This series of exchanges may be becoming fodder for my earlier attacks on irony in political discourse. We are dealing with ironies within ironies and everyone is getting confused as to who said what, what statements are direct, and what are ironic.
That is, I don't know whether in the statement below you are asserting what you think or paraphrasing someone else (Marx). I shall assume the passage quoted is your own perception -- namely, that *you* think that "there were fixed natural necessities (and relations) . . . into which history has intervened." I find that position radically non-marxist -- to be verging in fact on a socio-biological position. If it is not your position, I apologize in advance for what I say below.
Catherine Driscoll wrote:
> But this does still presume, doesn't it, that were fixed natural
> necessities (and relations) at some point, into which relations/necessities
> history has intervened, but which still form an unquestionable foundation
> for human society and human needs?
You probably don't mean what you seem to say here, and it is on the latter I focus. History doesn't, of course, intervene in anything. It is not an agent -- and it is not separable from the events/agents into which, in this wording, it is said to intervene. If you mean that it is human nature to consume carbon and nitrogen based compounds rather than lead and uranium, then yes there is a fixed nature. Engels has some entertaining remarks in Anti-Duhring in which he discusses absolutes, pointing out that such eternal truths as that birds have beaks and Napoleon lost at Waterloo are not what is really at issue when some people urge the existence of eternal truths. The only non-controversial propositions re "fixed natural necessities" would belong, I suspect, in the same category as birds have beaks.
Hence I can't imagine (beyond fairly trite tautologies, such that we do need protein and oxygen, that humans have vocal cords and are able to use them, etc.) what you could mean by "fixed natural necessities." Certainly such an assumption would be a doubtful place from which to explore the nature of contemporary gender relations.
Or are you ascribing this position to Marx? If so, nonsense --
though I don't know of any conceivable semi-grammatical assemblage of words to which you can't find some marxist who would agree. :-)
Carrol