Marxist Anthropology

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Marxist Anthropology

• essentially an economic interpretation of history
  based on the works of Karl Marx and Frederich
  Engels
• posits a materialist model of societal change
• developed as a critique and alternative to the
  domination of Euro-American capitalism and
  Eurocentric views in the social sciences.
• Change within a society seen as the result of
  contradictions arising between the forces of
  production (technology) and the relations of
  production (social organization).
• Such contradictions are seen to emerge as a
  struggle between distinct social classes

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• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• shows the basic struggle between classes, and
  recommends action against the 'spectre' of
  capitalism
• Capital (1867)
• shows how the capitalist system is exploitative
  in that it "transfers the fruit of the work of
  the majority...to a minority
• 1880 reads Henry Morgans Ancient Society (1877)
  and became interested in his evolutionary ideas
  of society
• 1883 dies before he can write a book based on his
  literary exploration on the topic

Karl Marx (1818-1883).
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Frederik Engels 1820 - 1895

• The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
  the State (1884)
• presents the evolution of humankind from
  primitive communism, to slavery, feudalism,
  capitalism, and finally, industrial communism

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• Marxist Theory
• from Adam Smith
• social relationships are generated by exchange
• a person can produce more than he requires for
  his own subsistence
• the power conferred by the ownership of money is
  the power to buy other peoples labor
• while supply and demand may cause the value of a
  good to fluctuate, its true or natural value is
  determined by the cost of the labour required to
  make it.

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Marxist Theory

• Wrote Capital during the Industrial Revolution in
  Britain
• Much of his analysis is directed at explaining
  the processes which give rise to capitalist
  society
• One of the primary concerns with modes of
  production

• Each mode of production has three aspects.
• A distinctive principle determining property
• A distinctive division of labour
• A distinctive principle of exchange

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• Marx regarded social systems as inherently
  unstable, rather than normally existing in a
  stable condition.
• He found the driving force of instability in the
  capacity of human beings to produce, by their own
  labor more than they needed to subsist on.
• He found that the way in which a social system
  controlled peoples access to the resources they
  needed was equally fundamental.
• Marx argued that the market created inequalities

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• History is marked by the growth of human
  productive capacity, and the forms that history
  produced for each separate society is a function
  of what was needed to maximize productive
  capacity.
• Much of the work of Marx and Engels examined the
  conflict generated by the increasing wealth of
  the capitalists (Bourgeoisie) at the expense of
  he working class (proletariat) who only sunk
  deeper into poverty
• Marx and Engles viewed history as a sequence of
  evolutionary stages, each marked by a unique mode
  of production

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• the history of Europe seen in terms of the
  transition from feudalism to capitalism and
  eventually to communism
• Under the feudal system, which preceded
  capitalism, surplus was secured by the legal
  power of the feudal lords over the serfs and
  peasants who worked in their lands.
• Violence and repression could reinforce legal
  power if the peasantry resisted handing over the
  surplus.
• Under capitalism, the extraction of surplus is
  managed more subtly through the mechanism of the
  wage.

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• The wage is only equivalent to some of the value
  of the worker performed but the labourer
• the remaining surplus value is taken by the
  capitalist in the form of profits.
• Thus, in a capitalist society, the power and
  wealth of the dominant class is seen as
  legitimate, rather than simply backed by coercion
  as it was in feudal societies.
• What is going on is concealed from the labourers
  under the idea of a fair wage for a fair days
  work. bourgeoise ideology - class have a
  vested interest in maintaining their power and
  will seek to resist such change
• especially through elaboration of mystification
  in the ideology, which results in the false
  consciousness of the lower class

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• Marx and Engles viewed social change as an
  evolutionary process marked by revolution in
  which new levels of social, political and
  economic development were achieved through class
  struggle
• A class is defined in terms of the relationship
  of people's labour to the means of production
• each mode of production produced characteristic
  class relationships involving a dominating and a
  subordinate class.
• These two classes were linked together in a
  relationship of exploitation in which the
  subordinate class provided the labour and the
  dominant class then appropriated the surplus

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• Capitalism produces a relationship of mutual
  dependence between the bourgeoisie and the
  proletariat (without labourers the capitalist
  cannot make a profit), which is also inherently
  antagonistic the interests of the two main
  classes are opposed.
• Marx and Engels saw a history of class
  relationships in which those who work have been
  polarized in opposition to those who control the
  means of production

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• Class in itself vs a class for itself
• Marx also maintained that self consciousness is
  an attribute of class existence
• Consciousness lead to one's group's collective
  solidarity, and common interests in relations of
  production.
• Marx viewed peasants as ambiguous

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• Marx believed that various tendencies in
  capitalism would promote class conflict.
• The progressive development of technology would
  bring deskilling of jobs,
• creating more homogenised and potentially united
  labour force
• the relative gap in wealth between the dominant
  and subordinate classes would steadily increase
• processes of capital accumulation and competition
  would combine to produce ever more extreme crises
  of capitalism,
• propelling processes of class conflict towards an
  ultimate social revolution.

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Evolutionary Marxism

• Engles states that socioeconomics develops in a
  series of stages from primitive communism, slave
  society, feudalism, capitalism and finally
  communism unilineal evolutionism T
• The first stage, primitive communism was an
  aspect of savagery
• characterized by a public control and ownership
  of the means of production
• and an absence of exploitation and social class.
  
• The next stage, slave society is related to
  barbarism.
• Property is identified with people, to own people
  is to have some control and ownership to the
  means of production.
• Yet, the notion of private property in relation
  to land did not exist at this stage of
  development

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Evolutionary Marxism

• The third stage, feudalism can be seen in
  Medieval Europe
• There is a class distinction made between
  aristocrats, those who own land and serfs the
  subjects of the aristocrats.
• Aristocrats own the land and distribute it among
  their loyal serfs. Thus, there is property
  related to land, and to control and own this
  property is related to the control and ownership
  to the means of production (i.e. the serfs)
• The capitalist stage is the current stage of
  society. The final stage (Communism) is yet to
  come
• At this stage there are two classes the
  bourgeoisie, the ones who control and own the
  means to production
• and the proletariat, those who most sell their
  labor to the bourgeoisie..

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• believed that Morgans evolutionary stages of
  human culture with material achievements and
  technology validated their evolutionary theory
• Marx and Engels gave currency to the idea of
  primitive communism.
• argued that the real basis of social and
  political inequality was property,
• and that since there was no private property in
  primitive societies, there was no state and no
  class or inequality

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Leslie White

• 19th century evolutionism discredited in USA in
  1930s and 1940s
• He retained Marxs causal paradigm, recognizing
  three subsystems of culture technology, social
  relations and ideology.
• Technology drives change in the social system
• And social life shapes ideology
• changed Marxs emphasis on the control of human
  labour and access to productive resources with
  the idea that the decisive force driving social
  evolution was the control of energy

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Peter Worseley
1956 published a Marxist reinterpretation of
Meyer Fortessanalysis of the Tallensi (Ghana)
society The Tallensi of are subsistence farmers
who traditionally lacked centralized
leadership.. Fortes said that men worked the
land of their fathers because ancestors graves
were built on it for religious reasons I.e.
functional He proposed a more practical reason
for peoples attachment to the land. Worsely
Showed that Tallensi young men returned to their
fathers homestead when he reached old because of
a the desire to inherit the right to farm some
of this land. Worsely demonstrated how Marxs
axiom that control of the means of production
conferred power, elucidated the economic basis of
lineage organization in small scale societies
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• STRUCTURAL MARXISM
• mid 1960s in France, the Netherlands and Britain,
  structuralism was the dominate theory in
  anthropology
• French philosopher Louis Althusser and
  sociologist Maurice Godelier merged Structuralism
  with Marxism
• introduced into British anthropology by Jonathan
  Friedman in 1974, with his article Marxism,
  Structuralism and Vulgar Materialism
• Friedman believed, like Marx, that society is
  formed by the conflict (or absence of conflict)
  between the infrastructure, the forces of
  production and the relations of production and
  the superstructure, the juridico-political and
  the ideological
• Thus we have the binary opposition

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• Neo-Marxists
• Neo-Marxists argued that polarized classes
  analogous to those detected by Marx and Engels
  under early capitalism could also be detected
  among across virtually the whole range of
  pre-capitalist societies.
• Thus African societies, presented in harmonious
  coherence by earlier functionalist ethnographers
  were now shown to be riven with conflict and
  class struggle.
• To the extent that male elders appropriated the
  surplus labour of their juniors and of women,
  they were seen to be exploiting class (or at
  least they could qualify as a class)in itself,
• This work valuable in exposing the implicit bias
  of functionalist accounts

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• Many contemporary theories have come to rely on
  Marxists insights particularly true of cultural
  ecologists, and neo-materialists, feminist and
  postmodern thinkers
• Characteristics of Marxist studies
• A focus on issues of structures of power and
  exploitation
• A concern with conflict and change
• A starting point in the material system of
  production and ownership of property
• An analysis of action as political power
  struggles between social groups defined by their
  control of property
• Various ways in which class, identity, and local
  struggles intersect

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• The Modern World-System, 1974
• looked at how the capitalist systems penetrated
  non-capitalist systems, using a binary
  distinction between the core area and the
  peripheral area
• argued that world economies linked by exchange
  relations were largely impossible before about
  1500

Immanuel Wallerstein

• The capitalist world economy which appeared
  around 1500 coincided with the expansion of
  commerce
• the states of Northwestern Europe were able to
  impose a regional division of labor and
  specialization of production - e.g. sugar in the
  Caribbean, bullion in the Andes, and cereals in
  Eastern Europe

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• and, through increasingly powerful state
  bureaucracies, to consolidate the flow of surplus
  toward the core countries
• The world system theory told anthropologists to
  examine the history of cultural conflicts to
  understand the change in any given cultural area

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• Political Economy

• Critical analysis of economic and power
  relationships between different human
  populations
• flow of wealth, labor, population in the world
• dominance and movement of capital and commodities
  
• construction of ideologies and ritual symbolisms
  that support or contest the World System (the
  international division of labor)

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Radical Critique
The writings of Marx had been largely ignored by
anthropologists but in the late 60s and early 70s
they were rediscovered

• 1950s and early 1960s any association with
  Marxism was career threatening
• In the 1960s there was a revolt against
  anthropological tradition.
• It arose along with
• the civil rights movement,
• the protest against the Vietnam War,
• the growth of the women's movement and the other
  features of those turbulent times.
• Starting in the late 1960s radical social
  movements emerged on a vast scale. First was the
  counter culture
• Everything that was part of the existing order
  was questioned.

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• The turn toward Marxist analyses coincided with
  changes in the empirical base of the discipline -
  the fieldwork situation
• These changes were underwritten by
• the ongoing decolonization of Third World
  countries,
• (2) the reorientation of funding opportunities
  toward social problems in the United States,
• (3) the politicization of native peoples at home
  and abroad, and
• (4) the emergence of various indigenous and
  advocacy groups including the International Work
  Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) in 1968 and
  Cultural Survival in 1972

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• our society with its world view, its taken for
  granted knowledge derived from the capitalist
  mode of production, influences the people who
  practice a particular science and the further
  development of that field
• In anthropology the earliest critiques took the
  form of denouncing the historical links between
  anthropology on the one hand and colonialism and
  imperialism on the other.
• passionate commitment to the powerless and to
  change

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In 1969, the Radical Caucus of the American
Anthropological Association presented a
resolution to the Association's annual meeting
which began
"Anthropology since its inception has contained a
dual but contradictory heritage. On the one hand
it derives from a humanistic tradition of concern
with people. On the other hand, anthropology is a
discipline developed alongside and within the
growth of the colonial and imperial powers. By
what they have studied (and what they have not
studied) anthropologists have assisted in, or at
least acquiesced to, the goals of imperialist
policy. It is becoming increasingly apparent to
many that these two traditions are in
contradiction."
 
 
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• How do we assess the claims of a discipline which
  writes accounts of "cultures" abstracted from the
  contexts of capitalism and imperialism, racism
  and domination, war and revolution?
• The reality is that anthropology is the offspring
  of colonialism, and reflects a state of affairs
  in which one part of humanity treats the other as
  an object and in which the anthropologist is
  her/himself a victim and her/his power of
  decision is a fiction, embedded as it is in the
  exploitative foundations of our society.

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• Europe and the People without History (1982)
• A Critique of Civilization as a responses to
  appeals from indigenous peoples to seek out the
  actual nature of the roots of the exploitative
  and oppressive conditions which are forced on
  humanity
• Wolf emphasized the importance of the social
  relations that structured the organization of
  production and the distribution of goods and
  labor within and between societies

Eric Wolf

• terms of Marx's concept of the mode of production
  in order to delineate the central processes at
  work in the interaction of Europeans with the
  majority of the world's peoples

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• In his view, the motor for the rise of
  international capitalism was located in the West,
  and the system itself was built on exploitation,
  enslavement, genocide, and the formation of class
  structures and states
• It also involved ethnogenesis - the creation of
  peoples without history both inside and outside
  Europe

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Critique

• How important is class and inequality in social
  life
• in many societies, kinship, religion, and
  ethnicity seem to have provided stronger
  connections than has class
• Has been criticized on its definition of ideology
  which puts it forth as a plot created by the
  ruling class to mystify the lower class this is
  not likely since the rulers also subscribe to the
  ideology.
• Further, how the ideology spreads is also
  unclear, as its relation to other forms of
  knowledge
• Another problem that Marxism has faced is in the
  evaluation of societies that do not possess any
  classes how and why did 'primitive communism'
  change without a conflict of classes?

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• Marxs framework cannot deal adequately with
  other dimensions of inequality. To conceptualize
  a society as mode of production is inevitably to
  privilege economic relations over other aspects
  of inequality. There is more than simply the
  class struggle going on in society
• Links of kinship religion, ethnicity and nation,
  have all tended to seem more powerful than links
  of classs.

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Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach in mind that the
philosophers have interpreted the world, in
various ways the point, however, is to change
it.
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Comaroff
Steward
Mintz