merely cultural?

Carrol Cox cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 9 15:01:34 PST 1998


alec ramsdell wrote:


> Is it simply a matter of changing relations of
> production?

Huh! SIMPLY????!!!??? Reversing 6 to 10 thousand years of history in an absolutely fundamental way, recasting the entire dynamic around which living human activity organizes itself? And you call it simple. Run that by me again. What in the world does the phrase "relations of production" mean to you? I'm serious: I simply can not dream up any conceivable definition of the term which would give it a place in any sentence containing the word simple or any synonym.

Before humans can even make a beginning in changing relations of production they (in many countries, eventually in all) must go through a long, painful, mostly uncharted and unchartable revolutionary process *internal to which* would have to be changes that make trivial the changes which led from tributary societies to capitalism.

Do you by any chance think that relations of production are "merely economic"?

Carrol



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