As with the concept of nature and the differentiation of the human from the animal, The German Ideology is in some respects continuous with this understanding of need in the 1844 Manuscripts. Need is the ontologically basic meaning of life in both texts. Whilst The German Ideology is not premised upon an affirmation of life or a confirmation of an authentic humannature – a discourse shot through the 1844 texts<sup>54</sup> – it nonetheless remains squarely within the bounds of the Romantic expression of the ways and means of life. It is difficult to identify a discourse more fundamental to The German Ideology than the production of the means of life.
<sup>51</sup> For an overview of Marx’s concept of need, see Philip J. Kain, Marx and Modern Political Theory: from Hobbes to Contemporary Feminism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 185-86. <sup>52</sup> Chitty, ‘The Early Marx on Needs’, 26.
<sup>53</sup> Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms [1875], in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 19 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 21 (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 531). The German reads as follows: ‘…nachdem die Arbeit nicht nur Mittel zum Leben, sondern selbst das erste Lebensbedürfnis geworden…’.
<sup>54</sup> See, in particular, Marx’s fictional ‘conversation’ with another ‘fully human being’ in his notebooks on James Mill: Marx, AJM, 462-63 (JM, 277-78).
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