Having used a stone to throw, it is not a huge leap to find more efficient means of using it, as a projectile, using a sling or catapult, for example. Having used it to cut, its not a huge leap to notice that some cut better than others, and so, first to use these, and then, to create them, by shaping them. In each case, Man does develop an idea, and manufacture the world around him, but it is an idea that itself originates from things that already exist, including existing, previously developed ideas, and products, in the real world. Without stones there are no stones as tools or weapons, and so no evolution of those tools and weapons to more efficiently meet Man's own material needs.
At each stage of his social evolution, therefore, Man confronts an already existing material world whose ever changing nature he must continually categorise and analyse, in order to understand its own laws of motion. It is the existing material world he must contend with, and which determines his ideas, and constrains his ability to change that world. Just as without rocks there are no stone tools, so, too, without electricity there are no electronic computers. And, the development of these ever improving tools and technologies is not driven by ideas, but by The Law of Value, the requirement to continually meet Man's material needs, the production of use-values, using the least amount of labour/value.
But, as Marx demonstrated, this development of technology, driven by The Law of Value, also has consequences for Man's social development too, because the technology that Man uses, and is able to use at any stage of development, also determines how he goes about that production, which creates changing relations of production and distribution, which, in turn, creates new social relations.
“M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.” (p 102)
The bourgeois-idealist sees a material world that has been consciously manufactured by Man, starting first with ideas, which are then transformed into reality, and concludes that it has always been thus, and always will be so. Indeed, the petty-bourgeois socialist sees things in a similar way, believing that it is only necessary to construct a set of ideas, based upon how a fair and egalitarian society would work, and to construct schemas for their realisation, in order to then proceed to their to their construction. Such, for example, was the method of the Narodniks, described by Lenin. But, as Marx explains,
“... these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.
There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement – mors immortalis.” (p 102)
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