A theory from fragments

By the time The German Ideology was published in 1932, a version of “I. Feuerbach” had been circulating for several years due to the efforts of David Ryazanov, who directed the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow from July 1922 until he was arrested, in February 1931, for his alleged participation in a Menshevik plot.Footnote ¹⁶ Ryazanov knew right away that editing “I. Feuerbach” would be difficult. He explained that it comprised two separate and incoherent manuscripts, both of which were made from large sheets of paper that had been folded in half so that each would yield four pages for writing.Footnote ¹⁷ There were four sheets in what Ryazanov called the “small manuscript,” but he reported that their contents did not form a continuous train of thought. The title “I. Feuerbach” was on the front of two of them: he described one as a brief, fair-copy introduction to the work as a whole, which reproduced text that had been revised and crossed out elsewhere, while the other contained four paragraphs of what seemed to be the first section. Across the other two sheets in the “small manuscript,” the first of which was marked with “3)” on its front side, Marx and Engels call the stages of the division of labor “just so many different forms of property” and they describe the “tribal,” “ancient” and “feudal” varieties.

Ryazanov further identified a “main manuscript” that was significantly longer but riddled with crossed-out text, corrections, and additions. Its pagination was also vexing. While Engels had numbered each of the sheets in this “manuscript” on its front side, Marx had either crossed out or written over those numbers in the course of numbering the sheets’ individual pages. According to Marx's numbers, Ryazanov had pages 8–28, 30–35, and 40–72, and by this measure just twelve others were missing. But Engels's numbers pointed to a wildly different conclusion, for the pages that Marx numbered were made from three discontinuous series of sheets: 6–11, 20–21, and 84–92. Ryazanov also had a sheet with “5.” written on the front, although its content was not continuous with that of sheet 6, and he claimed to have the first sheet as well. He decided that this was the unnumbered sheet with the crossed-out introduction to “I. Feuerbach” and that the “main manuscript” began with the five remaining paragraphs. In these gaps, then, seventy-three sheets and nearly three hundred pages were gone.

But Ryazanov was undaunted. He dealt with the missing pages by assuming that their contents had simply been removed from “I. Feuerbach” for use in “Saint Bruno” and “Saint Max,” two of the other critiques from 1845–6, where he had found passages that were crossed out of the “main manuscript.”Footnote ¹⁸ And while this was a reasonable assumption at the time, it has also proven to be a faulty one.Footnote ¹⁹ We now know that sheets 6–11 originated in a draft critique of Bruno Bauer that dates from October 1845, and that large sections of text are crossed out because they were ultimately used in “Saint Bruno.” The other two sets of sheets were taken out of different parts of “Saint Max,” which Marx and Engels began in November 1845. Sheets 20 and 21 contain completed text from a section called “The Hierarchy,” some of which was copied back into “Saint Max” and crossed out of the excised sheets, while sheets 84–92 contain a series of fragmentary digressions and notes that Marx and Engels wrote after beginning a section called “Treatise No. 2: Private Property, State, and Right.” By the following summer, Marx had numbered the pages of these three sets of remnant sheets 1–72, in the order in which they had been written. Though we can only speculate about what they planned to do with all of this material—perhaps some passages would have been used in a critique of Feuerbach and other writings, perhaps some would have been discarded—it is clear that they had no intention of publishing this stack of pages as they left it.Footnote ²⁰

What is also certain is that, in April 1846, Marx and Engels sent “Saint Max” to Westphalia for publication in a new quarterly journal that they would edit, and for which they had already commissioned additional articles.Footnote ²¹ Publishing this journal in Brussels was not an option. Marx was expelled from France in January 1845 for his involvement with Vorwärts!, a radical German newspaper that was based in Paris, and he had pledged to “publish nothing about current politics” in Belgium as a condition of residing there.Footnote ²² Yet publishing the journal within the German Confederation would not be easy. By law, a publication could avoid pre-censorship if it exceeded twenty printed sheets, or 320 pages, which meant that a lengthy quarterly could allow its contributors to publish shorter works without official scrutiny.Footnote ²³ But in the spring of 1845, the first volume of Hermann Püttmann's Rheinische Jahrbücher was met with severe reactions from state authorities, including the demand that its second volume be pre-censored and significant political and financial threats against Carl Julius Leske, one of the few publishers who remained willing to print radical work.Footnote ²⁴ Although Leske had already agreed to publish Marx's planned critique of political economy, he was not in a position to take on another journal in the autumn of 1845.Footnote ²⁵ That November, Moses Hess reported that two Westphalian entrepreneurs, Julius Meyer and Rudolph Rempel, would publish it instead.Footnote ²⁶

Marx and Engels completed additional writings for the quarterly by the end of May 1846, including “Saint Bruno” and “The Leipzig Council,” which introduced their work on the pair of “saints,” and two critiques of German socialism. It was only then, around early June, that they began a critique of Feuerbach. But it was also around that time that their plans for the journal fell apart. Meyer and Rempel insisted that they had made no promises to Hess, and in late July Marx and Engels had their manuscripts sent to Roland Daniels in Cologne for safekeeping.Footnote ²⁷ At that point they had produced just three arrested openings under the title “I. Feuerbach.” What are called fragments “3)” and “5.” in the MEGA ² were probably written around that time as well.Footnote ²⁸ Marx and Engels do not appear to have worked on the critique of Feuerbach after Engels left Brussels in August 1846, although they did try, until September 1847, to find someone who was willing to publish their manuscripts.Footnote ²⁹

Ryazanov knew none of this as he worked with the fragments, and so he treated the pages before him as if they had all been written to serve the same argument. In the 1920s, he presented this material in a fairly straightforward way. He started with the three sheets bearing the title “I. Feuerbach,” followed by fragment “5.” and the rest of the “main manuscript” as Marx had paginated it. All that remained was fragment “3)”, which Ryazanov placed last under the heading “[Division of Labor and Forms of Property]” because he thought that these sheets offered an “unfinished exposition” of the conclusion reached in the “main manuscript.”Footnote ³⁰ For a title, he chose “I. Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook [sic],” which Engels had written on the back of the “main manuscript” after Marx's death.Footnote ³¹ But the work bearing this name looked very different when it reappeared in the MEGA I/5. Pavel Weller prepared it under Ryazanov's supervision and all changes had likely been made before the latter's arrest, although it is Ryazanov's replacement at the institute, Vladimir Adoratsky, who is credited as the volume's editor.Footnote ³² As Adoratsky explained in his introduction, one of the aims of the MEGA I/5 was to work out “the dialectical coherence” of the various topics that “I. Feuerbach” covers.Footnote ³³ To this end, the three brief openings were left as Ryazanov had previously ordered them but the remaining pages, as well as their paragraphs and sentences, were freely arranged.

It was in this context that a crucial decision was made regarding fragment “3)”—the brief history of the division of labor and property forms that Ryazanov initially placed at the end of the “main manuscript.” In the MEGA, this fragment was instead seamlessly attached to the three brief openings to “I. Feuerbach,” which when read together distinguish Marx and Engels's approach to criticism from that of the Young Hegelians. Because these philosophers assume that “the real chains of men” are ideas and concepts, Marx and Engels argue that their criticism aims merely “to interpret the existing world in a different way,” not to fight against it, and that this, in turn, reveals those critics’ failure “to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings.”Footnote ³⁴ In contrast, the “premises from which [Marx and Engels] begin” are the premises “of all human history.”Footnote ³⁵ The first is “the existence of living human individuals,” who distinguish themselves from animals by producing their means of subsistence. We learn that the way in which they do this, their “mode of production,” does not merely reproduce their physical existence, for it is also a “definite mode of life.” It shapes who they are and it shapes the relations between them.Footnote ³⁶

Although the discussion of premises ends with this claim, the interpolation of fragment “3)” immediately after it gives the appearance that Marx and Engels intended this fragment to illustrate what it entails for the critic to “begin” here, from living individuals and their mode of production. The fragment opens with an argument that Marx and Engels acknowledge is widely accepted—that “the relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour, & internal intercourse.” They stress, however, that the “whole internal structure” of a nation depends upon this too. The development of its productive forces is reflected in the state of its division of labor, which is reflected in turn in the prevailing form of property because “the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, & product of labour.”Footnote ³⁷ Marx and Engels soon describe three of these property forms—“tribal,” “ancient communal and state,” and “feudal or estate”—along with the corresponding development of the division of labor, and later in “I. Feuerbach” they appear to pick up where this account leaves off when they depict, amidst the fragmentary writings on the sheets from “Saint Max,” three periods of private property and production since the Middle Ages.Footnote ³⁸ In the MEGA, then, Marx and Engels's “premises” were put in the service of fashioning what Adoratsky called the “first systematic exposition of their historico-philosophical conception of the economic development of mankind.”Footnote ³⁹ Their lesson to critics thus seemed to be this: that grasping the “existing world” and “their own material surroundings” requires that they approach their present through a sweeping history of production that entails and explains it.

“I. Feuerbach,” history, and the “mode of production”

Subsequent editors continued to put fragment “3)” in the same place, including after 1962, when newly discovered manuscript pages first signaled that there was something amiss about existing versions of “I. Feuerbach.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Even in the Collected Works (1976), where the arrested discussion of premises and fragment “3)” appear consecutively but as distinct sections, the only clue that the flow between them is artificial is given in a footnote two pages earlier.Footnote ⁴¹ As a result, readers followed an argument across the sections and placed a great deal of weight on the historical sequence that begins in fragment “3)” and seems to continue on the excised sheets from “Saint Max.” This way of reading the fragments contributed to two tendencies in the scholarship on Marx.

First, it became easy to conclude with both Adoratsky and Lev Churbanov, who finalized The German Ideology for the Collected Works, that in 1845–6 Marx was chiefly concerned to explain “the whole historical process.”Footnote ⁴² Although Marx and Engels tend to discuss the various historical property forms discretely, without explaining the transformations between them, Churbanov makes use of other fragments to interpret these passages, like one in which Marx and Engels write that “all collisions in history have their origin … in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse.”Footnote ⁴³ This was an important “discovery,” Churbanov writes, as it revealed that “in the course of the entire historical development a link of continuity is established between successive stages.” On this view, Marx and Engels disclosed “the laws of social development” in “I. Feuerbach” and, in doing so, “provided the key to the scientific understanding of the entire historical process.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The force of this interpretation is well captured in the writings of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, both of whom reject such teleological and deterministic readings of Marx's mature theory of history but nonetheless concede that this is where it began in 1845–6. They explain that Marx's early theory of history was tethered to an older conception of economic periods, one familiar from the writings of Adam Smith, in which the “mode of subsistence” evolves through “the natural progress of one universal economic logic.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In other words, it was a theory of “the self-developing division of labour” as it responded to the needs of “rationally self-interested producers.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By planting the seeds of commercial society in the “depths” of history and human nature, Marx, they argue, could simply show that capitalism was liberated from the confines of feudalism, where it had been all along, and avoid having to explain its unique origin and logic.Footnote ⁴⁷

The prominence of fragment “3)” also inspired a common approach to studying Marx's concept of a “mode of production.” We have seen that this concept appears in one of the draft openings to “I. Feuerbach,” and it is in numerous other fragments too, such as where Marx and Engels explain that their conception of history “relies on expounding the real process of production—starting from the material production of life itself—and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But where the concept does not appear is in fragment “3),” which is to say, in the historical sequence that editors placed at the heart of the “chapter.” This absence has encouraged scholars to focus on how Marx used and developed the “mode of production” in his subsequent writings, where they find it assuming what they take to be its characteristic role: either a means of clarifying the stages through which historical development unfolds, or a means of rejecting that model and thinking anew about historical difference.

According to Churbanov, for example, as Marx expounded “the various aspects of the concept ‘mode of production’” in his later works, he found a superior tool for grasping “the successive replacement of social formations, the general outline of which was given in The German Ideology.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In contrast, Wood argues that “sometime between the German Ideology and Capital [1867], with a crucial milestone in the Grundrisse [1857–8], a radical change took place” in Marx's thought.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rather than understanding different societies as different “stages in the development of one social form,” he began to use the concept of a “mode of production” in its “distinctive Marxist sense”—namely to grasp the historical specificity of social forms and the unique “laws of motion” that they contain.Footnote ⁵¹ Despite the concept's importance, then, it has been common for scholars to take its presence in the 1845–6 manuscripts for granted and to overlook both the work that it performs there and why it entered Marx's thought in the first place. Instead, they quietly affirm Eric Hobsbawm's claim that the “evolution” of Marx's views about historical periods and historical change is best studied by starting with The German Ideology and its claim that the “various stages in the social division of labour correspond to various forms of property.”Footnote ⁵²

But in the MEGA ² I/5, where fragment “3)” and the fragments from “Saint Max” once again become mere fragments, connected to nothing and bearing no substantive titles, it is no longer evident that they should be prioritized over other parts of the 1845–6 manuscripts when investigating Marx's early ideas about history. Indeed, it is worth remembering that it was only by chance that we came to read “I. Feuerbach” as we did. We do not have to accept Ryazanov's first version of “I. Feuerbach” as a faithful representation of Marx and Engels's purpose in order to appreciate that Marx's historical preoccupations took shape there differently than they did in later versions, a fact that can help to shake certainties about the 1845–6 manuscripts.

In Ryazanov's initial presentation of the fragments, the three draft openings were followed by fragment “5.”, where Marx and Engels distinguish their method from that of “German philosophy.” Instead of descending “from heaven to earth,” they write that they begin “from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process [demonstrate] the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process,” for “men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. … as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these.”Footnote ⁵³ This fragment, however, also highlights a challenge that comes with Marx and Engels's method. They explain in the closing paragraph that when a critic undertakes “real, positive science,” or when “reality is described,” then

In the final line of the fragment, they return from the problem of grasping epochs to their starting point: they write that they use abstractions “in contradistinction to ideology” and that they will illustrate a few with historical examples.

Marx is certainly interested in “historical development” in fragment “5.” His method of critique presumes that productive forces change over time and that individuals, relations, and ideas change with them. But he is not concerned to chart this development, nor does he seek a single law that would clarify the process and its various “stages.” Instead, he confronts the limits of the “general results” that our investigations of historical development will yield. Whatever purpose these “abstractions” may serve, Marx insists that they cannot delimit and define historical periods, or in other words, they cannot capture historical specificity and difference. And when he confronts the difficulty of understanding epochs, Marx is wrestling with a fundamental problem of historical knowledge. How can any epoch be understood as a time that is distinct from others without the crutch of a philosophical “recipe or schema,” and if abstractions gleaned from the “historical development of men” are of no use either? What kinds of resources might aid that work instead? This is not the concern that readers typically found in “I. Feuerbach.” But the problem of how we might attend adequately to individual epochs—and, crucially, to the present one—pervades the critique of Stirner, where Marx began to use the “mode of production” as a conceptual resource for distinguishing and grasping disparate times. What did he accomplish by using this concept as he did and by focusing so intently on how epochs can be known? To answer these questions, we must follow the “mode of production” into “Saint Max.”

“A new mode of production”

The term “mode of production” could be found in a wide range of texts in the mid-1840s, but it showed up infrequently, usually just once or twice in a given work. Its German, French, and English variants were all used to express the way in which something comes into being. It often indicated a natural process of generation: the formation of the cumulus cloud, the flowering of the Laelia autumnalis, the development of a heart murmur or insanity.Footnote ⁵⁵ One doctor regretted that experiments on blood could not illuminate “the mode of production [Productionsweise] of nature itself.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Elsewhere the term referred to the work of human ingenuity, like the way in which syllables are formed in Homeric prosody or how sound is made by a physharmonica.Footnote ⁵⁷ In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel distinguished the artistic mode of production (Weise der Production) from mechanical and scientific production, and he described how it differs in its classical and romantic forms.Footnote ⁵⁸ Marx may well have read these lines in 1842, when he was preparing a treatise for Bruno Bauer's pamphlet Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art.Footnote ⁵⁹

Our earliest record of Marx using the term “mode of production” comes from a very different context. It appears on a few occasions in his notebooks from 1844, which he filled in Paris while he was studying political economy for the first time. By then, political economists had used this term just as sporadically as had botanists. It is not in Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) or David Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). James Mill does not use it in his Elements of Political Economy (1821), nor does Engels in “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie” (“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” 1844). These were among the first texts that Marx studied.Footnote ⁶⁰ He also read volume 1 of Fryderyk Skarbek's Théorie des richesses sociales (1829), and the term is not there either, although Skarbek does use it once in volume 2. In the course of discussing consumption habits, he writes that if there is a strong demand for shoddy products in a given country, then its industry “will by no means endeavor to improve the mode of production [mode de production].”Footnote ⁶¹ And when other political economists used this term they did so in the same way: it indicated the manner in which goods are made, which could refer to a nation's industry and its branches, for example, or to the practices that are used to make a particular commodity. Marx would have seen an example of this in Wilhelm Schulz's Die Bewegung der Production (1843) near passages that he excerpted.Footnote ⁶² He also would have seen it in the third edition of Jean-Baptiste Say's Traité d’économie politique (1817), where his studies likely began and where the term appears in a single section heading, “Effect of regulations that fix the mode of production [mode de production].”Footnote ⁶³ Marx copied a brief passage from this section, which describes how different branches of industry—agriculture and manufacture—are shaped by governmental regulation.Footnote ⁶⁴

Marx eventually used the term exactly as the political economists did. In a notebook from the end of 1844, he refers to “all of the modes of production [Produktionsweisen]” of a country as he sketches a critique of Say's ideas about overproduction.Footnote ⁶⁵ But there is no other record of this happening that year. The term expresses a different concept in a notebook that dates from August, where it helped Marx to understand human nature as it is and could be. And in the final months of 1844 he transformed the concept once again as he wrote his part of The Holy Family, his first collaboration with Engels. There, the “mode of production” became a tool for grasping a given historical epoch, which Marx had previously claimed is the primary task of social critique. These are the initial steps in the life of Marx's “mode of production” and I shall analyze them shortly. Turning first to the journal project that brought him to Paris will illuminate the resources and concerns that were involved in the concept's development.

* * *

Marx was on the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne from October 1842 until March 1843, when he resigned “owing to the present conditions of censorship.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Prussian government had banned his newspaper in January of that year and decreed that its operations cease on 1 April.Footnote ⁶⁷ The suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung left Marx eager to unite “truly thinking and independent minds” in France and Germany, and to this end he conceived a new journal with Arnold Ruge and decided to publish it in Paris.Footnote ⁶⁸ His chief hope, he told Ruge, was to contribute to the project of social transformation, but he acknowledged that this would be difficult because no one knows exactly “what the future ought to be.”Footnote ⁶⁹ One way of dealing with this uncertainty would have been to follow philosophers in the pursuit of absolute knowledge, and with the principles obtained, to evaluate the existing world and craft a dogmatic vision of the future. Marx swiftly rejected this approach—“constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair”—and he proposed instead that they “find the new world through criticism of the old one.” In other words, they would undertake a “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” By attending to the world that they inhabited, they would discover not only principles with which to evaluate the present but also aspirations and possibilities for the future. Their journal, Marx wrote, would clarify for “the age [Zeit] … its struggles and desires” and thereby “show the world what it is really fighting for.”Footnote ⁷⁰

But where does this work begin? What must critics analyze in order to grasp the conditions, and with them the principles and desires, of their “age”? Marx's answer was “the political state,” which can reveal human needs and social truths because it registers “the practical struggles of mankind.”Footnote ⁷¹ The critic, Marx insisted, must identify the principles that have already been fought for in the political sphere and raise them to their “universal form,” which means making them the standard for human life as such. To illustrate his point, he observed that the champions of representative government had defended the principle that human beings should govern themselves, rather than be dominated by property, and his contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher sought to show that conditions in the modern state did not meet this standard.Footnote ⁷²

In one of his articles, Marx explained that the American and French Revolutions had replaced the rule of kings and privileges with popular sovereignty, but that this “political emancipation” did not solve the problem of domination. This was because the modern state necessarily splits the human being in two: it creates equal citizens who act together in the political state only by opposing this sphere to civil society, where individuals remain marked and moved by the particularities of their material existence.Footnote ⁷³ Marx argued that this double life is not yet a human life. Not only is species-life—or those conscious, social activities that distinguish the human being—separated from the everyday lives that people lead, but where the task of the citizen is merely to secure the individual's natural rights to liberty, security, and property, domination persists and the rule of property is perfected, only now in the sphere of civil society.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Marx, the modern state must be overcome in order to attain “human emancipation” and realize the principles that brought that state into being.

In another article, Marx explored the role that Germans could play in this work. Although the German political present was “anachronistic” for being the “open completion of the ancien régime,” he argued that it nonetheless contained elements of a “thoroughgoing revolution,” one that could overcome the German “Middle Ages” and the “modern state” at once.Footnote ⁷⁵ This was because Germans had kept up with the modern world in two crucial respects: their political philosophy was the philosophy of the modern state, and they had shared in the “suffering” that the regime of private property brought with it. A critique of the German present would scrutinize its historical and its philosophical aspects alike—the ancien régime and the modern state. And while Marx knew that this critique alone would not transform existing conditions, he thought that a partnership between philosophy and the growing proletariat could. Through this alliance, the critique of the German present becomes a practical demand for “the negation of private property.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher thus offered Marx an occasion to work out his own views about the nature and tasks of social critique despite the failure of the journal, which appeared just once, in February 1844. But editing this journal also proved to be important for allowing him to read Moses Hess's “On the Essence of Money” (“Über das Geldwesen”) around the time that he began to study political economy. This essay was not published until the spring of 1845, in Püttmann's condemned Rheinische Jahrbücher, but Hess had originally given it to Marx for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.Footnote ⁷⁷ What is significant about this essay is Hess's description of the human being, whose essence, he argued, consists in the exchange of “productive life-activity,” or collaborations that activate and fully realize the creative powers of each individual. On this account, the human being “at every moment produces itself anew” because its essence is a product of society and history.Footnote ⁷⁸ Marx would soon combine Hess's idea of “productive life-activity” with the political economists’ “mode of production” to explain the dynamic nature of the human being. In doing so, moreover, he would reimagine what a “mode of production” can effect.

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In 1859, Marx wrote that he first took up “economic questions” in his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, but that it was only after the newspaper's demise, when he reexamined Hegel's philosophy of right, that he came to see that the legal relations and political forms that interested him were rooted in “the material conditions of life,” and that political economy offered the key to understanding these conditions.Footnote ⁷⁹ He began to study works of political economy around the end of 1843 or the beginning of 1844 and, as he read, he filled at least nine notebooks with lengthy excerpts. While most of those notebooks contain only occasional comments from Marx, in three of them he responded to the excerpts by working out detailed accounts of his own views. These are known as his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” and their contents are often read as the conclusions that Marx had reached at the end of his initial course of study. As Jürgen Rojahn writes, however, the notebooks date from different times during the spring and summer of 1844 and what they contain is far from “a systematic exposition of a world-view.” These so-called “manuscripts” instead “show Marx's thought in motion—that is, the emergence and development of new ideas, a process driven by his reading and by the discussions he participated in.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Marx's novel use of the term “mode of production” was part of this “motion.” It appears in passages that explore the meaning of communism in the third manuscript of 1844, which dates from August. That account, however, builds upon claims that he began to work out in the first two manuscripts as he pushed Engels's analysis of private property in a new direction. Engels had contributed an article to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher called “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” where he argued that the defenders of free trade had overcome mercantilism without questioning its chief premise, “the validity of private property.”Footnote ⁸¹ As he examined the categories that stem from private property, Engels also tracked its practical consequences and concluded that it is the root of “the immorality of mankind's condition hitherto.”Footnote ⁸² Marx thought highly of this essay and it was surely a useful guide as he embarked upon his own study of political economy.Footnote ⁸³ He even followed Engels in examining what political economists miss when they take private property for granted. In the first manuscript of 1844, Marx illustrates the analytical and practical consequences of private property by starting from “a present-day economic fact”—that workers become poorer as they create more commodities and thus more wealth.Footnote ⁸⁴ But Marx also looks beyond the relationship between workers and their products to consider what he calls “the essential relationship of labour,” or “the relationship of the worker to production.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This investigation leads to a conclusion that Engels did not reach. For it reveals not just the consequences of private property, but also that private property is itself a consequence of a particular kind of activity.

Marx calls this activity “estranged labour” in the first manuscript and he explains it in contrast to a different kind of activity, one that is uniquely human. Here, he combines Hess's concept of “productive life-activity” with Feuerbach's idea that the human species is distinguished by its consciousness.Footnote ⁸⁶ While beavers and bees make dwellings because they are compelled to do so by physical need, humans do not produce out of necessity alone. They can produce in freedom too. This means that they can design and fabricate a “world of objects” that exists beyond themselves and their basic needs, a world that can be enjoyed by others and that is governed by the laws of beauty. Marx argues that it is by fashioning such a world that human beings cultivate their mental and physical capacities, which become embodied in the objects they yield. In turn, these objects allow humans to confront and contemplate the increasing wealth of their abilities.Footnote ⁸⁷ The object of free, human production is therefore the human species itself, or “truly human and social property.”Footnote ⁸⁸

In contrast, the human being is lost through estranged labor because that activity is neither spontaneous nor willful, but doubly forced. Not only are workers set in motion by the will of someone else, who gives them their tasks and materials, but they also take on this yoke because they are compelled to do so by physical need, or because the wage that purchases their labor is what keeps them alive. Marx stresses that where “life activity, productive life itself” is something external to individuals and a mere means to their existence, so too is the object of their activity.Footnote ⁸⁹ The object of estranged labor is thus private property, which dominates its makers and confronts them with their debasement. As Marx continues to work out the nature of this property in the second manuscript, little of which survives, he refines his account and clarifies that it involves “the production of human activity as labour, that is, as an activity quite alien to itself, to man and to nature, and therefore to consciousness and the expression of life,” along with “the production of the object of human activity as capital—in which all the natural and social determinacy of the object is extinguished.”Footnote ⁹⁰

When Marx defines communism in the third manuscript, he does so with this activity and this object in mind—he calls it “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return [Rückkehr] of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.”Footnote ⁹¹ But this “return” would not entail reaching an original, yet lost, condition. While Marx identifies needs, faculties, and capacities that are “human,” he also insists that this essence was never given to us. Like Hess, he argues that we instead produce ourselves as we produce our world. Our nature is a hardy yet malleable artifact of our productive activity, and just as that activity can make us human, it can also estrange us from that essence. Marx had worked out a version of this claim in the first manuscript's account of estranged labor, and he develops that claim in the third manuscript by taking a wider view of the problem and describing it in new terms. He now writes that this estrangement occurs as our nature is made through “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.,” but stresses that these “are only particular modes of production” and that they “fall under its general law.”Footnote ⁹² The key to overcoming all estrangement is thus attending to industry, the site of “economic estrangement,” which involves not just the “inner life” of human beings but also their “real life.”

Marx later illustrates this point by using the term “mode of production” again, this time to show that private property and workers are made through the same process. “The crudest modes (instruments) of human labour are coming back,” he writes, “the treadmill of the Roman slaves, for instance, is the mode of production, the mode of existence, of many English workers.”Footnote ⁹³ One effect of this simplification of instruments and labor is to turn the child, “the human being still in the making,” into a worker, and “the weak human being into a machine.” Even animal requirements like light, fresh air, and cleanliness cease to be needs for these workers, who seek only the barest physical subsistence. “This life, too,” they come to believe, “is human life and existence.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Hence Marx's claim in 1846 that a “mode of production” does more than just reproduce the physical existence of human beings. For it is also “a definite form of expressing their life,” he will write, “a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are.”Footnote ⁹⁵

But industry is also important in the 1844 manuscripts because of the objects that it yields. Marx observes that the production of private property has made humans so preoccupied with possessing things that this has become the only way in which they experience the world. “In the place of all physical and mental senses,” he writes, “there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”Footnote ⁹⁶ And yet, while private property is “the material perceptible expression of estranged human life,” these objects, along with industry more broadly, are also the “exoteric revelation of man's essential powers” and show that natural science has “prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Marx concludes that “a new mode of production and a new object of production” would therefore yield “a new manifestation of the forces of human nature and a new enrichment of human nature.”Footnote ⁹⁸ It would produce a new kind of human being, “the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses.”Footnote ⁹⁹

* * *

In the third manuscript of 1844, Marx never used his concept of a “mode of production” to make claims about history or its epochs, but it took on a temporal quality there nonetheless as it clarified his ideas about human nature as it is and what it might become. He pushed the concept further in this direction a few months later as he developed another set of ideas from the same notebook. These had to do with German criticism and its “uncritical attitude to the method of criticising,” which Marx argued remained too close to Hegelian philosophy and its view that “only mind is the true essence of man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In both the third manuscript and a letter to Feuerbach from the same month, Marx focuses on the method of Bruno Bauer and the other contributors to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, the journal that Bauer edited. Because “these Berliners” follow Hegel in regarding “consciousness or self-consciousness … as the only human quality,” they regard “distinct forms of estrangement” as “various forms of consciousness or self-consciousness” too.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As Marx explains, this means that they “acknowledge only one real need, the need of theoretical criticism,” as this is how consciousness is transformed. And in contrast to Marx, who insisted that the task of attaining human emancipation requires not just a critique of present conditions but also a “practical element,” the proletariat, Bauer and his associates take criticism to be “the only active element in history.”Footnote ¹⁰² Marx informed Feuerbach of his plan to write “a small booklet attacking this aberration of criticism” and soon after decided to do so with Engels, whom he befriended in late August 1844. They completed a sizable work at the end of the year and published it in February 1845 as The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Engels called it a declaration of war.Footnote ¹⁰³

The centerpiece of Marx's contribution is a series of critiques of Bauer, including his replies to letters that the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung had received. In one letter, a correspondent who praises Bauer also laments that the Young Hegelians had tried to acquire “knowledge of the world and of man … only by acuity of thought,” and that they had overlooked the importance of both natural-scientific and industrial knowledge, as well as the senses, in its pursuit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bauer reproaches the correspondent for proving to be “an opponent of Criticism itself” and he insists that “nature is not the only reality because we eat and drink it in its individual products.” In addition, Marx observes, Bauer counters “the embarrassingly importunate demand to study ‘nature’ and ‘industry’ with the following indisputably witty rhetorical exclamation: ‘Or’ (!) ‘do you think that the knowledge of historical reality is already complete? Or’ (!) ‘do you know of any single period in history which is already actually known?’”

Marx mocks Bauer's disdain for nature by invoking his own claims about natural science and industry from the third manuscript of 1844. He initially ridicules the limits of Bauer's knowledge: “Critical Criticism knows this much about the individual products of nature that ‘we eat and drink them.’ All respect for the natural science of Critical Criticism!”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He then turns with Bauer to the topic of historical knowledge and replies with questions of his own. Marx asks,

He concludes, “Just as it separates thinking from the senses, the soul from the body and itself from the world, it separates history from natural science and industry and sees the origin of history not in vulgar material production on the earth but in vaporous clouds in the heavens.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In these lines, the “mode of production” maintains the connection to human life that Marx had established in the third manuscript of 1844. But he now floats the idea that, in fashioning human beings, a given mode of production begets history as well. Understood in this way, the concept is primed for the kind of critique that Marx outlined in his letter to Ruge, for it becomes the key to grasping historical difference and specificity, and thus the present time itself.

Stirner and his ages

Shortly after The Holy Family was published, Engels told Marx that it was “splendidly written and enough to make you split your sides. The Bauers won't be able to say a word.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It seems that Marx was also satisfied with their work and that he was ready to leave the “Critical Critics” behind. In February 1845, he signed a contract with Leske to publish a two-volume critique of politics and political economy and he devoted himself to this project over the ensuing months. That summer he traveled to England with Engels, who was writing his own book on English society and socialism, and they spent most of July and August reading in Manchester. By October, they had decided to collaborate on a critique of protective tariffs and free trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But by then Bruno Bauer had also replied to The Holy Family, which called them away from their new projects and back to a critique of German philosophy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Marx would tell Leske in August 1846 that he had not touched his promised volumes in months: “For it seemed to me very important to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This period of work began in November 1845 with an anonymous response to Bauer's article.Footnote ¹¹¹ And although it revealed that Marx and Engels were as unimpressed with Bauer's reply as they were confident in The Holy Family’s arguments, they quickly drafted another response before putting it aside to devote their attention to Max Stirner, the pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt.

In the early 1840s, Stirner taught in Berlin at a private school for girls and spent his evenings in lively conversation with “The Free,” an informal group of radical thinkers that began to revolve around Bruno Bauer in 1842.Footnote ¹¹² Although Stirner had already published numerous articles, none had fully prepared his associates for The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum) when it began to circulate in the final months of 1844.Footnote ¹¹³ This book was largely a response to Feuerbach's critique of religion, which claimed that humans made God by projecting their essence as an external being and worshiping it as something divine. Feuerbach argued that this is how humans were first able to contemplate their own nature—as an object outside themselves—and that over time, as religion progressed, some of this nature was recovered from the deity. “What by an earlier religion was regarded as objective,” he wrote, “is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshiped as God is now perceived to be something human … every advance in religion is therefore a deeper self-knowledge.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ This long process culminates with the aid of a new kind of philosophy, which reveals that “the antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory” and that “man has his highest being, his God, in himself; not in himself as an individual, but in his essential nature, his species.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

“Can we put up with this,” Stirner asks, “that ‘our essence’ is brought into opposition to us, that we are split into an essential and an un-essential self?”Footnote ¹¹⁶ According to Stirner, Feuerbach had elevated the ideal of “man” to the position occupied by “God,” which allowed it to dominate the individual ego and efface its unique properties. “The human religion,” in other words, “is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Stirner's book describes this domination by past and present ideals and advertises the future that is won by refusing them. He insists that this act sparks an “insurrection” rather than a revolution—“revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged”—and that the future that follows knows nothing of communism, which would only be another translatio imperii, one that makes the ideal of “human society” rule in place of “man.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Stirner's insurrection breaks this chain with an act of defiance. Individuals rise above the established order by refusing to do anything for the sake of “God” or “man.” Thereafter, these “egoists” act only for their own sakes and look only to themselves for fulfillment.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Stirner's criticism extended to anyone who believed in a human essence, including Marx, whose “ruthless criticism of all that exists” had taken Feuerbach's critique to its conclusion. Although Marx had celebrated Feuerbach's discovery that “man is the highest being for man,” he also insisted that this knowledge alone could not overcome self-estrangement.Footnote ¹²⁰ Religion, Marx explained, is both a source of estrangement and its symptom; it is only because “the human essence has no true reality” that people seek its “fantastic realisation” in God, and so the critique of religion must become a critique of the world that requires it.Footnote ¹²¹ Marx's articles in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had therefore aimed “to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms,” particularly by showing that the modern state prevents individuals from realizing their essence in their daily lives.Footnote ¹²² Again, he argued that this occurs because the modern state splits the human life in two, the public citizen and the private individual, and because it treats social activity as a means to private satisfaction, such as by safeguarding the natural right to property that it avows. Marx therefore stressed that self-estrangement will be overcome “only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life.”Footnote ¹²³ Stirner saw in this aspiration an affinity with the liberalism that Marx critiqued, for in both, the singular ego is effaced by a conception of a universal human essence: “To identify me now entirely with man the demand has been invented, and stated, that I must become a ‘real species-being [wirkliches Gattungswesen]’.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Marx began a review of Stirner's book soon after he read it, but he missed his deadline and abandoned the essay in early 1845.Footnote ¹²⁵ In his second attempt at a critique, which he wrote with Engels, Stirner appears as the eponymous “Saint Max” and joins “Saint Bruno” as a member of “the Leipzig Council,” a body that is concerned with “the most sacred interests of the spirit” instead of with “earthly things” like “potato blight, banking affairs and railways.”Footnote ¹²⁶ And with this renewed critique of German philosophy, Marx returned to the questions that he had put to Bauer in The Holy Family. These were questions about the nature of history and how we can know its periods that he had himself answered cursorily with reference to the “mode of production.” Marx revisited them in part because Bauer had done so first. In his reply to The Holy Family, Bauer had insisted that criticism and critics “have guided and made history, that even their opponents and all the movements and agitations of the present time are their creation.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In “Saint Bruno,” Marx and Engels ridicule the logic of this claim and stress that Bauer had failed to grasp the “conflicts of the present.”Footnote ¹²⁸ But the problem of how the critic can come to know a particular epoch, especially the present one, became a larger preoccupation for Marx in the 1845–6 manuscripts and was no longer confined to his dispute with Bauer. Indeed, it animates the critique of Stirner, whose argument in The Ego and Its Own relies upon an elaborate set of claims about the nature of the present.

In the first part of his book, Stirner describes the ego's domination across ancient and modern times and then anticipates a new epoch in Part Two, one in which the individual ego can finally flourish. However, these three times correspond to others. They are the childhood, youth, and adulthood of the human being, a lifespan that Stirner further defines by realistic, idealistic, and egoistic approaches to self-understanding.Footnote ¹²⁹ He also explains that world history is shaped by the “Caucasian race,” which has already experienced ages of “Negroidity” and “Mongoloidity.” While the former age “represents antiquity, the time of dependence on things,” Stirner understands the “Mongolian age” as “the time of dependence on thoughts, the Christian time,” when an interest in discovering what lies behind the visible world has taken several guises.Footnote ¹³⁰ The period dawned with the Catholic Middle Ages but was subsequently transformed by Luther and again by liberals, who put their faith in “real concepts and eternal laws instead of ‘crude dogmas’ and precepts.”Footnote ¹³¹ According to Stirner, just as the “Caucasian race” had to cast off its “innate Negroidity,” so too must it overcome this “Mongolian” or “modern” age by renouncing both “God” and “man,” the leading concept of liberalism.Footnote ¹³²

“Saint Max” examines how Stirner “elaborates on this scheme.”Footnote ¹³³ Focusing on Stirner's treatment of ages is how Marx and Engels show that his criticism is impotent and it invites Marx to revisit his own views about how the present age can be grasped. In both cases, he and Engels repeat claims that he had previously made in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Feuerbach, they write, had shown that religious ideas are illusions but left others to determine their earthly source. The trouble is that Stirner ignores this work and instead “believes that in his struggle against ‘predicates’, against concepts, he is no longer attacking an illusion, but the real forces that rule the world.”Footnote ¹³⁴ As Marx and Engels stress throughout “Saint Max,” when the present is grasped through a prevailing idea, all that should be required for overcoming it is getting that idea “out of [one's] head.” But when this is the critic's goal, “everything remains as before.”Footnote ¹³⁵ They counter this approach to the present and its transformation with the one that Marx had modeled in the pages of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. There, they argue, he had offered “a critical view of the world” by attending to its “actual material premises.” They also acknowledge that his use of traditional philosophical terms in those essays, including “human essence” and “species,” had given Stirner an excuse to overlook the novelty of what he was doing in them.Footnote ¹³⁶ As we have seen, Marx distilled his aims and method in his letters to Ruge, which were among the journal's contents: he sought to illuminate a future that is prepared by present conditions, along with the practical struggles that must be undertaken in order to realize it. In “Saint Max” Marx reiterates that this task requires the critic “to leap out of [philosophy] and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality.”Footnote ¹³⁷

The “mode of production” and social critique

When the critic makes this leap, however, where should “the study of actuality” begin? As we saw above, Marx's answer to this question in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was “the political state”: he looked for the principles that were victorious when a system based on rights overcame a system based on privileges, and he held these up as standards with which to evaluate and reimagine existing social life. But he models a different approach in “Saint Max,” which is particularly evident where he challenges Stirner's account of the very political struggle that he had examined in the Jahrbücher. As Marx and Engels observe, Stirner

Instead of understanding the medieval and modern periods through their prevailing political forms, Marx insists here on what he had proposed in The Holy Family—that they can only be grasped by attending to how each one is made.

But in a crucial respect Marx's approach to critique had not changed. He did not stop arguing that the critic's primary task is to grasp the nature of the present, nor did he suddenly reduce this work to finding a universal law or logic that could explain the essence of all historical periods. This, of course, is what readings of “I. Feuerbach” have long suggested about his ambition in 1845–6. In “Saint Max,” Marx rejects this approach as he scrutinizes how certain treatments of epochs can stifle the work of critique. Reflections like these are rare in his oeuvre and it is telling that they appear where he begins to use the “mode of production” as a historical concept. Indeed, they suggest what Marx initially sought to achieve with it: to illuminate historical specificity and thereby understand distinct epochs.

Marx and Engels observe, for example, that while German philosophers often distinguish an ancient epoch of realism from a modern or Christian epoch of idealism, many French and English writers—economists, historians, and scientists—make the opposite case. For these writers, the modern age is the site of materialism, empiricism, and “the realist ami du commerce” (“friend of commerce”), the bourgeois. Marx and Engels have no interest in adjudicating this debate, for “all these abstract counterposings and historical constructions are of very little use.”Footnote ¹³⁹ So is a schema that makes the present the truth or task of history, which causes “earlier times [to] acquire a bizarre and hitherto unprecedented appearance.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To be sure, these concerns could be extended to Hegel's model, where Stirner found the abstractions that ground his schema and learned that “the later epoch is the ‘truth’ of the preceding one.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ But as Marx and Engels describe Stirner's “clumsy” efforts to copy Hegel, they clarify why they are especially troubled by the idea of using an inherited “historical construction” to grasp the nature of distinct periods.Footnote ¹⁴² They write that when Hegel set out to create, “for the first time, a system embracing the whole of history and the present-day world in all its scope,” he could only do so with “comprehensive, positive knowledge,” and thus by attending, on at least some occasions, to empirical history.Footnote ¹⁴³ Stirner, however, “is satisfied with exploiting [and transforming] an already existing pattern,” which he illustrates in turn “by means of isolated examples.” This approach frees him from having to understand epochs through his own historical investigations and it leads to “comic” results, especially when he jumps “from the past into the immediate present.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He only compounds his error when he traces the reign of an idea—“clericalism”—as it takes on “different names, different disguises,” in medieval and modern times, because “with this sort of conception of history, ‘all cats become grey’, since all historical differences are ‘abolished’ and ‘resolved’ in the ‘notion of clericalism’.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

For Marx, “the study of actuality” would surely need to avoid these mistakes. If the present were approached through an abstract schema, or through a law that governs all periods and makes each one essentially the same, then it would not be known at all. As he insists in fragment “5.”, “the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of men,” do not adequately illuminate epochs.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The “study of actuality” thus requires the critic to do more than just attend to empirical history and material conditions. Critics must also find a way to see and understand difference.

However, this does not mean that “general results” were unimportant to Marx; “Saint Max” abounds in them. And this is one of the most striking aspects of that text: it shows Marx, for the first time, insisting that epochs be approached through their distinct modes of production, or to use the language of fragment “5.”, through “the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch,” while also capturing his efforts to work out what it means to engage in production at all—its nature, effects, and stakes—along with what it would entail to develop a method of critique that is centered on this activity. These efforts can be seen where he and Engels battle Stirner's claims about topics like the individual and private property with the conclusions they had reached through their recent studies in political economy. At their most general, they are conclusions like these: that “always and in all circumstances,” individuals are brought together by human needs; that they enter these relations “not as pure egos, but as individuals at a definite stage of development of their productive forces and requirements”; that they “inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse accumulated by their predecessors,” which condition both their physical existence and their relations with each other.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Marx and Engels also point out that, “at all times,” property “is bound up with definite conditions, first of all economic, which depend on the degree of development of the productive forces and intercourse—conditions which inevitably acquire a legal and political expression.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸

One place in “Saint Max” where the “mode of production” functions in its new role alongside such “general results” is in a section called “Treatise No. 2: Private Property, State, and Right,” where Marx and Engels critique Stirner for trying to comprehend private property as an idea instead of examining it “in its empirical existence, in its connection with the productive forces of individuals.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ As we saw above, many of the sheets that editors used to make “I. Feuerbach” originated here: they contain a series of fragments on subjects such as the division of labor, private property, the proletariat, and communism that Marx and Engels wrote as they digressed from their initial work on the section. At one point in the finished “Treatise,” Marx and Engels challenge Stirner's claim that private property is “a fiction, a thought,” because it is guaranteed by law rather than by possession.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ They observe that when he makes the “political recognition of private property in law … the basis of private property,” it follows that its attendant problems stem merely from “the faith of individuals in the conception of right, which they ought to get out of their heads.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ This is also the case with the concept of “respect,” which, according to Stirner, further secures bourgeois property by keeping individuals from seizing whatever they wish to possess.Footnote ¹⁵² As Marx and Engels put it, on this model, commercial property “excludes itself” from landed property out of “respect,” just as industrial property does with commercial property. And so Stirner “has only … to get respect out of his head in order to abolish at one stroke the division of labour and the form of property that arises from it.”Footnote ¹⁵³ But the idea that people exclude themselves from others’ property is an illusion, Marx and Engels insist, and “in today's mode of production and intercourse each person delivers a blow at this illusion and directs his efforts precisely to excluding all others from the property that at present belongs to them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Here, then, the general claim that in “I. Feuerbach” seems to be the basis of Marx's understanding of epochs—that the division of labor yields a corresponding property form—is invoked for the sake of challenging Stirner's arguments about private property. And where Marx does refer to the present time in this passage, he uses a different concept—the “mode of production”—which, as he would soon clarify, is “a definite form of activity … a definite mode of life.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This activity surely involves a division of labor, but it is not identical to or exhausted by it. As Marx's starting point for the “study of actuality,” the “mode of production” offers a much wider lens for perceiving “how [individuals] produce” the material world, their relations, and themselves.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

That Marx had settled on viewing the present through this concept, even if he had yet to fully work out how to study “today's mode of production,” is confirmed in one of the critiques of German socialism that he and Engels wrote after completing “Saint Max.” They explain there, “different stages of production involve different relations of production to consumption, different contradictions of the two; it does not occur to [Karl Grün] that to understand these contradictions one must examine the particular mode of production, together with the whole set of social conditions based upon it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ To be sure, this reference to “stages of production” could be taken to mean more than that Marx and Engels assume that production changes over time. It might be seen as a sign that they believe that one's own present should be approached through the unfolding of all previous stages, whose pattern and logic will yield adequate knowledge of the existing world. But this interpretation is quickly stifled by Marx and Engels's claim that the critic should begin to analyze existing contradictions by studying “the particular mode of production” that makes the present age what it is. And we soon learn that this knowledge is important indeed, for “only by actually changing the mode of production and the entire social system based upon it can these contradictions be solved.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸