REV and SOCIALISMO are INEVITABLE English version.

 

REV and SOCIALISMO are INEVITABLE English  version.

TITLE by Hugo Adan 

10/29/2020

The selected text belongs to the subtitle: "THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY" (page 71 in Spanish. And page 51 in English. My book was published in 1985, so the numbering of the pages may vary in recent editions.)

HERE THE MARXIST TEXT

“The final result I reached and which, once achieved, served as a common thread for my studies, can be summarized as follows”, said Karl Marx:

1-In the social production of their lives, men enter into certain relations of production, that are necessary and independent of their will: these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material power of production.

2-The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real base on which the legal and political superstructure arise and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond.

3-The mode of production of material life has determinist power. It determines the general character of the processes of social, political and spiritual life. It is not man's conscience that determines his social being, but on the contrary, it is his social being that determines his conscience.

4-At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society collide with the existing relation of production and the appropriation relations or, which is only their legal expression for the same thing, that is with the property relations in which they had developed. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relationships become their obstacles. THEN A PERIOD OF SOCIAL REVOLUTION BEGINS.

5-By changing the economic base, the entire immense superstructure erected on it is more or less rapidly transformed. When studying these revolutions, a distinction must always be made between the material changes that have occurred in the economic conditions of production, which can be appreciated with the accuracy of the natural sciences, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical forms. In a word: the ideological ways in which men become aware of this conflict and struggle to resolve it.

6-And just as we cannot judge an individual by what he thinks of himself, neither can we judge these times of revolution by his conscience; on the contrary: we must explain this consciousness by the contradictions of material life, that is, by the conflict between social productive forces and the relations of production.

7-No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces that fit within it have developed and new and higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of its existence have matured within the womb of the old society.

8-For this reason, humanity always proposes only objectives that it can achieve; on closer examination, problems itself arises on when the material conditions for its solution already exist or at least are in process of formation.   .

9-In general lines, we can consider the Asian, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois mode of production as epochs of progress in the economic formation of society.

10- The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production, antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of conflict that arises from the social conditions of life of individuals. At the same time, the productive forces  developing  within the whom of the bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society is closed, it comes to an end. [Preface (1859)]

….

SOURCE:  KARL MARX Selected Writing in Sociology & Social Philosophy

Newly translated  by T.B. Bottomore

====

====