Was it you who brought up that stuff about boojie scientists being so keen to establish physiological explanations for our behaviour/performance that they do stuff like preserve Albert Einstein's brain?
I just heard on the radio (unfortunately while my own brainlet was committed to other things - so I'm short on detail) that they've been prodding at precisely that brain and found its 'Inferior Parietal' zone to be 15% bigger than the mean - and clues from other configurations within said brain to indicate more neurones might have been linking within this particular bit than is usual (This zone is where we're reputed to do our mathematical calculations - a suspiciously reductionist model of how brains work, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless).
I'm keen to keep this sort of science within our frame of reference when it comes to thinking about sex/gender, as parenthood has served to convince me that the bodies and brains into which we're born are not to be completely subsumed by the culture/ideology categories (exciting some personal shifting of ground on this stuff in recent years - I've been coming over, well, sorta fuzzily 'dialectical-bio-social'). Mind you, I wouldn't want the job of isolating the differential ingrediants ... making me, if I may paraphrase some useful Angela-speak a practical sex-differentialist rather than a theoretical one. Dunno how useful that actually is, now that I commit it to cyberpaper ...
And on 'productive labour' - here's a beaut paragraph I've kept since Rakesh sent it some years ago:
"As Geoffrey Kay whom I basically quote here has argued, productive labor as only that labor which produces surplus value is thus not a theoretical definition made for the purpose of studying capitalism, but a practical definition made by capitalism in its modus operandi. Hence valid objections to this practical defintion of productive labor that it is unrealistic (it would be realistic to include all the labor which makes indispensible contributions to surplus value production, eg., domestic work), irrational (labor producing armaments or luxuries can produce surplus value), or inconsistent (a nurse in a private hospital produces surplus value while one in a state hospital does not)--all these valid objections--are properly directed, as G Kay puts it, against capitalism itself." (Geoffrey Kay, The Economic Theory of the Working Class, St Martin's, 1979 p. 133)
So much for that 'parasites of the parasites' stuff - more John Lennon's 'slave of the slaves' sorta thing ...
Cheers, Rob.