In response to Samuel Bostaph's:

> We choose because we have free will and human actions are  
> non-deterministic. [Apologies to you Marxists out there
> who have  swallowed the historical materialism argument.
> I think you are wrong,  but that is another argument.] 

Alan Isaacs wrote:

A claim that humans make economic choices because they have 
free will is not a challenge to Marxism any more than to 
neoclassical economics.  Rather it is a challenge to the 
physicalist interpretation of the world, which is to say 
modern science.  

I'm not sure if the following is what Alan is suggesting, 
but one could take this as meaning that both "modern science" 
and "Marxism" are committed to the conclusion 
that free will is an illusion (since minds are, or are
grounded in, material objects, and the natural laws of
material objects are deterministic).

I can think of a number of ways of responding to this, 
but the one I want to concentrate on is the implication 
that "Marxism" is committed to determinism.

This may be true of some marxisms, but certainly not that 
of Marx himself, who devoted his doctoral thesis to 
praising Epicurus's physics over that of Democritus on the
precise and explicit grounds that Epicurus's doctrine was
designed to make room for human free will.

Julian Wells