ABSTRACT
Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” of early 1845 record an extraordinary attack on idealisms and materialisms as understood to date. Within Marx and Engels’s succeeding manuscript critiques of 1845–1846, only a very few items actually reached the press, leaving a large number of handwritten pages famously abandoned. The very roughest of these were, quite surprisingly, fabricated by David Riazanov into a “Feuerbach chapter” in 1923–1924. Successive editions of the so-called book The German Ideology have, from 1932, commenced with this material.
This chapter uses an English-language rendition of selections from these very rough manuscript drafts to illustrate and expound a nascent view of knowledge as practice, practice as politics, and politics as future-making. Marx and Engels thus break free from subject-object epistemologies rooted in consciousness as a property of individual minds. Epistemology is socialized, and ontology is historicized “all the way down.” Therefore, the criteria for truth or falsity can no longer be construed in any way that abstracts from human social activities located sequentially in time.
