Marx: the consciousness and the social existence that determines consciousness

[ish mailian]

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views,
and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but
express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new
one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps
even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions
were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the
18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death
battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious
liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway
of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and
juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical
development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science,
and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc.,
that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes
eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead
of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in
contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages,viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all
the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with
the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 6:22 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish
> between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
> production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
> science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic
> – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
> conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by
> what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of
> transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
> consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material
> life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of
> production and the relations of production. No social order is ever
> destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient
> have been developed, and new superior relations of production never
> replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence
> have matured within the framework of the old society.
>
> Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
> solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem
> itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are
> already present or at least in the course of formation.
>
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
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