robbo203
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mcolome1 wrote:I think you need an immediate crash course on socialism and capitalism In the USA anything is socialism, and anything is liberalism, or big government, and most peoples who said that, they have not read the first preface of a reformist document known as the Communist Manifesto, or they have not read the introduction of the book The wealth of the nations, or do not know about the concept of state capitalismPS. Wikipedia on many concepts is the blind guiding the blinds
Wikipedia is not socialism or socialist in the sense that socialism constitutes a distinct system of society. You could however argue that it is "socialistic" as a compromise term. That is to say it exhibits certain structural properties that could be said to prefigure a genuine future socialist society. Not just Wikipedia but a lot of other things too. The internet, for example, has been likened to a "high tech gift economy". See here http://innovate.ucsb.edu/796-richard-barbrook-the-hi-tech-gift-economy. The point is that its basic principles of engagement resemble or mimic those that would be found in socialist society. free access, voluntarism, generalised reciprocity and so on David Graeber has written of the "communism of everyday life" and of how capitalism is just a rather bad way of running a basically communistic society. Its a bit of poetic licence, I know, but Graeber does have a point. The non money sector under capitalism is absolutely huge. According to UN data it is actually larger in terms of the expenditure of labour hours than all forms of paid or monetised activities put together. Of course people who grow their own veggies or volunteer their labour to manning the lifeboats are not generally doing so out of some generalised commitment to the ideal of socialist society, But that is not the point. The point is that they are motivated by concerns that have nothing to do with making money and have everything to do with directly helping themselves and other around them. This should be welcomed and encouraged by all socialists. As socialists we should not sniff at these countless examples of unmediated activity or airily dismiss them as having little or no relevance ce to the socialist cause. They are a seedbed in which a genuinely revolutionary outlook can germinate. They are what routinely aid socialists in their arguments with others who claim that socialism is somehow against "human nature". As socialists we all, I am sure, invoke examples of actually existing human behavior drawn from the non money sectofr, to refute such a claim. One final point and to clarify – I don't think "big government" or statism constitutes in any way an example of such "socialistic activity" and any comparison would be invalid. The state sector relies on tax revenue and the relation of state employees to their employers is essentially no different to that of the private sector
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:Ok call it a consumer glorified form of consumer survey and keep the comment cards in the store for people. That works too. keeping in stores deprives the workers of the means to decide how things are done unless they're in the store. It means you can't write down notes or comments or surveys at home though unless you bring them with you. Your feedback will only count if you have it in mind while in a store.Well, the problem is a little more tricky than that. The information contained on the "comment card" needs to be transmitted to the producers themselves to modify or innovate their products, accordingly – unless of course, the store can take it upon itself to source some other supplier that stock the products in question. And even then there are other considerations to take into account. For instance, if one particular customer requests a particular kind of product not in stock would it warrant the effort tracking down an alternative supplier to accommodate just this one individual's consumer preference? And what about transportation and fuel considerations in the case of a supplier further afield. Is there a critical threshold of consumer demand that needs to be breached before contemplating approaching an alternative supplier of a novel product or persuading an existing supplier to modify its products? If so what would this threshold be? I don't have any easy answer to this. I think as with a lot of things in a socialist society it will be a case of just muddling through within the broad constraints of a generally understood procedure of how to go about doing things. This is in part why I favour a more multifaceted multilevel approach to cover every angle – not just limiting consumer surveys to some in-house exercise in public consultation. There could be agencies especially set up for this purpose and commissioned by production units for that purpose or production units themselves could carry out surveys themselves to ascertain levels of consumer satisfaction with their products. The possibilities are limitless. How things will pan out will depend on many factors . The density of distribution stores within a locality which generally correlates positively with population size, could impact on the variety of products available and hence on the ability to choose between them. There is also the question of the products themselves. We wont need "57 varieties of baked beans" as the expression goes but we will need quite a considerable variety of boots or T shirt for people to chose from. A final point worth making concerns the distinction between bespoke products and mass standardised products. I think with the advent of new technologies such as 3 D printers there will be much more scope for the former carried out on a DIY basis. Indeed, I believe production in general will become noticeably more decentralised and localized in a socialist society with all the cultural, environmental and transportational implications this entails We really need to be thinking more of a kind of spatial model of socialist prpduction or, if you like, a kind of socialist geography of human choices. By putting flesh on the bare bones of our socialist skeleton we invite interest and appeal to concerns that preoccupy people today such as the deep damage wrought by the capitalist mode of production to our physical environment, not just through a reckless comsumerism it fosters but also through the way in which consumer demand is gratified under capitalism
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:But lets talk about how to run a socialist society without convenient computer access. There's some easy ways that disenfranchise people like having some elites track store inventory and act as if that's the only metric that counts for participation. Just picking up items from a store or leaving them seems a shallow and pale sort of participation. How is that much better than participating in the capitalist marketplace? It's not. It doesn't allow you to make suggestions about what you want on the store shelves it only allows you to vote on whether you want an item already on the shelf or not. To make something feasibly participatory you need a convenient form of participating in a wide range of things. This could be accomplished by a "participation" card. A participation card would be something like a voting ballot, but would be smaller and more convenient so about like the size of a business card. you could then write in a suggestion or comment on something. Now to do that you don't need a computer, but to count millions of these participation cards you would need some computers. They could be processed using distributed computer processing so not centralized if you dislike centralization. But for sake of convenience lets assume the "comment cards" are processed centrally right now because it's easier to explain what has to happen next. You need every store and every politician and every decision and every individual to have access to other peoples comments and you need to be able to sort them and pass them on if they're not relevant to the people who receive them. So most likely you need a store that can scan the comment/vote cards into a public accessible database at a low cost. and then the collective will of the people can be understood better.I question this, Steve. You overlook that the relationship between the consumer in a socialist society to the goods on display in the store would be fundamentally different to what obtains under market capitalism. There is no exchange involved – simply direct free access, This makes a world of a difference, despite what you say. Your "participation card" seems to imply something other than this and strikes me as being unnecessarily bureaucratic. Are you meaning to say that if you dont have a participation card you dont get to have a say? The idea of people having to carry their participation cards around with them, much like a store card today, frankly doesnt appeal and if that is not what you in mind then the term is misleading, I suggest. In the end the consumers in a socialist society are making a choice in selecting what goods they take from the store The particular pattern of preferences arising out of the totality of consumer decisions is something that the folk operating the store will act upon in replenishing stock via a self regulating system of stock. But that hardly makes then some kind of "elite". The very fact that self regulating system of stock control by its very nature accommodates itself to the choices made by consumers itself an indication of the participation of consumers in decisions about what gets produced. Of course this same "consumer is king" argument might be invoked in the case of capitalism but there is a big difference here, Goods are commodities with a price attached to them and your ability to access them is contingent on whats in your wallet Certainly there are other ways of participating in the process of deciding what gets to be produced in a socialist society than merely effecting a consumer choice – that is, by removing a particular item from the store shelf – which will then impact on what the store gets to do when it comes to reordering stock. The problem with this is that the consumer only gets to choose between stock actually on the shelf which is limiting. In itself this does not provide a mechanism by which novel kinds of stock might get to find there way onto the store shelf in response to the subjective preferences of consumers. That requires another kind of mechanism to supplement a self regulating system of stock control – namely consumer surveys. These can be conducted in-house (that is within the store itself) or initiated by the suppliers cum producers to elicit some kind of feedback on what consumers in general want which would be richer in informational content than merely relying on stock control data. Or indeed both kinds of consumer surveys could be put into use. In any event your participation card would be quite unnecessary unless you mean by this simply a glorified form of consumer survey, In which case why not just call it that and dispense with the trappings of a kind market apprroach to the question
Subhaditya wrote:p.s. i used the word 'encourage' not 'force'… whats with this blindness there is a difference between encourage and force… person being encouraged can reject it while person being forced will be killed or jailed or fined for refusal.The problem is that the basic premiss of your argument is that socialism WILL fail of group sex is not the norm. That sounds very much like an imperative. Group sex will be a obligatory requirement if we want socialism to continue. I don't believe that for one moment. The fact is we simply don't know what pattern of sexual relationships will emerge in a socialist society and it would be idle to speculate. More to the point it would be counterproductive. Try telling a worker today that he or she – and it seems to be overwhelmingly if not exclusively women that you are talking of – is going to be shared around as the object of sexual desire and see what sort of response you get. I'm a strong advocate of utopian thinking in the sense of trying to put flesh on the bare bones of a socialist model but I think this is an area where caution is advisable. It is quite conceivable that group sex might become more commonplace but it is equally conceivable that many might prefer to maintain a monogamous relationship. This has zero implications for the continuance of socialism either way and, in any case, equating more sex with having more sexual partners is questionable. Not to mention that there is more to life than sex I'm not an advocate of monogamy or polygamy or anything else but I am an advocate of letting people freely decide for themselves. The decisions they make about their sexual lives will not impact on the continuance of the socialist society they have collectively brought into being. Neither sex nor anything else can be used as a weapon to leverage power and influence over others in a society where the means of living are freely available to all. Free access to goods and services along with the voluntary cooperative nature of labour in socialism are what will dissolve the possibility of any kind of concentration of power in a socialist society and this point can hardly be emphasised too much
Young Master Smeet wrote:http://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloudQuote:The term cloud is understood by the High level Expert Group (HLEG) as a metaphor to help convey both seamlessness and the idea of a commons based on scientific data.and
Quote:Imagine a federated, globally accessible environment where researchers, innovators, companies and citizens can publish, find and re-use each other's data and tools for research, innovation and educational purposes. Imagine that this all operates under well-defined and trusted conditions, supported by a sustainable and just value for money model. .Take money out of equation and the reference to "companies" and this does indeed seem to be a fairly plausible description of how science might be conducted under socialism/communism. It will be a state of affairs in which individuals will be enabled to pursue and develop and their own particular interests, relying on the mutual support of others, without barriers being placed in their way as is the case today under the dictatorship of money which blocks opportunities and secrets away scientific knowledge behind paywalls and patents, . The only limitation will be that of the human mind itself to assimilate knowledge about the world around us. Since none of us can grasp more than a tiny sliver of the total stock of human knowledge and since this knowledge by definition extends to everything that human society as a whole knows about the world around us, this necessarily presupposes a marked social division of labour which severely limits the ability of individuals, no matter how scientifically gifted, to contribute to and competently comment on the development of scientific theories other than those he or she has had the time and training to become familiar with. In one sense this is an "elite" view of science – in the sense that only a few in society can ever expect to become a fully qualified molecular biologist. A large scale technologically advanced society in which everyone because a qualified molecular biologist would not be able to survive for long because it requires individuals to become trained in numerous other occupations besides molecular biology which would be precluded by the time and effort spent in becoming s trained molecular biologist. So there would be multiple elites in this sense of a complex social division of labour in a socialist.communist society. However, it wont be an elitist construction of science in the special sense in which it is today under capitalism and the rule of money. Moreover, the scientific specialists in a socialist/communist society will have absolutely no power or leverage whatsoever to compel anyone or any group to do anything against their will or in opposition to their own perceived interest. Free access to goods and services coupled with the voluntaristic nature of work itself, completely dissolves the very basis of political power itself
Hi Subhaditya I don't disagree with some of the things you say but part of what you say seems to be mistaking the shadow for the substance. I refer to your argument against monogamy. My position is that I am neither for nor against it. If people wish to maintain a monogamous relationship thats fine by me, If they wish to enter a polygamous relationship thats equally fine by me. Its the compulsion to conform to one or the other thats the problem. I'm not convinced by your rather tortuous line of argument. According to you sex is a critical need (true) and that if we dont get to have enough of it this mechanically translates into increased competition over sex leading to increased levels of violence. But what does getting enough sex entail? There is no apriori reason why our sexual needs cannot be fulfilled completely within a monogamous relation, It depends on the individual, Yet you interpret sexual scarcity in terms of not having enough partners to satisfy your sexual needs, rather than the actual time we spend having sex, Again this may be true for some individuals but it does not follow that it is true for everyone, You mention porn but I think there is a danger of inadvertently succumbing to a kind of capitalist supply and demand model of sex. Under capitalism sex is a commodity. Sex sells. Not only is sex sold in the direct proximate sense but but also facilitates the sale of other commodities through the seductive power of association.Porn is the expression of the commodification of sex, I don't wish to come across as prudish here, If people want to indulge in porn thats entirely understandable given the nature of the society we live in, But we shouldn't overlook what lies behind it . The fetishism of commodities takes on a deeper meaning in the case of sex. There is some evidence to suggest that porn can be addictive in some cases – what does this say about the law of supply and demand – and for men in particular this can lower the quality of their relationship with their female partners though – curiously – not the other way round apparently . See this for example http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/pornography.aspx. I'm not quite sure what the evidence is in case of gay relationships There is a lot more to life than sex. Don't get me wrong. Lenin in his debate with Alexandra Kollontai talked of sex "stealing fire from the revolution" if I remember correctly (though I cant recall the actual source of this quote). Kollontai's socialist feminist perspective is nicely summed up in this article https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1724 You state:In the Hindu sacred scriptures a King had the divine right to have sex with as many as he liked while a poor man only had his wife… wouldn't you desire power in such a place, I would. I mean getting to experience as many women as I like… who wouldn't want that. When we watch porn its all we do… experience someone other than our wives. If you found yourself in a position to turn your desires into reality would you not go for it… I did imagine most would. Therein lies the need for power. But what if you could do this that is turn your porn desires into reality as an average Joe…. that will be one less reason now for craving power and being content as the average Joe. I find this a little confusing. On the face of it it seems to be saying that the king having access to as many women as he likes should have no need to crave power. Would that that were the case in real life! Pornography and prudishness are but two sides of the same coin that we exchange for sex under capitalism – not necessarily in brutish physical sense of resorting to prostitution but also in the more refined sense of a Jane Austen novel in which a good marriage is equated with a sound business proposition without even the hint of embarrassment at the very thought of it
ALB wrote:robbo203 wrote:Or will socialism be the ultimate expression of a post modernistic culture in which anything goes?Of course not. I know you don't think this as you have argued here a moral case as well as a class case for socialism and that this is just a rhetorical question.But just in case someone gets the wrong impression, we don't agree with the post-modernists that cannibalism is just a matter of taste.
LOL. "Cannibalism is just a matter of taste". Quite a quotable quote that!. But talking specifically about sexual preferences or attachments which is what this thread is about, rather than culture in general, I imagine people would be free or freer to chose what form this takes with the proviso that it would be consensual. So, yes, at least in this respect "anything would go" but up to a point (where consensus runs out). It is certainly possible even likely that some, maybe even most, people would chose to be in a monogamous relationship which is why I question the tacit assumption that monogamy as such is the problem. The problem is trying to push such a relationship down ones throat if I can put it like that.One point of clarification – I don't see the moral case for socialism as something separate from the class case for socialism. Class consciousness is a moral construct. It is the expression of a "proletarian morality"
Subhaditya wrote:James W. Prescott's research shows that monogamous and any society that tries to discourage physical pleasure seeking is a violent one.So how will socialism succeed in an environment of violence… people will be killing each other not for food, water or shelter but for sex… need for sex is no less trivial than need for food,water or shelter… so shouldnt socialism deal with it as seriously as it deals with issues like food,water, shelter ?Good point but I dont think you should push the argument too far in the direction of specifying or layng down a particular prescribed pattern of sexual relations as the means by which sexual needs could be accommodated. After all,even in a monogamous relationship sexual needs can be met. Sexual needs are in any case not the only consideration in forming attachments or relationships; what about love or affection? I think the main point that comes across in your argument is that a socialist society should not seek to constrain the way in which individuals seek sexual pleasure, providing of course that this is consensual (which by definition rape is not and which no one here would defend). I would go along with that and with the corollary that socialists should behave in this regard in a way that prefigures the kind of society they seek and the values it embodies. But it is problematic to infer from this any particular pattern of sexual attachment. There are so many variables to contend with. Look at the way notions of sexual attractivenesss or beauty today are mediated or structured by the fashion industry, advertising and so on. We assume such pressures won't exist in a socialist but who knows? Surrogate versions of the same could emerge. Or will socialism be the ultimate expression of a post modernistic culture in which anything goes?
LBird wrote:The SPGB does not agree the workers should democratically control their science (but argues that 'science' is an elite activity, with disinterested experts, who employ a politically-neutral scientific method, and that there is no place for democracy in the production of 'Truth').Until you answer the question of 1) WHY and 2) HOW the production of truth should be organised be "democratically organised" we are banging our heads against a wall with you, LBird Why don't you ever answer the simple question – how do you propose to organise multiple global plebiscites on literally thousands upon thousands of scientific theories? Do you seriously think this is feasible? If 0.1 per cent of the population voted to endorse String Theory – probably a wildly optimistic prediction – would you consider that the "democratic production of scientific truth" had been secured?. What happens if a socialist society decided not to go through the whole, rather pointless (and very expensive), rigmarole of democratically voting on scientific theories but just let the scientists get on with the job? Do you think this would in any way undermine the practical and democratic running of a socialist society as far as this affects the allocation of resources? In a society where goods are freely available and labour is performed on a purely voluntary basis what possible leverage could the scientists exert over the population in general? A trained astrophysicist may know a lot more about String theory than the average person but how does this translate into social power over the average person in socialism? Please explain!
alanjjohnstone wrote:Well worth a read about how society fears the consequence of discovering the true nature and intelligence of animal specieshttp://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37826-we-are-not-alone-listening-to-the-8-7-million-other-animals-who-live-on-earthYes indeed Alan – an interesting read. Apropos that there is a fascinating link here concerning Dolphins and their ability to communicate with each other. Dolphins according to the article " have possessed brains that are larger and more complex than human ones for more than 25 million years" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/11/dolphins-recorded-having-a-conversation-for-first-time/ Going back to the piece you linked to, this comment is central : "It's a phenomenon leading primatologist Frans de Waal calls "anthropodenial." It's the reflexive "rejection of humanlike traits in animals and of animal-like traits in humans" and it still persists despite mounting evidence to the contrary. De Waal collected much of that evidence himself during years studying primates like bonobos. They are 98 percent genetically similar to humans, they exhibit many of the hallmarks of humanness and they are famous for the ribald complexity of their culture.And yes, it is a culture." "Anthropodenialism" gained ground as evidence for evolution began to accumulate in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Mediaeval concept of the Great Chain of Being – actually it goes back to the Ancient Greeks – held that God's entire creation was a continuum in which there were no gaps (the principle of "plenitude"). However the whole structure was essentially static. Apes for example might resemble human beings but could never evolve into human beings. They were part of God's grand design. Two developments then occurred that are relevant to this discussion… The first was what was called the "temporalisation" of the Great Chain – that is, reconceptualising it as a dynamic process. The evidence from such fields as comparative anatomy and palaeontology contributed to this development. For example, the evidence of fossils of extinct creatures did indeed suggest there were gaps in creation and so cast doubt on God's limitless benevolence The next development focussed essentially on human beings and in particular their perceived relationship to primates. European expansion and colonialism gave rise to what was called the "Problem of the Savage" – how to fit strange new exotic cultures that Europeans encountered within their cosmological view of the world. Some of the armchair travellers speculated from their comfortable estates in the Home Counties, that the "primitive natives" in faraway places with their strange incomprehensible language and customs, must have constituted intermediate species between the apes and true humans. In my native country of South Africa there was a tradition among early white settlers of organising hunting trips in the Western Cape to kill members of Khoi people as trophies – much as the hunting fraternity today chase after foxes Polygenism – belief in the multiple origins of different human groups – represented a transformation of the Great Chain into a racial hierarchy – and became quite popular in the 19th century, While it appeared to offer a materialistic or biologistic account of human diversity – indeed many polygenists were atheistic – the rival theory of monogenism which a posited a common origin for all humans was ironically in large part religious inspired. The gulf between humans and animals became absolute due to the former's possession of a soul which, needless to say, was threatened by talk of human beings having evolved from the apes. It was really only with the rise of Darwinian evolutionism that the monogenists emphasis on the uniqueness of the human species came under sustained threat. Might I suggest that in some ways "anthropodenialism" today is a faint echo of this early monogenist perspective?
ALB wrote:Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:Because Sociologist who study primates tell us humans have the abiity to behave in ways primates behave.Of course we have and a lot more other ways too. But the point is that they can't behave in the ways we can and do.
There is an interesting article in the Scientific American on the subject of chimp behaviour….http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/like-humans-chimps-reward-cooperation-and-punish-freeloaders/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160824 Im not entirely convinced that the distinction between primate and human behaviour is quite as cut and dried as it may seem. Frans de Waal's work is quite seminal in this regard – books such as Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (2007) and Chimpanzee Cultures (1994) Here he is delivering a TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en
Hi Osama, You cannot introduce socialism without majority support for socialism. The very nature of socialism requires that people understand and want it. The history of political parties such as the German Social Democratic party which, in the late 19th century, was easily the largest organisation in the world to claim to stand for a revolutionary transformation and with whom Marx and Engels had connections, prove this. The SDP succumbed to the revisionist ideas of reformists like Eduard Bernstein – a leading figure in the SDP – and advocated a "minimum" programme of reforms alongside a "maximum" programme of social revolution. What happened? Well, what happened is that workers were attracted to the SDP because of its minimum programme and eventually the maximum programme was effectively abandoned. The SDP emerged in the 20th century as a straightforward capitalist party standing for capitalism and nothing else. There is a hard lesson to be learnt from that!
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:Primitive society before the advent of a currency was limited to what was called a gifting economy. A gifting economy is maybe class based or maybe classless depending on how you understand "class". It's an interesting myth that people bartered for goods and services before the advent of an exchange currency, but it's just a myth apparently. There's no actual examples of pre-currency civilizations engaging in barter and instead they operated on a system of patronage. Wikipedia says more about this better than I can . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economyHi Steve David Graeber likewise rejects the idea that there was ever a barter based economy. See his book Debt: The First 5000 years https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf I'm not quite sure what you mean by a gift economy operating "on a system of patronage". Karl Polanyi's threefold typology springs to mind here – a market system, a redistributive system and a reciprocity system. I would class a gift economy under a reciprocity system – generalised reciprocity to be precise which is more or less what we understand by socialism by the way "Patronage", on the other hand, seem to me fall more naturally under the heading of a redistributive system where wealth flows inwards towards a centre eg, a tribal chief and is redistributed outwards as a way of cementing social bonds and maintaining loyalty and allegiance. In other words it would be more appropriate to a tribal social formation than a hunter gatherer band society for example. But then I may have misunderstood what you mean by patronage…
Adam, In the same chapter of Anti Duhring from which you quote there is another passage a little further on which says this The role played in history by force as contrasted with economic development is therefore clear. In the first place, all political power is organically based on an economic, social function, and increases in proportion as the members of society, through the dissolution of the primitive community, become transformed into private producers, and thus become more and more divorced from the administrators of the common functions of society. Secondly, after the political force has made itself independent in relation to society, and has transformed itself from its servant into its master, it can work in two different directions. Either it works in the sense and in the direction of the natural economic development, in which case no conflict arises between them, the economic development being accelerated. Or it works against economic development, in which case, as a rule, with but few exceptions, force succumbs to it. These few exceptions are isolated cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go to ruin productive forces which they did not know how to use This would seem to contradict Pearce's reading of Engels. Political power , aka the state, develops out of the "dissolution of the primitive community"
ALB wrote:It does not quite say what Pearce says but has more in common with what our pamphlet speculates about those carrying out a technical social functions evolving into a ruling class (as well).Yes, it doesn't quite say what Pearce says and I too cannot find anything in Engels that specifically says that the state emerged in a primitive communism prior to the division of society into classes. This would be contrary to what one might expect from a reading of a materialist conception of history. Perhaps, if the minority you referred to earlier at whose service "armed bodies of men over and above the rest of society" emerged, constituted a proto class then by the same token the political set at the time would constitute a proto state but not yet a developed state based on centralised power. At any rate I cant really see how state formation and the division of society into classes can be separated out as cause and effect. The former surely is just the political expression of the latter and the latter, the socio economic expression of the former. All states depend upon the extraction of an economic surplus to maintain and reproduce themselves which in turn presupposes a system of class exploitation. If so I cannot really see how the view Pearce attributes to Engels can be correct
