Carrol
^^^^^^^ CB: If you don't know what I mean by "material production" it's because you are trying very hard not to understand it and not reading what I say about it. If you really want to understand what I say, read it, and my meaning will be quite clear - especially, you who have been on lists where I've discussed the topic probably 50 or 75 times, in your "presence", in the last ten years or so, starting right out the rip on Marxism-Thaxis. The first posts I sent there were on materialism, vulgar vs. fancy, etc. You seem to purposely misconstrue my use of "material" as vulgar , physicalist materialism, that famous error.
Anybody who reads much Marx will quickly see that notions like "material production" don't come from Charles (smile), but from Marx and Engels. Relations of production are relations of material production for Marx. Marx is self-designated a "materialist"; see Theses on Feuerbach , for example. Marx was a Feuerbachian materialist, and then a critiqued Feuerbachian materialist, but a "materialist" fo sho. What does Carrol think Marx means that he is a materialist ? (smile)
Here's a famous quote from Marx ( lui-meme; not Charles). He refers to :
"relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their _material_ forces of production " , "mode of production of _material_ life ", "_material_ productive forces of society", "_ material_ transformation of the economic conditions of production" , "contradictions of _material_ life," and "_material_ conditions for their existence"
I'm referring to all these "materials" as "material production" , for short (smile).
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
>From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm