Why is it so important that we have culture and animals don't? Why does all this have to hang on something as materially incoherent and violently abstracted as "culture"? Is it better/more important than an argument that we share just about all of our characteristics with different animals but to differing degrees and that it is our complex of overlapping socionatural relations that makes us qualitatively different than them not something abstract like "culture"?... That in fact the social, cultural, and biological aspects of human nature/culture are evolving co-products of these relationships... here, what differentiates us is not a single something, culture, violently abstracted from materially and symbolically incommensurable social systems but the evolved networks of capacities which have resulted from our diverse ways of laboring - enabled and constrained by social, cultural and ecological conditions directly found by us (nodding the 18th Brumaire) to produce the worlds we find ourselves able to envision ourselves constructing.
If all the products of human activity in the past that we find in the present - and here I include landscapes, flora, fauna, machines, cities, technosciences, social, political and economic institutions, etc. - contribute to enabling and constraining our future development then why not define ourselves in relation to those things and our coevolution rather than in relation to ourselves in opposition to those things?
Your stance on culture doesn't get us anywhere, as I see it. If there are good things about culture and bad things about culture then there are cultures worth having and others not worth having... something closely related to your argument that the war part is a bad part... but how do we determine whether or not a war is necessary? how do we determine which kinds of gender relations, or technologies or medicines or religions are good and others not so good if having a culture, any culture, is what makes us all human and therefore all equally human and therefore all equally....? Hasn't an awful lot of universal human rights stuff been foisted on cultures who don't believe a word of it - in the name of development or progress or....? There is a modernist critique of racism that is pretty imperialist... "Africans are humans, qualitatively different from apes, you ignorant fools, because they have culture..., its just that their culture is backward and once they learn of the glories of modernization they'll be just like us in every way." Oy. Arguments like this almost NEVER engage Africans in the fight against racism.
Your stance w/r/t environmentalism and ecology is typical in its focus on warning us about dangers to humans... but what if our species being is not to have a post-natural culture, unlike Marx's mere animals, but to have complex and rich set of relations with wildly differentiated social ecological phenomena? Who cares if there are bears or elephants or tigers or spotted owls or ash trees or land races of maize or... so long as human beings are in danger, plants, animals, feh! For that matter, what if some of those human cultures greatly value some of the ecological stuff and feel endangered by their disappearance... are they just examples of backward premodern subcultures? Everything I know from science studies and cultural studies tells me that the idea (and materiality) of nature is inextricable from the idea (and materiality) of culture and yet you write as if the two were distinct, in fact you write as if the difference is what defines humanity.
I don't think you gain a fundamental refutation of racism by your move since racism isn't about biology or culture, its about power. Look at The Culture of Poverty, its not being Black that was the problem, it was Black culture... poor urban blacks and poor rural whites weren't naturally inferior, they were culturally inferior and therefore needed reformation/modernization. Gould and Lewontin et al needed no move like yours to explode the idea of scientific racism - all they needed was to look at the science closely and to look at genes closely, voila.
Marx's work on labor, that you excerpted, serves as an abstraction that allows him to show that the essence of modern steel workers is in fact qualitatively different than that of ancient hunters because they labor in qualitatively different ways under qualitatively different social structures for qualitatively different reasons.
Our genes can only be understood to make our bodies/nature if you see our genes as, i the final analysis, a partial product of our sociality... we made ourselves in metabolic relation with the non-human world, a world we socialized along the way, and before we were homo sapiens sapiens. Levins and Lewontin note, along similar lines, that the ideas of ecological niche and species are usually taught as if niches and species pre-exist each other when the science of ecology tells us that species make their niches and niches and species coevolve in metabolic relations with laterial and higher/lower order phenomena. If we're going to approach the world relationally, it seems to me that we should follow the Old Mole and approach ourselves in the same way and, for me, that means dereifying culture and the nature/cultural dualism.
Last, my putting nature and culture in quotes is a product of spending the last twenty years reading material on the historicity and diverse meanings of both terms. The best, quick and dirty introductions are RG Collingwood's The Idea of Nature (or Raymond Williams' chapter of the same title) and Terry Eagleton's The Idea of Culture.
Thanks for this, its very useful for my teaching... that must be three, I'll hold off until tomorrow now.
-A