Re: [Marxism] Red-tail hawk sighting

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

> From: Haines Brown
> > ... This only amounts to the simple statement
> > that we depend on our environment. It has absolutely
> > nothing to do with Marxism. It is just a very
> > simplistic example of functionalism.
> 
> I'm a little puzzled about what you consider Marxism
> to be.

Fair enough. I consider Marxism to be the only ideology that is
peculiar to, appropriate to and natural to the modern industrial
working class.

It naturally makes the economy central because the working class
creates surplus value in capitalist production. The capitalist
economy, however, refers to a relation of nature and society, and so
Marxism naturally must grasp that relation and therefore offer a
notion of nature and of society. The capitalist system can't be
understood either without a representation of superstructure, and so
Marxism encompasses politics. Etc. That is, as I suggested in my
previous note, it started as a scientific understanding of capitalism,
but like other sciences, it has been expanded toward a grand theory of
everything, with the human creative relation with nature at its
center.

Finally, I'm a bit puzzled by the relation of your own comment and
mine. Are you implying that Marxism offers a functionalist approach to
things? I doubt it you intend this, but then how else do we relate
the two statements? 

> > (3) I find your comment (3) hard to fathom. ...  This may be true
> > in religious terms, but hardly seems Marxist and hardly seems
> > scientific.
> 
> I will happily admit to having no interest in bloodless and inhuman
> forms of "Marxism". Ultimately, it's about people.

I'm not sure of the intent of your comment. Yes, it is about people as
a class, but a class as a process, and therefore as necessarily tied
to the creation of new value through our relation with the natural
environment. Is your objection that this implies an economic process
taking place without a human subject? To what "inhuman" forms of
Marxism do you refer? More relevantly, are you implying that an
explanation of our relation with nature is an issue that is somehow
alien to our proper concern?

As for your further comments, I tried to address them in my reply to
Louis. 

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM
         Dialectical Materialist        
         
        

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