The German IdeologyKarl Marx

Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology in 1845-46, but it was not published in full until 1932. The manuscript is polemical, unfinished, and foundational. It contains the first systematic statement of what Engels would later call the materialist conception of history.

The central thesis: consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness. Human beings are not defined by their ideas, their religion, or their philosophy but by the way they produce their material existence. The mode of production (the forces and relations of production taken together) forms the real basis of society, and legal, political, and ideological forms arise from it. When the productive forces outgrow the existing relations of production, social revolution follows.

Marx and Engels direct this framework against the Young Hegelians (Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner), who believed that changing consciousness was sufficient to change the world. The critique is withering. The German ideologists mistake the products of a particular social formation for eternal truths. They fight shadows while the material conditions that produce those shadows remain untouched.

The work also introduces the concept of ideology itself: ideas that present the interests of the ruling class as universal interests. The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class, because the class that controls material production also controls mental production.