c b wrote:
> "ThIs" is also the type of thing that Marx and Engels say a lot. I
> didn't come up with this. This is from them. Are u saying that there
> is an inconsistency in Marx and Engels discussion of their own theory
> ?
>
> There are, I think, right there in _Ludwig Feuerbach_ that u are
> quoting statements to the above effect
What they say, including what Marx says in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, is that the historical process is a process that substitutes rational self-determination for instinctive determination through "education" by means of "self-estrangement" within the labour process, a process defined by relations of production..
That "mind" - "self-conscious reason" - develops within these relations is evidenced by the development of "the productive forces of social labour" since these objectify this development.
It's for this reason that "the economic structure" is "basic" and other expressions of the development of mind - e.g. in politics, religion, philosophy, art - are "superstructural."
As I've pointed out before, this interpretation, including the resulting treatment of the primal human community as antithetical to the end point of development - "freedom," is confirmed by Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
"we must not forget that this organization [‘the old gentile society’] was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community. [5] The power of this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests—base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth—inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means—theft, violence, fraud, treason—that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before.”
“[5] ‘Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unified him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of domination and subjection.’ -- (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 51, New York.) Ed.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm
"Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm
Ted