> A public school in America, under capitalism, IS a capitalist relation.
Sure, but the permeation of the choice & competition agenda combined with extensive tests (provided by profit-making enterprises) has brought things to a new level. The schools were always embedded in capitalist society, but market behavior is permeating it in new ways.
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At least tentatively, I would think that Doug's metaphor of permeation would be more useful than Adam's turn on the word "relation." I don't doubt that sleep, for example, has a different 'meaning' in capitalist society than under feudalism, and that difference is embedded in capitalist relations (of production), but that is not the same as saying sleep _is_ a capitalist relation. For one thing, this (apparent) insistence on the all-comprehensiveness of capitalism obscures the role of contingency in human life, in capitalism as much as in the ancient palace economies or in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Put another way, capitalism _tends_ toward constituting a dialectical totality -- but it is not one: the dialectic breaks down at some point. (In fact Albritton makes the interesting suggestion that after socialism is achieved there will be no need for historical materialism.)
But I hope Adam develops his argument in future posts.
Carrol
P.S. when did gambling as we know it appear? Off hand I don't remember any references to it in ancient or medieval literature. There are no professional gamblers or aristocrats ruined by gambling among Chaucer's pilgrims. The Etruscans had dice: a pair of dice is the only clue (so far useless I believe) to the Etruscan language.