Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas

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					        Excerpt from The German Ideology by Marx and Engels (1845-1846)
                         Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas

composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore
proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an "eternal law".

itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others' attitude to these ideas and
two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collisio n, in which the class itself is
endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the
semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power
distinct from the power of this class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular
period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter
sufficient has already been said above.

     If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class
ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without
if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas,
concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the domina nce of the bourgeoisie
be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since
the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that
increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of

opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it
appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. [2] It can do this
because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all
other non-ruling classes, because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its
interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. I ts
victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not
winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a
position to raise themselves into the ruling class.
    When the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made
it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only
insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony
only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of
the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and
profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this
new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous
conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule.

     This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas,
comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in
which society is organised, that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent
a particular interest as general or the "general interest" as ruling.