Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism - Franz Jakubowski (1936) Page 1 Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism Franz Jakubowski (1936) CHAPTER I: Marx and Engels on their Predecessors The Critique of Hegelian Idealism "Modern socialism", wrote Friedrich Engels, "is, in its content, primarily the product of the perception on the one hand of the class antagonisms existing in modem society between possessors and non-possessors, wage workers and bourgeois; and, on the other hand, of the anarchy ruling in production. In its theoretical form, however, it originally appears as a further and ostensibly more logical extension of the principles established by the great French philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like every new theory, it had at first to link itself to the intellectual material which lay ready at hand, however deep its roots lay in economic facts."[1] If we are to examine the relation between consciousness and being in historical materialism, we must pay particular attention to the ideas which Marx and Engels already found in front of them. Lenin, the orthodox marxist, points out that in order to be able to understand Marx properly, "we have to organise a systematic study of Hegel, conducted from the point of view of materialism". Everyone, marxists and non-marxists alike, recognises that the dialectic is of fundamental importance to marxist theory. And whatever Marx's overall attitude towards Hegel, he always saw himself as Hegel's disciple and successor on this particular question of the dialectic.[2] Therefore we can only get a correct grasp of Marx's problematic if we look at it in the light of his divergence from Hegel. At the same time, Marx's conception of historical materialism developed not only out of this but also out of the polemic against contemporary materialism as he found it, embodied by Ludwig Feuerbach. However, Feuerbach's writings had actually had a decisive influence on Marx's critique of hegelian idealism. "The enthusiasm was general: we were all Feuerbachians," wrote Engels, although the influence was not quite so great on Marx. As early as 1843, the year when Feuerbach's Philosophy of the Future appeared. Marx was already criticising Feuerbach in a letter to Ruge (13 March) for talking too much about nature and too little about politics. In The Holy Family however, written two years later in 1845. Marx was still emphasising Feuerbach's importance as the critic of hegelian philosophy, the thinker who brought it to a close. It is only in the Theses on Feuerbach, one of the essential sources of historical materialism, that he definitely distinguishes himself not only from the idealism of Hegel but also from all previous kinds of materialism, including Feuerbach. Marx's own problematic springs from this dispute with Hegel and Feuerbach, whom he saw as the typical representatives of the idealist and materialist philosophies. Nothing has obscured our understanding of Marx's problematic more than the habit which both marxists and critics of Marx make of quoting one paragraph from the Preface to "The Critique of Political Economy" along with a few similar passages, while ignoring the question of where Marx and Engels found that problematic and how they developed it from that point. I shall attempt to avoid this mistake by basing the first part of the discussion mainly on their early writings.
Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism
Jul 01, 2023
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