the grundrisse (introduction) (1857-1858), karl marx (in Tucker)

(222): exactly the critique to be made of Rousseau et. al. -- the historical contingency of the individual they enshrine. moreover it extends to political economy: "Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual--the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century--appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past."

(223): not only is "civil society" illusory and contingent, but it is also particular as a 'private arena'. remember, this is the society that has extended the division of labor further than ever before.

(225): KEY, and the rub of the matter: "The aim is, rather, to present production... as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding."

(226): 1. the bourgeois ideologues are forgetting that, even though property (as appropriation of nature or labour) exists everywhere, private property in its present form is historically specific; 2. the law and police are not timeless, but pegged to a particular historical era--they embody the right of the strongest, only "in another form."