ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the negative, or critical, aspect of Marx's 'metaphysics' and more positive assertions about the ulti-macy of matter and about the place of humanity in this material universe. The German Ideology is a joint, fairly early work of Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels intend several types of conceptual frameworks to fall under the general rubric of 'ideology' as well; at one point, they speak of 'morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness'. The value of the label 'materialism' was in the first instance one of self-identification for Marx. Marxist materialism, in short, as an outgrowth of Marx's theory of ideology and in the spirit of that theory, is primarily a kind of anti-metaphysics, a critique of dominant past metaphysical systems, rather than a new, rival metaphysical system in the grand style.
