>Red alert!! Commie on board.

>Only joking. I believe there is a valid distinction between
>capitalism (good) and the monopoly stage of capitalism (bad)
>in which we live. The latter has ushered in consumerism and
>its effects upon identity.

No need to apologize, I am a self asserted communist. Honestly, and as well intentioned as that particular view of capitalism is, I don't believe in the existence of two types of capitalism. Sure capitalism goes through stages of growth and accumulation but the realization of monopoly capital is a logical point of progression that the system has arrived at. Its all a product of competition and ceaseless growth as a result of the latter. Now we all know that in a finite world ceaseless growth is not possible and sooner or later, whether one likes capitalism or not, it must collapse. I will stop here because this could be a several hundred page doctoral thesis if I really went into depth with it.


>I would contend that all which exists is linguistic in nature.
>Is it possible for individuals to understand the physical
>world outside the its meaning as defined by the language we
>use? For example, without the connoted meaning imported by
>language, a diamond becomes no more than shiny stone..

AHH! Multiplicity of colour narritive alert!!! Postmodernist on board!!! Actually, that's not to alerting, the pomos are everywhere these days to my dismay. But enough of my polemic, on to your question of language. I have one simple question. Can you imagine language developed outside of material existence? In other words, without a physical world for our senses to experience, is there any possibility of language? Marx used a useful example to convey this. He stated that the word "fruit" is an abstract concept to describe the world of oranges, apples, bananas, etc. There is nothing physical about the word "fruit" itself. One cannot touch, smell, or taste "fruit" in the abstract sense, on can only perform these actions on the particular things that the word "fruit" describes. Thus without, first, the existence of things we call apples, oranges, and bananas, there is no need for the linguistic invention of the word "fruit". Thus, we first experience the material world and then invent language to describe what our senses have experienced. The same goes for your example of a diamond. Without the existence of a shiny stone (which themselves are words used to describe something that exists materially before we even have the language to describe it) we cannot have the word, the concept, "diamond" in the first place.