentally caused by capitalism; see Klein, 2015, Kovel, 2007, Foster, 2000). -Russell Dale 13.1. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS 291 13.1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Excerpts on Language, Ideas, and Persons 13.1.1 From the German Ideology (1845) 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.1 The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law." The division of labor, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the 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' attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes 1The text in this section comes from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/ german-ideology/ch01b.htm, but for the full context, please see Marx and Engels, 1845. 292 CHAPTER 13. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. 

The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above. If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. 13.1.2 From the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.2 The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal 2The text is from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ preface.htm. 13.1. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS 293 and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. 

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. 13.1.3 Marx, From Theses on Feuerbach (1845) [From the sixth thesis.] ...the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.3 3The text is from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. But, see also Marx and Engels, 1845. 294 CHAPTER 13. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS 13.1.4 Marx, From the Grundrisse (1857) The object before us, to begin with, material production. 4 Individuals producing in Society — hence socially determined individual production — is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith5 and Ricardo6 begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades,7 which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and 4The text is from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm. But see Marx, 1857. 5Marx is referring to Adam Smith (1723âĂŞ1790) whose book The Wealth of Nations Smith, 1776 is considered the fundamental historical text of classical capitalist, "freemarket" economics. 6Ricardo here is David Ricardo (1772-1823) who, after Adam Smith, is probably the next most influential of classical economists of so-called "free-market" capitalism. You should bear in mind that Karl Marx himself is usually considered one of the "classical economists" even though he was, along with Engels, the most severe of the critics of capitalism. 7The footnotes that I mark as from "MIA" (i.e., the "Marxist Internet Archive") are by the editors of that website. I will add comments after some of their remarks as well. MIA has the following footnote for the word "Robinsonades": "Utopias on the lines of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe." What the MIA editors are trying to explain in their very brief note is the following. In 1719 the English novelist Daniel Defoe published his book Robinson Crusoe. It is about a man who gets shipwrecked on an island and has to make do there without a community around him. Since that time such stories of people living "on there own" have been very popular. In the 18th-century an entire genre of works came about after Defoe's book based on premises such as that of Robinson Crusoe. These books became called "Robinsonades". The theme of many of these works was, to put it in modern terms, that a human being could become more "natural" or "real" by getting outside of society and fending for him or herself. But, perhaps all of these works completely ignored the social inheritance in the stranded persons: they spoke languages and had knowledge and usually material items that they got from their previous life in ordinary human communities. Marx here is criticizing the illusion here that somehow people who get alienated by such physical circumstances from society are more "natural" or "real" on the grounds that the entire way that such people deal with their new alienated circumstance (on the desert island, or whatever it is in the particular Robinsonade in question) is the inheritance of their previous life in ordinary human communities, and it often involves the use of clothing, knives, guns, and so forth that the people brought with them from ordinary society: these are socially-produced items. The idea that there can be a lone and fully developed individual outside of any community is a fiction. There have been cases where people were "brought up by wolves", as the so-called "Wild Boy of Aveyron", but in such cases, the person seems to be extremely limited in actual abilities outside of the context in which they were brought up. There is a lot of research and literature on "feral children" that you may want to look up in this connection. 13.1. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS 295 a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's contrat social, 8 which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of 'civil society',9 in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenthcentury individual — the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century — appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as historyâĂŹs point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of hu8Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Swiss philosopher who wrote mainly in French. He was one of the most influential writers of the 18th-century. He continued the tradition of "social-contract" theory which goes back as far as Socrates in the Crito by Plato, but in Modern times (that is, since the 17th-century) had been chiefly associated with the thought that came from Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan (Hobbes, 1651). Hobbes in Leviathan argued that humans are fundamentally greedy and at war with each other and only come to have societies as a matter of self-interest: to basically create a ceasefire in the "war of all against all", as Hobbes called it, people create a "social contract" and agree to respect each other's lives and stuff in exchange for peace. Rousseau was critical of Hobbes's view that humans are fundamentally selfish and brutish. Rousseau argued in his work The Social Contract (Rousseau, 1762) that people start off in a pretty good situation with respect to each other, but that some try to enslave others and all sorts of nasty things come about because of that, so people create a social contract to protect themselves from those who would enslave them. The social contract is made to protect the good aspects of life that existed before the contract. 9 "Civil society" means, basically, society in its everyday doings, but not including the state or government. Civil society and government are separated even though the two depend on each other in many ways under Modern capitalism. Civil society is also in opposition to the family.

In Modern society, people are looked at as independent of their families and the extended family groups they came from, and are just clumped all together in "civil society" as "citizens". Marx is using this idea of "civil society", but he is also critical of it. People still, of course, think of themselves in terms of their families in everyday life, but in terms of social thought and political life, we are supposed to think of ourselves as merely individuals, citizens, consumers, voters, and so forth, all conceptions that take us as mere individuals, apart from our connections to others. 296 CHAPTER 13. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS man nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart10 avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing. The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a ζῶον πολιτικόν11 not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society — a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness — is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by 10MIA: "Sir James Steuart (1712-80), 'the rational exponent of the Monetary and Mercantile System' (Marx), an adherent of the Stuart cause who went into exile in 1745 and pursued economic studies on the Continent. Author of An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, London, 1767 (2 vols), Dublin, 1770 (3 vols — the edition used by Marx)." 11ζῶον πολιτικόν is transliterated "zoon politikon". It literally me ans "political animal". MIA: "zoon politikon — political animal." 13.1. MARX & ENGELS, IDEAS AND CLASS 297 Bastiat,12 Carey,13 Proudhon,14 etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made, and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus communis. 15 12MIA: "Fredric Bastiat (1801-50), French economist, and 'modern bagman of Free Trade' (Marx). A believer in laissez-faire and the natural harmony of interests between labour and capital; a fierce opponent of socialism in theory and in practice (as a deputy in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies of 1848 to 1851)." 13MIA: "Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), American economist, an opponent of Ricardian pessimism ('Carey, who does not understand Ricardo' — Marx), believed in state intervention to establish harmony between the interests of labour and of capital, and in the tendency of real wages to rise." 14 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809âĂŞ1865) was a French thinker and politician who is often considered a father of the anarchist movement which is closely related to the communist movement. Proudhon is famous for coining the slogan "Property is theft". Marx and Proudhon were friends for a while but went in very different directions. In Marx's book The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx severely criticized Proudhon's ideas. 15 The Latin phrase "locus communis" is usually translated as "commonplace". MIA: "Of a commonplace (mind). Marx refers here to Bastiat's Harmonies Economiques, Paris, 1851, pp. 

 

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