C. McDade
@cmcdade.bsky.social
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A person, take them for all in all.
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I don't quit because I love myself.
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![Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845
Part I: Feuerbach.
Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook
A. Idealism and Materialism
History: Fundamental Conditions
Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore, had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories of civil society, of commerce and industry.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:xhl42u35pgtxj2mt22uax56m/bafkreihyhzfknddwjzlnadpyzaijcjjr72gqzfduy7dqhomcjk6ywt4tnm@jpeg)
![Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845
Part I: Feuerbach.
Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook
A. Idealism and Materialism
[4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History.
Social Being and Social Consciousness]
The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
[The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of their real relations and activities, of their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it.
Continued under the second text image.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:xhl42u35pgtxj2mt22uax56m/bafkreib7dxe44wi6szu2gkabcfuiywew2znsrdmrnrdtgvvw2hy6osgaju@jpeg)
