t real premise of human existence, and therefore of all human history, the premise that men must be able to live in order to 'make history'. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. . p> [This is] a fundamental condition of all human history which today as thousands of years ago must be daily and hourly fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. '[23]
So there is a core activity at any point in history which is a precondition for everything else which happens. This is the activity of work on the material world in order to get food, shelter and clothing.
The character of this activity depends upon the concrete material situation in which human beings find themselves.
This determines the content of the most basic forms of human action. And so it also determines what individuals themselves are like.
'The mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.
As individuals express their life so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both of what they produce and how they produce.
The nature of individuals thus depends on the material circumstances determining their production ... '[24]
These passages cannot be properly understood unless Marx's central point about human activity - best expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach (written at the same time as The German Ideology) - is understood. For Marx humanity is part of nature. It arises as a product of biological evolution, and one must never forget its physical dependence on the material world around it. All of its institutions, ideas, dreams and ideals can only be understood as arising from this material reality - even if the route through which they so arise is often long and circuitous. As Labriola put it, 'Ideas do not fall from heaven and nothing comes to us in a dream '. [25]
But that does not mean humans are not qualitatively distinct from the rest of nature. Like any other species, humanity has its own defining features. For Marx the key such defining features are that human beings have to react back upon the material circumstances in which they find themselves in order to survive:
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. [26]
Humans cannot act independently of their circumstances. But this does not mean they can be reduced to them. They are continually involved in 'negating' the material objective world around them, in reacting upon it in such a way as to transform both it and themselves.
At each point in history, human beings have to find some way to cope with the needs of material survival. How they cope is not something independent from the objective physical world; rather it is a product of that world. Yet it can never be grasped simply as a mechanical consequence of the physical constitution of nature. It is not mechanical causality, but human action which mediates between the world in which human beings find themselves and the lives they lead.
Social production
Production is never individual production. It is only the collective effort of human beings that enables them to get a livelihood from the world around them.
So the central core activity - work - has to be organised socially. Every particular stage in the development of human labour demands certain sorts of social relationships to sustain it.
In The German Ideology Marx refers to the social relations between people at any particular point in history as the 'form of intercourse '. And he insists that, 'The form of intercourse is again determined by production '. [27]
The various institutions that embody human relationships can only be understood as developing out of this core productive interaction:
'The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations ... The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life processes of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imaginations, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. '[28]
In order t...
