> Doesn't primal humanity , as you term it below, have some level of
> _mutual
> recognition_ greater than apes ? I know you refer in your post to a
> historical process of "education" with internally related stages for
> humanity to attain mutual recognition, which implies that primal
> humanity
> did not have it. It would seem that this "education" comes from the
> whole
> enormous experience of class divided society, with the stages as
> modes of
> production, perhaps, but I may misunderstand your implication.
Since relations of mutual recognition are, by definition, the creation solely of reason, they can't come into being in social contexts where willing and acting remain to some degree instinctive. This point is explicitly made in the passages I quoted. So too is the point that activity within the successive "modes of production" is positively developmental of the capability for self-determination, of "slumbering human powers". This development coincides with the development of "forces of production" because such forces express human powers. The development brought about by activity within the internal "relations of production" that define each stage is required for and brings about the transition to the next higher stage.
"By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm>
"this objective connection ['characteristic of the capitalist "world market"'] is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which It presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ ch03.htm#p156>
Ted