>>> Ted Winslow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 04/10/00 03:57PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>
> CB: This is an interesting thesis you put forth, but a question that arises
> for me is that humans have tools and relations of production before they have
> class exploitative relations of production ( master/slave relationship). So
> the development of the forces of production occurs without a master/slave
> relationship. It is SOCIAL labor that is the big human leap.
It's the ultimate degree of tool development that's made possible by the
dialectical process of human historical development not the mere use of
tools.
__________
CB: Does this contradict what I said ? Humans have a higher degree of tool development
than animals before the "master/slave" relationship develops. Hunters and gatherers
have much higher tool development than animals.
__________
Apes use tools.
__________
CB: But not symbols. Hunters and gatherers have a much higher development of tools
than apes.
_________
____________
If you correct the mistake implicit in the idea that
apes are human ancestors (we share a common ancestor), human anatomy (e.g.
the human hand) is, from the perspective of Marx's ontology, the key to the
anatomy of the "ape".
___________
CB: Where is that in Marx ? Where did I say apes are human ancestors ?
The opposable thumb is not as important as symbols, which allow SOCIAL labor,
including passing on productive techniques from generation to generation.
For example, it is more important to be able have a crew that can talk to each other,
plan and all that than an opposable thumb.
Pithecanthropines ( who are not apes but our direct ancestors) had symbols.
_________
This is another key feature distinguishing an historical materialist from a
scientific materialist ontology and methodology. For the latter, the later
can always be fully explained in terms of the actual characteristics of the
earlier (ultimately, in terms of a world fragmented into externally related
dead - in fact, as Wordsworth points out, "murdered" - bits of "matter" in
strictly determined motion - i.e. in terms of an ontology of external
relations from which self-determination and final causation are excluded).
For the former, the earlier can only be fully explained through knowledge of
the later because the later tells us what was present as a "potentiality"
in the earlier. This potentiality can only be fully known and understood in
its actualized form. The later, consequently, provides the key to the
earlier.
_____________
CB: That may be so.
But we aren't trying to figure out what was the key to the earlier. We are trying to
figure out the key to the later.
So, given that _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ is a classic historical
materialist text, are you saying that capitalism provides the key to feudalism ?
CB
