----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I think there may be a problem of communication between Perelman and Brewer. The word 'hunting' does not mean the same in Britain as in America. In Britain, 'hunting means to pursue foxes, hare, occasionally stags in a few places, with a pack of hounds. The hunters follow the hounds either on horseback (the gentry and the -- capitalist -- farmers) or on foot, bicycle etc. (the lower orders). No useful food is provided for any human by this sport, and scarcely even for the hounds. However, a great deal of food is obtained by 'shooting' (never called 'hunting' in English). The principal targets are pheasant and other game birds. Landlords who prefer shooting to hunting 'preserved' pheasants in woods and copses on their estates. Sometimes they even risked grave unpopularity in the county by allowing their gamekeepers to shoot foxes. [Note that foxes and pheasants are subsitutes, not complements. Hence there was/is a perpetual conflict of interest between hunters and shooters] Pheasants in particular make a tempting target for poachers, and it was to defend these that mantraps and spring-guns were installed, and the Game Laws enforced. Hunting does no damage to crops, for the season is confined to the Winter months. But the preserving of pheasant for shooting produces a great deal of damage to crops. There was therefore an even sharper conflict of interest -- in early 19th C. England -- between capitalist farmers and those of their betters who preserved pheasant and employed the Game Laws to that end. In this context, the Game Laws were decidely anti-capitalist -- a vestige of those 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations' to which 'the bourgoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end'. [I wonder if a second source of confusion may lie in the fact that in English 'farmer' means a capitalist who hires land from a landlord and labour from among the villagers and employs these to produce crops for the market; whereas in American 'farmer' means a landlord who works his own land? Neither quite fits Marx's notion of the 'bourgois', by definition an urban being.] The situation in Scotland is quite different from that in England. There is far less hunting (except in one or two Lowland counties such as Ayreshire) and far more shooting. The principal targets are grouse and similar game-birds, and deer, each of which provide valuable food. But the shooting takes place on vast grouse moors and deer forests which are almost completely useless for any other purpose save extensive sheep and cattle grazing -- which can usually coexist with the brief annual seasons on grouse and deer. Note that 'deer parks' occur not in Scotland but in England -- as in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford -- and are largely ornamental. In my opinion it is impossible to write with any understanding of the Game Laws, their economic consequences and their ideological implications without at least this minimum of information. I do not believe that either Marx or Engels had any knowledge or experience whatsoever of British rural culture. There were typical urban intellectuals. (We used to call them 'townies'.) Although he married into an aristocratic family -- or possibly because of it -- Marx wrote disparagingly of 'the idiocy of rural life'. What Marx and Engels knew about was urban culture (which is far less geographically specific) and the effects upon this of industrialisation. Anthony Waterman ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]