The Unconscious Struggle for Human Existence According to philosopher Karl Marx, humans are "slaves to historical necessity and their thought and thinking are rigidly determined by the mode of production" (Beer xxii). This view of historical materialism asserts that the culture, political, and government systems of a given people derive from the material conditions of their existence. Thus, "life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life"(Reader 155). In the short story, "The Boarding …showed first 75 words of 2689 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2689 total…Church. Eliminating class structure would inevitably eliminate one's abiding by a false consciousness in that we would view people as they really are and not what we make them out to be. Ideology would no longer represent the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The ultimate gain in this process will be a free association "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (32).