"The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but an historical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different times — e.g. the estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life."
How are people accidentally different when its obvious everyone is both physically and ethnically not the same?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm
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What I think he means here about accidental differences is that all individuals have different historical backgrounds that have “accidentally” fallen upon them. Hence, they are all different both ethnically and physically.
Further, an individual is not born with a clean slate instead his/ her historical past dictates their future and individuality. What appears to be odd here is that, if the past dictates the future and Marx believes that all communities should be alike in every aspect, than all historical facts would be similar and hence all individuals would eventually be alike.
For example, when you see a young child with certain characteristic traits you might automatically predict the child’s ethnical background and hence who and what they might become.
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