> Your statement here doesn't say why evidence/expression of
> rational self-determination and self-conscious reason is "basic" in
> the economic structure, but not basic in superstructure.
>
> I'm saying that the expression in economic structure is "basic" because
>
> In human history and society , the necessary
>> conditions are (in) material production. That's why Marx focuses on
>> material production as a scientific, necessary or rational approach to
>> human history.
>
> like I said two posts ago.
As is explicitly claimed in what you quoted, the economic structure is "basic" because it's through self-estrangement within that structure that self-conscious reason develops.
Religious beliefs also express the development of mind. They are "superstructural" in relation to the economic structure because the latter "determines" the development of mind and so determines their development as well.
As does the development of "the productive forces of social labour," the development of religious beliefs expresses the development of mind.
"The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm
The passage from Engels's "Origin" I quoted claims self-conscious reason - i.e. "the human mind" - was undeveloped in "the primitive tribal community" - a community "founded ... on the immature development of man." This "immature development" was expressed, among other ways, by "childish religious conceptions."
This is why, according to Engels, "the power of this primitive community had to be broken," i.e.
"the power of this primitive community had to be broken" because "tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals," because it "presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production," because "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," because "man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers outside the tribe and to himself," because "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," and because "the people of this epoch ... are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community [Engels in a footnote at this point quoting Marx in capital claiming that "the primitive tribal community" is "founded ... on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unified him with his fellow men"].
This is the retracing of the "dissolution" of "primeval communities" referred to in the Manifesto footnote.
All this is made consistent with what's claimed in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique by interpreting "consciousness" there to mean degree of rational self-consciousness, a degree that, for the reasons to which I've just pointed, is "determined" by "the economic structure."
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
Interpreting "consciousness" in this way also makes the passage consistent with the claim from Anti-Duhring I quoted:
"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