"The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different times-e.g. the estate as something accidental to the individula in the eighteeth century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have to make foe each age, but one which each age makes itself from among different elements which it find s in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life. Of the elements handed down to a later age from an earlier, what appears acccidental to that later age as oppposed to the earlier, is a form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse which corresponded to a less developed stage of productive forces."
I also went along and looked up the word accidental, hoping to find an alternative meaning that would help me understand the passage. But there was no word, when replaced would give it a clearer understanding.
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Out of all the passages used in this assignment, I think this one is the most confusing, more so than the passage I used myself. I can understand the first sentence but once it is gone for far as making distinctions between "the estate" and "the family" I start to lose grasp of what is being said. The only thing I can take away from this aside from what Priti said is that these accidental occurrences that happen to the individual in relation to developing productive forces is that productive forces themselves are always changing and what is "accidental to the individual" is always changing along with it. To think of the word "accidental" in this case to me would mean thinking of happenings or occurrences or a chain of events that are all linked to one another by the prior or earlier age to now or a later age. These happenings like lets say for the sake of the "comment" assignment, in a real world term of example is like communication. At a prior or earlier age communication was conducted through speaking or writing letters, which then turned into the phonograph then the telephone/ radio, then the internet etc. These accidental happenings start at some point and continue to develop in terms of "productive forces" at a given point in time.
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