Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 10:56:07 -0600
From: Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers-AT-state.ut.us>
Subject:  Re: Group or individual -Reply -Reply


Leo:
> I would take a different posture, following
> Poulantzas, that for a Marxist class struggle is central.

Adam:
Yes, but why do classes exist ?
Why do they struggle against each other ?

Lisa:  These are all interesting, and I think related to my interest
in foragers.  The obvious difference is that if there is a non-class
society, foragers are it.  But...

I think that classes struggle against each other because there are
conflicts of interest between _people_.  If they have similar
interests, opposed to those of some others, under some specific
circumstances they may be called "classes".  This is only one aspect
of conflict/cooperation that in various forms are found among all
social animals.  

Cooperation [or apparent cooperation, which can occur by several
different mechanisms, as abstracted by game theory] is generally a
result of people trying to serve their mutual interests.  

This is one way to look at a class - it has conflicts [of interest]
within it; at the same time it has common interests, which it may
unite to pursue, against the interests of members of another class. 
So, class struggle can be seen as one of the forms or social outcomes
of a situation in which there are both conflicts and commonalities of
interests, and people sort themselves into various groupings as each
one sees one's _own_ interests.

I guess this is an example of how I try to 'get inside' 'sociality',
to see how things work in terms of various people each doing
something 'individual'.  Pretty far from 'sociality' as a
metaphysical given or previously evolved 'thing in itself', I know,
but there you go.

This is not incompatible with Marx as I've seen him so far, IMHO,
FWIW.

Lisa



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