Why carry our argument over to Marxmail without reproducing - in whole, what I have written, so that your audience can understood the points of contention? Let me guess legal tactics. See . . . Charles . . . when I call you a petty flogging attorney it is not slander. Even on Marxmail everyone rejects how you pose and present the issues. And you still consider yourself the great Marxist Leninist in the mode of Lenin. Well, . . . OK . . . lawyer Lenin. For the record here is the entirely of what was written Melvin P. Charles B: >>Do you agree or disagree with the following proposition: Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. Marx and Engels are looking for _necessity_ put historical materialism on a scientific basis. In human biology there is necessity, things that must be done.<<
Reply I disagree because the above jumbles up the actual method or approach of Marx and Engels, which anyone other than the novice immediately recognize. "Production and economic classes are (NOT and have never been and will never be) "the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society." (1) Production of the means to support human life - not any production, and next to production, (2) the exchange and/or distribution of that, which has been produced, is the basis of all social structures and give meaning to economic classes. In every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders based on ritual, depends on what is produced to maintain life, how it is produced and how the products are exchanged. It is not enough to speak of biological need without exchange and distribution of the means to support life. In the first section of the Communist Mainsheet words like trade, market, commerce, "increase in the means of exchange and in commodities in general" dominate the presentation. To leave out exchange and speak of society is an obvious incorrect formulation because society only emerges at a certain stage in the human drama. It is not enough to compare human beings to plants because plants do not exchange the products of labor as the fundametnality that makes the word society have meaning. Society - a word and concept you use, is a system. A system is a combination of parts forming a complex whole. The foundation of society is made up of two basic interdependent parts or what we call the economy. One side - part, is the way we produce and the other side is the way that what we produce is distributed. The production process is generally described in connection with the combination of human labor + tools, instruments, machinery + underlying energy source. We have experienced in our life time that a production process can be industrial but not necessarily capitalist. In a socialist industrial society the exchange and distribution of that which is produced to maintain human life is exchanged and distributed somewhat differently because the property form varies. It is true that and I most certainly agree that in human life "there is necessity, things that must be done." That is why is was fairly easy to basically quote Engels statement concerning the production of the means to maintain life and next to this how these things are exchanged. It is precisely exchange and distribution of that which is produced to maintain life that allows us to understand the fundamentality and concreteness of class. I disagree because what you present jumbles up the actual method or approach of Marx and Engels, which anyone other than the novice immediately recognize. Chalk it up to the fast pace in which exchange of ideas take place n the Internet. No . . . I disagree. Melvin P. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
