Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> 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."
I agree that Charles badly misconstrues Marx, but I do not see any evidence whatever that human history can be seen as ' a set of "stages in the development of the human mind."' Marx may or may not have thoguth so at one or another period of his life-- I won't argue the philological issues. But if he did so at any time, he was wrong. And such a concept is incompatible with the element of contingncy in human life implict and explicit in Marx's historical writings (such as the 18th-Brumaire or the chapters on primitive accumulation).
I don't know what Charles means by "material production," but Marx's emphasis is on _relations of production" -- that is, culture -- not on the physical materials of production, though the importance of the latter as a precondtion is clear enough, but only as a preconditon, the meaning of which is determined by collective human action.
Carrol