Material Conditions and Social Consciousness: A Marxist Analysis
Both legal relations and forms of state cannot be understood by themselves or by the so-called general development of the human spirit, but merely in the material conditions of life which Hegel sums up, following the precedent of the English and French eighteenth-century, under the name of civil society, and that the anatomy of civil society must be sought in political economy.
In the social production of their lives, men establish certain necessary relations independent of their will, relations of production appropriate to a particular stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social process of political and spiritual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
When you reach a certain stage of development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with existing production relations, which is merely the legal expression of this, with the property relations within which they have maneuvered there. From forms of development of productive forces these relations turn into their fetters, and open an epoch of social revolution. By changing the economic base, the whole immense superstructure on it changes more or less quickly. In considering such transformations, one must always distinguish between the material transformation in the conditions of economic production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical, in a word, the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. And just as we cannot judge a person by what he thinks of himself, we cannot judge these times of transformation by their consciousness, but on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained by the contradictions of material life, by the conflict between the social productive forces and relations of production.
No social formation disappears before all the productive forces develop that fit within it, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only the objectives that can be achieved, because, looking closer, you will always find that these objectives can only arise when there are already, or at least are brewing, the material conditions for their realization. Broadly speaking, we can designate as so many epochs of progress in the economic formation of society the Asiatic mode of production, the ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois. 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 an antagonism that comes from the social conditions of life of individuals. But the productive forces developed in bourgeois society provide, at the same time, the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. This social formation closes, therefore, the prehistory of human society.