>> Well, you can get that impression from *The German Ideology*,
>
>>From where in the GI? Cites, please.
Remember I said 'can get that impression', not 'must arrive at that conclusion'. The hard relativist need only look at the first few pages to find apparent vindication. I reckon Lysenko's nutty ideas might have started with such a reading of 'As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce'.
I stress again, this need not (I insist should not) be read as anti-humanism. It just can be, that's all. And we've all met a few who do.
> >I think the following Singer quotelet is pretty important stuff, hence its
> gratuitous repeat.
>
> 'First of all, we have evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to
> "enter into mutually beneficial forms of co-operation."
>
>Why not both?
Well, mebbe there is such a thing as 'mutually beneficial capitalism' - if there is, we're talking modest benefits indeed (or throwing out the notions of ''alienation' and 'exploitation' all together) and, I reckon, but a moment in the motion of capitalism anyway.
It also occurs to me that unless you're as mad a Lamarckist as Lysenko was (not a criticism of all Lamarckism, just its extreme variants - I am given to believe, for instance, that some geneticists now suspect effectively genetic information may indeed be finding its way into our nucleic acids), you'd have to argue that the dynamic relations preceeding capitalism by a few tens of thousands of years would be what's made us ruthless proto-capitalists. Certainly the 'what' and 'how' of what we produce today hasn't had the time to fix new essential drives (in *EPMs*, the young Marx importantly distinguishes between fixed and relative drives). I do not hold we can be turned into ideal-type communists - certainly not in a generation or two (else I'd not be so hard on the murderous Lysenko), but that does not mean I have to hold we can't do an awful lot to our naturalised relative drives in a comparatively short period, just at the level of cognition, for a start!
> >To say a
> certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right. To
> accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every
> human trait with an evolutionary origin.'
>
>There''s tension between the secoind part of the quote and the first.
Well, it ain't quite a logical contradiction, either.
Nice to be blathering with you again, Justin! Rob.