Sigmoid Flexure Mundus Marx

[Terrance]

.....The Right of Death & Power Over Life.....

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the
abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding
this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations
nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories,
which were slumbering — so M. Proudhon
the philosopher tells us — in the bosom of the "impersonal reason of
humanity". 

M. Proudhon the economists understands very well that men make cloth,
linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what
he has not
understood is that  definite social relations are just as much produced
by men as linen,
flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces.
In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production;
and in changing
their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living,
they change all their social relations. 

****The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill
society with the industrial capitalist.***** 

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the
material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories,
in
conformity with their social relations. 

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations
they express. They are historical and transitory products. 

There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of
destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only
immutable thing is the
abstraction of movement  — mors immortalis. 

[Marx quotes these words from the following passage of Lucretius's poem
On The Nature of Things (Book III, line 869): "mortalem vitam mars
immortalis
ademit" ("moral life has been usurped by death the immortal").] 


Poverty of Philosophy

Marx understood that apart from their economic implications technologies
(hand-mill & steam-mill) technologies create the ways in which people
perceive reality, and that such ways are the key to understanding
diverse forms of social and mental life.