Name: The German Ideology
ISBN: 9781614270485

The German Ideology

Nearly two years before his powerful Communist Manifesto, Marx (1818-1883) co-wrote The German Ideology in 1845 with friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels expounding a new political worldview, including positions on materialism, labor, production, alienation, the expansion of capitalism, class conflict, revolution, and eventually communism. They chart the course of "true" socialism based on Hegel's dialectic, while criticizing the ideas of Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx expanded his criticism of the latter in his now famous Theses on Feuerbach, found after Marx's death and published by Engels in 1888. Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, also found among the posthumous papers of Marx, is a fragment of an introduction to his main works. Combining these three works, this volume is essential for an understanding of Marxism.

What Hacker News says

vidarhJan 2026

Whether you think it possible or not, this take misunderstands Marxism at a fundamental level.

For Marxists, automation is a good thing - in fact it is a core precondition of socialism.

Marx spent half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over capitalism for the productivity increases brought by capitalism.

So why do you think it was to the chagrin of Marxists? Marx spent decades cheering on the advancement of industrialisation, and specifically argued (in The German Ideology) that socialism would be impossible without these advances in productive forces.

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vidarhJan 2026

The CCP isn't Marxist and doesn't claim to be.

Deng basically copied parts of Lenins "New Economic Policy" of "limited capitalism" because he like Lenin realised they'd made a mistake in preempting dismantling of the market, in direct contradiction of the Marxist view that a socialist revolution requires a well developed capitalist economy, and Marx explicit warning against attempting socialism too soon. That's what I pointed to with the reference to the German Ideology. Because of course taking out profit enough to do meaningful redistribution will harm growth. That's not a "gotcha" - it's an inherent, core assumption of Marxist thinking that socialism only becomes possible because of capitalism.

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Der_EinzigeMar 2025

That particular book is of special interest to me as a stirner shill/fanatic. The "Specter of Marx" he's refering to is Max Stirner! Derrida is trying to answer the question of "Why did Stirners book, The Unique and its Property, trigger Marx to write The German Ideology and dedicate over 300 pages to shitting on stirner?".

I've cover to cover read that book, and it's garbage dog shit just like Zizek is. The moment that you start trying to wax poetic about whose what ism is when you become post-modern neo marxism. It's academic ivy league eliteist careerism and its disgusting. Fashionable nonsense. Zinn and Zizek are playing the exact same game. One just writes more coherently than the other.

If you think Hegel or Marx are worth citing, you're a pomo/fraud. If you think Psychoanalysis/Freud are worth citing, you're a pomo/fraud. Deleuze killed himself. Mark fischer killed himself. Althussar killed his wife. Wilhelm Reich was a loony who after writing his analysis of the sexuality of fascism went nuts about "Orgone" machines. Foucault, Sartre/De Bouvier were pedos and collaborators. Even my favorite half-breed of pluralism mixed with pomo shit, Arendt, was in love with the arch nemesis of "oh they were literally a nazi " pomos - Heidigger! And who can forgot Carl Schmitt?

JUST WRITE THESE IDIOTS ALL OFF ALREADY AND LEAVE THEM IN THE DUST BIN OF HISTORY!

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vidarhJul 2024

It's amusing, because you'd agree more with Marx than with those "commies" with those "idealist delusions" you mention.

E.g. Critique of the Gotha Programme has a whole sections where Marx rips the then still largely Marxist precursor of the SPD for trusting the state too much, for not understanding that equal opportunity means distribution can't be equal, and The German Ideology has Marx pointing out that "eat or be eaten" means socialism according to him is impossible in a society that isn't rich enough to meet sufficient needs to remove poverty entirely through redistribution.

Overall, Marx central thesis is that workers being forced into a choice of "eat or be eaten" is what he believed would eventually force them to rise up and end capitalism once capital gains sufficient upper hand to drive labour costs down so much it's rising up or starving.

These "idealist delusions" about greed not existing annoyed him enough that there's a whole section in the Communist Manifesto mocking them, and the reason Marx and Engels used the term "communist" instead of "socialist" was to set themselves apart from socialist movements that believed that people could just be convinced to stop being greedy.

If society isn't driven by greed, that would invalidate the central theses of Marxist communism. All of his core predictions rests on the assumptions that greed is what drives the evolution of capitalism towards a stage where he believed workers would eventually not put greed aside but understand that the way to maximise their own benefits would be to work together to strip capitalist of power and wealth.

Whether or not we think he was right or wrong about that, it's in any case clear that the major inspiration of communist ideologies explicitly rejected the notion of ending greed.

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Der_EinzigeJun 2024

The very fact that Max Stirner, and anything from anyone with some notion of "Anarchism" in their ideological descriptions is explicitly not something you're aware of is very telling of how the main stream academy has unjustly left Egoism and related ideas to languish in obscurity.

Stirner was prophectic in calling out Hegel's and Marx's bullshit, and the way that his work triggered Marx so hard that Marx felt the need to write an entire book calling him a doo-doo head (The German Ideology) shows that he was subversive in the best way possible - he got under the skin of a thinker whose legacy is hundreds of millions of people dead. I suggest giving him a read, as he has a truly non-rationalist philosophy which is very different from any that you've read before.

Re: Deleuze being "bog standard". You think that doing tons of LSD with his homie Guattari while they wrote Anti-oedipus was "normal"? One of them even killed themselves by throwing themself out of a window (supposedly due to "chronic pain" but who the heck knows with their literal schizoanalytical ideas)

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moshunApr 2024

I’m not sure if you’re joking so forgive me if the sarcasm missed me, but there is a gargantuan body of work on this subject. It’s central to theories Marx developed and was expanded on by both his contemporaries and more modern scholars in fields like political economics, sociology and cultural studies.

Some reading around this:

Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970)

Antonio Gramsci: "Prison Notebooks" (1929-1935)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "The German Ideology" (1845) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)

Honestly it’s astonishing that so few (especially in the US) have an understanding of these points of view and are left reading sources like the Epoch Times to form a view of capitalism that isn’t “I love it, even though I don’t what it is”.

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