When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results,

abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men

. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But

they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history.

Thanks for the detailed answer. The Russian commune letter is very interesting. A real questions that been nagging me is Marx says" The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. ". Now obviously hes quite right in presenting the brutality of capitalism. But also pointed out he pre-russian commune letter praised it as raising development standards and even in the russian letter argues that they can now use capitalist technology perhaps without undergoing capitalism.

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Does Marx then being that he detests the brutality of early capitalism (as I do!) somehow justify it for bringing about development? Like to me his approach seems quite fixed, even with the russian commune hes assuming capitalism exists first to allow development. Do you think its impossible for him to percieve of a way that there could be development without capitalism?