Marx fifth lecture
A. Two interpretations of "individualism":
1. Individualism as a bad thing according to Marx: a separateness of human individuals from social ties, which they see as external to their essential being. (See p. 376 on "the individualized individual," echoing "On the Jewish Question.")
2. Individualism as a good thing: valuing the specific details of the personalities of different individuals. This can be seen as lying behind Marx's protests against the homogenization whereby the specifics of one's work lose significance. His dislike for individualism in the first sense doesn't imply being in favor of imposing uniformity.
B. The German Ideology:
1. The Preface: people live by false conceptions (e.g. conceiving themselves as "individualized individuals"); it's a fantasy to suppose these false conceptions can be dislodged by a merely intellectual move. They are reflections of the realities of social and economic life; their power over us can be undone only by changing those realities. (Compare Thesis XI, p. 158.)
2. This is the materialist conception of history: the driving force of history is "real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live" (p. 163). Ideas, conceptions, consciousness (see p. 169) are an "efflux … of material behaviour". Understand the history of economic arrangements and you will understand the history of, e.g., conceptions of the human individual.
3. What about human nature? What human beings are like at a time depends on the mode of "material" life at that time. (See p. 164: "The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.") Compare Rousseau for the idea that human nature in this sense is a product of history (though of course Rousseau doesn't have the materialist conception of history). According to Marx philosophers mistake what human beings are like at the time when they are writing for a timeless essence of humanity (see p. 182). If you want "human nature" to mean something timeless that determines the shape of human lives, Marx is saying there's no such thing as human nature. But in two other senses there is such a thing: (a) what human beings are like at a time; (b) the distinctive potential to live as a communal being. (See p. 193: "In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.")
4. The division between civil society and the political state (compare "On the Jewish Question") gets a new twist here. The state figures as an "illusory community" (pp. 191, 193) or as the sphere of "an illusory communal life" (p. 176); this is like the imagery of heavenly as opposed to earthly life that he uses in "On the Jewish Question." The new twist is that civil society now figures as the sphere of relations of dominance and subservience between classes (e.g. capitalists and workers), not just between individuals. And "the State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests" (p. 184). So the theory of the state is now something that pretends to be an image of a properly human life but really serves the interests of a dominant class — an ideology.
5. [Not in lecture.] This allows us to be more specific about the driving force of history; see p. 189 and following. "Forms of intercourse," e.g. and especially relations of dominance between classes, tend to lag behind changes in "productive forces." For instance at the early stages of modern industry (a new arrangement in "productive forces") "forms of intercourse" were still feudalistic (this is exemplified by the dominance of the old nobility in pre-revolutionary France). The result is an upheaval (like an earthquake when two tectonic plates get out of kilter). The upheaval (revolution) is spearheaded by a new class, the bourgeoisie in that case. At first the new class seems to stand for human emancipation in general; but then it becomes in turn a dominant class whose interests control the "illusory community." Marx sees an exception in the proletarian (worker) revolution that he foresees; emancipation of the workers really will be human emancipation, and the "illusory community" will be replaced by "the real community."