From: "Marshall Feldman" <marsh-AT-uri.edu>
Subject: BHA: RE: Gary on FEW
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 12:27:56 -0500


Forgive me if I am missing some part of this discussion. I have been
lurking, and the following stimulated a bit of a response.

> 3. Ontological materialism - asserts the unilateral dependence of social
> upon biological being, and of biological on physical being, and the
> emergence of the former in each case from the latter. I'd say Roy's now
> an ontological idealist, who substitutes 'spiritual' for 'physical'.

This sounds like reductionism to me. Can't one be a ontological materialist
and simply hold that social, biological, and physical being objectively
exist and cannot be reduced to ideas or spirit?

> 5. (Geo-)Historical materialism - 'a research programme nucleated by the
> core idea of the causal primacy of men's and women's mode of production
> and reproduction of their natural (physical) being, or of the labour
> process more generally, in the development of human (four-planar)
> species being'. I would say that Roy is now a historical idealist,
> asserting the primacy of ideas in social life. (For a materialist, ideas
> are of course central to the labour process - or more generally
> 'material conditions' - but it is not exhausted by them. I think Roy is
> now giving ideas - esp mistakes! - a far more autonomous and primary
> role. Another way of putting this: he has sublated HM, inverting its
> emphases and retaining them in that form as 'negative presences' in
> TDCR)

Where does the quotation about geo-historical materialism come from?

Thanks.

	Marsh Feldman



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