Karl Marx
The German Ideology
Part I: Feuerbach.
Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook
C. The Real Basis of Ideology
Division of Labour: Town and Country
[...] [1] From the first there follows the premise of a highly developed
division of labour and an extensive commerce; from the second, the
locality. In the first case the individuals must be brought together; in the
second they find themselves alongside the given instrument of
production as instruments of production themselves. Here, therefore,
arises the difference between natural instruments of production and
those created by civilisation. The field (water, etc.) can be regarded as a
natural instrument of production. In the first case, that of the natural
instrument of production, individuals are subservient to nature; in the
second, to a product of labour. In the first case, therefore, property
(landed property) appears as direct natural domination, in the second, as
domination of labour, particularly of accumulated labour, capital. The
first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond:
family, tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent
of one another and are only held together by exchange. In the first case,
what is involved is chiefly an exchange between men and nature in
which the labour of the former is exchanged for the products of the
latter; in the second, it is predominantly an exchange of men among
themselves. In the first case, average, human common sense is
adequate — physical activity is as yet not separated from mental activity;
in the second, the division between physical and mental labour must
already be practically completed. In the first case, the domination of the
proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship,
on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material
shape in a third party - money. In the first case, small industry exists, but
determined by the utilisation of the natural instrument of production and
therefore without the distribution of labour among various individuals; in
the second, industry exists only in and through the division of labour.
[2. The Division of Material and Mental Labour.
Separation of Town and Country, The Guild System]
The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation
of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins
with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State,
from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation
to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law League).
The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of
administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus
of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the
population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division
of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in
actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of
production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country
demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The
antagonism between town and country can only exist within the
framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the
subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite
activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a
restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and
daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here
again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter
exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism
between town and country is one of the first conditions of communal
life, a condition which again depends on a mass of material premises
and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the
first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The
separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation
of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and
development of capital independent of landed property — the beginning
of property having its basis only in labour and exchange.
In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made
from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had
become free, each man's own particular labour was his only property
apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost
solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of serfs
constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the country
against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised municipal
military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of
labour, the necessity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a
time when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of
the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests
of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously
acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country:
these were the causes of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds.
We have not at this point to go further into the manifold modifications of
the guild-system, which arise through later historical developments. The
flight of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right
through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the
country, came separately into the towns, where they found an organised
community, against which they were powerless and in which they had
to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for
their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. These
workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power,
since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the
guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to
their interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and
therefore not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never
managed to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for
day-labourers in the towns created the rabble.
These towns were true "associations", called forth by the direct need,
the care of providing for the protection of property, and of multiplying
the means of production and defence of the separate members. The
rabble of these towns was devoid of any power, composed as it was of
individuals strange to one another who had entered separately, and who
stood unorganised over against an organised power, armed for war, and
jealously watching over them. The journeymen and apprentices were
organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The
patriarchal relationship existing between them and their masters gave
the latter a double power — on the one hand because of their influence
on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the
journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond
which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and
separated them from these. And finally, the journeymen were bound to
the existing order by their simple interest in becoming masters
themselves. While, therefore, the rabble at least carried out revolts
against the whole municipal order, revolts which remained completely
ineffective because of their powerlessness, the journeymen never got
further than small acts of insubordination within separate guilds, such as
belong to the very nature of the guild-system. The great risings of the
Middle Ages all radiated from the country, but equally remained totally
ineffective because of the isolation and consequent crudity of the
peasants.
In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was
as yet [quite naturally derived] and, in the guilds themselves, not at all
developed between the individual workers. Every workman had to be
versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that
was to be made with his tools. The limited commerce and the scanty
communication between the individual towns, the lack of population and
the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labour, and
therefore every man who wished to become a master had to be
proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval
craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which
was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason,
however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in his
work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which
he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose
work is a matter of indifference to him.
Capital in these towns was a naturally derived capital, consisting of a
house, the tools of the craft, and the natural, hereditary customers; and
not being realisable, on account of the backwardness of commerce and
the lack of circulation, it descended from father to son. Unlike modern
capital, which can be assessed in money and which may be indifferently
invested in this thing or that, this capital was directly connected with
the particular work of the owner, inseparable from it and to this extent
estate capital.
Further Division of Labour
The next extension of the division of labour was the separation of
production and commerce, the formation of a special class of merchants;
a separation which, in the towns bequeathed by a former period,
had been handed down (among other things with the Jews) and which
very soon appeared in the newly formed ones. With this there was given
the possibility of commercial communications transcending the
immediate neighbourhood, a possibility, the realisation of which
depended on the existing means of communication, the state of public
safety in the countryside, which was determined by political conditions
(during the whole of the Middle Ages, as is well known, the merchants
travelled in armed caravans), and on the cruder or more advanced needs
(determined by the stage of culture attained) of the region accessible to
intercourse.
With commerce the prerogative of a particular class, with the
extension of trade through the merchants beyond the immediate
surroundings of the town, there immediately appears a reciprocal action
between production and commerce. The towns enter into relations with
one another, new tools are brought from one town into the other, and
the separation between production and commerce soon calls forth a new
division of production between the individual towns, each of which is
soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry. The local restrictions
of earlier times begin gradually to be broken down.
It depends purely on the extension of commerce whether the
productive forces achieved in a locality, especially inventions, are lost for
later development or not. As long as there exists no commerce
transcending the immediate neighbourhood, every invention must be
made separately in each locality, and mere chances such as irruptions of
barbaric peoples, even ordinary wars, are sufficient to cause a country
with advanced productive forces and needs to have to start right over
again from the beginning. In primitive history every invention had to be
made daily anew and in each locality independently. How little highly
developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given
even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians,
whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come
through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by
Alexander and its consequent decline. Likewise, for instance, glass-painting
in the Middle Ages. Only when commerce has become world
commerce and has as its basis large-scale industry, when all nations are
drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired
productive forces assured.
The Rise of Manufacturing
The immediate consequence of the division of labour between the
various towns was the rise of manufactures, branches of production
which had outgrown the guild-system. Manufactures first flourished, in
Italy and later in Flanders, under the historical premise of commerce
with foreign nations. In other countries, England and France for example,
manufactures were at first confined to the home market. Besides the
premises already mentioned manufactures depend on an already
advanced concentration of population, particularly in the countryside,
and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals,
partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among the
merchants.
That labour which from the first presupposed a machine, even of the
crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development.
Weaving, earlier carried on in the country by the peasants as a
secondary occupation to procure their clothing, was the first labour to
receive an impetus and a further development through the extension of
commerce. Weaving was the first and remained the principal
manufacture. The rising demand for clothing materials, consequent on
the growth of population, the growing accumulation and mobilisation of
natural capital through accelerated circulation, the demand for luxuries
called forth by the latter and favoured generally by the gradual extension
of commerce, gave weaving a quantitative and qualitative stimulus,
which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto existing.
Alongside the peasants weaving for their own use, who continued, and
still continue, with this sort of work, there emerged a new class of
weavers in the towns, whose fabrics were destined for the whole home
market and usually for foreign markets too.
Weaving, an occupation demanding in most cases little skill and soon
splitting up into countless branches, by its whole nature resisted the
trammels of the guild. Weaving was, therefore, carried on mostly in
villages and market-centres without guild organisation, which gradually
became towns, and indeed the most flourishing towns in each land.
With guild-free manufacture, property relations also quickly changed.
The first advance beyond naturally derived estate capital was provided
by the rise of merchants whose capital was from the beginning movable,
capital in the modern sense as far as one can speak of it, given the
circumstances of those times. The second advance came with
manufacture, which again made mobile a mass of natural capital, and
altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against that of
natural capital.
At the same time, manufacture became a refuge of the peasants from
the guilds which excluded them or paid them badly, just as earlier the
guild-towns had [served] as a refuge for the peasants from [the
oppressive landed nobility].
Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a
period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of
retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to
serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture,
and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From
this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the
disintegration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we
find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and
permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that,
for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were
only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the
most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid
rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.
With the advent of manufactures, the various nations entered into a
competitive relationship, the struggle for trade, which was fought out in
wars, protective duties and prohibitions, whereas earlier the nations,
insofar as they were connected at all, had carried on an inoffensive
exchange with each other. Trade had from now on a political
significance.
With the advent of manufacture the relationship between worker and
employer changed. In the guilds the patriarchal relationship between
journeyman and master continued to exist; in manufacture its place was
taken by the monetary relation between worker and capitalist — a
relationship which in the countryside and in small towns retained a
patriarchal tinge, but in the larger, the real manufacturing towns, quite
early lost almost all patriarchal complexion.
Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an
enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with
the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new
products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver
which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the
classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed
property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers,
colonisation; and above all the extension of markets into a world market,
which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and
more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into
which in general we cannot here enter further. Through the colonisation
of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the nations
amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly greater
extension and animosity.
The expansion of trade and manufacture accelerated the accumu-lation
of movable capital, while in the guilds, which were not stimulated
to extend their production, natural capital remained stationary or even
declined. Trade and manufacture created the big bourgeoisie; in the
guilds was concentrated the petty bourgeoisie, which no longer was
dominant in the towns as formerly, but had to bow to the might of the
great merchants and manufacturers. Hence the decline of the guilds, as
soon as they came into contact with manufacture.
The intercourse of nations took on, in the epoch of which we have
been speaking, two different forms. At first the small quantity of gold
and silver in circulation involved the ban on the export of these metals;
and industry, for the most part imported from abroad and made
necessary by the need for employing the growing urban population,
could not do without those privileges which could be granted not only, of
course, against home competition, but chiefly against foreign. The local
guild privilege was in these original prohibitions extended over the whole
nation. Customs duties originated from the tributes which the feudal
lords exacted as protective levies against robbery from merchants
passing through their territories, tributes later imposed likewise by the
towns, and which, with the rise of the modern states, were the
Treasury's most obvious means of raising money.
The appearance of American gold and silver on the European
markets, the gradual development of industry, the rapid expansion of
trade and the consequent rise of the non-guild bourgeoisie and of
money, gave these measures another significance. The State, which was
daily less and less able to do without money, now retained the ban on
the export of gold and silver out of fiscal considerations; the bourgeois,
for whom these masses of money which were hurled onto the market
became the chief object of speculative buying, were thoroughly content
with this; privileges established earlier became a source of income for
the government and were sold for money; in the customs legislation
there appeared the export duty, which, since it only [placed] a hindrance
in the way of industry, had a purely fiscal aim.
The second period began in the middle of the seventeenth century
and lasted almost to the end of the eighteenth. Commerce and navigation
had expanded more rapidly than manufacture, which played a
secondary role; the colonies were becoming considerable consumers;
and after long struggles the separate nations shared out the opening
world market among themselves. This period begins with the Navigation
Laws [2] and colonial monopolies. The competition of the nations among
themselves was excluded as far as possible by tariffs, prohibitions and
treaties; and in the last resort the competitive struggle was carried on
and decided by wars (especially naval wars). The mightiest maritime
nation, the English, retained preponderance in trade and manufacture.
Here, already, we find concentration in one country.
Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the
home market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and abroad as
much as possible by differential duties. The working-up of home-produced
material was encouraged (wool and linen in England, silk in
France), the export of home-produced raw material forbidden (wool in
England), and the [working-up] of imported material neglected or
suppressed (cotton in England). The nation dominant in sea trade and
colonial power naturally secured for itself also the greatest quantitative
and qualitative expansion of manufacture. Manufacture could not be
carried on without protection, since, if the slightest change takes place
in other countries, it can lose its market and be ruined; under reasonably
favourable conditions it may easily be introduced into a country, but for
this very reason can easily be destroyed. At the same time through the
mode in which it is carried on, particularly in the eighteenth century, in
the countryside, it is to such an extent interwoven with the vital
relationships of a great mass of individuals, that no country dare
jeopardise its existence by permitting free competition. Insofar as it
manages to export, it therefore depends entirely on the extension or
restriction of commerce, and exercises a relatively very small reaction
[on the latter]. Hence its secondary [importance] and the influence of
[the merchants] in the eighteenth century. It was the merchants and
especially the shippers who more than anybody else pressed for State
protection and monopolies; the manufacturers also demanded and
indeed received protection, but all the time were inferior in political
importance to the merchants. The commercial towns, particularly the
maritime towns, became to some extent civilised and acquired the
outlook of the big bourgeoisie, but in the factory towns an extreme petty-bourgeois
outlook persisted. Cf Aikin, [3] etc.
The eighteenth century was the century of trade. Pinto says this
expressly: "Le commerce fait la marotte du siècle" ; and: "Depuis
quelque temps il n'est plus question que de commerce, de navgation
et de marine." [ "Commerce is the rage of the century." "For some
time now people have been talking only about commerce, navigation
and the navy." -Ed.]
This period is also characterised by the cessation of the bans on the
export of gold and silver and the beginning of the trade in money; by
banks, national debts, paper money; by speculation in stocks and shares
and stockjobbing in all articles; by the development of finance in
general. Again capital lost a great part of the natural character which
had still clung to it.
[4. Most Extensive Division of Labour.
Large-Scale Industry]
The concentration of trade and manufacture in one country, England,
developing irresistibly in the seventeenth century, gradually created for
this country a relative world market, and thus a demand for the
manufactured products of this country, which could no longer be met by
the industrial productive forces hitherto existing. This demand,
outgrowing the productive forces, was the motive power which, by
producing big industry — the application of elemental forces to industrial
ends, machinery and the most complex division of labour — called into
existence the third period of private ownership since the Middle Ages.
There already existed in England the other pre-conditions of this new
phase: freedom of competition inside the nation, the development of
theoretical mechanics, etc. (Indeed, the science of mechanics perfected
by Newton was altogether the most popular science in France and
England in the eighteenth century.) (Free competition inside the nation
itself had everywhere to be conquered by a revolution — 1640 and 1688
in England, 1789 in France.)
Competition soon compelled every country
that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by
renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good
against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under
protective duties. Big industry universalised competition in spite of these
protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only
a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means
of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to
itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced
the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the
centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals
to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible
ideology, religion, morality, etc. and where it could not do this, made
them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time,
insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of
them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world,
thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It
made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of
labour the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed natural
growth in general, as far as this is possible while labour exists, and
resolved all natural relationships into money relationships. In the place
of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities
which have sprung up overnight. Wherever it penetrated, it destroyed
the crafts and all earlier stages of industry. It completed the victory of
the commercial town over the countryside. [Its first premise] was the
automatic system. [Its development] produced a mass of productive
forces, for which private [property] became just as much a fetter as the
guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the
developing craft. These productive forces received under the system of
private property a one-sided development only, and became for the
majority destructive forces; moreover, a great multitude of such forces
could find no application at all within this system. Generally speaking,
big industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes
of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various
nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still
retained separate national interests, big industry created a class, which
in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already
dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same
time stands pitted against it. Big industry makes for the worker not only
the relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable.
It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level of
development in all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard
the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created
by big industry assume leadership of this movement and carry the whole
mass along with them, and because the workers excluded from big
industry are placed by it in a still worse situation than the workers in big
industry itself. The countries in which big industry is developed act in a
similar manner upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as
the latter are swept by universal commerce into the universal
competitive struggle. [4]
These different forms are just so many forms of the organisation of
labour, and hence of property. In each period a unification of the existing
productive forces takes place, insofar as this has been rendered
necessary by needs.
The Relation of State and Law to Property
The first form of property, in the ancient world as in the Middle Ages, is
tribal property, determined with the Romans chiefly by war, with the
Germans by the rearing of cattle. In the case of the ancient peoples,
since several tribes live together in one town, the tribal property appears
as State property, and the right of the individual to it as mere
"possession" which, however, like tribal property as a whole, is confined
to landed property only. Real private property began with the ancients,
as with modern nations, with movable property. — (Slavery and
community) (dominium ex jure Quiritum [5] ). In the case of the nations
which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through
various stages — feudal landed property, corporative movable property,
capital invested in manufacture — to modern capital, determined by big
industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has
cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the
State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern
private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased
gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen
entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has
become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of
property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of
State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class
and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no
longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean
average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the
community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside
civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which
the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes,
for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The
independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries
where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where
the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a
part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say,
in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over
the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect
example of the modern State is North America. The modern French,
English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists
only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into
the consciousness of the normal man.
Since the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class
assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an
epoch is epitomised, it follows that the State mediates in the formation
of all common institutions and that the institutions receive a political
form. Hence the illusion that law is based on the will, and indeed on the
will divorced from its real basis — on free will. Similarly, justice is in its
turn reduced to the actual laws.
Civil law develops simultaneously with private property out of the
disintegration of the natural community. With the Romans the
development of private property and civil law had no further industrial
and commercial consequences, because their whole mode of production
did not alter. (Usury!)
With modern peoples, where the feudal community was disintegrated
by industry and trade, there began with the rise of private property and
civil law a new phase, which was capable of further development. The
very first town which carried on an extensive maritime trade in the
Middle Ages, Amalfi, also developed maritime law. As soon as industry
and trade developed private property further, first in Italy and later in
other countries, the highly developed Roman civil law was immediately
adopted again and raised, to authority. When later the bourgeoisie had
acquired so much power that the princes took up its interests in order to
overthrow the feudal nobility by means of the bourgeoisie, there began
in all countries — in France in the sixteenth century — the real
development of law, which in all countries except England proceeded on
the basis of the Roman Codex. In England, too, Roman legal principles
had to be introduced to further the development of civil law (especially
in the case of movable property). (It must not be forgotten that law has
just as little an independent history as religion.)
In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the
result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi [6] itself asserts on
the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely
independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing. In practice, the abuti has very definite economic limitations for the owner of private property, if he does not wish to see his property and hence his jus abutendi pass into other hands, since actually the thing, considered merely with reference to his will, is not a thing at all, but only becomes a thing, true property in intercourse, and independently of the law (a relationship, which the philosophers call an idea). This juridical illusion, which reduces law to the mere will,
necessarily leads, in the further development of property relationships, to
the position that a man may have a legal title to a thing without really
having the thing. If, for instance, the income from a piece of land is lost
owing to competition, then the proprietor has certainly his legal title to it
along with the jus utendi et abutendi. But he can do nothing with it: he
owns nothing as a landed proprietor if in addition he has not enough
capital to cultivate his ground. This illusion of the jurists also explains
the fact that for them, as for every code, it is altogether fortuitous that
individuals enter into relationships among themselves (e.g. contracts); it
explains why they consider that these relationships [can] be entered into
or not at will, and that their content rests purely on the individual [free]
will of the contracting parties.
Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new
forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.),
the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of
acquiring property.
Notes, written by Marx, intended for further elaboration
12. FORMS OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The influence of the division of labour on science.
The role of repression with regard to the state, law, morality, etc.
It is precisely because the bourgeoisie rules as a class that in the law it must give itself a general expression.
Natural science and history.
There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.
[Marginal note by Marx:] To the “community” as it appears in the ancient state, in feudalism and in the absolute monarchy, to this bond correspond especially the religious conceptions.
Why the ideologists turn everything upside-down.
Clerics, jurists, politicians.
jurists, politicians (statesmen in general), moralists, clerics.
For this ideological subdivision within a class: 1) The occupation assumes an independent existence owing to division of labour. Everyone believes his craft to be the true one. Illusions regarding the connection between their craft and reality are the more likely to be cherished by them because of the very nature of the craft. In consciousness — in jurisprudence, politics, etc. — relations become concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of the relations also become fixed concepts in their mind. The judge, for example, applies the code, he therefore regards legislation as the real, active driving force. Respect for their goods, because their craft deals with general matters.
Idea of law. Idea of state. The matter is turned upside-down in ordinary consciousness.
Religion is from the outset consciousness of the transcendental arising from actually existing forces.
This more popularly.
Tradition, with regard to law, religion, etc.
Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life-process. How does it happen that their relations assume an independent existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life become superior to them?
In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the development of the productive power at any particular time.
Landed property. Communal property. Feudal. Modern.
Estate property. Manufacturing property. Industrial capital.
Footnotes
1. Four pages of the manuscript are missing here.-Ed.
2. Navigation Laws — a series of Acts passed in England from 1381 onwards to protect English shipping against foreign companies. The Navigation Laws were modified in the early nineteenth century and repealed in 1849 except for a reservation regarding coasting trade, which was revoked in 1854.
3. The movement of capital, although considerably accelerated, still remained, however, relatively slow. The splitting-up of the world market into separate parts, each of which was exploited by a particular nation, the exclusion of competition among themselves on the part of the nations, the clumsiness of production itself and the fact that finance was only evolving from its early stages, greatly impeded circulation. The consequence of this was a haggling, mean and niggardly spirit which still clung to all merchants and to the whole mode of carrying on trade. Compared with the manufacturers, and above all with the craftsmen, they were certainly big bourgeois; compared with the merchants and industrialists of the next period they remain petty bourgeois. Cf. Adam Smith.
[6. Competition of Individuals and the Formation of Classes]
4. Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite, apart from the fact that for the purposes of this union — if it is not to be merely local — the necessary means, the great industrial cities and cheap and quick communications, have first to be produced by big industry. Hence every organised power standing over against these isolated individuals, who live in relationships, daily reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history, or that the individuals should banish from their minds relationships over which in their isolation they have no control.
5. Ownership in accordance with the law applying to full Roman citizens.-Ed.
6. The right of using and consuming (also: abusing), i.e. of disposing of a thing at will.-Ed.
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