The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditionsdeterming their production. The relations of different nations amongthemselves depend upon the extent to which each has developedits productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse.With the development of private property, we find here for the first timethe same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensivescale with modern private property. On the on hand, the concentration of privateproperty, which began very early in Rome..The Essence of the Materialist Conception of HistoryThe production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly inerwoven with the material activity and the material intercourseof men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of theirmaterial behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressedin the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people.Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc -real, active menn,as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productiveforces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthersforms. Consciousness can never be anything else than consciousexistence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in allideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in cameraobscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retine does from their physicallife-process.History:Fundamental Conditions