Polis and Need

As Plato enumerates the needs to the meeting of which a Polis is a means, he implicitly defines a Polis as an organization of labor.  That definition contrasts sharply with more recent alternatives such as: a means to stop humans from killing each other, part of the path towards the Salvation of a Person-Soul, and a medium for the pursuit of personal happiness.  The second might be especially astonishing to Plato, a grotesque extrapolation of the thesis, in which he occasionally dabbles, of a Soul-Body separation. So, regardless of the influence of Plato on Medievalists, via Augustine, his closest kin among his successors might be one of their staunchest opponents, Marx, for whom, regardless of its Classism, Plato's invention is the prototype of a Polis the Base of which is Economic relations.