Woj,
I read what you write very carefully and you are at your best when you are at your most absurd. Absurdity and accompanying stubbornness allows us to throw about our brains and occasionally rediscover the basics, if not clarity.
My intervention was only to the notion that classes -- meaning social and economic classes, which is what the "lexical" meaning of the word is in this context, were not social relations that existed in all human societies and historically could have arisen only since the agricultural revolution. Thus for most of human existence, coinciding with our evolutionary emergence as a separate species engaged in basic hunting and gathering, social and economic classes simply were not possible.
Why this should be surprising, or even contentious, to people without ideological blinders I have no idea. After all hunter-gatherer societies don't have formal institutional organizations such as businesses, bureaucracies, state-formations, laws and legal institutions. As we know "states" or " formal governmental institutions" are probably only 5,000 years old and primitive"state-formations" were only possible when humans settled down after the agricultural revolution. I don't think that any of this is controversial. Hunter-gatherers don't have state-institutions and don't have social and economic classes, if we want to use such words so that they have any meaning in context. Of course, contra- some Marxists, words such as "class" and "state" are not precise scientific terms and don't
approach the exactitude of formal logic. So all I am asking for is relative clarity here.
Instead of relative clarity all I get is every attempt to make words as unclear as possible and an attempt to use the word class by its "lexical" definition derived from the context of logic. Listen, I will let you in on a secret; the "lexical" meanings of words are, not defined by the dictionary, but are known according to context of use -- thus the word "evolution" does not mean the same thing in the context of astrophysics as it does in the context of biology. Similarly, the word "class" does not mean the same thing when talking about social and economic classes as it does when talking about set theory. I don't believe a debate has to devolve to such basics of communication but that is essentially where you wish it to go. And the reason you wish it to go there is not from simple sophistry but rather because it seems to be a principle of your expressed politics to be as cynical about human nature as possible. (At least on this list. Perhaps it has something to do with tweaking "utopians" like myself.)
You say: "I used the term "class" in in its lexical sense meaning "set" (e.g. a class of objects) to say that there have always been different classes (i.e. sets) of people and as a rule these sets had unequal social status, power or access to resources. The way some Marx's followers use the term "class" ( i.e. sets of people defined by their relations to the means of production around the 19th century) is a specific case of this more broad term "class" - so if you argue that the term "class" as used by Marxists does not apply to h-g societies strikes me as purely semantic."
So let us suppose we accept the lexical meaning of the word class that you provide. That will mean that hunter-gatherer groups have classes. In fact they will have more classes than people. So there will be the class of every child under 5 years of age, and the class of every child over 5, and the class of left-handed people, and the class of every unmarried person, and each individual will be a class unto him/herself. Fine, I will accept this piece of sophistry. Still, I insist that only societies more complex than hunter-gatherer groups, organize institutions of oppression and domination, to exploit large groups of people economically and politically qua their position in the relations of any particular society.
Thus your original statement, "I am reasonably sure that if it were possible to get rid of class contradictions, it would be accomplished somewhere. If we somehow managed to get rid of class divisions defined by capitalist property relations, new ones would emerge.
"The fact that there are no human societies without internal class divisions (however defined) speaks volumes. If getting rid of such divisions were possible, such society would exist."
where you use the term class in the sociological or even marxist sense, is simply, empirically wrong as to the human past. It's very simple: Qualify your statement with a modifying phrase such as *"no 'complex' human societies'* and then move on. There is no need to argue, and I am shocked that you are arguing, which is what leads me to believe that you must keep to your views of "class" out of ideological principle.
Now this brings up another point, for which I want to apologize. I called you "prejudice" and that word was harsh. What I meant is that when you say things like "I know the spiel" and infer that I am telling "a nice heart-warming story" about hunter-gatherers, this shows your prejudice against people you assume to be "Utopian leftists" of some sort. You don't know my spiel and nowhere did I tell a heart-warming story. You attribute to me some sort of marxian-teleological eschatology, where as you are the only one on this list who has trembled with chiliastic expectation. So you assume that my notion of class is simply an adherence to Marxist definitions, whereas I have never defined class except loosely in a social and economic context. You should stop attributing to me notions that you have no evidence for simply because such notions fit your preconceived ideas of what a "leftist" must be.
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