Pre-historic human societies

Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
Sun Nov 25 09:09:16 PST 2001


Greg:

This is clearly your subject, more than it's mine(!)

Before I leave off, to paraphrase Marx, once you have the question right, then you already know the answer. Without wanting to be pedantic, (for example) I would say commodity exchange presupposes non-commodity exchange, bourgeois (dominated) societies presuppose non-bourgeois societies, globalisation presupposes protectionism and so on. So old chestnuts like the origins of markets and the existence of primitive communism are not necessarily the most important questions (IMO).

I accept that Marx was influenced by Morgan; he was still only dealing with with one body of theory in a discipline which should never claim to be more than quasi-scientific (at most). And Marx did make mistakes occasionally...

Regards,

Grant.



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