>Hey Kelley!
hey rob!
an interesting thread you started, eh?
>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?
well, given what i do for a living or, rather, try to do i have some serious objections to it. i don't do so out of hand...and try to be patient. if impelled for some reason i do like to read the stuff and criticize some of the rather untenable assumptions by revealing contradictions in their work. e.g, the authors of ian's recommend claimed both that females are disposed to be attracted to aggressive men--physical features *said* to be associated w/ or interpreted as aggressive--b/c of some once important need to be protected by strong males AND that aggressive [high testosterone] males have a problem staying married, let alone finding partners in the first place. hmmmm. doesn't that make you wonder? with regard to the first claim, there is obviously an assumption of heterosexuality, monogamous too, and off the universality of the nuclear family-- for why would females be attracted to aggressive males were it not for the idea that she has only one male to protect rather than an entire community?
lawdy but i keep thinking of the flick, 'quest for fire,' now. thanks rob.
>"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."
well, some of the marxist feminist arguments took this seriously wrt housework, childcare etc. they argued that it must be socialized--brought into the realm of the paid labor force--so that bourgeois women could be liberated from gender oppression under capitalism and so that we could *see* how that labor was integral to capitalism. socialist feminists, though, went further to ask why what some called patriarchy seemed so persistent nonetheless. [the segregation of the labor force for ex, the devaluation of work that was once housework, to show how medicine established itself as the province of males by wresting that work away from midwives through the establishment of the AMA and the deployment of the rhetoric of scientific expertise....etc.]
real quick thoughts. i just saw your post. there's more to the story and i've done an injustice to it here but....time you know.
kelley