From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Tue Nov 21 2006 - 22:48:14 EST
Hi Rakesh,
What is the JSTOR reference you give?
Thanks,
Howard
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rakesh Bhandari" <bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU>
To: <OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] marx's conception of labour
> >On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> >
> >>Marks dismisses the description of social insect slavery as only
> >>analogical in the strict biological sense.
> >
> >What do you suppose Marks meant by that? I hope, more than that
> >Leptothorax duloticus don't have bullwhips or drink mint juleps,
> >and that L. curvispinosus don't live in cabins and play the banjo.
>
> Hopes dashed. He does not mean more than that, for after all
> entomology tells us no more about the enslavement of the Middle
> Passage than it can about the enslavement of iron fillings by a
> magnet. Marks, p. 104 What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee.
>
> Also know whether the L. curvispinosus are captured in an immature
> state and hatch later only
> to be domesticated to perform 'housekeeping tasks' without
> compulsion. But then that is domestication not slave making. Also
> with us humans polygenesis has been discredited under the weight of
> continuous, albeit often illegal, interbreeding. That is to say, pace
> Louis Agassiz, human slavery involves members of one's own species
> under continued compulsion. This case of ant "slavery" does not fit.
> It's just a weak and meaningless analogy. Even from a functional
> point of view. There is certainly no homology in a biological sense.
>
> I did not know that there were Marxists who subscribed to EO Wilson's
> sociobiology rather than the critique of it--as for example by the
> Sociobiology Study Group of the Science for the People from which
> above critique is drawn. Availabe through JSTOR.
>
> I also think he makes a good case for why non human animals don't have
culture.
>
> Rakesh
>
>
>
> >
> >[The ant Leptothorax duloticus is known as a "slavemaker" and
> >studies have shown that the "enslaved" L. curvispinosus suffer
> >fitness costs such as "significant reductions in dealate queens,
> >workers, and larvae relative to control colonies exclosed without
> >slavemakers" ("Prudent Protomognathus and despotic Leptothorax
> >duloticus: Differential costs of ant slavery", J. F.
> >Hare and T. M. Alloway, Proceedings of the National Academy of
> >Sciences of the United States of America, October 9, 2001).]
> >
> >Allin Cottrell
>
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