Dennis Claxton quoted David Harvey:
> A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut down the class power that propels it forwards, requires an appropriate theory of social change. Marx's account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism in fact embodies such a "co-revolutionary theory."16 Social change arises, he argues, through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the social body politic:
>
> a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption
> b) relations to nature
> c) social relations between people
> d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs
> e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects
> f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements
> g) the conduct of daily life and the activities of social reproduction.
This is Harvey's interpretation of a footnote in chap. 15 of Capital.
"A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#n4
This does point to a "dialectical unfolding," but the "dialectic" in question is Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception," i.e. what Marx, appropriating it, calls the "dialectic of negativity."
Applied to human development, this dialectic, as Marx, again appropriating it, points out, is conceived by Hegel (in the Phenomenology) as working through "estrangement" within the labour process.
What develops is "self-conscious reason," so human historical development conceived in this way is "different stages in the development of the human mind" to which correspond different "mental conceptions."
Because it's estrangement within the labour process that brings about development, a key expression of the development is the "mental conceptions" objectified in the forces and relations of production that constitute that process.
Religious conceptions also express this development. They, however, are "superstructural," given the "basic" role assigned to estrangement within the labour process. A "critical" "history of religion" has, therefore, "to take account of this material basis."
The full development and actualization of self-conscious reason "abolishes" religion and constitutes "social relations" as "critical, scientific, and human relations."
"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
Ted