Dominique Pagani "On Marx"

What does Marx's sentence "in the social production of their existence, men enter into determined relations" mean, and how does it illuminate the world today?

Dominique Pagani starts from the film about the young Marx to recall that the philosopher Marx worked on most was Hegel, from whom he retains the formula "the result is nothing without its becoming." He applies this formula to the commodity, whose real history is hidden, and illustrates it with the World Bank's policy in Africa, then with a critique of the dominant ideology hostile to progress. He then comments on the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: man is a production, an idea Marx inherits from Rousseau and the passage from the state of nature to the civil state. He distinguishes natural determinism from social determinism: what men have made, they can unmake. He arrives at the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, which opens an era of social revolution, and applies it to today's capitalism.

Conceptsbecomingcommoditydominant ideologyprogressproductioncivil societyforcedeterminismtotalitarianismalienationclassproductive forcesrelations of productionmode of productionrevolution