Bevans on Lisa's Critics: She needs no enemies with friends...

[cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Carrol Cox)]

    We should all be delighted that Kelley Bevans has let us know that
there can be no ruling class without a surplus. Gee! If only I had known
that 35 years ago when I started teaching the Odyssey--then it might have
dawned on me why there was all that excitement. Gee! And all that time
I thought poor Odysseus was only trying to earn his daily crust of bread.
    I'm not sure whether to try to explain to the poor guy that relations
*are* material or perhaps first send him an old Dick and Jane reader so
he can learn to read.fir
    Why, you play dough imitation of a brain-damaged horned toad (apologies
to horned toads), do you think the Romans failed to invent capitalism after
inventing both the steam engine and the water wheel? Moreover, have you
studied every group over the past 100,000 years that have been "isolated
in [an] arid homeland" and determined that everysingle such group had
arrived at exactly the same mode of life as the !Kung.
    Did you read in my original message that the relationships between
relations of production and forces of production constituted one of the
dark and bloody grounds of 20th c. Marxism. Until you have learned to
change your own diapers and make some sense of that "bloody" (which is
literal as well as part of a cliche). Did you note Ian's laconic "Indeed"
when he quoted that part of my message.
    You act like a fucking 10-yr old hyperactive who has missed his daily
ritalin--an idea pops into your head and out you vomit it on everyone in
sight. Carrol


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