Voyou said:
I think Marx makes this point somewhere in the 1844 Manuscripts, but I can't find the exact reference right now.
^^^ Here's where Marx makes the point about sex being "doubly" social, both naturally and culturally(socially) social. ^^^^^^^
"In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. ( how's that for essentialism ? -CB)
>From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself;_ the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being_ (emphasis added , CB: it is th most natural social relation). It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
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