I'm not going to do the line-by-line thing either, because I think we're losing the plot. I'm not sure that our terms are commensurable enough for this debate to continue. For example, in the first place, by "economic" I do not mean primarily the academic discourses called economics or political economy or development studies. I mean the stuff that happens in coal mines, in factories, on cattle stations, warehouses, shops, etc. (Or the stuff that simply does not happen, in the case of an underclass.)
The original debate was about whether "culture" was as significant as "relations of production", right? With regard to the latter concept, can I assume we are talking about the same thing Marx was talking about? In that case, during his career, Marx himself gradually discarded idealistic/utopian philosphical speculations as a dead end in terms of effective activism and instead attacked the enemy in its academic heartland. So Marx's general style, particularly in his masterpiece, _Capital_ , was to use the paradigm of "classical economics" against itself. (Kelley, I think Michael Perelman or someone hs said much the same thing to you before?) In a parody of bourgeois economics, which pretended there were things like "rational economic man", the concept of "relations of production" was deliberately intended to exclude things like "culture". This is not to say that there is no overlap in the real world. But in the sense that Marx himself used those terms, they exist, conceptually, in _inverse_proportion_ to each other. And so, if I haven't said this already, of course culture and relations of production are "messy" and tangled up in the real world, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense to talk about both in the same sentence. Or even the same paragraph. I mean "relations of production", in the most meaningful senses of the term, are rarely afforded detailed treatment in popular culture. Which is one reason why we need to distinguish between them. It doesn't mean I dislike popular culture; nothing could be further from the truth; I love popular culture, but just don't think it explicitly or directly conveys much about the key activities of the contemporary global capitalist economy.
Regards,
Grant.
PS: I would go further and say that the New Left concepts of "cultural capital" (which I tend to see as a cunning attempt by "social scientists" like Bourdieu to inflate their own personal market value in a very direct way) are anathema to Marx's own conception of historical materialism, since, in the sense of classical economics, "capital" was a thing with a historically precise (bourgeois) exchange value, such as tools/plant/equipment, labour power, money, raw materials, etc. It was also, said Marx, essentially a "social relation", meaning mainly that capital was not a mystical, eternal, "natural" state of affairs, but simply an ugly fact of life in the present time. Marx did also use the term "social capital", the main point of which was not to praise the "social", but to to rebut the fatalist/libertarian idea that an "anarchy of production"could sustain itself. In short, I think "cultural capital", as a conceptualisation, is ironic since it inevitably tends to denigrate culture (however you want to define that), by comparing it to "economic capital" and attempting to blur any distinction between the two.