In Paris, Marx starts making contact with Engels.
Engels becomes Marx’s sugar daddy and boywife, because Engels has a family textile business and is therefore rich.
Historical materialism
Combines economy, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and God knows what else.
Theoretical analysis should lead to political action, to intensifying class struggle and eventually overthrowing the bourgeois class.
This brings philosophy from truth being “a correspondence of a statement with the real world” to “something that permits one to act efficiently”
Ideology is a deep-seated tendency to ignore the truth, embedded within everyone. Ideology is a “false consciousness” that conceals the exploitation intrinsic to all socio-economic relations between classes.
Hegel believed that history brings only an increase in rationality, and that philosophy is entirely theoretical.
Young Hegelians reject his equation between reason and reality (what is reasonable is real…), Hegel’s “idealistic” orientation, conservatism and Christianity.
In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach says that what is worshipped in religion is really a projection of humans onto a “higher” being. When we thus transfer traits that are proper to humans, we loose some of our own humanity, alienating us from our own essence.
To Feuerbach, the solution is to replace God with the universal idea of mankind.
Marx and his boywife believe that the issue with this is that this is just shuffling concepts around. It’s not about truly changing anything, but about changing our interpretation of things.
Young Hegelians are like Hegel in thinking that ideas and intellectual constructions are the true motor of human actions, and history in general.
Marx and Engels
People think in the way they produce. An oppressed worker internalizes the conditions of their oppression.
The mode of production creates forms of consciousness, so M&E start by analyzing production, rather than consciousness.
Consciousness is not detached from material reality.