> Note that on this list there are sharp divisions as to what
> constitutes
> a human being; that is the context for debates over abortion.
> "Humanness," what it means to be human, is therefore socially
> constructed, not "given" as a transhistorical metaphysical fact. Acts
> and institutions which violate the historically established concept of
> wht it is to be human provoke anger and revulsion.
Disagreement about what constitutes a human being doesn't logically entail the conclusion that one particular answer, i.e. "what it means to be human ... is socially constructed" (in the sense given this idea within the ontological and anthropological framework of "structuralism") is true.
In fact, that answer can't be true since, among other things, it's self-contradictory (see, e.g., the third thesis on Feuerbach).
Marx's idea of the human "essence" treats it as historically constituted, i.e. the internal relations constitutive of some "beings" as "human beings" are themselves an historical creation, just as the "process" that develops the "slumbering powers" that constitute the human "essence", the human "in itself", is an historical process that makes the human "in itself" "for itself" in "the true realm of freedom".
According to Marx, this historical "process" is the "labour process" in its successive forms as "different stages in the development of the human mind". It's in this sense that "relations and forces of production" constitutive of this "process" are "basic".
"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm>
What's "transhistorical" is the "good", including the ethical "good" as elaborated, for instance, in Aristotle's idea of "perfect friendship", whose actualization requires these fully developed "powers" and constitutes "the true realm of freedom".
Glen Beck's "anger and revulsion" resonate with many more Americans than yours.
What basis other than a transhistorical concept of the "good" is there for judging them mistaken, a judgement that does seem to be entailed in your association of them with "brown shirts".
The "acts and institutions" to which they would lead if they became sufficiently widespread and powerful wouldn't be "good".
Ted