c b wrote:
> In human history and society , the necessary
> conditions are material production. That's why Marx focuses on
> material production as a scientific, necessary or rational approach to
> human history.
This rejects the interpretation of Marx's "materialism" that makes human history a set of "stages in the development of the human mind" with "development" in this sense treated as the outcome of "self-estrangement" within the "economic structure," specifically within the labour process treated as a "school."
The end of this process is the actualization of "self-conscious reason" in "universally developed individuals" with the fully developed capabilities required to create and live in "the true realm of freedom."
So "necessity" understood within this framework is the "necessity" of "self-conscious reason," a necessity that includes the "ethical" necessity elaborated in Marx's account, e.g. in his "Comments on James Mill," of how we would produce if we produced as "human beings" where by "human being" is meant the potential to actualize "self-conscious reason."
Among other things, this has no logical space for the idea of fully free relations as the outcome of "instinct." Production as "true human beings" requires mastery of instinct, a mastery achieved via the "struggle" that is human history understood within this ontological and anthropological framework.
Thus Engels claims that at the beginning human being was "still half animal, brutal, still helpless in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own strength" and had, for this reason, "to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism."
An "economic structure" inconsistent with the development of "self-conscious reason," of "enlightenment," is made, as in the passage from "Ludwig Feuerbach," the basis of "despotism," in the case of "ancient communities" of "the cruelest from of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia."
"As men originally made their exit from the animal world—in the narrower sense of the term—so they made their entry into history: still half animal, brutal, still helpless in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own strength; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm
"it is a fact that man sprang from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communities have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis of the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm
Ted