Necessity By The Manifesto of the Communist Party, every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The history of all human society, since the breaking up of the ancient communes, is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary anthropological, or "human nature", rationale for this conception. In a section titled "History: Fundamental Conditions" they say: "... life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of material life itself. And indeed this is a ... fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." Nowadays, health care is a physiological necessity , too. However, the references to material necessaries are not quite argued all the way to why economic classes are the locus of meeting physiological needs. It is implied but not spelled out all the way to CLASS. Only the laborers are referred to in the hypotheses , the thought game of _The German Ideology_ Thought experiment, a la Einstein. Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. Whatever humans do that is "higher" than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill our plant/animal like needs. Therefore, the "higher" human activities are limited by the productive activities. This means that historical materialism starts with human nature, our natural species qualities. In this respect, historical materialism is directly a branch of natural history, the natural history of the human species. "Higher" human activities , super-structural activities are limited by the economic base activities; limited by NOT TOTALLY DETERMINED BY. Material necessity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of super-structure, art, science, politics , Big Men, law, the state, convention, culture. "Necessary and sufficient " conditions as in p implies q; q is a necessary condition of p; p is a sufficient condition of q. Formal or symbolic logic , Aristotlean logic. Here Marx and Engels use formal , not dialectical logic. Material necessity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of super-structure, means we can explain some but not all of what goes on in art, science, politics , Big Men, law, the state, convention, culture by reference to class struggle and the mode of production; some can be explained vulgarly and some profoundly, BUT NOT ALL . Sent from my iPhone