Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 20:24:46 -0400
Subject: Human Social Relations: Always Already!


     I have followed the debate over "how" humans came to form social
relations with
increasing incredulity, and though I had planned to be mostly a lurker on
this
maillist, I can't not put my word in here.

    Whereever we find humans, they are always already enmeshed in a fabric of
social relations. Period. It is not for historians to explain how that fact
comes or
came about anymore than it is a biologist's task to demonstrate how an early
universe made up of a soup of sub-atomic particles ever formed molecules or
atoms. As historians (i.e., as Marxists) we *begin* with that fact, and then
we
try to trace out what *follows* from it. As soon as we try to answer such a
foolish
question as "How does it happen that humans are always caught up in social
relations?" we begin to tie ourselves in knots. I don't know whether or not
it is a sensible 
question for a biologist or physical anthropologist to ask; if it is, I would
be
fascinated by the information. One of my major personal bits of entertainment
consists of collecting all sorts of information for the fun of it, and the
origin (I presume
pre-human) of social relations would certainly be a delightful piece of
information.
But however it was answered, it would have no direct relevance to me as a
Marxist
or as a historian.
       JC
P.S.: What is really at issue in Engels's essay on labor and evolution is not
really
the facts of biology but the question of the priority of matter to thought,
of social 
relations (which are the focus of concern for the historical materialist) to
the abstract
individual.


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