Re: Lisa replies re: Lisa's anthro

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

>
> Somebody, please tell me what marxian label/category you would prefer
> for 'resource characteristics'?  Where does this fit into a marxian
> view of the social totality?  I'm not sure.
>

I'm not quite sure what to say about this.
'resource characteristics' seems to me to be an extremely fluid concept.
For instance, early humans would not have noticed the oil under Saudi Arabia,
and if they had, wouldn't have known what to do with it.
Nevertheless, the physical environment has an effect on the way human
society develops, so the question does need answering.

Engels puts human labour at the centre of both the developmemt of human beings
as a species, and the development of class societies.

Labour is the process by which we transform the environment and ourselves.
Labour must fit the environment. We cannot go fishing if we are not near
a reasonably big expanse of water. On the other hand, we cannot go
fishing if our past labour had not produced a physical and social set up
which allows time + resources to produce, say, a bow + arrow or blow pipe.

For most apes, the water in the river is part of their "resource characteristic"
but the fish in it aren't. The sum total of our past labour inserts the fish 
into
our "resource characteristic" horizon.

Successful fishing produces a surplus which may eventually result in a
level of social development sufficient to produce say, a boat with nets. Now, 
the
"resource characteristics" have changed - we can go to the middle of the lake,
and go and get the big fish in the middle.


There is a dialectical relationship between the environment and human society,
and human labour is at the centre of this relationship.

Inside human society, categories such as the forces + relations of production,
base + superstructure etc apply. There are dialectical relationships between 
these,
and human labour is at the centre of them also.

Coal isn't part of the forces of production - but a coal mine is, as is the
engineering knowledge required to build + run the mine. A fish isn't part of the
forces of production or relations of production or the superstructure of human
society. But a bow and arrow is part of the forces of production, as is the
knowledge to shoot it. Who shoots the arrow is an aspect of the realtions of
production. Some bit of decoration carved on the bow is part of the 
superstructure.

Of course, the more primitive the society, the less these different aspects of
the whole can be distinguished from each other.

Jazz is clearly part of the superstructure of capitalism. But a harvest
dance which is partly pure ideology and partly a way of communicating + 
reinforcing
crucial cultural information about where the harvest is and which people in the
group should go + fetch it ? There are elements of forces of production, 
relations
of production, and superstructure here.

Sorry I can't be more specific about any particular society here.

What I think is remarkable about Marx + Engels writings is that with the 
extremely
limited knowledge available to them, they did actually provide a framework to
analyse the development of the human species and the development of class 
societies.
It happens time + time again that people investigating a particular field 
suddenly
realise that Marxism does provide a useful framework for these studies - and
sometimes, as with some of the chaos theorists, it completely horrifies them !


Adam :-).


Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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