Karl Marx, Anthropologist
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Karl Marx, Anthropologist
Thomas C. Patterson
Oxford • New York
First published in 2009 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Thomas C. Patterson 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Patterson, Thomas Carl. Karl Marx, anthropologist / Thomas C. Patterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-511-9 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-511-1 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-509-6 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-509-X (cloth) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Anthropologists—Germany—Biography. 3. Anthropology—History. 4. Anthropology—Philosophy. I. Title. GN21.M2575P38 2009 301.092—dc22 [B] 2009000314
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 184520 509 6 (Cloth) ISBN 978 184520 511 9 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group
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For Friends, Colleagues, and Students
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Contents Preface
ix
Chronology
xi
Introduction Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints Organization of the Book
1 3 5
1
The Enlightenment and Anthropology Early Enlightenment Thought The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment The Institutionalization of Anthropology
9 10 15 23
2
Marx’s Anthropology What are Human Beings? History Truth and Praxis
39 41 51 57
3
Human Natural Beings Charles Darwin and the Development of Modern Evolutionary Theory Human Natural Beings: Bodies That Walk, Talk, Make Tools, and Have Culture Marx on the Naturalization of Social Inequality
65 67 74 87
4
History, Culture, and Social Formation Marx’s Historical-Dialectical Conceptual Framework Pre-Capitalist Societies: Limited, Local, and Vital
91 93 105
5
Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World The Transition to Capitalism and its Development The Articulation of Modes of Production Property, Power, and Capitalist States
117 119 128 138
viii • Contents 6
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century Social Relations and the Formation of Social Individuals Anthropology: “The Study of People in Crisis by People in Crisis”
145 147 158
Notes
173
Bibliography
181
Index
219
Preface This book is an exploration of a form of social theory that has a long history of suppression in the United States. The high points of this were undoubtedly the Palmer Raids of the 1920s and the McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities of the 1950s, although the antipathy of the vast majority of academics to anything but mainstream social thought in the decades that followed has been only slightly less deadening. The red-baiting of scholars who saw Marx only through the lens of anti-communism has gradually been replaced by scholars who assert that Marx is really passé, especially after the dismantling of the Soviet Union. While the sentiments underlying such statements are often conveyed by rolled eyes or kneejerk red-baiting, they are as often backed up by claims that one or another of the latest fads in social theory provide the bases for more textured analyses of what has happened during the last twenty years or even by declarations that history is over since the whole world is now, or should be, on the road to capitalism. What rarely happens, however, is any direct engagement and extended dialogue with what Marx actually said. More common are statements that rely on what someone claimed Marx said or that engage with the commentators on Marx, sympathetic or otherwise, rather than Marx himself. My goal is to engage directly with Marx’s works rather than those of subsequent writers in the Marxist tradition. Nevertheless, I am acutely aware of the difficulty of disengaging from the arguments and insights of subsequent commentators on Marx’s views, both sympathetic and otherwise, since my own thoughts and actions were shaped in part in the same intellectual and social milieu in which they wrote and were read. Keeping in mind Marx’s quip that he was not a Marxist, the book is Marxian rather than Marxist. Hence, it is not a book about Marxism and anthropology or Marxist anthropology; several of those have already been written. While Maurice Godelier’s (1973/1977) Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Ángel Palerm’s (1980) Antropología y marxismo, Marc Abélès’s (1976) Anthropologie et Marxisme, and Randall McGuire’s (1992) A Marxist Archaeology are a few that come immediately to mind, there are others as well. My first direct acquaintance with Marx’s writing occurred in 1959 in an introductory course in Western civilization with a selection from The Communist Manifesto. Two years later in Peru, I realized that broadly leftist newspaper writers in Peru provided accounts that better fit with my perceptions than those of their more mainstream contemporaries, and that they gave me a clearer and deeper understanding of what was happening there at the time. Over the next five years in
ix
x • Preface Peru, I would occasionally buy at a kiosk in Lima and read pamphlets containing articles Marx had written about capitalism. I also purchased the English-language edition of his Pre-capitalist Economic Formations shortly after it arrived in a Lima bookstore. The latter provided the inspiration and means for beginning to think in new ways about the societies, past and present, that were the object of inquiry for anthropologists. At various times from the late 1960s or early 1970s onward, I participated rather regularly in reading groups or university courses variously concerned with the writings of Marx, Engels, or their successors. These groups ranged from ones composed entirely of political activists through those with mixtures of activists, anthropologists, and students from different universities to courses and seminars with student and occasionally other faculty participants. Writing is a social rather than a solitary venture for me. I read passages to friends over the telephone and share drafts of manuscripts with them, hoping they have time to comment on them and feeling exceedingly appreciative when they do. I also try out ideas in courses to see if they are expressed clearly in ways that students can understand and use constructively to build and refine their own views. Since I have been doing this for quite a few years at this point in my life, the list of people, living and dead, who have helped me clarify my own ideas is a long one. Instead of attempting to list all of them, and undoubtedly missing a few in the process, let me mention just a few: Karen Spalding and Richard Lee who have been there almost since the beginning; Christine Gailey, John Gledhill, Karen Brodkin, Bob Paynter, Peter Gran, and Kathy Walker who have regularly helped me clarify my ideas and prose since the 1980s; Edna Bonacich, Joseph Childers, Stephen Cullenberg, Michael Kearney, and Juliet McMullin who have helped me to look at Marx through different lenses since I arrived at UCR in 2000; and, most of all, Wendy Ashmore—my colleague, friend, and wife—who sets high standards and has provided instantaneous feedback, constructive criticism, happiness, and contentment for more than a decade.
Chronology 1818 1820
5 May: Karl Marx born in Trier, Westphalia in the Rhineland of Prussia. 28 November: Frederick Engels born in Barmen, Westphalia in the Rhineland of Prussia. 1830 Marx enters high school in Trier. 1835 Marx’s essay on choosing a vocation; Marx enters the University of Bonn. 1836 Marx transfers to the University of Berlin. 1837 Marx writes about fragmentation of curriculum and begins to grapple with Hegel’s writings. 1838 Engels drops out of high school to work as unsalaried clerk in Bremen. 1841 Engels joins Prussian army and attends lectures at the University of Berlin. 1842 November: Marx and Engels meet at Cologne office of the Rheinische Zeitung; Engels goes to work at family textile firm in Manchester, England, where he meets Mary Burns who introduces him to English working-class life and with whom he has lifelong relationship; Engels begins collecting materials for The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), arguably the first empirical anthropology of an urban community. 1843–4 Marx resigns from the Rheinische Zeitung; marries Jenny von Westphalen; emigrates to Paris in search of employment, and writes Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844); Marx and Engels meet for second time and begin lifelong collaboration, the earliest product of which was The Holy Family (1845), a critique of the Young Hegelians. 1845–8 February 1845: Marx expelled from France by the Minister of the Interior; Marx, his wife and children move to Brussels; Marx argues in Theses on Feuerbach (1845) for the importance of the practical activity of corporeal human beings as social individuals bound together by ensembles of social relations. April 1845: Engels arrives in Brussels; in The German Ideology (1845–6), Marx and Engels lay foundations of their materialist theory of history and refine the philosophical anthropology Marx sketched earlier; both devote energies to organizing workers and join the German Communist League. 21 February 1848: German Communist League publishes Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. 3 March 1848: King of Belgium deports Marx, who returns to Cologne and launches the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
xi
xii • Chronology 1849
1851–3
1853–7
1857–9
1861–3
1864
1867
1870 1875
1876 1877–82
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung suppressed by Prussian government; Marx and Engels arrested and subsequently released; Marx deported and deprived of citizenship. June: Marx and family arrive in Paris, are placed under police surveillance in July, and leave in late August for London; Engels participates in armed uprising in South Germany, escapes as refugee, returns to England, re-enters family firm in Manchester as clerk. Marx and Engels analyze the failed revolutions of 1848–9; Marx’s The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Engels’s Revolution and CounterRevolution in Germany (1851–3). Marx writes series of articles for New York Daily Tribune on colonialism and plunder of India, destruction of Indian textile economy, complexity of Indian society, village communities, and subversion of traditional property relations and creation of new property relations during colonial rule. Marx synthesizes his philosophical anthropology, critique of political economy, and notions of pre-capitalist modes of production in Grundrisse (1857–58) and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Marx historicizes and further refines his views on labor, the importance and appearance of surplus values, and the role of competition and monopoly in creating dependence in an increasingly international capitalist economy in his early drafts of the three volumes of Capital. Formation of the International Workingman’s Association (i.e. The First International) in which Marx and Engels would play prominent roles until it was disbanded in 1876. Marx publishes first volume of Capital (1867), which analyzes the simple reproduction of capital and primitive accumulation using anthropological and historical information. Social relations and contradictions of the Paris Commune analyzed by Marx in The Civil War in France (1871). Marx circulates his Critique of the Gotha Program, a proposal put forward by socialists and communists in the German Democratic Workers Party who advocate social reform rather than revolution. Engels writes The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man. Marx writes large part of second volume of Capital, including section on the circuits of capital and expanded reproduction of capital; this was buttressed by readings of rural social organization in Russia, changes in global property resulting from colonialism and intrusion of capitalism into non-Western, non-capitalist societies in order to understand interconnections of cultural diversity and capitalist expansion; Marx circulates Workers’ Questionnaire (1880).
Chronology • xiii 1880 1883 1884
Engels writes Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. 13 March: Marx dies in London. Engels publishes The Origins of the Family Private Property and the State: In Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. Morgan (1884), which was based partly on Marx’s notes on Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877); Engels’s book translated into Italian, Rumanian, Danish, and French during next four years. 1893 Engels elected honorary president of International Socialist Congress (i.e. Second International). 1884–95 Engels prepares the second and third volumes of Capital for publication. 1895 5 August: Engels dies in London
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Introduction Karl Marx was an anthropologist. This may seem an unusual claim, since he is more frequently identified as a political radical, an economist, a journalist and, occasionally, even a philosopher. When Marx (1818–83) lived in the nineteenth century, knowledge had not yet been divided into the academic disciplines found on college and university campuses today. While anthropology as an academic discipline and a profession would not appear until the 1870s or 1880s, courses on anthropology had already been taught in some universities for more than a century by a variety of persons—physicians, historians, theologians, and philosophers, like Immanuel Kant who lectured annually on the subject for more than twenty years beginning in 1772. We know that Marx took an anthropology course taught by Henrik Steffens during his first year at the University of Berlin in 1837, and that he attended lectures by the anthropogeographer Carl Ritter (Finkelstein 2001; Kelley 1978, 1984; Ryding 1975: 7); however, we also know that taking a course in a subject is not a rite of passage that automatically or necessarily makes students into anthropologists or physicists at the end of the term. Thus, we need to look at the claim more carefully. Precisely what does it mean to assert that Marx was an anthropologist? What evidence and lines of argumentation support this contention? Anthropology has a dual heritage. One strand, which we will call “empirical anthropology” for the moment, examines both the external characteristics of human beings and their cultural achievements, including how they communicate symbolically, the activities that define their social lives and relationships, and the material evidence for their history both social and as a species (Diamond 1980: 13). Over the centuries, various writers have contributed to this strand of anthropological thought; these include Herodotus’s description of Egyptian society in the fifth century BC, Li Ssu’s analysis of tributary relationships during the Ch’in Dynasty, Domingo de Santo Tomas’s sixteenth-century grammar and dictionary of the Inca language, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy, or Mary Leakey’s fossil and archaeological discoveries in East Africa, to name only a few. Empirical anthropology has had a very discontinuous distribution in time and space, and this fact has fueled a number of long-running debates concerned with whether anthropology originated in classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the late nineteenth century; whether it was quintessentially a European activity; and whether there might be non-European traditions of empirical anthropological practice. In my view, it is possible to talk about a number of distinct traditions of empirical anthropological inquiry, such as those fostered in classical antiquity, Renaissance
1
2 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Italy, sixteenth-century Spain, or the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment (e.g. Pagden 1982; Rowe 1964, 1965; Wokler 1993).1 The other strand, often called “philosophical anthropology,” is concerned with the presuppositions of the various traditions of empirical anthropology, especially with what its practitioners believe to be the core features, or ontological structures, that constitute human beings. As Michael Landmann (1969/1974: 18) put it: “Are we looking for properties that must be manifested in all men who have ever lived or will live, in all cultures, or, in other words, for a criterion enabling us to determine whether or not a being is a man at all?” Since its scope is different, philosophical anthropology operates at a different level from the empirical strand and articulates in different ways with social critiques as well as with other discussions or disciplines. It arguably has a more continuous distribution in time and space. While I am not claiming that there is only a single tradition of philosophical anthropology, I would argue that, at any given moment, it resembles a cable with multiple, intertwined and interacting strands. Moreover, empirical inquiries have episodically forced changes in philosophical anthropology. While Marx was undoubtedly aware of both empirical and philosophical anthropology during his student days at Berlin,2 he was seemingly concerned initially at least with the former, judging by his 1842 critique of the philosophical underpinnings of influential faculty members, who constituted the “German historical school of law” and who argued among other things that laws typically develop organically from the community without the interference of authorities (Marx 1842/1975). His association with Frederick Engels, which also began that year, would soon bring the empirical strand and its ongoing importance into sharp focus. Shortly after they met, Engels would spend two years in Manchester, England where he worked in a family-owned mill and assembled the information for The Condition of the Working Class in England, which has a legitimate claim to being the first urban ethnography (Engels 1845/1975). In a similar vein, Marx and Engels’s (1848/1976) Communist Manifesto, which appeared in 1848, can be viewed as a set of policy recommendations not unlike those made today by applied anthropologists concerned with the well-being of the peoples with whom they work. It was an early effort at anthropological praxis—the merging of data, theory, and practice. These were followed from the early 1850s onward by the thick descriptions and analyses of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France, which depict the dynamics of mid nineteenth-century class struggle in France and the organization of the Paris Commune in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (Marx 1852/1979, 1871/1986). Interspersed with his more empirical studies were theoretically informed, historical analyses of different forms of pre- or noncapitalist property relations and the development of capitalism—i.e. The Grundrisse of 1857–8 and Capital, which he wrote in the mid 1860s (Marx 1857–8/1973, 1863–7/1977, 1864–94/1981, 1865–85/1981). Marx also continued his explorations of the philosophical underpinnings of a variety of subjects ranging from his critique
Introduction • 3 of the socialists’ Gotha Program to the new ethnology of Lewis Henry Morgan and others, which he outlined in his Ethnological Notebooks in the early 1880s just before his death (Marx 1875/1989, 1880–2/1974). This book has two aims. The first is to examine what one social theorist, Karl Marx, made of the anthropological discussions that had taken place since the mid eighteenth century and that, in many ways, had formative or shaping influences on his thought. For more than a century, commentators have customarily acknowledged that Marx drew inspiration from the writings of British political economists, German philosophers, and French socialists (e.g. Engels 1878/1987; Lenin 1913/1963). However, it is clear from citations and casual references that Marx read more widely than those commentators suggested. While trained as a philosopher, Marx was also an anthropologist by nineteenth-century standards if not by modern ones. The question here is: What were the sensibilities of his philosophical anthropology and what might it look like today? After contextualizing Marx’s work and elaborating his anthropology, I want to consider what his legacy actually is or could be to the issues of anthropological importance today—not just the obvious or the easy ones such as the transition to or the effects of capitalism but also issues about which he said little if anything directly. In other words, given what we know about his philosophical anthropology, what might he have said today about such issues of empirical anthropology as the evolution of humankind, the origins and consequences of symbolic communication with and through language, the development of personhood, state formation, and, perhaps most importantly, the question of where anthropology goes from here.
Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints This book is a polemic. I have a perspective or standpoint on Marx’s writings and their relations with authors who employ and advocate other social theoretical traditions as well as with subsequent writers within the Marxist tradition who have been influenced to varying degrees and in different ways by Marx and his successors. Controversies have swirled around interpretations of Marx and his writings for more than a century. These result partly from different political and philosophical commitments and partly from disagreements over political tactics in particular concrete situations. There are diverse external critiques of Marx’s thought and that of his successors (e.g. Giddens 1981; MacGregor 1998; Rorty 1989) as well as even more numerous and diverse disagreements that are internal to the Marxist tradition (e.g. Cohen 1978; Cullenberg 1996; O’Neill 1982; Thompson 1978). Some of the debates reflect the availability of Marx’s writings at the time they were written. For example, the third volume of Capital was not published until 1895; the Theories of Surplus Value did not appear until 1911; The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which were published first in German in 1932 and then in Russian in 1956, only became
4 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist available in English in 1960; and the Grundrisse was largely unknown in the West until Martin Nicolaus’s English translation appeared in 1973. In practical terms, this means that someone writing in 1910, for instance, might not even have been aware of the existence of the unpublished works and would certainly not have been able to assess either their content or potential significance at the time. A number of things are at stake in the debates. These include but are not limited to the following questions: Did Marx hold a linear theory of social (r)evolution, or did he have more textured appreciation of the possibilities of diverse trajectories of historical development and the importance of historical contingency? Was he an economic determinist who held to a strict base–superstructure model of society and believed in the economic determination of society, culture, and history in the last instance, or did he have a more nuanced understanding of the mutual interconnections of ensembles of social relations, culture, practical activity, and the capacity of people to make their own history on occasion? Did he argue that people were merely the bearers of economic, political-juridical, and ideological structures that shaped their beliefs and actions, or did he believe that human beings possessed agency and had the capacity to change those structures? Did he hold that human beings acted always as economically rational individuals and that the cultural norms of a society were reducible to individual choice, or did he think that people make their own history under circumstances not of their own choice but rather under those which they confronted? Did he accept a notion of society that was merely the sum of its individual parts, which existed prior to and independent of the totality (a Cartesian totality which could be reduced atomistically to those parts); did he adopt a more holistic (Hegelian) notion of society in which neither the parts nor the whole were reducible to the other and whose essence unfolded dialectically, successively, and teleologically throughout history; or did Marx see the sociohistorical totality as something that lacked a beginning (essence) or end (telos) and was instead “the ever-pre-givenness of a structured complex unity” as Louis Althusser (1963/1970: 199; emphasis in the original) claimed? Did Marx suppose that thinking and being were distinct from one another and that the latter had an ontological priority over the former, or did he believe that they were mutually constitutive of one another and hence both irreducible to and overdetermined by the other? Were social-class structures expressing domination, oppression, and exploitation universal features of the human condition, or were they historically constituted under particular circumstances and conditions? Were Marx’s social individuals—defined by their positionality in particular ensembles of social relations—also fragmented, contradictory subjects? Were they alienated individuals whose subjectivities were partly constituted through the perceptions of others; were their subjectivities self-constructed, situational, and impermanent; or did they only come into existence through the interplay of language and power lodged in impersonal institutions? The answers to these and similar questions are not exclusively academic concerns, since they may have immediate consequences for what you as a human being
Introduction • 5 believe, for how you choose to live your life, and for the kinds of practical activity, commitments, and political action with which you are able and willing to engage. As an activist friend, born and bred on the Lower East Side of New York, used to say: “The path to radical social change is like riding the Broadway local from the Staten Island terminal (a subway line that runs from Staten Island to the Bronx). Some people get off at the first stop; others will ride to Times Square or even Harlem; and a few will stay all the way to the end of the line.” This book has a standpoint with regard to these and other issues. Among other things, I will argue that Marx adopted a critical-dialectical perspective that historicized both nature and human society—a perspective that began with Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Buffon in the mid eighteenth century, and that ultimately had a significant impact on Scottish Enlightenment writers like Adam Smith as well as German critics of Enlightenment liberalism like Herder and Hegel. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Marx began to develop a philosophical anthropology that included the corporeal organization of human beings, ensembles of social relations, the relation of the individual to society, the diversity and historicity of human societies, alienation, objectification, production, reproduction, labor, freedom, practical activity, and the historicity of dispositions and social relations commonly attributed to human nature. These informed the empirical anthropology he developed from the 1840s onward: his studies of the failed revolutions on the European continent in 1848–9, the Indian mutiny of the 1850s, the critique of capitalism in the 1860s, and the impact of imperialism on societies and cultural practices on the periphery of the capitalist world in the 1870s.
Organization of the Book Marx was a prodigious reader. He was familiar with the writers of both classical antiquity and the Enlightenment. Since neither were ever monolithic intellectual movements, this means that he had greater or lesser familiarity with various philosophical perspectives that were developed first in antiquity and then were recycled, refined, and superseded from the late seventeenth century onward. More importantly, he was familiar with the arguments they produced and with the ways in which they were inscribed in the cultural patterns, traditions, and politics of his day. Chapter 1, “The Enlightenment and Anthropology,” examines how nature and then human society were slowly historicized from the 1670s onward, culminating in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Buffon’s Natural History, and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, all of which were published around 1750. These path-breaking works had marked influences on subsequent writers. It is reasonable to say that the Scottish historical philosophers like Adam Smith as well as central European philosophers like Kant, Herder, and Hegel engaged in a dialogue with the historical-dialectical and critical anthropology outlined by Montesquieu,
6 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Buffon, and Rousseau. An anthropological perspective, combining both its empirical and philosophical dimensions, crystallized at the University of Göttingen in the late eighteenth century; the importance of this, from our standpoint, was that this perspective served as the model for university reform in Europe and elsewhere, most notably at the University of Berlin where Marx was a student in the late 1830s. Chapter 2, “Marx’s Anthropology,” outlines the major features of his philosophical anthropology—the corporeal organization of human beings, the significance of ensembles of social relations, the diversity and historicity of human societies, and the importance of praxis in the production, reproduction, and transformation of those communities. Unlike Rousseau, Hegel, and others, Marx did not distinguish between the physical and moral character of human beings and thus separate the human history from the realm of nature. He saw a dialectical interplay between a biological substrate—the corporeal organization of the body, which endows all members of the human species with certain potentials—and the sets of social relations that shape everyday life in the worlds in which the social individuals of historically specific communities live and acquire their consciousness. Thus, human nature is not only historicized but also plural. Marx’s view of the world was profoundly historicist, and history involved the intertwined development of human beings, ensembles of social relations (societies), and nature itself. Finally, the chapter considers Marx’s notion of praxis, the most basic and characteristic feature of human beings, by means of which they establish relations with objects of the external world and with one another. Chapter 3, “Human Natural Beings,” considers the bases for Marx’s agreement with and positive evaluation of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859/1964). These included Darwin’s rejection of teleological arguments in the natural sciences, his adoption of a notion of historically contingent change, his concern with variation, and his view that individual organisms are the consequence of interactions with their environments. This provides a foundation for considering in more detail real or potential connections between the materialist and naturalist positions put forth by Marx and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century—a process which has been set in motion by Joseph Fracchia, Richard Lewontin, David McNally, and others in recent years. The chapter then explores concepts elaborated by Marx in the 1840s, which he subsequently honed in later works: the corporeal organization of human beings, objectification (how they came to be aware of the world through sensory experience while living in social groups that transformed given natural and preexisting sociocultural worlds into human worlds), and dispositions (the capabilities and constraints embedded in those thinking bodies). Labor is an embodied process as are instruments of labor like the hand, the human perceptual system, the brain, and the anatomical structures associated with speech. Using this conceptual framework as well as Engels’s (1876/1972) essay on the role of labor in the transition from ape to human, it examines the human fossil record in order to discern the interplay of changing dispositions and anatomical structures, the emergence of practices such as tool-making and language, and how these might have happened.
Introduction • 7 Chapter 4, “History, Culture, and Social Formation,” explores the alternative Marx developed from the late 1850s onward to the societal evolutionism of the Enlightenment theorists of agrarian capitalism or to Hegel’s teleological views about the actualization of the human mind and the unfolding of free subjectivity. Marx focused instead on the historicity of the individual and of social relations rather than a human nature that could be reduced largely to its psychobiological or spiritual dimensions. In his view, the distinctive features of humankind—creative intelligence realized through and manifested in labor, sociality, language, culture, the production of use values (items that satisfy human needs), and the creation of new needs—were neither timeless nor persistent but rather were constituted, reproduced, and transformed in particular sociohistorical contexts. Marx began his analysis of how societies produced the material conditions for their own reproduction not with exchange, supply and demand, or the allocation of scarce resources (the starting points for classical political economists) but rather with production itself. Using the concept of a mode of production, he developed a commentary on alternative pathways in the development of property relations away from those of the original kinship-based communities. In effect, he argued that not all historically specific societies developed in the same way or even passed through the same succession of modes of production. Here, we examine both the theoretical framework Marx sketched as well as how archaeologists and historians have contributed to the clarification of its implications. Chapter 5, “Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World,” considers what Marx thought about the processes underlying the transition to capitalism and the subsequent development of industrial capitalism on an ever-expanding scale through the formation of domestic and overseas markets, and colonies that supplied not only raw materials but also customers for the commodities produced. While it is a story of the plunder of primitive accumulation and the relentless subordination of ever-increasing numbers of people both at home and abroad into the disciplinary relations of capitalism, it is also a story of resistance, uneven development along different trajectories as a result of articulation of capitalist societies with societies with different modes of production that were differentially resistant to change, and the imposition of colonial rule by capitalist national states. The story also involved massive emigration, the rise of nationalist politics and its interconnections with diasporic communities, political fragmentation, creation of new colonial territories and national states, and the development of new forms of political institutions and practices. Marx was aware that there were state-based societies in which commodity production was not well developed and market exchange had not penetrated into all corners of everyday life. What distinguished them from capitalist societies and from one another were the forms of social property relations and production as well as the specific forms in which goods or labor power were appropriated from the direct producers by the members of non-producing class(es)—e.g. through extra-economic means such as coercion, taxes, laws, or rent or the exploitation of various categories
8 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist of unfree labor and wage-workers. He recognized that property was a relation between classes of individuals that was mediated by things. He also recognized that political power entailed maintaining injustice in and through property relations. This recognition underpinned his writings about the state from the 1840s onward both in general works and in accounts of particular cases, like France, Germany, or the United States. His views on these topics provide the foundations for a historical and critical-dialectical anthropology for the twenty-first century. Chapter 6, “Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century,” begins with Marx’s first premise of history: the existence of real, living human individuals. In The German Ideology, he identifies three additional premises: (a) the activities by which the individuals satisfy their needs; (b) the creation of new needs; and (c) the reproduction of the individual in the family. Marx also claimed that reality does not reside in the idea of society but rather in the reality of the individual, and that, while there can be no relation between the individual and society, there are relations among individuals. Moreover, history is experienced phenomenologically in the lives of living individuals. This raises a number of questions. For example, how do personal conditions and experiences become general ones? How do individuals realize needs and desires, create new needs, and reproduce themselves? What is involved in the self-realization of these capacities, and what constrains their self-actualization? The problems we confront in the twenty-first century have not changed: the need for social justice in its myriad dimensions, discrimination (based on racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the intolerance of various nationalisms and fundamentalisms), the inequities marked by class struggle, and the degradation of the world on which we live, to name only a few. Marx might even argue that the celebration of diverse identities in the absence of inequality and discrimination is probably not such a bad idea. The issue is how do we eliminate discrimination in circumstances in which diversity is continually reconstituted in order to perpetuate inequalities? Marx’s political activism and sense of social justice were always combined with continuous critical investigation. He was acutely aware of how unforgiving the consequences of political action can be; he also knew how important it is to understand as accurately and completely as possible the forces involved and in getting political action right. After all, some stories or visions of the future have better endings than others!
–1– The Enlightenment and Anthropology The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” was a tumultuous period. It persisted, according to some, from the early 1600s to as late as the 1830s. It was marked by a series of processes that mutually shaped and reinforced one another. These included: (1) the formation of merchant empires and overseas colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia established by Holland, Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Russia from the mid fifteenth century onward combined with the creation of increasingly large domestic markets in England and other parts of Europe (McNally 1988; Tracy 1990); (2) the rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment, skepticism, and the appeal to reason or rationality which challenged and ultimately eroded the divinely ordained authority claimed by the churches and the aristocracy during and after the Reformation (Israel 2001; Popkin 1979); (3) the “scientific revolution”—also characterized as the “conquest of nature” or the “death of nature”—which involved the assimilation of a new understanding of nature into the wider culture and society, because of the desire of the emerging commercial classes for technological innovations and the erosion of barriers separating intellectuals and artisans (Forbes 1968; Jacob 1988; Merchant 1980; Zilsel 2003); and (4) the rise of industrial capitalism, analyzed later by Marx in Capital, which involved the appearance of new forms of manufacture from about 1750 onward that were based on the continual adoption of technological innovations, the transformation of social relations, the construction of factories, and the growth of cities across northern Europe (Hobsbawm 1968). The Enlightenment was also marked by continuous conflicts between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and various Protestant fringe movements from the 1520s onward. Some claim that this “war of the Churches constituted Europe’s prime engine of cultural and educational change” until the mid seventeenth century when “major intellectual turmoil developed first in the Dutch Republic and the Calvinist states of Germany” (Israel 2001: 23). Besides the ideological and political strife that formed the backdrop to everyday life, there were probably no more than a few decades between 1600 and 1830 when peace prevailed and battles or wars were not being waged somewhere in the world. The impact of the Enlightenment was not limited to the soldiers and sailors who died in these wars. It was felt by all layers of society. More than one aristocrat and preacher of the day lamented that “even the common people were susceptible to new ideas” (Israel 2001: 1, 8–9). While Europe is often portrayed as its center of gravity, this is not precisely correct. Enlightenment thought was discussed and deployed in the Americas, the Middle
9
10 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist East, and Asia. For example, the rhetoric of the American Revolution was rooted in the ideas of Enlightenment writers. The contents of Mercurio Peruano, published in Peru during the 1790s, included articles ranging from Newtonian science and natural history through commentaries on political economy to discussions of philosophy, the French Revolution, and the idea of the nation. Commercial minorities that connected the Ottoman state, India, China, and Japan to Europe were familiar with the scientific and social-theoretical contributions of the Enlightenment (e.g. Chatterjee 1986: 54; Gran 1979; Habib 1990; Mauro 1990; Rossabi 1990; Wang 1990). What the Enlightenment provided were analytical categories and a conceptual framework—a language, if you will—for discussing issues of the day. Political reformers and leaders of nationalist or revolutionary movements in areas as widely separated as Latin America, the eastern Mediterranean (including Egypt and Greece), and Japan used this language from the late eighteenth century onward to express and buttress their plans and goals. Moreover, virtually every nationalist movement of the last two centuries has made use of concepts originated by or derived from Enlightenment writers. This chapter has three goals. The first is to comment briefly on early Enlightenment thought in order to provide a background to standpoints that appeared around 1750 and affected social commentators, including Marx, who wrote after that date. The second goal is to examine both the philosophical and empirical foundations of the new anthropology of Enlightenment writers as well as the contexts in which it emerged in the mid eighteenth century. The third goal is to examine the subsequent development of anthropology and to consider the various manifestations of anthropological sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Early Enlightenment Thought The standpoints of Enlightenment thinkers never constituted a unified, fixed body of ideas and arguments. The movement can be described as a spectrum of warring factions engaged in heated debate, whose perspectives, boundaries, centers of gravity, and even membership shifted as they developed through time. At one end were the traditionalists who argued for the divinely inspired authority of the existing aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The other, radical end of the spectrum was occupied by a number of individuals, the most notable of whom were Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The former, a Dutch lens grinder, challenged knowledge claims based on revealed religion and argued, among other things, that nature creates itself in accordance with rules which govern its operation, that the creations of nature are produced in a fixed order, and that human values (e.g. good and evil) do not exist in nature but are human creations instead (Allison 2005; Garrett 1995). The latter, a German mining engineer and civil servant, laid the foundations for seeing nature historically as a dynamic world in flux that had
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 11 the capacity to change continually through time (Garber 2005; Glass 1959: 37–8; Sleigh 1995). Arrayed between the traditionalist and radical extremes were a series of intermediate, “moderate” standpoints—such as Cartesianism (rationalism) and empiricism. Each position had theological, scientific, political, and philosophical dimensions. The arguments among their advocates “rarely referred directly to the political and social conflict but did so in a mediated way. These conflicts were about the nature of fundamental boundaries, like that between mind and body, human and animal, living and non-living, male and female” (Jordanova 1986: 33). They also gave rise to enduring terms like “materialist,” “liberal,” “romantic,” “conservative,” and “socialist” not to mention the words “ideology” and “scientist.” The most striking features shared by a majority of the factions of the Enlightenment, but not always the same ones, were arguments about the autonomy of the individual, the importance of rationality or the use of reason, the existence of a natural world constituted outside of human beings, and rather mechanistic views about what nature was like. It is also clear, however, that they did not always necessarily see or understand the individual, rationality, and nature in quite the same way. This was true as well of their views on the importance of toleration, equality, property, and contracts, which were also widely discussed. For our immediate purposes here, the debates about nature and history from about 1670 to 1750, fueled in significant ways by Spinoza and Leibniz, laid the foundations for the development of a new way of perceiving and understanding nature and the place of human beings in it. As Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 366) observed, “Like the thought it was combating, the new scientific philosophy was to rest upon a general conception of man, nature, and God.” This perspective emphasized the importance of observation and reasoning; it asserted that mechanistic explanations which viewed nature as a huge machine were too simple to account for its complexity; and it transformed God from a creator who intervened directly in nature into an artisan who either acted indirectly or not at all.1
The World Historicized Both nature and human society were slowly historicized after the 1670s. By this, I mean that understanding the history of some thing was absolutely necessary for truly knowing that thing, regardless of whether it was nature, human society, or a commodity. Here, history involved the concepts of both process and succession. This historicized perspective of the world and its inhabitants crystallized in the mid eighteenth century with the appearance in rapid succession of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, Buffon’s Natural History in 1749, and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755. Let us consider each writer in more detail. The Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755), was an astute social commentator and critic who had read widely in the travel literature
12 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist of the day and recognized the diversity of manners and customs that existed from one society to another. For our purposes, he wrote three books of note. The earliest was the Persian Letters (Montesquieu 1721/1973), in which two imaginary young princes from Persia travel throughout France and comment in letters they send home about the incomprehensibility of French mores and traditional values as they existed in the early eighteenth century around the time of Louis XIV’s death. In this work, Montesquieu saw “society as a reality that was external to the individual, constraining him to act and think in certain ways” and that “prevents him from evaluating his position in society with any degree of objectivity, . . . [since] his understanding of its values, norms and institutional structures are purely subjective” (Baum 1979: 43). In his second work, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734/1965), Montesquieu rejected theological arguments and began to work out the methodological foundations for a historical standpoint that would neither view human history as one accident or error after another nor see the diversity of manners and customs of peoples around the world as signs of human weakness or irrationality (Althusser 1959/1982: 20–1). He sought instead to discover the particularities of Roman history. With regard to the former, he wrote: It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it. Maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if by chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish in a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents. (Montesquieu 1734/1965: 169)
Thus, as Raymond Aron (1965/1998: 15) put it: “behind the seemingly accidental course of events, we must grasp the underlying causes which account for them.” Montesquieu distinguished two phases of Roman historical development: one when the government and the society were in harmony or equilibrium; the other when there were contradictions between the aims of the state, on the one hand, and values, principles, or spirit that unified the populace, on the other. These crises were the dialectic of history, its motor. Montesquieu refined his concept of the underlying causes of development in his third work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748/1965). He argued that the diversity of laws and manners, i.e., forms of government, found in societies around the world could be reduced to a few types—republics, monarchies, and despotisms. Each type had its own distinctive nature, which was shaped by both the number of individuals who possessed sovereignty and the ways in which they exercised it; each type also had distinctive sentiments—such as morality, honor, or fear—that promoted harmony
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 13 among its citizens. In other words, Montesquieu saw a connection between the form of government, on the one hand, and the style of interpersonal relations, on the other; he argued that social life is shaped by the way in which power is exercised. As he had shown earlier, when there were contradictions between the spirit (sentiments) of the people and the aims of the state, crises emerged which eroded the form of government. Montesquieu also considered the material or physical causes—like climate or soil—have on the customs, manners, and laws of diverse peoples. He argued that there was a correlation, for example, between the incidence of polygamy and warm climates, and that the laws and forms of government of nations reflect those material influences. Thus, there was a second dialectical relationship between the environment broadly defined and the customs and institutions of people. He was also adamant that the spirit or will of the people was determinant in the final instance. There is a continuous dialectic throughout The Spirit of the Laws “between absolute values which seem to correspond to the permanent interests of men as such, and those which depend upon time and place in a concrete situation” (Berlin 1955/2001: 157). The project of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88)—superintendent of the royal botanical gardens in Paris—was more expansive than that of Montesquieu. In the first three volumes of his Natural History, which appeared under the imprimatur of the Royal Press in 1749,2 Buffon covered diverse topics ranging from the history and theory of the earth and the formation of planets through biological reproduction and embryonic development to the natural history of human beings. There was a ready audience for his work, which was composed of a curious, sophisticated, and politically influential public that wanted to be usefully entertained without having to invest too much effort as well as the savants and natural philosophers of the various royal societies and academies of science. This audience was fascinated with the steady stream of unknown plants and animals from the far reaches of the earth that arrived each year in Amsterdam, Paris, and the other commercial centers of Europe; its members flocked to lectures illustrated with various scientific experiments, anatomical dissections, and opportunities to peer at specimens through one of the new, powerful microscopes fashioned in the 1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723). As a result, Buffon’s theories were widely read and critically discussed almost from the moment they appeared (Roger 1989/1997: 68–78; Sloan 1979, 1995). “Buffon made the study of natural history everybody’s pastime” (Mayr 1982: 101). The opening essay in the first volume, “Discourse on Method,” established a backdrop. Here, Buffon dealt with three issues: human reason, whether or not there is an order to nature, and man’s place in nature (Roger 1989/1997: 81–92). With regard to the first, the two dominant views concerning reason were those of Descartes and Locke; the former argued rational thought would yield truth; the latter claimed that the mind combined ideas derived from sensory experience in new ways. Buffon merged the two perspectives. Science was more than the
14 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist description of mere facts, since it also involved the use of reason—comparison, analogy, and generalization. With regard to the second question, he argued that there was indeed an order in nature, but that the mathematicians and taxonomists, like Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), had simply failed to capture its complexity, because it was too complicated for their equations (Sloan 1976). In this discussion, Buffon’s model of the natural historian was Aristotle, the naturalist of living systems, organic diversity, and internal, teleological processes. Like Aristotle, Buffon took human beings as his starting point; however, he also added Leibniz’s recently published views about continuous gradations, or chains of being, in nature. In the next two essays, Buffon tackled the history and theory of the earth and the formation of planets (Roger 1989/1997: 93–115). Here, history meant a description of the present distribution of oceans, mountains, and strata, while theory was viewed as an attempt to explain the physical causes or past organization that produced the present distributions (Haber 1959; Porter 1972; Rossi 1984; Rudwick 1985). Buffon argued that the processes of planetary formation as well as the cyclical ones that operated on the earth’s surface after it formed erased virtually all traces of the original events. Thus, a proper theory of natural history had to combine natural causes with accidents. Jacques Roger (1989/1997: 114) described his theory in the following way: “The normal sequence of natural causes only generated an eternal repetition of the present, [while] chance alone could create the unique and irreversible event, after which nothing would remain as it was before.” The importance of Buffon’s theory was twofold. First it was a theory of transformation and change. Second, it freed studies of the history and formation of the earth as well as its antiquity from reliance on or even reference to the biblical account. Buffon’s underlying concern in the second volume of Natural History was to change the direction of natural history as a field of inquiry (Roger 1989/1997: 116–50). To do so, he distinguished living beings, animals and plants, from nonliving matter—a classification that recognized animal, vegetable, and mineral. The focus of the new natural history would be the study of reproduction; he further argued that it was necessary to start at the simplest level—the living (organic) matter that was shared by both animals and plants. This argument seemed to combine the materialism of the Epicureans and Leibniz. Buffon argued that living beings reproduce; the question in his mind was how rather than why they did so. This materialist formulation of the question, which was quite similar to the way he wrote about the formation and subsequent history of the earth, stirred some controversy, because it seemed to talk about internal molding forces while excluding two forms of creationism—preformationism and pre-existence—that had been popular among religious traditionalists and the mechanists since the late seventeenth century. 3 Buffon observed animal reproduction in a variety of species in order to establish regularities through comparison. The conclusions he drew were that the first development, the fetus at conception, was a production of parts that appeared for the first time, whereas subsequent embryonic development was merely growth of those parts.
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 15 In other words, living matter (organic molecules) was combined and recombined to produce successive generations of individuals of the same species.4 Buffon’s third volume of Natural History picked up where the first one began— with man. Its concern was the natural history of the human species (Blanckaert 1993; Roger 1989/1997: 151–83). Buffon clearly placed human beings in nature and argued that all of their propensities—their capacities for speech, intellectual activity, and creative innovation, which underpin the rise of civilization—were also natural. Moreover, there was an unbridgeable gap between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, and Buffon simply refused to humanize the latter as some of his contemporaries did. Since human beings lived in the physical world, they had to appropriate the resources of that world in order to cope with the uncertainties of their own cultures and ultimately to survive. In the opening chapters, he examined the history of the individual and the different stages of human development—childhood, puberty, adulthood, and old age; he relied on differences in climate, environment, dietary regimes, and nationality to account for the physical and physiological differences noted in travel accounts. As Claude Blanckaert (1993: 33) remarked, it was necessary, after Buffon, to take account of the physiological demands and to consider the disruptive, initiating, or dynamic role played by customs, modes of subsistence, and education of peoples living in different climatic regions. Buffon also argued that the human species had been relatively uniform (and archetypically white-skinned) in its early stages, and that, as its members moved out from their mid-latitude homeland, their physical appearance, customs, and abilities were slowly altered (degenerated in his words) and diversified under the influence of climate into the varieties that are seen today. While Buffon’s empirical anthropology was rooted in the travel literature, medicoanatomical investigations, and biases of his day, his philosophical anthropology was materialist. It put human beings in nature and attempted to account for changes in the species in terms of its concrete interactions and relationships with the rest of the natural world at particular times and places. This led him to consider in new ways factors like climate, geography, diet, reproduction, or customs. The long-term impact of Buffon’s work rests on his capacity to integrate studies that ranged from cosmology and the history of the earth to animal reproduction. His analyses cut across different levels ranging from the molecular to the cosmological, historicized nature in the process, and integrated seemingly disparate ideas and information into a more or less coherent whole. More importantly, they influenced later writers (e.g. Reill 2005; Richards 2002; Sloan 1979).
The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment Montesquieu and Buffon provided a “green light” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and other commentators of the Scottish Enlightenment to write about the
16 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist history of human society.5 Although Locke and the natural law theorists had written about the origins of the ownership of private property in the late seventeenth century, Rousseau and the Scots historicized discussions about the origins and expansion of property rights and relations after 1750.6 Their accounts were conjectural histories concerned with the development of human nature and the progress of society as reflected by changes in modes of subsistence. In spite of the fact that they drew from the same ethnographic and historical accounts, their philosophical anthropologies as well as their views about contemporary commercial society differed in significant ways. The aim of this section is to consider both their differences and some of their shared concerns.
Rousseau’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was critical of modern, civil society, which was based increasingly on commerce and industry. In A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, he charged that people were morally corrupted both by the civilizing process and by life in the commercial societies that were slowly crystallizing across the globe, as their elites steadily severed customary, mutually recognized obligations to the members of the lower classes and replaced them with social relations based on market exchange. He wrote that “the politicians of the ancient world were always talking about morality and virtue; ours speak of nothing but commerce and money” (Rousseau 1750/1973: 16). History, in his view, provided a corrective to what politicians said by focusing on what they actually did. It also furthered “people’s reflective self-identification and self-location within time, space, and a context of others,” and it had the potential of expanding their vision of human possibilities, of thinking of themselves not as “passive observers” but rather “as active participants” (Barnard 2003: 162). Rousseau (1755/1973, 1755/1992a) outlined his critical, philosophical anthropology in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, published in 1755. Some of the distinctive features of his historical-dialectical perspective were: (1) human nature as a historical process associated with the emergence of human beings from nature through the creation of culture and their transformation of nature through social labor; (2) the interactions of human beings with one another and with their external (natural) world as shaped by successively different, historically specific sets of social relations; (3) a recognition of both the existence and anteriority of social forms other than modern bourgeois society; and (4) a historicized conception of “man” as a subject who was not always identical with “bourgeois man” of modern society. Rousseau saw human beings as part of nature (Rousseau 1755/1973: 37–8).7 While he declined to speculate on whether the first human beings were “covered with hair,” or “walked upon all fours,” he was certain that successive transformations in the constitution of the human species had occurred since its inception: “changes
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 17 which must have taken place in the internal as well as external conformation of man, as he applied his limbs to new uses, and fed himself on new kinds of food” (Rousseau 1755/1973: 47). Rousseau (1775/1992a: 81–3) also believed that the great apes were a variety of human being, because they had similar biological and psychological dispositions;8 however, unlike savage and modern man, the ape had not “develop[ed] any of its potential faculties.” He inferred that there might be “a temporal and sequential relation” between apes and human beings, one reflecting “genetic continuity” (Frayling and Wokler 1982: 113–14; Wokler 1997a, 1997b). In his view, the test for determining whether apes and human beings were varieties of the same species would take more than one generation to answer; it involved determining whether they could produce hybrids that could continue to reproduce. Asher Horowitz (1987: 31) described this dimension of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology in historical-dialectical terms: “As a biological species, humanity is the product of a process of evolution. The evolution of the human species is inseparable from the inauguration of its own history, and humanity’s biological evolution is a result of its own historical activity.” Let us consider more closely what was involved in emergence of history—i.e., the creation of culture—from nature. Rousseau began his historical account with “savage man” who initially was virtually indistinguishable from other animals, which he viewed as little more than “ingenious machines” whose demands were established and satisfied through “inherited repertoire[s] of instinctual behavior” (Horowitz 1987: 68). To the extent that proto-humans possessed an inherited repertoire, they were like other animals; what distinguished them, almost imperceptibly at first, from other animals was a capacity to learn from their experiences of and interactions with the external world. This process of free agency slowly released them from the constraints of their behavioral repertoire and laid the foundations for further learning and the development of truly social relations as opposed to the atomized, independent behaviors of animals like ants or bees. It also led gradually to what Rousseau called perfectibility or self-transformation: an increased consciousness of desires and needs, which in turn set the stage for the transformation of the external world through labor and the creation of new needs. Language and tool-making were early but essential steps in the process of perfectibility (Horowitz 1987: 60–76; Rousseau 1755/1973: 47–61). Thus, the development of both free agency and perfectibility was part and parcel of the sociohistorical development of human nature and of the transformation or mutilation of nature, both of which occurred within historically specific forms of social relations. This “self-constitutive practical activity” involved “the creation of a cultural, superorganic realm in the social process of labour” (Horowitz 1987: 86–7). Rousseau recognized three successive forms of society in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, each with its own distinctive socioeconomic relations, internal contradictions, and incomplete realization of freedom and happiness. These were primitive society, traditional pre-capitalist society modeled after the Greek polis,
18 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist and modern, civil society. Rousseau (1755/1973: 72) also believed that “many of the differences between men which are ascribed to nature stem rather from habit and the diverse modes of life of men in society.” The historical development of primitive society rested on the growing importance in society, rather than in nature, of the bonds that were created by mutual affection, dependence, self-esteem, and self-interest; he called these sentiments amour propre and believed that the development of self-esteem and pride occurred as a result of public recognition of personal qualities of excellence that were valued by the community (Horowitz 1987: 92–4).9 Thus, amour propre played a crucial role in both the formation and control of behavior in primitive society, and primitive society itself was not entirely based on a system of needs, as the empiricists had claimed. In his view, communal life was an expression of the abilities of its members, who were further bound together by sharing. What internal differentiation existed in the community reflected a nascent division of labor based on age and sex, rather than a division in which the members of one or another group enforced order or monopolized the use of force. Life in primitive society was disrupted when production begins to be based on forms that the community could no longer replicate. The development of functionally differentiated forms of production was always historically contingent rather than necessary from Rousseau’s perspective. When new divisions of labor appeared, they undermined and ultimately dissolved both communal life and the existing social relations of production. The motors driving this change were the adoption of agricultural and metallurgy as well as the consolidation of new forms of amour propre that increasingly emphasized vanity rather than pride, competition for public esteem, and the life of the individual as opposed to that of the community. What emerged in their wake was a society that was simultaneously structured by newly forged sets of needs, by exchange relations rather than generalized reciprocity, by internal social differentiation, and by the institutionalization of separate spheres of activity. In a phrase, the emergent society was no longer a unity (Rousseau 1755/1973: 76–85; Horowitz 1987: 89–107). Rousseau’s second stage of sociohistorical development was constituted by the city-states of classical antiquity. Conceptually, they were midway between primitive society and the kind of commercial society that was emerging in the mid eighteenth century. The distinctive feature of Athens and the Roman Republic was that certain individuals had a new relationship with the community. They were citizens, because they fulfilled the obligations required of members of the community, such as serving in the army or as a state official. A right of citizenship was access to the productive resources of the community, which, while owned by the community, were held privately so long as the beneficiary discharged his duties to the state. These privately held resources were not worked by the citizen himself but rather by slaves or serfs who, as a result of their status, were not citizens. The goals of the productive activity of this servile class were neither production for the market nor the accumulation of profit; it was aimed instead at the production, maintenance, and reproduction of the
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 19 citizen in his new relation to the community. This relationship was predicated on the organic unity of the citizen and his community. Amour propre was transformed in the process of forging this new relationship. Virtue came to be viewed increasingly in terms of “glory and public esteem in directly social endeavors,” and individuals strived for “the cultivation of personal qualities, so that communal virtue becomes the condition and occasion for personal virtue” (Horowitz 1987: 105). In sum, freedom and equality were realized only by individual citizens in the community, who cultivated virtue, on the one hand, and saw no distinction between the universality of their claims and the particularity of their social position, on the other. These early civilizations were exceedingly fragile and contained the seeds not only for their own destruction but also for their own transcendence. The possibilities for destruction included enlightenment (the capacity to think and speak for oneself), the further growth of individualism based on the distinction between public and private, increasing conflicts between the individual citizen and the state-based community, the expansion of commercial relations, the emergence of despotism, militarism, and defeat in war. The road taken for transcendence involved a further metamorphosis of amour propre, increased individuation, and alienation (Horowitz 1987: 102–7; Rousseau 1755/1973: 85–105; 1755/1992b). Civil society was Rousseau’s third stage of sociohistorical development. He viewed it as a vast system of needs, a form of society in which each man must now, therefore, have been perpetually employed in getting others to interest themselves in his lot, and in making them, apparently at least, if not really, find their advantage in promoting his own. Thus he must have been sly and artful in his behaviour to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a kind of necessity to ill-use all the persons of whom he stood in need, when he could not frighten them into compliance, and did not judge it his interest to be useful to them. Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. (Rousseau 1755/1973: 86–7)
Rousseau’s conceptualization of the “dynamic of civil society,” as Horowitz (1987: 109) noted, “compel[ed] all the actors to foster actively the proliferation of the needs of others.” This system of social relations constructed as exchange relations promoted a condition characterized by “universal disorder, competition, and exploitation” (Horowitz 1987: 116). The historically contingent tendencies that underwrote the development of civil society emerged from the increasing conflicts between the individual citizen and the state-based community and the consolidation of individualism. These were buttressed by the simultaneous liberation of property from the community and the assertion of exclusive property rights (rights of ownership, use, and disposal) by individuals, and by the formation of the state,
20 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist which claimed to guarantee the safety, freedom, and equality of property owners— “the constituent elements of their being” (Rousseau 1755/1973: 92). For Rousseau, money was one of the characteristic features of civil society. The use of money facilitated exchanges initially between property owners producing different goods and later between property owners and those who lacked property. Its use was increasingly universalized. Not only was money equated with work itself, it was also pursued for itself, because it had became a sign of accumulated wealth. In civil society, “money was the prime necessity, and thus the immediate object of labour; and . . . in consequence all labour incapable of earning money was necessarily neglected” (Rousseau 1765/1986: 309–10). This impoverished everyday life and underwrote both the erosion of the last vestiges of community as well as the growing objectification, alienation, and repression of its members. In civil society, amour propre had become Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” one individual’s quest for power gained at the expense of others. Rousseau’s focus in his historicized account of humanity was its rise in nature, its slow creation of nature as a category, and its subsequent sociohistorical development, which he viewed as the continuous, but always historically contingent, transformation of the individual in society and of the simultaneous, related transformation of society itself. From his perspective, the existence of human beings outside of society was simply unthinkable. The motors driving his account were agency and perfectibility. He was also aware of the significant differences that existed between primitive society and modern civil society. The savage and the civilized man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness for the one would reduce the other to despair. The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and be free from labour. . . . Civilized man, on the other hand, is always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations. . . . He pays court to men in power, whom he hates, and to the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at nothing to have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his own meanness and their protection; and, proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those, who have not the honour of sharing it. . . . [T]he source of all these differences is . . . [that the civilized or bourgeois] man only knows how to live in the opinion of others. (Rousseau 1755/1973: 104)
Moreover, Rousseau knew that the political life of the city-states of ancient Greece was no longer a model for politicians in modern society. In 1764, he wrote the following to the citizens of Geneva: The ancient peoples are no longer a model for the moderns; they are too foreign in every respect. You, especially, Genevans, stay in your place. . . . You are neither Romans nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians. Leave those great names alone; they do not
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 21 become you. You are merchants, artisans, bourgeois, always occupied with your private interests, your work, commerce, profits; you are people for whom freedom itself is only a means toward untrammeled acquisition and secure possession. (Rousseau, 1764/1962: 284, quoted by Löwy and Sayres 2001: 47)
While the presuppositions of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology were fundamentally different from those of the Scots as well as those of German commentators from the 1770s onward, his influence on them was nonetheless substantial.
The Scottish Historical Philosophers Through their travels, the Scots were acutely aware of what is now called uneven development. Their country was less prosperous than England, and there were significant differences within the country between the north and the south or between the Highlands and the Lowlands. In 1750, a day’s ride into the countryside from a commercial center like Glasgow with its shops and burgeoning factories must have seemed like a journey into a past era replete with clan chieftains, backwoods subsistence farmers, herders, and roving foragers on the margins, all of whom bartered the goods they owned. A sincerely felt moral concern among Scottish intellectuals, like Adam Smith (1723–90), was to determine how they could make a backward country prosper (Waszek 1988: 30–7). To accomplish this goal, they argued, it was necessary to have accurate empirical information derived from experiment and observation, comparison and analysis; they could then synthesize the information and use the results to formulate the natural laws of economic development (Forbes 1982). The methodology was Newton’s applied to human society rather than inanimate objects. To do so would be a virtuous act that would benefit the nation and meet with the approval of others; they knew the act was virtuous, because it involved sympathy (i.e., empathy), the capacity to put themselves imaginatively into the situation of others and to intuit what the others instinctively feel (Broackes 1995: 380). The concepts of spectatorship and sympathy played prominent roles in Smith’s (1759/1976) Theory of Moral Sentiments and guided the conjectural histories of society that Smith and his contemporaries wrote between 1757 and 1777. The Scots did not believe, as Hobbes and Locke had, that society was constituted by a rational act, a social contract among individuals, in order to protect life, liberty, and property. They argued instead that the formation of society could not be predicated on reason. In their view, emotion preceded reason and reflection, and awareness of the advantages of life in a community only emerged later. David Hume (1711–76) argued that the sociability of human beings was natural and rested on sexual impulse and desires that linked generations together and shaped their habits regarding the distribution of beneficial but scarce goods. For him, protecting property rights to goods was the main condition for society and preceded notions
22 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist of justice. Taking a slightly different tack, Smith argued that human sociability underpinned the development of morality, since individuals serve as mirrors for one another. The exchanges that occurred among individuals in the mirroring process were not only the means by which they gained the approval of others and satisfied their mutual needs, but they were also the way in which those individuals were constituted as individuals in the society. More importantly, they were the foundation of human sociability itself. Hume, Smith, and the other Scots had a common perspective on human nature that was intimately linked with their views on sociability. Despite the diversity of human actions, institutions, and customs—reflecting variously the influence of education, government, and environment as well as peculiarities of particular cultures and individuals—there were also stable characteristics, motives, and instincts that were shared by all human beings. That is, human beings have in common certain predispositions, such as “the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition” or “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” that distinguish them from other species (Smith 1776/1976: 17). These dispositions were fixed characteristics of the species that were invariant from one society to another or from one individual to the next; this view, of course, contrasted markedly with Rousseau’s. Besides their views about natural sociability of human beings, property, scarcity, exchange, and the immutability of human nature, the Scots also believed in progress, the idea that society was developing in a desirable direction. Smith and the others saw progressive development in areas of society as diverse as language, astronomy, jurisprudence, government, and, most importantly, the mode of subsistence. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–3/1982), Smith argued that the progress of society was a natural, law-driven process tied both to the natural dispositions shared by all human beings—e.g. to better their own circumstances—and to the increasing division of labor, which was associated with population growth and changes in their modes of subsistence. From his perspective, the first societies were composed of small numbers of individuals who provisioned themselves by hunting and foraging. As their numbers increased, they domesticated animals and became pastoralists. When their numbers increased even further, those in favorable environments domesticated plants and turned to agriculture. This was followed by a significant advance in the division of labor, as artisans—carpenters, weavers, tailors, and the like—ceased to produce their own food and settled instead in towns to pursue their crafts and to barter or exchange the goods they produced with other members of the community and then with the inhabitants of other nations. The Scots also recognized that the culture and values of a societies were linked to their modes of subsistence; hence, foraging societies were different from those whose economies were based on commerce and manufacturing. However, the sequence in which the different forms of society appeared followed from the nature of property, or as Smith (1776/1976: 405) put it, “according to the natural course of things.”
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 23 The materialist, conjectural histories of society constructed by Smith and his associates in Glasgow and Edinburgh with their emphasis on the natural development of the economy were merely part of a more general system of morality rooted in a discussion of imagination and sympathy. They described, and promoted, the development of commercial society in accordance with natural laws and the natural propensities that were shared by all human beings. They realized that manifestations of these natural laws and propensities varied from one time to another, even as basic human nature itself remained constant. They interpreted the variation as a series of gradations that reflected not only continuous and uninterrupted historical change but also the unfolding of some potential or force that was inherent in society itself. While they historicized society, the Scots separated the study of history from the study of social dynamics; however, theirs were not the only attempts to historicize discussions of human nature and society in the mid eighteenth century. Rousseau and the Scots were concerned with the development of a new kind of society—commercialized and later industrialized—that came to be called “civil society.” Their questions were: What was it? And, how did it develop? While the Scots advocated, with some uneasiness, the growth of civil society as a means to increase the wealth of nations, Rousseau was openly critical of the effects of modern civil society on individuals, their outlooks on life, and the social relations that structured their interactions. The views of Rousseau and the Scots on the trajectory of human historical development, as well as their philosophical anthropologies, also differed significantly. While Rousseau blurred the distinction we now make between the human and the natural realms, the Scots highlighted their differences. For Rousseau, the motors driving human history were the interplay of free agency, perfectibility, and the transformation of the external world in contexts shaped by contingent rather than necessary forms of social relations. For Smith and the Scots, human history reflected the gradual, progressive development, in accordance with natural law, of propensities that were common to all human beings, even though they manifested themselves variously in societies with different modes of subsistence. The problems addressed by Rousseau, Smith, and the others, as well as their philosophical anthropologies, both influenced and provoked successive generations of writers from the late eighteenth century onward. Kant, Herder, Hegel, Jefferson, Marx, and others wrestled with their views about humanity and how the world in which they lived came to be the way it was.
The Institutionalization of Anthropology In the late eighteenth century the lines between disciplines were not as sharply drawn as they would become, nor were they even drawn in the same places as they are today. Instead, it was a time when a physiologist–comparative anatomist (Blumenbach) wrote about epistemology; when a naturalist (Buffon) discussed
24 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist mathematics; when a philosopher (Kant) lectured on anthropology, astronomy, history, and laid the foundations for the modern concept of biological species; when a poet, novelist, and statesman (Goethe) discovered the intermaxillary bone of the human skull, collected botanical samples, and drew pictures of Roman ruins; and when a political revolutionary (Jefferson) conducted archaeological excavations in Virginia and collected vocabulary lists of American Indian languages. What united them were curiosity about the world and their quest for enlightenment, for understanding that world without necessarily having to rely solely or exclusively on the authority of others. What inspired them, among other things, were authors like Montesquieu, Buffon, Rousseau, and the Scots, whose writings provoked critical thought and practice. The influence of Rousseau and others was already evident in the German principalities by the late 1750s. This was a time of massive foreign influence in Central Europe. East Prussia had been incorporated into the Russian Empire during the Seven Years War (1756–63), and the president of the Berlin Academy, French naturalist Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, actively sought to bring the issues of Enlightenment debate to the “center of German cultural discourse” by offering annual prize competitions on subjects selected by the Academy (Zammito 2002: 59). This was part of the cultural and political agenda of King Frederick II, who himself was a longtime friend of Voltaire. Another aspect of Frederick’s agenda was to reform the universities and remodel them after the curriculum at the University of Göttingen. A third aspect of Frederick’s plan was to undermine and displace academic philosophy, which he viewed as pedantic and out of touch with the real world. The king was supported in his effort to bring the ideas of the French and Scottish Enlightenments to the public, especially by that newly emerging layer of society, the “bourgeois intelligentsia,” whose members were concerned with education not only as a source of social mobility but more importantly as a sign of social identity (Zammito 2001, 2002: 16–35). Testimonials perhaps to the impact of these intellectual exchanges were Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1803) claims that “Hume awoke him [i.e., Kant] from his dogmatic slumbers” and that “Rousseau set him straight.” It was in this context that Kant and his student, Johann Gottlieb von Herder (1744–1803), began to grapple with Rousseau’s writings at the University of Königsberg in 1762, that Kant launched his annual course in anthropology in 1772, and that anthropology was institutionalized at Göttingen in the 1770s.
Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology Kant’s early writings were concerned mainly with the natural sciences. Two additional themes appeared in his writings in the early 1760s. The first was an extended critique of Cartesian rationalism and the application of mathematical methods to metaphysical questions; his Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 25 Theology and Ethics (1762), which was runner-up for the Berlin Academy’s prize, shifted the study of human nature from metaphysics toward the natural world. It also gained him public recognition. The second theme dealt with human equality and education. By the time that Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) appeared, Kant was already working his way through Rousseau’s comments about human nature, culture, enlightenment, inequality, and the trajectory of history; at the same time, he was also forging his own critique of academic philosophy in the German states (Beiser 1992a). Terms like “freedom” and “equality” slowly crept into his writings. The alternative he proposed in the mid 1760s was a practical philosophy, which would not only study “natural phenomena that hinder or contribute to the development of morality in human life,” but also be useful by helping us distinguish natural from artificial feelings by stressing what human beings share (Louden 2000: 18). The natural phenomena he had in mind included the diverse experiences of natural and civilized man, categories clearly derived from Rousseau, that resulted from differences in sex, age, culture, education, and environment (Zammito 2002: 108–9). In a course description for the 1765–6 academic year, he wrote: [It] considers man, throughout the world, from the point of view of the variety of his natural properties and the differences in that feature of man which is moral in character. Unless these matters are considered, general judgements about man would scarcely be possible. The comparison of human beings with each other, and the comparison of man today with the moral state of man in earlier times, furnishes us with a comprehensive map of the human species. Finally, there will be a consideration of . . . the condition of the states and nations throughout the world. (Kant 1765/1992: 289; emphasis in original)
This was one of the building blocks for the anthropology course that Kant taught each winter semester from 1772 to 1796 and for his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant 1798/1978; Louden 2000: 62–4; Stark 2003; Zammito 2002: 221–307); it was apparently paired with an ethics course that he also taught during that period. While the content of the anthropology course varied somewhat from year to year, he typically dealt with human beings as sensuous things of nature endowed with natural talents and temperaments in one part and, in another, considered them as ethical beings who acted from principles and reason instead impulse or inclination in social contexts molded by diverse factors. Thus, he distinguished the physical character of human beings from their moral character. The former was what nature made of human beings; the latter was an individual achievement formed through education, moral discourse, reflection, and the ability to think for oneself (Louden 2000: 76–85). For Kant, the formation of moral character was the more fundamental question, judging by his remark that the proper materials of anthropology were “to be found neither in metaphysics nor in a museum of natural history in which the skeleton of the human being can be compared with that of other animals . . . [but]
26 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist rather these materials can be found only in human actions, in which the human character is revealed” (Kant 1785/1991: 211–12; emphasis in original). For Kant, there was a linkage between the emotional temperaments and physical states of the human species. He posited psychological differences between men and women and argued that these were rooted in nature. In his view, women played the central role in the formation of moral character, because, besides ensuring the preservation of the species, they were a moralizing force in society that influenced men, legislated customs, and established how social intercourse should be structured. It was the natural duty of women to provide individuals with the skills and discipline required to become rational and ethical human beings.10 Skill and discipline collectively constituted culture. Skills allowed individuals to use the products of nature; discipline allowed them to free themselves from the dominance of natural needs and desires. While the process of enculturation was apparently asocial in Kant’s mind, culture could only unfold and progress in the context of social relations and could begin to achieve its full potential in a civil society (civilization), which was composed of free individuals whose actions were constrained by the lawful authority of the whole. The moralization of civilization represented another, higher stage of historical development as yet unachieved (Louden 2000: 79–87, 143–4). The concepts of races and peoples also played roles in Kant’s philosophical anthropology. His concept of race, which built on Buffon’s work, was simultaneously historical, naturalistic, and teleological. Kant viewed race exclusively as skin color; it was hereditary, and involved the transmission of a latent set of natural predispositions manifest in all human beings that were activated differentially as human beings moved into different environmental settings.11 These predispositions helped the human species achieve its “collective destiny” (Louden 2000: 97). By a people, he meant the inhabitants of a region who viewed themselves as a civic whole because of their common descent, customs, and language (Kant 1798/1978: 225). For Kant, the two were not the same. Races reflected the effects of environment, whereas peoples reflected culture and history. From his perspective, some peoples were racially mixed, and races often included numerous peoples. Moreover, some peoples, mostly Europeans, had developed their natural predispositions, while others, mostly non-European, had yet to do so, because they lacked culture and civilization, which, of course, could only emerge in civil society. In sum, Kant historicized the development of the human species and human society. Like the Scots, he believed in progress; however, he saw it as moral progress, rather than economic progress. It was achieved through legal and political means and the “unsociable sociability” of individuals who simultaneously entered into social relations and fought with one another (Louden 2000: 146–53). Kant (1784/1986), 1785/1991, 1786/1991) began to develop his theory of history in the mid 1780s, building on Rousseau and on the liberal political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and the Scots; his essays were also responses to Herder’s Reflections
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 27 on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784/1968). Kant understood history teleologically, as motion toward a goal. This movement was characteristic not only of the natural world viewed as lifeless matter in motion but also of humanity. In the former, the laws of nature were the motor driving change. In the latter, the underlying force was the increasing perfectibility of the natural capacity of human beings to reason. “Restless reason” induced by the constant tendency of human beings to move toward and away from one another was the initial impetus for movement away from animality (Galston 1975: 236). The threat of a war of all against all not only drove human beings into civil society with coercive laws but also promoted education, freedom, and commerce. Implicit in Kant’s notion of the perfectibility of reason were the ideas that someday, with freedom, there would be universal agreement and, hence, the “end of history”—ideas whose actualization he thought were a long way off. What he did sketch, however, was the kind of empirical information that the study of history would reveal and that could inform the enlightened peoples of his day: the advances of each civilization, the evils that led to their destruction, and the mechanisms of enlightenment that remained. As William Galston (1975: 265) noted, “morality participates in the universality of Reason, but Reason progresses. The content of morality is therefore everchanging. Moreover, this change corresponds to the actuality of history, for the universality of Reason manifests itself in concrete human affairs.” As you will recall, Kant distinguished between pure reason, which was independent of experience, and practical reason, which used empirical data in relation to particular bodies of experience. In light of this distinction, Robert Louden (2000) described Kant’s pragmatic anthropology as the study of the “impure ethics” that result when purely “rational beings” become “human beings” embedded in society.
Herder’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology In 1765, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Kant’s student at Königsberg only two years earlier, also began to write about the question of how philosophy could be made more universal and useful. Herder’s (1765/2002) essay, “How Can Philosophy Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People,” dealt with a theme that concerned his teacher as well. Kant’s inspiration was apparent both in the question itself and in how the essay was conceptualized; Herder also acknowledged the influence of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Scots. Nevertheless, he set forth an agenda whose developmental trajectory would increasingly diverge from the one pursued by his mentor. He argued that “if philosophy is to become useful for human beings, then let it make the human being its center;” later in the same essay, he suggested the “restriction of philosophy to anthropology” (Herder 1765/2002: 21, 27). Herder was critical of the views of Hume and Voltaire who saw humankind as pretty much the same in all times and places and who asserted that history has not
28 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist provided us with any new insights. What Herder proposed instead was to allow history and philosophy to interact and mutually enliven each other in order to learn “about the spirit of the changes in various ages” (1766/2002: 255; emphasis in original). In 1769, he stated this cultural relativism somewhat differently: “Human nature under diverse climates [i.e., the total physical, organic, and humanly constituted, cultural milieus] is never wholly the same” (quoted by Barnard 1969: 382). From his perspective, human nature was both malleable and variable. Moreover, each age and people had its own distinctive customs, ways of life, manners of thought, tastes, and forms of government; these changed; and what was considered true and useful for one might be false and useless for another. Moreover, there was less pronounced diversity among the individuals of the same age or people (culture). Herder would elaborate these themes for the rest of his life. For our purposes, three of Herder’s works are important. The first is his essay “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” which won the Berlin Academy prize in 1771 and established him as a major intellectual force (Herder 1772/2002). The second is “This Too a Philosophy of the History for the Formation of Humanity” which appeared in 1774 (Herder 1774/2002). The third is Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, the first volume of which appeared in 1784 (Herder 1784/1968). In them, Herder laid the foundations for a philosophical anthropology concerned with language, culture, history, and their interconnections. Herder used the word “culture” in both the singular and the plural. Briefly, the former referred to the patterns of language, thought, and behavior that were characteristic of a particular community in time and space; the latter acknowledged the diversity that existed between communities that were separated from one another in time and space. For Herder, culture was an integrated whole a composite or complex configuration which, by virtue of its inherent relational characteristics, is something more than a mere sum total or aggregate. In an aggregate the parts are separate and unrelated, and their number can be increased or reduced without having this affect the nature of the total but merely the size. A whole, on the other hand, is something more than the sum of its constituent parts. The “more” is not contained in the parts considered in isolation, but rather arises from their inter-relation and the varying degree of their integration. Herder contrasted the holism characterizing culture with the atomism characterizing an aggregate, by comparing the former to an organism. In doing so, he wished to focus on two crucial qualities: functional inter-relatedness and self-generated activity. (Barnard 1969: 385)
Herder viewed the culture of a community as a complex of interacting organisms. There were two reasons for this perspective. First, he believed that the different parts or segments of culture might develop at different rates, which could disturb its internal cohesion and lead to conflicts and contradictions within the whole. Thus, the cultural whole was not necessarily in “a state of blissful harmony” but rather was
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 29 “a field of tension” (Barnard 1969: 385–6). Second, the diversity existing within the social and political culture of a community also had the capacity to produce the kinds of tensions that were characteristic of the human condition. This diversity and the tensions it produced were consequences of the fact that Herder viewed politics as human activity rather than a set of practices and institutions that were associated exclusively with the state. Thus, the coherence of a culture was contingent and dependent, at any given moment, on the relations that existed among the reciprocally interacting processes that constituted the whole and on the intrinsic capacity of the whole to forge new features and integrate them into the fabric of everyday life. This provided a synchronic view of culture, which was situational and functional; however, it was clear to Herder that a historical, or diachronic, analysis was also needed in order to describe content or the purpose of particular cultural segments. Herder’s notion of history, which involved both persistence and change, was an interactive, dialectical one that involved the interplay of two processes: Bildung and tradition. Bildung was a non-repetitive process that entailed the assimilation, evaluation, and addition of new materials to the distinctive heritage of the community. Tradition was an ongoing, intergenerational process that entailed sifting through the stock of institutionalized beliefs and so forth in order to update them and to resolve the tensions and contradictions created by Bildung. Herder was less concerned with the antecedents of particular cultural segments or configurations than he was with their significance once they had been integrated into the heritage of the community (Barnard 1969: 389–90). He thought of historical development as motion in which what was already latent in a culture was actualized or made manifest; in other words, there was teleology in history. Herder’s views about teleology derived inspiration from both Spinoza and Leibniz. For Herder, a shared or common language was the cement that held together the members of a community. To paraphrase Barnard (1965: 57), there was a relationship, an interaction, among the language shared by the members of a community and the habits of thought and modes of life of its members. It was the means by which they became conscious of themselves as individuals and of their social relations with other individuals both inside and outside of the community. Language not only linked them to the past by revealing the thoughts and sentiments of past generations, it also allowed them to enrich and perpetuate those views for future generations through the processes of Bildung and tradition. In his essay on the origins of language, Herder, in contrast to Rousseau, saw language as a uniquely human attribute that separated human beings from animals. In his view, human beings were fundamentally different from animals; they were not simply animals with reason added, but beings whose energies had developed in an entirely different direction. Language, in his view, marked the possession of a reflective mind. At the time Herder was formulating his philosophical anthropology, the idea of race was being discussed increasingly by Enlightenment writers. Kant, for example, incorporated it into the core of his anthropological thought. Herder, however, did not
30 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist find any utility in the concept. In 1784, he described his thoughts and reservations about its use in the following way: Lastly, I could wish the distinction between the human species, that have been made from a laudable zeal for discriminating sciences, not be carried beyond due bounds. Some for instance [i.e., Kant] have thought fit, to employ the term races for four or five divisions, originally made in consequence of country or complexion; but I see no reason for this appellation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does not exist, or in each of these countries, and under each of these complexions, comprise the most different races. For every nation is one people, having its own national form, as well as its own language: the climate it is true, stamps on each its mark, or spreads over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the original national character. This originality of character extends even to families, and its transitions are as variable as imperceptible. In short, there are neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties, on this Earth, Complexions run into each other: forms follow the genetic character: and upon the whole, all are at last but shades of the same great picture, extending through all ages, and over all parts of the earth. They belong not, therefore, to proper systematic natural history, as to the physico-geographical [i.e., anthropological] history of man. (Herder 1784/1968: 7)
Herder’s historical-dialectical and critical anthropology built on Rousseau’s and consequently resembled it in important ways. Both, for example, distinguished culture from civilization—Herder explicitly and Rousseau more tentatively. For both, civilization was something mechanical that was associated with the state, and the civilizing process was one that muted or erased altogether people’s knowledge and experience of everyday life. Culture, in Herder’s view, was organic, and he situated it in activities and reflective thought of people who shared a language and resided in relatively unstratified communities. Culture emerged not from activities of intellectuals and officials supported by the state but rather from the creativity and spontaneity of people dealing with everyday issues in the worlds in which they lived. Herder was by no means an anarchist who advocated the end of the state. He argued instead that the state should take responsibility for the humanization of its subjects, for ensuring that they enjoyed a certain level of welfare, and for providing education so that they might achieve their full potential, and he was openly critical of those that did not. Herder agreed with the Scots who also argued that history was an unconscious process rather than a consequence of great leaders or the result of “restless reason” as Kant would have it. What bothered Herder about the arguments of many of his contemporaries was their ethnocentrism, their claims that the commercial society emerging in Europe represented the highest stage of sociohistorical development, and their concomitant obfuscation of the cultural diversity that existed among communities in different regions, whose members had the same mode of subsistence.
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 31
Göttingen: Beyond “Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers” The title of Ernst Platner’s (1744–1818) book, New Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers: With Special Consideration to Physiology, Pathology, Moral Philosophy, and Aesthetics, published in 1772, marked the acceptance of new ideas about the linkages between the human and natural realms that were proposed earlier in the century. Unlike Descartes who viewed mind and body as independent substances—the former concerned with the principles of thought or consciousness and the latter possessing bulk and physical properties—Platner emphasized the mutual interdependence of mind and body and the natural forces involved in the process (Allert 1991; Košenina 1989; Zammito 2002: 237–53). The title also signaled the end of an era, for it gave no indication that new ideas about the significance of historical understanding, of organized systems as opposed to aggregates of individuals, of change through time, of the contexts in which things occurred, and of cultural and physical diversity were already crystallizing and becoming conjoined with one another, or that anthropology would be infused with these new perspectives by the end of the century. Montesquieu had linked the historical development of human society with nature (i.e., the environments in which different peoples lived). Buffon, Rousseau, and the Scots, in different ways, made human history part of nature: Buffon by looking primarily at the human species as a biological organism; Rousseau by seeing people, in the process of emerging from nature, as making their own history and transforming both themselves and the natural world through ongoing, reciprocal interactions with that world; the Scots by considering the historical development of humanity as the consequence of natural laws that were analogous to those of Newtonian physics. Their contemporaries and successors embroidered the fabric they had woven. The new historical understanding involved explanations of both the individual and individuality as well as of the development of society (Reill 1998). While Hume strove to develop a “science of human nature” that was applicable in all circumstances, Herder and others recognized the diversity of human societies and argued that the nature of individuals was shaped by the sociocultural and natural milieus of which they were a part. In a phrase, human nature was the result of socialization under historically specific and contingent social relations and circumstances, and it was imperative to take account of and to explain the diversity of both present and past societies. As Herder and others—like Johann Winckelmann (1717–68)—noted, there was uneven culture-historical development, and each era, each society had its own unique configuration of elements that underwrote its distinctive “spirit” or appearance. By the 1780s, Herder, Kant, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) were noting that sociohistorical and cultural development as well as the development of the human species itself was genetic in the sense that they involved both mechanical and teleological processes, and that the latter could not be reduced to the former.12 Their “fascinat[ion] about the idea of genetic
32 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist development was that it assumed the dual existence of individuality and regular order, without collapsing one upon the other” (Reill 1998: 119). It also required a new form of explanation, one that relied on narrative rather than reference to some universally applicable law. History was no longer the chronicles of kings, lists of dates, or the highways traversed by generals and armies but rather the byways where everyday folk wandered silently. An increasingly prevalent idea in the late eighteenth century was the notion that both the natural and human realms were constituted by more than mere aggregates of individual parts. Instead, they were organized wholes that resembled an organism. Unlike aggregates, the distinctive features of such totalities were more than the sum of their parts and were constituted by the organization of those parts. Writers began to think of nature and human society, both synchronically and diachronically, as internally differentiated structures that not only developed through time but also metamorphosed in the process. Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), for example, viewed “nature as a dynamically shifting balance of forces,” while other Romantic writers were fascinated with the diversity manifested in tropical rainforests or the tangled banks beside English streams (Richards 2002: 295–306). The comparisons, analogies, and metaphors employed by Herder and others underwrote and supported new ways of conceptualizing organization, growth or change over time, and diversity at various levels: the natural world, human society, and the individual human being. More importantly, they allowed commentators to articulate issues related to human organization, change, and diversity to their own experiences and to the sociocultural milieus in which they lived and worked. The University of Göttingen was a focal point for the convergence of these ideas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. Beiser 1992b; Denby 2005; Fink 1993; Flavell 1979, Leventhal 1986; Stagl 1995; Vermeulen 1992, 1995). Here, individuals with diverse interests rubbed shoulders with one another on virtually a daily basis. For example, classical philologist and archaeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) was Blumenbach’s teacher, Herder’s close friend, and a colleague of August Schlözer (1735–1809) who wrote extensively about the history, linguistics, and ethnology of peoples on the margins of Europe and used statistics to develop the comparative study of states. Moreover, the philological seminar that Heyne taught for many years had shaping effects on the curricula of other universities, like Harvard and the Andover Theological Seminary in the United States. One of Heyne’s students in the seminar was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767– 1835), who is hailed as a founder of comparative philology and as the educational reformer who modeled the curriculum of the newly opened University of Berlin after that of Göttingen. Marx, as you recall, was exposed to that curriculum and to Humboldt’s plan for a historically informed, comparative anthropology when he attended the university in the late 1830s (Bunzl 1996; Leroux 1958). Through the courses he took, Marx was also exposed to the critical-historical anthropology of Georg F. W. Hegel, who was the most prominent philosopher and social theorist on the continent until his death in 1831.
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 33
Hegel’s Critical-Historical Anthropology Georg F. W. Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophical anthropology sought to account for the actual (concrete) conditions of human existence and to explain how that social reality had been transformed by the collective (social) activity of human beings. From the late 1790s onward, he wrote with the ideas of Kant, Herder, Rousseau, and the Scots as almost continual points of reference. While he addressed themes that they had already discussed, he was at the same time critical of some of the conclusions they had drawn. For example, like Kant, Hegel believed that philosophy should be critical as well as systematic (scientific), that the social problems of the day were ultimately ethical or moral, and that social change was the product of human activity; however, unlike Kant, he viewed change from the standpoint of the community rather than the individual. From Herder, he gained an appreciation of the importance of historical understanding and the significance of varied cultural configurations of different historical epochs and civilizations; he also developed concepts of history and the primacy of collective social activity that were inchoate in Herder’s writings. Like Rousseau and Herder, he viewed history in terms of uneven development and the resolution of conflicts and contradictions. Hegel agreed with Herder and the Scots, notably Adam Ferguson, that the members of a society were bound together by shared cultural practices and beliefs as well as by the political institutions under which these habits manifested themselves. Like Rousseau and the Scots, Hegel was deeply concerned with the development of both modern civil society and the state as well as with the kinds of transformations they wrought on human beings. As a result, Hegel’s philosophical anthropology shared important features with those of his predecessors and diverged in significant ways from them (Lukács 1966/1976; Rockmore 1992/1993). His empirical anthropology was rooted in his concern with history and with the formation of civil society (e.g. Berry 1982; Dickey and Nisbet 1999; Knox and Pelczynski 1964; Waszek 1988). History, in Hegel’s (1822–30/1975: 11–151) view, simultaneously involved the interconnected development of the individual and the community in relation to the realization of a goal—the actualization of the human mind in all its potential and free subjectivity (Geist) in both. Thus, history was teleological; there was “a rationally discernible development in history, a development, which, once comprehended, would change the attitude of people toward their social environment” (Plant 1983: 57; emphasis in original). The clearest embodiment of this goal, which was inchoate in earlier stages of human history, was manifested most clearly in the latest historical stage—modern civil society—which was ushered in by the French Revolution. What emerged in the wake of the revolution was an era in which the institutions and practices of the old regime, which limited freedom and the capacity of reason, had been dismantled and replaced by rampant individualism. This was the first time, according to Hegel, that human beings had the freedom to actualize themselves as rational, moral individuals; moreover, through their individuality, they could also
34 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist actualize themselves as social members of a community. In this particular form of society, they could step back from their social roles in the community and conceive of themselves as autonomous, self-determining individuals who possessed rights as well as interests, ideas, and the capacity to make moral judgments that were distinct from those of other individuals in the community. They realized themselves as individuals in their social roles in the family, the market, and civil society and in their roles as citizens of a political state. States, in Hegel’s view, had evolved, embodying the positive values of earlier states, to ensure the actualization of the individuals and to promote the good of the community as opposed to the particular interests of its members (Hegel 1817–30/1978; 1821/1967). For Hegel, human beings were social beings. They satisfied biological, social, and cultural needs in society and actualized their distinctly human capacities— thought, language, and reason—by virtue of their membership in historically specific communities (Hardimon 1994: 153–6). Most importantly, they developed their minds, intellect, and subjective spirit in the context of the social institutions, practices, and roles—the cultural configurations—that shaped everyday life in those communities and formed the backdrop to the processes of socialization and education that took place in them. They not only determined how biologically given drives and desires were satisfied but also how individuals expressed and developed their interests, talents, and skills. Another way of saying this is that the physical, psychic, cultural, and social dimensions of human beings interpenetrated and articulated with one another, and that how the whole individual was actualized varied in important ways from one historical stage to the next and even within the same historical-cultural people. Hegel saw history as the progressive unfolding of reason and consciousness and the development of Spirit. As Robert D’Amico has noted, Hegel’s theory of history is based on self-production [in which] Spirit (Geist) manifests itself . . . in objectifications, externalizations, and alienations that represent forms of consciousness. Spirit comes to understand itself through the history of these objectifications. Spirit is ultimately the reason inherent in history as a teleological process. Hegel calls objectification a power of negativity because the objectifications of Spirit transform and therefore negate what is given in reality [i.e., external nature]. Human labor is just such a manifestation of the power of Spirit. Labor modifies its world and thereby allows man to know it and free itself from the bonds of natural necessity. . . . Hegel stresses two aspects of the role of labor as objectification. First, labor is defined as that which mediates the world. By the term mediation Hegel means that the human world becomes transformed (mediated by activity and purpose and therefore is no longer a world of natural objects. Culture or Spirit is precisely the objectification of this teleology or mediation. Second, practical activity, by giving meaning to its world, creates a “second nature” which conditions humanity. Since what is conditioning humanity is the externalization of its own purposive activity, it is conditioned by its own product and
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 35 not by an external, natural object. . . . For example, law and morality condition and form human beings through a process of cultivation (Bildungsweise) or civilizing influence. (1981: 5–6)
As Hegel put it, “After the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the scene as the antithesis of nature; he is the being who raises himself up into a second world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces, that of nature and that of the spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself” (1822–30/1975: 44; cf. 1837/1956: 52–3, 241–2). Thus, for Hegel, objectification is characterized exclusively by consciousness, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the kinds of determination that occur in the natural world. History began with the rise of states and ended with the present. While Hegel acknowledged the existence of pre-state societies in the prehistoric period that had achieved “a significant development in certain directions” or even experienced “complications, wars, revolutions, declines,” these did not give rise to history (Hegel 1822–30/1975: 134–7). History progressed unevenly through fits and starts as the people of a historical era succeeded in resolving the contradictions of their time. For example, Hegel argued that neither Abraham nor Jesus was able to reconcile his vision of the independence and freedom of the individual with those of the wider communities of which they were members; consequently, they felt a sense of profound estrangement from those societies. The male citizens of the Greek city-states were able to overcome this kind of estrangement even though they did not see themselves as independent individuals in the modern sense—i.e., as distinct from the customs of the city-state or as participants in the market exchange relations that characterized modern civil society. The separation of the individual from the community only occurred during the Protestant Reformation (Plant 1983: 55–75). History was important, because it explained the present and ended in the present. It accounted for the cultural configuration of modern civil society as well as the modern state. In civil society, individuals satisfied their needs by pursing their private interests in the market, where the purchase and sale of goods and services made them interdependent and connected them in an increasingly dense web of social relations. The modern state not only reaffirmed the unity of the nation, which was weakened as individuals pursued their own goals, but also provided the system of ethical life and social substance that would allow them to reconcile and overcome the conflicts and contradictions of civil society and thereby ensure that they could achieve their humanity (Rose 1981). For Hegel, “the rational end of man is life in the state” (1817–30/1978: 242). Hegel was not the only theorist to comment on civil society and the state during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His contemporary, Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825) made a slightly different argument about their connection. SaintSimon was concerned with the appearance of industrial society, which, in his view, marked the both the internationalization of society and the end of the nation state.
36 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist While industrial society was built around the institutions of civil society, a point with which Hegel would have agreed, Saint-Simon viewed the state as opposed to the development of civil society because of the domination of society by incapable bureaucrats who were out of touch with the times. Unlike the Scots and Hegel who viewed the present as the end of history, Saint-Simon had a vision of what society could become in the future. Saint-Simon died in 1825, Hegel six years later in 1831, when the young Karl Marx had barely entered his teens. In the 1830s, Marx would absorb the ideas of both writers as well as those of Montesquieu and Rousseau among others. He would also absorb the importance of enlightenment, critical thought, and the difference between faith and reason. In this chapter, we have viewed the Enlightenment as an ongoing conversation among individuals who held distinct, theoretically informed views about the world, about human beings, and about their place in that world. The conversation was often acrimonious, and it was always threatening to those whose privileged positions in society rested on the maintenance of tradition and the active repression of critical inquiry. At times, the conversation was public as when the Scots, Kant, Herder, and Hegel responded in different ways to Rousseau and to one another. At other times, it was more private—an exchange of words between friends (Spinoza) or a university lecture published only posthumously (Hegel). The conversation was fueled by the conquest of nature, exploration, commerce, colonization, and later industrialization, which provided the grist for the development of an empirical anthropology that increasingly took cognizance of the history and diversity of human beings as well as the world in which they lived. This realization paved the way for the development of new philosophical anthropologies that were distinguished from one another by the (ontological) beliefs that their advocates held about the nature of human beings, their relations with one another, and their place in the world. In one sense, the Enlightenment provided a set of questions that the proponents of different philosophical anthropologies felt they needed to address. In another sense, the conversation that ensued can be viewed as a work in progress. Let us dwell for a moment on some of the issues and lessons that Marx’s predecessors raised for him. First, nature, human beings, and human society had been historicized and their diversity acknowledged. After Rousseau, it was no longer possible to argue effectively that individual human beings living in a state of nature entered into a social contract with the sovereign (Hobbes) or with one another (Locke) thereby creating society in the process; moreover, it was becoming increasingly difficult to argue that human beings were ontologically prior to human society. Second, while many of Marx’s predecessors believed in progress (Smith) or the dialectical unfolding of history (Hegel), others did not. For some of them, human nature was fixed and immutable and progress was a consequence of the passage of time; for others, however, human nature was culturally determined (Herder and Hegel) and progress, if it occurred at all, resulted from the resolution of contradictions. Third, Marx’s predecessors were collectively concerned with the
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 37 inequalities and individualism that were characteristic of the commercial-industrial societies that shaped their everyday lives (Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Saint-Simon). These civilizations, to use a term coined in response to Rousseau, were described as mechanical, associated with the state, and limited or muted the knowledge acquired in the course of everyday life in the community (Herder). Fourth, from the time of Rousseau onward, it was increasingly difficult to maintain that the profound individualism and kinds of unequal social relations developing in modern civil society were characteristic of all societies. Fifth, there also was a growing clamor about the meaning of freedom and the autonomous individual in the context of the class structure of modern civil society and the state (Hegel). Marx certainly learned from their writings and carried many of their arguments into his own work. In the chapters that follow, we will consider what he retained of their views and where he broke with them.
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–2– Marx’s Anthropology Marx was a child of the Enlightenment. As a teenager in Trier during the early 1830s, he discussed various writers with his father, his future father-in-law, and the director of the local high school that he attended (McLellan 1973: 1–16; Seigel 1978: 28–64). The writers ranged from Homer and Shakespeare, on the one hand, to Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, and Saint-Simon, on the other. The discussions had a significant impact on the young man; for example, when he was seventeen and still a student in Trier, Marx (1835/1975) wrote an essay on choosing a vocation which contained arguments that paralleled those of Rousseau’s Émile, which had been published in 1762 (Hillmann 1966: 33–48). Marx was also a bookworm. He read classical, Enlightenment, and contemporary writers with considerable care (e.g. McLellan 1973: 15, 22, 113, 267, 418). The excerpts he copied from Aeschylus, Goethe, Winckelmann, and others and his commentaries on those passages would come to fill fifty notebooks—more than 30,000 pages—by the time he died (Prawer 1978: 348). From early onward, he quoted long passages from favorite authors like Shakespeare and Homer and easily found quotations in the works of Aristotle and other writers of classical antiquity. In fact, he made the first German translation of Aristotle’s De Anima and apparently intended to publish it (Meikle 1985: 58). His library would eventually include nearly a hundred volumes by Greek and Roman writers, many in the original language, as well as commentaries on those works by later authors (DeGolyer 1992: 115; Kaiser 1967). Marx owed an intellectual debt to Enlightenment writers: the importance of reason, the centrality of the problem of freedom, the denial of knowledge claims based on authority, the historicity of things including forms of society, and the separation of the real world from representations of that world, to name only a few. However, their influence, as Nigel Davidson (2005: 8–9) perceptively remarked, did not come exclusively from books. There are two obvious reasons for this. First, Marx, who was born in 1818, was raised in the Prussian Rhineland, which was occupied by the French from 1794 to 1814; it was the region in Europe “where the influence of the French Revolution was most directly experienced. . . . For Marx, therefore, the French Revolution was not simply absorbed from the works of French liberals, it was also a historical experience only recently past, whose effects and unfulfilled promises still defined the politics of the time” (Davidson 2005:
39
40 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist 8–9). Second, revolutions elsewhere formed an almost continuous backdrop to his childhood and adolescence: Naples (1820), Spain (1820), Greece (1821), Spanish America (1808–22), and, a decade later, the Irish Rebellion (1829), Holland (1830), and Poland (1830–1). The July Revolution in France (1830), the English Reform Act (1832), and Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829–37) enabled mass politics and extended voting rights (Hobsbawm 1962: 138–40). The debate about revolution was not an abstract one. “There was going to be some sort of revolution—everybody but the dullest Prussian bureaucrat knew that—but what kind of revolution?” (Davidson 2005: 9). Marx’s participation in this debate as well as in the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth century was continuous from his days as a student at the University of Berlin in the late 1830s. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 and 1870 forced him to further hone and refine his analyses and understanding of the world. This process of continual critique and re-examination persisted until his death in 1883. This is the milieu in which Marx honed his philosophical anthropology—his answers to the questions: Who or what are human beings, and what has made them human? Some writers (e.g. Gould 1978; Henry 1976/1983: 12; Schaff 1965/1970: 50) have argued that the central categories of answers to these questions are the social individual, praxis, and history. With respect to these categories, Marx insisted that human beings are “a part of nature” and that they “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical [i.e., bodily or corporeal] organisation” (Marx 1844/1975a: 276; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31; emphasis in original). These productive activities or practices always occur in the context of associated individuals living in specific “ensembles of social relations” that have varied in space and time (Marx 1845/1976: 4). Simply put, human beings are born into communities and formed as social individuals through the intersubjectivity (the shared meanings and activities) of the persons who participate in those sets of relations. Praxis is the creative and self-creative activity by which human beings shape their world and themselves; it involves work, the mastering of nature, and formation of the human individual as a subject and social being (Kosík 1963/1976: 133–7; Petrović 1991). The temporal dimensions to these processes are fundamental. Human beings are determined by their history; at the same time, they chart the course of that history through their actions, within the constraints imposed by their bodies and the societies of which they are members. In this sense, the human condition has an irreducibly historical character. This historical understanding—which has the capacity to make clear the interconnections of the past, present, and future—affords us not only the opportunity to confront the burden of the past but also, under some circumstances, to set off on new courses for the future. The goal of this chapter is to explore Marx’s historical-dialectical anthropological theory.
Marx’s Anthropology • 41
What Are Human Beings? Marx, like Rousseau and Hegel before him, saw a relationship between human beings and nature. While his predecessors distinguished between the physical and moral characters of human beings and thus separated nature from the realm of human history, Marx did not. While Rousseau and Hegel viewed the relationship as one of emergence—the creation of culture for the former and the actualization of free subjectivity for the latter—Marx believed instead that The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be established is of the physical [i.e., bodily or corporeal] organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic, and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31)
Thus, Marx rejected the notion of a fixed human nature or essence in the singular and adopted instead a historicized notion of human natures in the plural. That is, there is a dialectical interplay between the biological substrate, which endows all members of the species with certain potentials, and the ensemble of social relations that shape everyday life in the worlds in which they live and which they themselves produce, reproduce, and, on occasion, change. On the one hand, as Joseph Fracchia (2005: 40) has argued, the “transhistorical attributes of human corporeal organisation . . . underlie and make possible the infinite though not unlimited range of those changing manifestations of human being—that is, of socio-cultural forms.” On the other hand, the ensembles of social relations not only condition how human beings live but also shape their relations of production as well as the personalities, consciousness, and behaviors that are characteristic of each historical epoch (Fracchia 1991: 159–60). Keeping in mind that Marx was averse to both biological reductionist and culturehistorical relativist perspectives, let us now look in more detail at how he characterized human beings simultaneously as natural beings and as social and conscious natural beings, as he discussed the specifically human features, capabilities, needs, and dispositions shared generically by all members of the species.1
The Corporeal Organization of Human Beings While Marx made numerous references to the corporeal organization of human beings throughout his writings, he never systematically developed the idea. Nonetheless, the importance of the concept is evident in his remarks. For example, in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” he mentions “practical, human sensuous activity;” in
42 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Capital, he discusses the corporeal foundations of use values (they satisfy the needs of human individuals) and the immiserating effects or costs on the human body that result from lengthening the duration of the work day and thereby diminishing the time for rest and recuperation (Marx 1845/1976: 4; 1863–7/1977: 125–6, 276–7, 341–416). Fracchia (2005: 41ff.) suggests that enough can be gleaned from these scattered passages to see the “systematic and foundational logic” underpinning the remarks; in his view, the organization of the human body is for Marx more than merely “a simple prerequisite” for being human. The foundations for Marx’s view that human beings were a part of nature first appeared in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he wrote early in his career to begin sorting out his theoretical differences with other writers— especially Hegel, the political economists, and the socialists. Marx agreed with Hegel’s view that human beings were part of nature and that they had produced a “second world.” In the gendered, referential language of the day, Marx wrote: Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers—he is an active natural being. These forces exist within him as tendencies and abilities—as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs—essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature, and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it. (1844/1975a: 336; emphasis in the original)
Marx made several points in this passage. Let us begin to unpack what he meant. First, human beings are active, sensuous creatures that perceive the world around them. Their sense organs—their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin—combined with motor skills that allow them to move their bodies or various parts of them, including the sensory organs, constitute an interrelated perceptual system. This system provides sensations of the world; more importantly, they are active mechanisms for exploring nature—for moving, looking, listening, smelling, tasting, and touching the various external objects in the world around them. It permits human beings to feel by providing both passive and active sensations of the external world. It provides perceptions, assessments, and understandings of the ambient conditions as well as the animate and cultural elements of the environments the human beings inhabit. The adjustments resulting from movement of parts of the perceptual
Marx’s Anthropology • 43 system—e.g. eye, head, or hand movements—constitute modes of attention that allow human individuals to explore the available information, to form conceptions of those externalities, to orient themselves and move in relation to them. The human perceptual system also provides a basis for communication (Gibson 1966/1983). The human perceptual system, broadly conceived, evolved through time over the past 60 or so million years. Parts of the human perceptual system are shared to varying degrees and in different ways with those of their non-human primate relatives and shared ancestors. Some features of the human perceptual system and the anatomical correlates associated with them are: upright posture; bipedal locomotion; increased brain size; emphasis on vision including the related brain centers: stereoscopic color vision; diminished sense of smell and taste relative to other animal species; ability to discern intensity and direction of middle-range sounds; hands with opposable thumbs and enhanced dexterity; relatively small deciduous and permanent teeth; reduced amounts of bodily hair and increased number of sweat glands; prolonged life history stages (gestation, infancy, immaturity); menstrual as opposed to estrus cycles in reproductive females; tool-use; and habitual speech including the vocal apparatus and related brain centers (Langdon 2005). The structure and organization of the system and their anatomical correlates, as well as the externalities of their environments dispose human beings to interact with the worlds around them in particular ways. For example, human individuals are terrestrial and diurnal—that is, they typically do not inhabit ocean floors, reside on high mountain peaks, or see very well at night. The system imposes limitations, some of which have been overcome in recent years as a result of enormous amounts of cultural intervention; for example, human beings carrying oxygen and other essentials with them regularly climb to the top of Mt. Everest or use night-vision goggles to see in the dark. Second, to say that human beings are part of nature means that they are also feeling organisms that are actively involved with the world in which they live. They experience a range of feelings and emotions: fear, joy, love, and hunger, to name only a few. This engagement begins at the moment of birth and starts from the individual. The world provides the objects and others that the human individual internalizes and objectifies. This is the process of subjectification—the formation and development of the self (Ego)—which underpins the self-expression of the individual. Subjectification is an active process that involves action, thinking, and feeling. As Agnes Heller (1979: 11) has noted, feeling “is an inherent structural part of acting and thinking rather than their mere ‘accompaniment.’” At any moment, the individual’s engagement with its surroundings may range from minimal (out of awareness or consciousness), on the one hand, to the center of conscious attention, on the other. Nevertheless, it is during the process of acting and thinking, of developing new capacities and reintegrating them into more meaningful wholes, that the individual’s capacity for feeling also has the potential to expand. Third, human beings distinguish themselves from the worlds in which they live through a process of self-objectification—i.e., labor or purposive activity—and
44 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist thereby constitute themselves in a world of externalized objects that they have not only created but also that condition their lives in turn. In other words, objects are subjected to human purposive activity, and the subject who is objectified in a world of objects, is transformed in the process. These externalized objects satisfy needs, like hunger, that are experienced subjectively and whose satisfaction requires an object outside the self. Objectification, labor in its essential form, has been described as “the embodiment of human motivation, purpose, and ends” (D’Amico 1981: 3) with the “modes of objectification . . . [being] as many as human capacities and practices and the results . . . [being] worlds of artifacts—material, social, and semiotic” (Fracchia 2005: 44). Marx argued that Hegel’s views about labor were abstract and philosophical, and that his standpoint was that of political economy. For Marx (1844/1975a: 333), Hegel “grasps labour as the essence of man—as man’s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labour.” Thus, Marx’s notions of objectification and labor were broader than those of his predecessor. They were tied not to thought or the movement of Spirit but rather to human activity and history as these were shaped by specific forms of alienation. Fourth, what is distinctive, in Marx’s (and Fracchia’s) view, about human corporeal organization are the bodily organs that were transformed into instruments of production: most notably, the perceptual system, arms, legs, hands, brain, and the vocal tract. Human beings deploy them and the objects they created as extensions of their corporeal organization to mediate, regulate, and control the metabolism that exists between them and nature. For Marx The solitary man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain. Just as head and hand belong together in the system of nature, so in the labour process mental and physical labour are united. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 643) The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in the germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and [Benjamin] Franklin therefore defines man as “a tool-making animal.” (Marx 1863– 7/1977: 286) In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being. . . . Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal process only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its
Marx’s Anthropology • 45 physical body, while man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard of the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. (Marx 1844/1975a: 276–7) We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. . . . We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many human architects to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 283–4)
Marx referred repeatedly over the years to the centrality of labor as the condition for human existence and the self-realization of human beings. It is the way human beings mediate and regulate the metabolism that exists between them and nature. It is the way they appropriate and alter external objects and transform them into things that satisfy their needs. More important, however, is the fact that all labor or work involves physical activity as well as thinking and other mental activities. As a result, this development of all the human productive forces is a process of both self-creation and self-affirmation, one that entails aesthetic as well as utilitarian attitudes toward human activity. It is a mode of objectification involving intentionality rather than instinct; it makes the life activity of the individual an object of will and self-consciousness. Marx saw this as a process of emergence, “the creation of man through human labour and the emergence of nature for man” (1844/1975a: 304); the motor for the developmental and directional change in human corporeal organization was labor which he described as “the living, form-giving fire” (1857–8/1973: 361). Fifth, human beings work to satisfy existing needs and to create new ones in the process. Labor, for Marx, involved the articulation of physical and mental activities directly or indirectly through thought and language. While the objects made by human beings may be utilitarian in the broad sense of the word, they may more importantly be aesthetic expressions—for example, the beauty of a finely chipped stone knife, the splendor of a poem, or the exquisite taste of a carefully prepared meal in contrast to fast food. Marx (1863–7/1977: 276–7, 655) rather systematically distinguished between physiological and necessary needs. The former were indispensable for the production and reproduction of the individual; the latter were “habitually required” in a given society. The needs of human beings developed, in his view, with the development of the productive forces—i.e., purposive activity
46 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist (work), the instruments of work, and the objects upon which work is performed (Marx 1857–8/1973: 494, 612; 1863–7/1977: 284). Marx also alluded to social needs—“the level of needs of the worker as a socially developed human being at a given point” (Lebowitz 2003: 40). Social needs are the genuine needs of every individual in a given society, like adequate health care or rest; these are typically available only to the privileged layers of that society, who, like congressmen in the United States today, portray themselves as representatives of the masses. While Marx never systematically elaborated a theory of social needs, he and Engels made passing references to the needs of human beings in general (McMurtry 1978: 33–4). These included adequate food, drink, clothing, and habitation; fresh air and sunlight; adequate living and working space; cleanliness of person and surroundings; rest from exertion; variation of activity; time for intellectual development, social intercourse, fulfillment of social functions, free play of the vital forces of the body and mind; growth; development; healthy maintenance of the body; aesthetic stimulation; play; and meaningful interpersonal and sexual relationships (Marx 1844/1975a: 295–6; 1863–7/1977: 341, 362, 375–6, 611, 762–802; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 38, 417).
“Ensembles of Social Relations” and Human Beings as Social Individuals Human beings are distinguished as much by their sociocultural and historical characteristics as they are by their need to work, their corporeal organization, or their biological features. Marx recognized the sociality of human beings and that being human was, in fact, actualized in their relations with other individuals, in their participation in historically specific communities. He wrote . . . that the development of the individual is determined by the development of all the others with whom he is directly or indirectly associated, and that the different generations of individuals entering into relation with one another are connected with one another, that the physical existence of the later generations is determined by that of their predecessors, and that these later generations inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse accumulated by their predecessors, their own mutual relations being determined thereby. In short, it is clear that development takes place and that the history of a single individual cannot possibly be separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individuals, but is determined by this history (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 438).
Another way of saying this is that these webs of social relations are the foundation on which intersubjectivity is possible. As a result, human individuals—their consciousnesses, their personalities, their ambivalences, their subjectivities, their individualities, their identities, and their cultures—have a profoundly social character (e.g. Henry 1976/1983; 54–118; Márkus 1978: 15–35; Negt 1988: 228–33: Schaff
Marx’s Anthropology • 47 1965/1970: 49–102). Human beings are shaped by the sets of relations into which they are born and which they help to actualize, reproduce, and occasionally even transform during their lives. The kinds of work they do—the ways in which they satisfy their needs, express their identities, and form new wants and desires—are all cast in this forge. In a phrase, sociality permeates all aspects of the individual’s life, even when he or she is seemingly alone. The spheres of activity founded on these relations are internalized, accepted, or rejected by the individuals involved. Thus, these ensembles are not natural relations that exist among generalized or universal human individuals but rather are the particular relations that exist among specific, concrete individuals who live at particular times and in particular places or, as Marx would say, in given historical epochs. As a result, “the specific character of human beings in a given era cannot be determined a priori but only in reference to the [particular] ensembles of social relations” (Fracchia 1991: 160). Human beings are clearly social individuals, but how did human social individuals come into being? For Marx, work in the broad, not exclusively utilitarian, sense was one distinctive feature. Consciousness was another. “Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from the life activity of the animal,” wrote Marx (1844/1975a: 294). By consciousness, he meant the mental outlook (1) that is formed under particular social conditions, and (2) that is, at the same time, an expression of those circumstances. His view of consciousness was broader than the one we typically employ today. It involves intentionality. It also includes “cognizance of the surrounding world” as well as the “mental production” of the whole sphere of presuppositions, dispositions, feelings, and so forth that are handed down by tradition and accepted in an unreflective manner (Márkus 1978: 26, 70n31a; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 36). While consciousness is ultimately based on the possibilities for development in the corporeal organization of the species, consciousness itself is a social phenomenon. Adam Schaff describes this in the following way: at a certain level of biological evolution, which changes very slowly, man—in the sense of his attitudes, opinions, value-judgments, etc.—is a product of ontogenesis, a wholly determined social product. For what he becomes in ontogenesis is fully determined socially; and this in a way that is quite beyond his control—through language, which embodies a certain type of thinking, and education, which imparts certain customs, modes of behavior and of ethics, etc. (1965/1970: 66)
For Marx, consciousness is not the passive reception of stimuli from the natural and sociohistorical world in which the human individual lives. This socially and historically determined activity is, instead, a “creative and formative factor in all social activity” (Márkus 1978: 28). It entails increasing awareness of the objects of the natural world, other human beings, and their relations with them. It is a repeated moment in the life activity of the individual. It exists between the appearance, recognition, and subjectification of those objects, persons, and relations and the
48 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist potentials they have for satisfying or creating new needs; the appropriation of these “objects of social practice;” and “the activation of human actuality” (Márkus 1978: 29). Thus, consciousness is also related to Marx’s concepts of objectification and labor—the transformation of exterior objects to satisfy needs. Consciousness “is a particular type of activity directed toward the ‘appropriation’ of reality in a specific way” (Márkus 1978: 29). Social consciousness never exists in a general or abstract sense but rather always is a manifestation of particular ensembles of social relations and sociohistorical conditions; hence, it also includes “false consciousness”— mistaken ideas that conceal, distort, or invert reality and of whose existence the subjects are unaware. Marx portrayed the linkages of consciousness in his famous base–superstructure architectural metaphor: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. (Marx 1859/1970: 20)
This passage is often read not as a shorthand or summary statement of complex relations but rather as claims for (1) the separation of the economic from the cultural and other realms of society and, ultimately, (2) the economic determination of society and history. It does not say that the culture is not economic or that the economic lacks significant cultural, legal, or political dimensions. Such claims also overlook passages Marx wrote earlier that are hard to square with models of economic determination. For example, In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are all out of proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 110) The mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individual. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31–2)
In this view, “culture [consciousness] constitutes a mode of expression of life conditioned by the form of production or form of life activity” (D’Amico 1981: 11). Thus, cultures, which are the expression of particular ensembles of social
Marx’s Anthropology • 49 relations, are scaffoldings for human activity in historically particular circumstances. Consciousness renders those relations intelligible and reproducible; it is also a condition for transforming them (McMurtry 1978: 145–56; Outhwaite 1991: 128). As social beings, human individuals acquired their consciousness in historically specific communities and could develop as individuals only in those societies. Marx was aware that “the development of the individual is conditioned by the development of all other individuals with whom he stands in a direct or indirect intercourse, and that the various generations of the individuals, which enter into relations with each other have an interconnection” (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 438). Their consciousness, passed from one generation to the next, is re-created daily, reworked, and transformed by particular historical individuals. Marx (1844/1975a: 299) was acutely aware of the dialectical relation between the individual and species-life (the community). Richard Lichtman writes that Like other dialectically related notions, individual life and species (communal) life can neither be separated from each other nor identified. Though joined, their mode of experience does not coincide. Individual life is the mode of “experience” of the social whole, and the social whole has itself no existence separate from the fact of its being experienced in the lives of individuals. Each individual is an experiencing nodule or terminus of the ensemble of relations that constitutes the social system. This is not to reduce society to the sum of individual experiences. For what the individual experiences is primarily the structure of social relations in dialectical polarity with the world of nature. But even more significant is the fact that how this experience is itself structured is also a dialectical consequence and cause of the particular form of individualism in a historical epoch. In short, the specific conscious experience of individuals occurs in the context of the totality of structural relationships among individuals, structural relationships among the aspects of nature, and the structure of relationships between these distinct but reciprocal realms. And, of course, there is that part of the human psyche, which plays no part in Marx’s system—the structure of the repressed unconscious. (Lichtman 1982: 220)
This does not mean, however, that all of the individuals of particular communities share some monolithic form of consciousness that is imposed externally or by tradition and that homogenized their views of the world, and Marx realized this. Gyorgy Márkus describes individuality and the constituents of personality in the following way: The material and ideal “elements” of his objective world become transformed into constituents of his own personality . . . only through a process of appropriation . . . [that is] due to his own selective activity. And it is first of all this activity and its social consequences that directly form the specific, irreducible individuality of every human being. Each concrete individual finds a more or less strictly circumscribed scope of historically possible forms of behavior and activity as something set by, and with, his
50 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist historical situation, class position, etc. . . . A concrete walk of life, the personal history of an individual is determined in the incessant interplay, give-and-take if his own actions and the “reactions” of his social environment. Human personality evolves . . . in a constant dialogue between man and world, between subjective activity and objective social reality. (Márkus 1978: 23)
Marx referred to this as “the difference between the individual as a person and what is extraneous [accidental] to him” (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 81). Accidents are not the only way in which individualization and the emergence of individuality occur. As the production and reproduction of everyday life acquire an increasingly social character and individuals begin to produce for each other through cooperation, they have greater possibilities of learning from the experiences of those with whom they have ties. This is a consequence of the ongoing dialogue between human beings. This does not prevent them, as Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 47) phrased it, from hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, herding in the evening, and criticizing after dinner without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic. However, when and if a social division of labor develops and the interests of the individual conflict with those of the community, social relations are transformed. Some individuals begin to pursue their own interests and to exploit others—i.e., appropriate their objects and labor. Social differentiation and specialization follow in their wake. In the example cited above, individuals are no longer persons but rather have become hunters, fisherman, shepherds, or philosophers through the exchange relations and rules of distribution that have been forged. They are simultaneously universalized and depersonalized, which are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, their dependence on others means that they can potentially draw on the knowledge and experience of an ever-widening circle of human beings. On the other hand, their autonomy and independence are diminished. In these historicized processes, they are increasingly estranged from nature, from others, from the products they produce, and from themselves. This estrangement, or alienation, resulting from forces that occur behind the backs of individuals, leads to the reformation of personality characteristics and individuality; they too are manifestations of historically particular ensembles of social relations. Marx’s focus on “ensembles of social relations” emphasizes the connection between the human individual who is growing self-conscious of other persons and of things that are external to him. His aim is to understand the human social being as a worker and thinker, a producer and consumer situated in historically specific social worlds that vary in time and space. The historical development of these variable social worlds provides the real conditions for individualization and human individuality. It underscores the sociohistorical character of work and consciousness, both of which, in turn, are linked dialectically to the corporeal organization of human beings. As Marx put it, real individuals are “individualized through the process of history” (1857–8/1973: 496).
Marx’s Anthropology • 51
History Marx’s view of the world is profoundly historicist in the sense that he believed it impossible to understand something fully unless one knew how it came to be the way it is. The historicity of things was important for understanding both process and succession. For Marx, history involved the inextricably intertwined development of human beings, of ensembles of social relations (societies), and of nature itself. Early on, he and Engels wrote that “we know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist” (Marx and Engels, 1845–6/1976: 28). Marx’s materialist science of history has a number of distinctive features. Let us look at these in more detail. First, perhaps the most significant features of his historical science are the rejection of nineteenth-century atomist (Cartesian) reductionism, on the one hand, and the adoption of a dialectical holism, on the other. Reductionism, which is still a prominent mode of analysis of the natural and social worlds today, attempts to explain complex organisms, like human beings, and their behavior in terms of their constituent parts—e.g. neurons, genes, or the molecular sequences on chromosomes. The proponents of atomist reductionism are committed to five ontological principles: (1) each system has a set of natural building blocks which they seek to identify; (2) these units are homogeneous at least with regard to the whole of which they are parts; (3) the building blocks exist prior to the whole and hence have properties that are distinct and independent from those of the whole; (4) the whole may be nothing more than the sum of its parts, or the interactions of the building blocks may produce additional or emergent properties; and (5) causes are active subjects (agents) whereas effects are the properties of objects that have been acted upon. Marx (1840–1/1975) laid the foundations for his rejection of atomist reductionism in his doctoral dissertation and developed the argument throughout his career. Basically, he challenged the validity of each of its ontological premises and resisted reductionist epistemologies, which reduced the source of knowledge to appearances (cf. Levins and Lewontin 1985: 269; Meikle 1985: 10–15; Wilson 1991: 120–30). As Marx (1864–94/1981: 956) put it: “All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence.” Second, Marx’s theory of history builds on the notion of a totality that includes both natural history and human history. In his view, a totality is a multileveled, historically contingent, and dialectically structured unity that exists in and through the diverse interpenetrations, connections, and contradictions that shape the interactions of the parts with one another, with the unity itself, and with the greater whole of which they are a part (Kosík 1963/1976: 18–9; Levins and Lewontin 1985: 133–42, 278–85; Mészáros 1991). Thus, (1) reality is structured by processes and
52 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist relations that are not always apparent on the surface; (2) the constituents of the totality are not identical with each other or in their relations to the whole; (3) the parts do not exist prior to the whole but rather acquire their characteristic properties in the interactions that constitute the whole; (4) the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and it is impossible to understand the whole merely by studying its constituent elements; (5) the whole is in continual flux though the parts and levels of the totality may be changing at different rates; (6) this flux means that they may destroy the conditions that brought the totality into being in the first place; and (7) these transformations create possibilities for new historically contingent structures that have not existed previously. Consequently, Marx’s ontology and epistemology have different foundations from those of atomist reductionism. As he put it: “The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in mind. But all of this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being” (Marx 1857–8/1973: 101). Third, Marx’s theory is firmly rooted in an appreciation of variation. He wrote approvingly that the historical geologists had shown that the formation of the earth was a process, a “self-generation” (Marx 1844/1975a: 304–5). 2 This historical, material world was a precondition for the existence of human beings, of human production, and of human society in its myriad forms. He appreciated the significance of variation in both time and space. It was impossible in his view to speak of either nature or society in general or in some abstract sense; it was necessary instead to think of the spatial and temporal particularities of both. He referred repeatedly over the years to the diverse “natural conditions in which man finds himself”—a multiplicity of worlds shaped subtly or not by their geology, hydrology, climate, and soil fertility exhaustion to name only a few of the factors he mentioned (e.g. Marx 1863–7/1977: 637–8; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31, 42). For human communities with similar modes of production, the consequence of such environmental variation is that even slight differences of emphasis in what is taken from nature or in how tools and labor power are employed, can yield significant variations in the details of how labor is organized. Marx was acutely aware of the fact that particular physical conditions, or material worlds, could impose limitations on human communities with particular means of production—for instance, the unpredictability or impossibility altogether of agricultural production in high-elevation or high-latitude environments, like the alpine grasslands of the Andes mountains or the tundra of northern Canada. Moreover, he was aware that environments changed with the passage of time. Some changes were due to the impact of new forms of human activity, like agriculture or the domestication of animals (Marx 1863–7/1977: 287–8). Other changes—such as those produced by earthquakes or floods—were less obviously or less directly the result of human activity. He also knew that the tempo and mode of such changes varied from region to region and from epoch to another. Frederick Engels, I believe, eloquently captured Marx’s sentiments in this regard when he wrote:
Marx’s Anthropology • 53 There is damned little left of “nature” as it was in Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it. The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the human beings themselves have continually changed, and all this owing to human activity, while the changes of nature in Germany which have occurred in the process without human interference are incalculably small. (Engels 1873–82/1987: 511)
Fourth, although he often employed the language of essentialism and reductive materialism in his writing, Marx did not view historical change exclusively as either the unfolding of some potential inherent in the totality that revealed a necessary and regular succession of development stages or the outcome of forces or events that accidentally impinged upon the totality from the outside.3 Yet, there are elements of both developmental necessity (directionality) and chance (accident) in his historical arguments. For example, Marx (1863–7/1977: 772–80) described the developmental logic of capital accumulation in terms of concentration (reproduction on an extended scale) and centralization (regrouping capital into fewer units)—a logic that played itself out historically in England, albeit with fits and starts, in the nineteenth century. But, he also noticed that the development of capitalism in Russia in the 1870s was seemingly following a different pathway from that of England (Marx 1881/1983: 123–4). Moreover, when considering the structure of capitalist production in the 1860s, Marx (1864–94/1981: 567–72) suggested that there were several potential routes of its development in the immediate future given the then-existing property relations and balance of force—the formation of monopolies in certain spheres of production that would provoke both state intervention and the emergence of a new financial aristocracy. An alternative was the development of factories or companies run by workers. Both, in fact, have occurred since he wrote. “Developmental contingency,” a concept elaborated in another context by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985: 94–6), affords us a useful, shorthand description of Marx’s views about historical change. The concept captures the interplay of structure and process, of necessity and accident. To paraphrase their description of the concept and its implications, development is a historical process in which the effects of a force cannot be specified in a general or abstract way; they can only be specified in the singularity of the conditions and relations that exist at a particular time and place. One consequence of this is that the historical formation of ensembles of relations and their associated environments appear as “as a temporal sequence of events in which the exact order is critical” (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 95). Another consequence is that subtle variations among local communities have the potential to affect what happens or does not happen next; in other words, further development always involves confronting the existing structures and following, or not, one of several alternative pathways. Still another consequence is that the transition from one historical formation to another depends more on the conditions that prevailed at the time of the transition than on how those conditions and relations of the totality emerged. Finally, in some instances (labor strikes, for example),
54 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist the possible outcomes for particular communities are often quite constrained but perhaps not completely controlled; as a result, the driving forces involved appear to play themselves out with almost law-like regularity. At other moments, when the balance of forces are more nearly equal, people do have a real potential or capacity to make their own histories; whether they have chosen to do so or succeeded in doing so are other issues. Fifth, Marx’s science of history is not a philosophy of world history that attempts to describe humanity or the flow of history in some general or abstract sense. This is an impossibility. He is concerned instead with examining what is happening or what has taken place in communities that have particular locations in time and space. As a result, the histories of communities are not internally monolithic because the different subjectivities that emerge are inseparable from the ensembles of relations that make them possible. Nor is history homogeneous, either within a given historical epoch or when different communities are compared. While the ensembles of relations that produce and reproduce history are empirically rich in detail and specificity, they do not create or constitute an infinite diversity. There are limits. Marx recognized them. They underpin his concept of a mode of production, which acknowledges the forms of cooperation, the commonalities, of different types of societies. In the Grundrisse, Marx (1857–8/1973: 459–514) distinguished two broad categories: capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. There were two major differences between them, as Jason Read (2003: 38) notes. Capitalist societies separated propertyless workers from the means of production and subsistence and freed up the flow of money within the community. In pre-capitalist communities, the workers retained control over their means of production, and wealth was integrated into the community. In addition, Marx made further distinctions within the category of pre-capitalist modes of production, which he labeled the primitive communal, ancient, Asiatic, Germanic, Slavonic, and feudal. The names Marx chose designated different forms of cooperation and social structure rather than either presumed geographically based identities or presumed inferiority resulting from some “chain of being” placement on a social evolutionary ladder whose top rung was occupied by Western capitalism. For example, the Inca and Aztec states of the Americas have been described in terms of the Asiatic mode of production; the Maasai and other pastoral peoples of East Africa have been described in terms of the Germanic mode of production; and the forms of cooperation and social relations of the primitive communal mode of production figure prominently in the everyday lives of numerous American Indian peoples, including many of those whose communities now own casinos. Eric Hobsbawm (1964: 36) is correct, I believe, when he interprets the various pre-capitalist modes of production identified by Marx not as an evolutionary succession or progression but rather as different forms of individuation and property relations, as alternative steps away from or pathways out of historically specific forms of primitive communal society.
Marx’s Anthropology • 55 Marx was struck by the observation that communities manifesting pre-capitalist modes of production tended to reproduce existing social relations. He described this in various ways: In all these forms—in which landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and where the economic aim is hence the production of use-values, i.e., the reproduction of the individual within the specific relation of the commune in which he is its basis—there is to be found: (1) Appropriation not through labour, but presupposed to labour; appropriation of the natural condition of labour, of the earth as the original instrument of labour as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials. The individual relates simply to the objective conditions of labour as being his; [he relates] to them as the inorganic nature of his subjectivity, in which the latter realizes itself; the chief objective condition of labour does itself appear as a product of labour, but is already there as nature; on one side the living individual, on the other the earth, as the objective condition of his reproduction; (2) but this relation to land and soil, to the earth, as the property of the labouring individual—who thus appears from the outset not merely as labouring individual, in this abstraction, but who has an objective mode of existence in his ownership of land, an existence presupposed to his activity, and not merely a result of it, a presupposition of his activity just like his skin, his sense organs, which of courses he also reproduces and develops etc. in the life process, but which are nevertheless presuppositions of this process of his reproduction—is instantly mediated by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified presence of the individual as member of a commune—His naturally arisen presence as a member of a tribe etc. [i.e., an ensemble of relations]. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 485)
With particular reference to communities manifesting the Asiatic mode of production, he wrote that The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot with the same name—this simplicity is the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remain untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regime of politics. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 479)
In the back of Marx’s mind as he wrote these passages was the dynamism of capitalism—the continuous reinvention of the subject and transformation of the productive forces. As Read (2003: 10) points out, capitalism was no longer fettered by the need to reproduce “any particular structure of belief, desire, or tradition.” One issue to be explained was that the different forms of consciousness, subjectivity, and social practice—as refracted by the modes of production manifested in particular
56 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist communities—directly affected and shaped the tempo and form of historical change. At the same time, Marx was acutely aware that historical changes had already happened, that they were taking place at an increasing pace in the present, and that, given the existing webs of social relations, they would continue to take place in the future. He portrayed the conditions that laid the foundations for the appearance of new forms of cooperation and subjectivity with the advent of capitalism: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. . . . Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. . . . These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 915–16)
In this passage, Marx identifies the motors that are driving the expansion of the capitalist mode of production as well as the complexities of the transition from the dominance of one mode of production to the dominance of another. Read (2003: 5) described the historicity of transition as the tension between reproduction (determination) of traditional forms of cooperation and subjectivity, on the one hand, and their dissolution (underdetermination), on the other. The new conditions forged during moments of transition were apparent not only to the peoples of the traditional societies in the colonies but also to those of the metropole and its satellites or internal colonies. Importantly, transitions are processes rather than single events; they are spread over both time and space. For example, the cotton fabrics produced by English wage-workers in the textile mills of Manchester in the late eighteenth century were made from cotton that was grown by African slaves in South Carolina; much of the cotton cloth produced in northern England was ultimately sold in India where the British had destroyed the local textile industry earlier in the century. In sum, Marx’s theory of history contains notions of structure, transformation, and directionality (Callinicos 1995: 95–110, 141–65). The structure is forged by particular ensembles of social relations and the connections of those communities with the environments that they continually use and re-create anew. Marx used the concept of a mode of production to distinguish one kind or type of society from another. These types were different from actually existing communities. Historically
Marx’s Anthropology • 57 specific communities, like the one in Atlantic Canada around 1750, manifested either a particular mode of production or some combination of modes of production, one of which was dominant over the others. Marx’s notion of history was based on the contradictions, tensions, and conflicts that develop within the realm of social production in its myriad manifestations; these were the motors of historical change. It recognizes changes in tempo—moments of acceleration, moments of stasis—as well as alternative pathways of development. It also acknowledges that sometimes changes, which were possible, did not happen; they were blocked for one reason or another. Finally, Marx’s theory of history contains a notion of non-teleological directionality, what we referred to above as contingent determinism.
Truth and Praxis Praxis extends Marx’s answers to the questions: What are human beings? What is their reality? How was that reality formed? Praxis is the most basic characteristic of human beings and their most distinctive feature.4 It is not an attribute of either animals or machines. As you will recall from earlier in the chapter, something essential happens when the sphere of human being becomes established in opposition to the “givenness” of nature, when human being becomes distinct from what is not human. Praxis is the active process by which human beings establish a relation with objects of the external world and with one another. It is the way they renew those relations, create new relations, and gain a more profound understanding of what they have made. Most importantly, praxis is not something that exists outside of human beings; instead, it permeates the very core of their existence. As Karel Kosík (1963/1976: 139) noted: “Praxis is both the objectification of man and the mastering of nature, and the realization of human freedom.” Let us look in more detail at how Marx conceptualized and employed the idea of praxis. The first dimension of Marx’s notion of praxis is that it involves human activity and production; it also involves consciousness of self and other. As Marx put it: Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two different ways affirmed himself and the other person. (1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. (2) In you enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognized as felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of your yourself, and consequently would
58 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. (4) In the individual expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. (Marx 1844/1975b: 227–8; emphasis in the original)
Marx makes several points in this passage. The objects produced by the individuals entail the transformation of raw materials provided by the natural world through the mental and physical activity of those persons. The objects are a manifestation of their activity in a congealed or crystallized form; as a result, the person and object are viewed as belonging to the same ontological category rather than to separate, distinct categories of person and thing (Bernstein 1971: 44). The object produced by one individual satisfies a need perceived by the other; thus, in Marx’s terms, the objects are use values. During the process of producing the object, the individual imagines the object in its finished form and subordinates his will to the task at hand. As Marx (1863–7/1977: 284) would put it later: “Besides the exertion of bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.” The way human beings apprehend the world with their bodies, how they interact with the natural and social worlds in which they live, and how they relate to each other in these processes are all aspects of objectification. In the process of objectification, human beings have not only made themselves; they also portray themselves as having dissolved the unity of nature and as having a separate existence from the material world. This is Marx’s theory of alienation, which is ultimately concerned with the separation of human beings from their practical activity, from the products they create, from one another, and from the realization of their own potential. Thus, the questions of how and what human beings produce are especially important, because Marx tied them to the question of freedom, which ultimately involves removing impediments to the development of the human capacity. Marx (e.g. 1844/1975a: 270–82; 1857–8/1973: 831–3) is clear that objectification takes different forms in different sociohistorical settings. In modern capitalist society, for instance, it involves alienation or estrangement of the worker from the product of his labor because of social relations that based on wage labor, private property in the means of production, and market exchange. Marx describes the process by which alienation emerges historically in capitalist society from a certain point of departure: The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity. . . . This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as
Marx’s Anthropology • 59 a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labour appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage [subservience] to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [and as externalization] . . . (1844/1975a: 271–3; emphasis in the original)
Marx proceeds to point out that “Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production” (1844/1975a: 274; emphasis in the original). In other words, because they posit the categories and conditions that are historically specific to capitalist production as transhistorical and hence universally applicable, the political economists have only a partial understanding of this historically contingent reality. They have created instead an ideology and continue to portray their representation of the world as real. Consciousness, the second dimension of Marx’s theory of praxis, is intimately related to objectification. For Marx, consciousness of nature is always a social product conditioned by the level of development of the forces of production and the ensembles of social relations and cultural forms associated with them. Consciousness originates in a new relation between the subject and self; it is a reflective moment in which the unity of humanity (subject) and nature (object) is negated, and a new understanding of what the relationship could be is initiated through human activity. Consciousness is an integral part of activity—consciousness not only of the properties of the raw materials given by nature, what potentially can be done with them, and the processes for transforming them, but also, and more importantly, awareness of the needs, feelings, and sentiments of other persons. For Marx, consciousness is simultaneously an element of human experience, a moment in its historical development, and the understandings that result from the sociohistorical development under historically specific ensembles of social relations. Thus, consciousness combines both real (true) understandings of the world and other human beings with misperceptions and misunderstandings of both. This leads us to a third dimension of Marx’s idea of praxis: the “relentless criticism of all existing conditions.” This aspect of Marx’s work was already crystallizing when, as a student, he was first beginning to grapple with Hegel’s thought and writings. The criticism of the writings of Hegel, Feuerbach, the political economists, and others as well as of his own thoughts would continue for the rest of his life. The kinds of questions he posed in his critiques were: What is the argument? What is implicit and explicit in the argument? What are the presuppositions? Where is the argument persuasive and why? What are the weaknesses and fallacies of the argument? Where is it ambiguous or vague? What empirical evidence supports or refutes the claim? How might we move from misleading or inadequate arguments to ones that provide new insights and fuller explanations or representations of
60 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist human reality? What are the implications for action? What kinds of action have the arguments supported or sustained? In some instances, his critiques involved sentenceby-sentence analyses of the arguments he was examining (e.g. Marx 1843/1975a, 1875/1989, 1880–2/1974). In other instances, they were the bases for working out new hypotheses (e.g. Marx 1857–8/1973). In still others, they were detailed analyses and assessments of the balance of forces at particular historical moments, like the Paris Commune, and why the particular courses of action that unfolded ultimately failed with regard to the realization of human freedom (e.g. Marx 1871/1986). Thus, for Marx, praxis as the determination of reality begins with an accurate, theoretical understanding of existing institutions and the contradictions inherent in them. He realized the importance and significance of empirical evidence in the process of developing such an understanding of the world—that is, how it came to be the way it is and, given the conditions at any particular time, the real possibilities that exist for the future. Marx was not particularly concerned with speculating about what the future might be like. His “relentless criticism” did mean, however, that he devoted considerable time and energy to examining the ideas that people had about the world. These, he observed repeatedly, did not always conform to ways things really were, although, as Richard Bernstein (1971: 52) notes, they do tell us something about the reality at that moment in time. They are representations or reflections of reality rather than reality itself. Marx’s relentless criticism of institutions and beliefs, then, is ultimately concerned with understanding them rather than condemning them outright. For example, in a famous passage, Marx (1843–4/1975: 175–6) wrote that Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as a people’s illusory happiness is a demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion. (as translated by Easton and Guddat 1967: 250; emphasis in the original)
The goal of this dimension of praxis, in Marx’s (1843/1975b: 144) view, should be the “reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form.” A correct theoretical analysis of politics, political economy, religion, or philosophy and the contradictions inherent in them would yield understanding of the institutions, beliefs, and practices involved (Bernstein 1971: 53). It was essential, in Marx’s view, to speak to truth and to let the chips fall where they might. Consequently, he did not accept arguments based on authority or divine inspiration or rely on the eloquence of arguments themselves. He argued instead that there is empirical evidence and that an argument should mirror the facts.
Marx’s Anthropology • 61 In other words, Marx was committed to a correspondence theory of truth whose criterion involves praxis—i.e., an unmediated representation of reality of both the immediate forms and the underlying structures that are reflected in them; with regards to the criterion of praxis, this means that truth must be explanatory rather than predictive (Bhaskar 1991b). Thus, Marx rejected claims based on authority, divine inspiration, consensus, or whether an argument was consistent with, entailed by, or contingent upon another statement—i.e., what philosophers call subjective, voluntarist, or coherence theories of truth, all of which were resurrected by one or another subsequent writers in the Marxist tradition. From early onward in his writings about capitalist society, Marx privileged the standpoint of politically engaged and socially conscious working classes that are capable of exposing and potentially transcending the inhumanity of their real existing relations (e.g. Marx 1843–4/1975: 184–7; 1844/1975a: 281–2; 1844/1975c: 202–6; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 493–6). One reason for this stance harkens back to the master–slave relationship that Hegel described in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807/1977: 111–19, §178–96). As you will recall in this vignette, the master, in order to be a lord, must possess a slave, who produces things for the master to consume and is dependent upon him. The slave initially takes the master to be his reality and lives in fear of him; his essential nature is his labor, and his consciousness is expressed in the things he produces, which are externalized from himself. However, the more the master succeeds in his lordship, the more he fails, as he slowly realizes his dependent consciousness; he has in fact achieved his position by virtue of the slave who is his essential reality. As the slave begins to realize that he is more than the things he produces, he realizes that he has a consciousness in his own right as well as a self-existence and freedom outside of the things he produces. Increasingly, as his consciousness grows more independent, he realizes that he can no longer be reduced to the things he makes. Both master and slave are aware of their divided nature and contradictory being (Bernstein 1971: 24–8, 91). Clearly, the master and the slave have different perceptions and understandings of reality. For Marx, the standpoint of the slave provides a fuller, more accurate image of reality than does that of the lord. While there is no impetus for the master to alter his relation with the slave, the slave has every reason to emancipate himself, to become a free human being. The incompleteness of the master’s understanding as well as the perversity of his actions is another reason why Marx privileged the perspective of an engaged, conscious working class. In his view, “the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does himself; but he does not do against himself what he does to the worker” (Marx 1844/1975a: 282). In 1845, a third dimension of Marx’s notion of praxis crystallized. This was revolutionary practice, or as he put it, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it” (Marx 1845/1976: 5; emphasis in the original). This coincided roughly with his growing involvement in workingclass political movements (e.g. the Communist League), the deteriorating political
62 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist situation in Europe, his steadily more difficult economic circumstances, and the appearance of Frederick Engels’s (1845/1975) The Condition of the Working-Class in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources. The appearance of Marx’s “revolutionary practice” involved a shift in perspective from that of the sympathetic philosopher looking at society from the outside to that of an empathetic participant in working-class everyday life and struggles—a participant scrambling to provide for his family and their survival, who simultaneously was critically assessing the balance of forces in European society, and trying to devise tactics and strategies for altering the balance of force and the circumstances of workers (e.g. Draper 1978; McLellan 1973: 137–225). Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this dimension of praxis is Marx and Engels’s (1848/1976: 519) call: “working men of all countries, unite!” Marx did not elaborate a theory of revolutionary practice. In his view, the possibility for revolution was a dialectical one that built on the contingency of relations, the balance of forces, and contradictions that existed at a particular moment. He did not have an elaborate theory about the form an ensemble of social relations would take as a people’s genuine needs were recognized and satisfied and as their freedom was actualized. He did not argue for a set trajectory of historical change; for example, as you will recall from the preceding section, he thought of pre-capitalist modes of production as alternative pathways out of a primitive communal condition. Instead, he pointed out the potential for revolutionary practice that might exist, given the balance of forces at particular moments. For instance, he suggested that there were at least two alternative possibilities for capitalist development in the 1860s (Marx 1864–94/1981: 567–73), and, together with Engels in 1882, he contemplated the potential impact of the ongoing class struggles in Russia and cautiously suggested: “If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant-communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (Marx and Engels 1882/1989: 426). As a backdrop for the contingency of revolutionary practice were conditions of capitalist development that unfolded with almost lawlike predictability: the constant formation of new markets for commodities; the concentration and centralization of production into steadily fewer and, at the same time, larger enterprises; increased rates of technological innovation; the increased importance of technology relative to human labor power in developing economic sectors; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; and periodic economic and financial crises that result from the impossibility of a smooth, continuous process of capital accumulation. In this chapter, we have sketched the outlines of Marx’s anthropology. As we have seen, Marx read widely and thoughtfully. At the same time, his interpersonal relationships and experiences while growing up in the Rhineland and, later, his steadily increasing involvement in political activism made him aware of what was happening in the world. His declining economic circumstances from the early
Marx’s Anthropology • 63 1840s onward thrust him into the working classes and helped to forge an awareness and consciousness of the fact that he could learn much from the experiences and understanding that the masses of workers had of the world in which they lived. The workers were not the objects of inquiry to be described and reported to the world; they were instead thoughtful, perceptive individuals with vast funds of knowledge from whom the world could learn. In this sketch of Marx’s anthropology, we have focused on the corporeal organization of human beings, the significance of ensembles of social relations, the historicity and diversity of human societies and their propensities to change, and the importance of praxis in the production, reproduction, and transformation of those communities. We have seen how Marx interwove the corporeal organization of human beings and their sociality with the diversity of their social relations as they engaged in practical activity to transform the raw materials of the environments to satisfy needs and to create new ones.
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–3– Human Natural Beings Marx was a materialist. In 1837, during his second year at the University of Berlin, he wrote to his father mentioning his struggle to understand Hegel’s system of philosophy and, more importantly, describing his efforts to bring together art and science, which were divorced from one another in the university (Marx 1837/1975: 18). While many writers have focused on Marx’s intellectual debt to Hegel, fewer have examined his connections with traditions of materialist thought. His attempt to bring the arts and sciences together in a single system involved studies in natural science, history, and the romantic philosophy of Friedrich Schelling (1755–1854) who sought the common basis of nature and self. Two years later, Marx (1839/1975) took extensive notes on the non-deterministic materialism of Epicurus (341–271 BC) and the school he established. Briefly, the Epicureans believed that life rose up from the earth rather than descending from the heavens; claimed that there were more worlds than this one and that the present one will change; noted the emergence and finite duration of living forms; denied the influence of distant, divine powers; stressed the importance of contingency or chance as opposed to necessity or teleology; argued that mind and body were united; and emphasized that men and women were active agents in the acquisition of knowledge and that they were capable of forging their own happiness (Foster 2000: 21–65). Marx’s doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1841, dealt with the differences between ancient Greek philosophies of nature (Marx 1840–1/1975). In his view, the Epicureans who had influenced early Enlightenment writers—like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton—were also the key that would unlock understanding of the present. Marx thought of Epicurus as “the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment” (Marx 1840–1/1975: 73). As we saw in the last chapter, Marx was concerned with questions about the emergence and development of human natural beings, their creation of human and natural history, and their metabolism with nature. These were important issues in his materialist account of history. He framed his argument in terms of changes in human corporeal organization, ensembles of social relations, and activities and practices that varied because of the different metabolisms that existed between human social individuals and the particular natural and social worlds (environments) in which they lived. He saw these changes in non-teleological, historical terms. Parts of his theoretical perspective were already supported by empirical evidence while other parts were suppositions based on the limited evidence available. This combination
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66 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist included (1) the anatomical similarities of human beings and chimpanzees recognized by Edward Tyson in 1699; (2) the close taxonomic and presumably historical relationship of human beings and non-human primates postulated by Carolus Linnaeus in the 1735 and subsequent editions of his Systema Naturae; (3) the diverse arguments proposed from 1750 onward by the Comte de Buffon, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Abraham Gottlob Werner that the earth was significantly older than commonly believed; and (4) the view expounded by Georges Cuvier in 1812 that there was, in fact, a succession of past worlds on earth. Thus, as Valentino Gerratana (1973: 64) put it, “Marx was already not only taking for granted the principle of the historical evolution of animal species and of nature in general, which found little favour in the sciences of the time, but [he was] also tending to exclude from that evolution any finalist [teleological] assumption.” From the late 1830s onward, when Marx was formulating his materialist conception of history, his slightly older contemporary—a young Englishman named Charles Darwin (1809–82)—was also working out his own materialist views about the historical evolution of plants and animals (Ospovat 1981). Perhaps Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 105) most directly germane comment about human evolution before the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 was that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.” His later remark—“since Darwin demonstrated that we are all descended from apes, there is scarcely any shock whatever that could shake ‘our ancestral pride’”—suggests that, while Marx (1864/1985) was amused at the public outcry over the implications of Darwin’s ideas (i.e., human beings and apes shared a common ancestor, and there was a transition from ape to human), he was definitely not bothered by them. As we shall see, while Marx, in fact, had the highest regard for Darwin’s insights, he was also critical of the way in which Darwin and others naturalized explanations of social inequality and other culturally constructed categories. Thus, this chapter has four goals. The first is to review the bases for Marx’s agreement and positive valuation of Darwin’s arguments in The Origin of Species and to survey subsequent developments of evolutionary theory. The second is to use the lens provided by Engels’s (1876/1972) “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” and by Marx’s own theoretical framework to examine relevant data derived from paleoanthropology and the natural sciences in order to discern the interplay of the changing dispositions and anatomical structures of human beings and their primate relatives as well as the emergence of practices such as tool-making and language. The third is to consider the implications of this biocultural nature for population structures. The fourth is to examine briefly Marx’s and Engels’s critique of the naturalization of explanations of the social relations of capitalist society and how this critique played out in the historical development of anthropology both here and abroad.
Human Natural Beings • 67
Charles Darwin and the Development of Modern Evolutionary Theory Marx (1860/1985) first read The Origin of Species in 1860. He immediately recognized its significance, and, except for a minor complaint about the style of the argument, he had nothing but praise for the volume. Marx commented explicitly about certain points of agreement or conclusions he drew from Darwin’s arguments. Moreover, there must have been other points of agreement between Marx and Darwin because of the materialist perspective they shared; these can be inferred either from Marx’s other writings or from the implications of his materialist theoretical perspective. The former include: (1) a short quote from Darwin’s chapter on variation describing how natural selection acts on variations of form under different conditions (Marx 1861–3/1991: 387–8; 1863–7/1977: 461); (2) the notion that evolution is a gradual, ongoing process (Marx 1867/1987: 494, 1868/1987a: 558–9); (3) evolution involves both the continued preservation of what has been inherited and the assimilation of new traits (Marx 1861–3/1989: 427–8); (4) acknowledgement of Darwin’s “history of natural technology, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 493); (5) a refutation of Malthus in Darwin’s discussion of the extinction of animal species (Marx 1861–3/1989: 350–1); (6) human natural beings are descended from apes and, hence, are also a unity with nature (Marx 1864/1985: 581; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 39–41); (7) Darwin’s “struggle for existence” in natural history is analogous to class struggle in human history (Marx 1860/1985: 232); and (8) a rejection of teleological arguments in natural science and, by extension, the adoption of a notion of historically contingent change (Marx 1861/1985: 246–7). In the latter category of inferences that may be drawn from Marx’s other writings or from his materialist perspective, we should include at least: (9) a notion of internal motors of formation and change as opposed to external engines of development, and (10) nonreductive forms of argumentation. In my view, one thing that emerges from Marx’s comments is that he saw Darwin, like himself, as more concerned with explaining processes of change rather than origins or events.
Darwin’s Metaphors and Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection The idea of evolution was “in the air” by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The universe had evolved according to Kant, the earth had evolved gradually according to Hutton, life on earth had evolved according to Lamarck and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, and even human beings had evolved according to Buffon and Rousseau—from apes no less. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of resistance to the idea of evolution. Part of it arose from the fact that none of Darwin’s predecessors had satisfactorily explained how one species actually evolved into another. The other source of
68 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist discontent among the public and a few natural historians was that it threatened their beliefs, religious and otherwise, about the world and man’s place in it (Desmond 1989). The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 fuelled the discontent. At the same time, it marked a radical departure from the teleological worldviews of his predecessors, who saw “the real objects of the world as imperfect reflections of underlying ideals or essences” and “that the real variations between real objects only confuse us in our attempts to see the essential nature of the universe” (Lewontin 1974: 168). Instead of sweeping away the real variations among individuals of the same species in order to focus on the type, Darwin focused his attention on that variation and made it the object of his study. His singularly stunning insight, as Richard Lewontin put it, was that individual variation and the differences between species were causally related. Darwin’s revolutionary theory was that the differences between organisms within a species are converted to the differences between species in space and time. Thus, the differences between species are already latent within them, and all that is required is a motive force for the conversion of variation. That force is natural selection. (1974: 170; emphasis in the original)
Darwin, like Marx, initially framed his ideas in terms of already existing metaphors, analogies, and analytical categories. He built on the language and imagery of German romanticism, political economy, animal breeding, and natural science as he struggled to explain his new understandings of the natural world and the evolution of species (e.g. Kohn 1996; Richards 1992; Schweber 1980, 1985). Anyone who has ever written even a term paper will understand and hopefully be sympathetic with the notion that the language and imagery in which arguments are initially conceived are often quite different from those that clearly explain ideas and their implications. In a more self-reflexive moment, perhaps, this might account for Marx’s two comments in letters about Darwin’s “clumsy English style of argumentation” as well as his own, at times, fumbling and often opaque attempts to say what he actually meant. Darwin used four powerful metaphors in The Origin of Species to frame and express his new ideas about nature, variation, and the motor force driving evolution. They are “an entangled bank,” “the struggle for existence,” “natural selection,” and “wedging.” His metaphors were used singularly or more frequently in combination to produce powerful, evocative images rich in meaning. He employed the phrase “an entangled bank” to express the complexity of organization of nature. The dual sources of inspiration were the engravings, paintings, and poems he was familiar with before his journey on the Beagle, on the one hand, and the luxuriant, Amazonian rainforests of Brazil, on the other (Kohn 1996). In The Origin, Darwin described the interrelatedness of all nature in the following way:
Human Natural Beings • 69 It is interesting to contemplate the entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (1859/1964: 489; emphasis added)
Darwin’s second metaphor was “the struggle for existence.” It too was not a new idea. Herder, for example, had remarked on crowding as well as the struggle between individuals and between species for survival; however, there was no sense of the potential for transformation in his view (Lovejoy 1959b: 211–2). Darwin, in contrast, used the metaphor to mean interdependence, chance, as well as contest, endurance, or persistence. He wrote that: I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other over which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of the desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which on average only one comes to maturity, may be said be more or less truly said to struggle with plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched way be said to struggle with these trees, for if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it will languish and die. But several seedling mistletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses which pass into each other, I use for convenience the general term of struggle for existence. (Darwin (1859/1964: 62–3; emphasis added)
Darwin’s third metaphor, “natural selection,” was used to describe both how variation is maintained and how descent with modification occurs. He relates it to his second metaphor, the struggle for existence: Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved by the term Natural Selection, in
70 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection. (Darwin 1859/1964: 61; emphasis added)
Darwin used his fourth metaphor, “wedging,” to represent in mechanical terms how natural selection actually operates on the hereditary variation that exists between individuals and between species. The imagery refers specifically to the activities of quarrymen and the implement they used at the Salisbury Craigs in Scotland to cut stone from the cliff faces, and, in the process, how they transformed a beautiful natural landscape into an ugly monument (Kohn 1996: 36). The fact of nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven by incessant blow, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force. (Darwin 1859/1964: 67)
Let us describe Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in slightly different terms. It is based on a series of observations he made about differences between individuals and on breeding experiments that he and other breeders conducted. First, hereditary variation exists between individuals of the same species and between different species. Second, the number of eggs, sperm, or seeds produced by an individual vastly exceeds the number of individuals born. This, in turn, exceeds the number that survive to the reproductive stage and that can potentially contribute hereditary material to the next generation; in one of Darwin’s plant breeding experiments only about one seed of a thousand actually germinated. Third, some individuals have a greater likelihood of becoming adults and reproducing than others, because the hereditary material they possess is advantageous for some reason in the environments in which they live. Fourth, as a result of differential survival, this advantageous material has a greater likelihood of being passed on to succeeding generations. Thus, Darwin could explain how both descent with modification and the formation of new species (speciation) occurred. He could account for the way these happened. He could assert with certainty that the kinds of plants and animals that exist today are the modified descendents of different kinds of organisms that lived in the past. He could declare with equal certainty that whatever happened in the future would be based on the organisms and conditions of the present. Darwin’s great insights were the principles of variation, heredity, and selection. What he could not explain, however, was the connection between individual variation, on the one hand, and the inheritance (heritability) of characteristics from one generation to the next, on the other. An Augustinian monk—Gregor Mendel (1822–84), a contemporary of both Marx and Darwin—would provide answers to these questions. While Mendel published the results of his experiments with plant hybrids in 1866, Marx was completely unaware of his work and Darwin, if he were aware of it, did not understand its importance. Although Mendel’s work was finally recognized in the early 1900s, its significance was still being hotly debated into the 1930s (Allen 1978).
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The Problems of Variation and Inheritance If Darwin made variation the proper study of biology, then Mendel was responsible for clarifying the mechanisms by which hereditary variation is created and transmitted. As Richard Lewontin (1974: 173–8) notes, Darwin and the other plant and animal breeders of his day were aware that offspring tend to resemble their parents (like produces like) but yet are different from them and that these differences are also inherited to some extent. They attempted to cross organisms from different varieties, and even species, and saw that, if any of the hybrids produced were fertile, they tended to revert to one or the other of the original parental type over a number of generations. Because the breeders focused on the differences rather than on the similarities, they viewed variation and inheritance as ontologically distinct categories. The effects of this were: (1) they saw the variation existing between individuals within the same species as different from the variation that exists between species; and (2) they focused their attention on the group or variety rather than on the individual. What Mendel did that was different from his contemporaries was that he focused on individuals, their ancestors, and their progeny. In other words, he distinguished between the individual and the group. Let us consider briefly what Mendel did in his experiments and what he actually showed. Mendel bred varieties of garden peas that differed from one another in a few traits—that is, when tall plants were bred with tall plants, their offspring were also tall. Mendel then bred a tall plant with a short one and noted that each of the hybrid offspring was tall and, in this trait, they resembled one of their parents. However, when he bred the hybrids of the first generation with one another, he noted that their offspring resembled one or the other of the original parental types—roughly three-quarters were tall and one quarter was short. On the basis of this experiment, he concluded, with regard to the characteristic being studied (1) that the hybrid individuals inherited a discrete particle (gene) from each of the parents; (2) that the expression of the gene for tallness was dominant over the other; and (3) that these particles re-assorted themselves in the offspring of the first-generation hybrids in such a way that there were both tall and short individuals in the second generation. When he bred individuals that were hybrids for two traits—such as tall vs. short plants and smooth vs. wrinkled pods—he observed that the gene pairs associated with different physical characteristics—let us say height and seed color—were inherited independently from one another. In other words, the significance of Mendel’s work was, to paraphrase Lewontin (1974: 177–8), that it showed that variation and inheritance were manifestations of the same underlying phenomena but that they required two different kinds of causal explanation. Mendel’s studies buttressed a later flurry of activity from the 1920s onward that was concerned with the genetic variation of populations and with how genetics related to the process of selection. This involved conceptualizing a local population of individuals, all of whose genes constitute the gene pool of the population, its reservoir of hereditary material that is passed from one generation to the next. Many
72 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist individuals or only a few may contribute to and share in the gene pool. The pool may be stable through time or change from one generation to the next depending on the particular conditions that prevail or appear. These investigations had three important consequences. First, they made it clear that no two individuals in a population have exactly the same combination of genes—including identical siblings who were born with the identical genetic systems but were subjected to different environmental and historical circumstances so that different genes mutated. Second, they clarified the nature of the genetic variation that exists within a population, identifying recombination, gene flow, and mutation as important sources. Recombination is what occurs when two individuals mate and their offspring receive half of their genetic complement from each parent. If the organism has about 30,000 gene pairs, as each human being seems to have, then the continual reshuffling from one generation to the next becomes a major source of the genetic variation that occurs in a population. Gene flow occurs when an individual from outside the population breeds with an individual from the population, and new genetic material is potentially introduced into the gene pool. The other source of variation is mutation. While many but not all of the mutations that appear in the gene pool of a population are variants that are already known and that already exist in the population, some are not. As a result, mutation is the ultimate source of new genetic material in a population. Third, these researchers began to examine how selection, as well as mutation and migration, alter frequencies of particular genes in a population They also suggested that genes acted in ways that controlled the metabolism of cells which in turn controlled the expression of particular characteristics; unfortunately, given the technology of the time, they had no way to prove it (Allen 1978: 126–40, 198). The first generation of population geneticists—Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962), John B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), and Sewall Wright (1889–1988)—recognized that Mendel’s principles operated in all organisms; that small-scale, continuous variability in characteristics, like height, also had a genetic basis; and that even small selection pressures acting on minor genetic differences can result in evolutionary change (Gould 2002: 504). In a phrase, they integrated and synthesized the views of Mendel and Darwin. They established the foundations for linking the traditional subfields of biology—genetics, paleontology, ecology, systematics, or developmental physiology, to name only a few—into a more holistic biology, that would come to be called the Modern Synthesis or the New Synthesis in the 1940s. This fusion was launched with the publication of Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1900–75) Genetics and the Origin of Species in 1937.
The Modern Synthesis and Beyond The heyday of the Modern Synthesis may have been in 1959 at the time of various centennial celebrations of the publication of The Origin of Species. Gould (2002:
Human Natural Beings • 73 503–84) described the Modern Synthesis as “a limited consensus,” that had “hardened” in the 1940s and 1950s in time for those celebrations. By the early 1960s, however, the three central tenets of the synthesis—adaptation, the individual organism as the unit of selection, and the sufficiency of microevolutionary theory to explain change as it is refracted in the fossil record—began to be challenged. One manifestation of the hardening, as Gould describes it, was an increased emphasis on adaptation: Every gene or gene complex was somehow adaptive. Adaptations, as you recall, are the products of natural selection modifying the gene pool of population in such a way that it increases the harmony between the population and its environment. Any hereditary characteristic that increases this congruity and promotes survival is an adaptation; adaptations take many different forms and may involve morphological, physiological, or behavioral features that enable individuals to survive and produce offspring. However, evidence was beginning to accumulate which indicated that some genes may be neutral—that is, they have no selective significance with regard to increasing or decreasing the fitness of individuals living in a particular environment, and, hence, they are neither advantageous nor deleterious. The second manifestation of the hardening and the challenge revolved around the question: At what level or levels does selection operate—the gene, the individual, the population, or the species? Advocates of the new synthesis argued that, while selection operates at the level of the individual, the adaptations that result might be beneficial to the group as well. The challengers disagreed. The arguments they raised in the 1960s and 1970s continue to the present. The third tenet is that the explanation used to account for small changes in the gene pool of a contemporary population is merely writ large, but identical, to the one that is refracted in the paleontological record. That is, change is steady and slow. Gould (2002: 558) called this the “principle of extrapolation.” One challenge to the uniformitarianism embodied in this tenet has been over the issue of whether the evolutionary process is always gradual, or whether it proceeds by fits and starts with moments of rapid change preceded or followed by periods of relative stasis (punctuated equilibrium). Gould concludes his discussion of the Modern Synthesis by noting how well it has endured, in spite of the challenges. Molecular biology has been a major growth field in the United States, England, and France since 1945 (Allen 1978: 187–228; Appel 2000). This development was accompanied by number of new technologies and techniques—computers, X-ray crystallography, DNA sequencers, powerful mathematical and statistical methods, and so forth—that afforded opportunities to examine for the first time the molecular structure of cell nuclei, the three-dimensional arrays of DNA molecules on chromosomes, the structure of genes, the regulation and development of genes, the sequence of DNA molecules on chromosomes, and the entire genomes of a number of species, including even that of human beings. We now know, for instance, that the genomes of human beings and chimpanzees are virtually identical (99 percent); that the rates of change in the proteins produced by the DNA code vary
74 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist little from species to species; that human beings and chimpanzees had a common ancestor 5 to 7 million years ago; that the 6 billion or so human beings in the world today fundamentally have, with few exceptions, the same genotype; or that there is more variation within human populations—let us say from Africa, Scandinavia, or Japan—than there is between them (Lewontin 1995; Marks 2002). There seem to be two counter-tendencies in biology today. The research of many biologists is reductionist in the sense that they are concerned with breaking down their objects of inquiry—the cell, the gene, the organism, or the environment—into their constituent parts. Another group—notably Richard Lewontin (1929–), Richard Levins (1935–), and their associates—views nature as a totality, a historically contingent and ever-changing structure. Nature is, in their perspective, a multi-leveled whole, a unity of contradictions, characterized by spontaneous activity, positive and negative feedback, the interpenetration and interaction of categories from different levels of the whole, and the coexistence of opposing principles that shape interaction. The various elements of the whole—the parts and the levels—as well as the whole itself are continually changing, though at different rates; consequently, at any given moment, one element might appear to be fixed in relation to another (Levins and Lewontin 1985: 133–42, 272–85). The importance of this dialectical world is that it helps us think of genes, organisms, and environments as interacting parts of a whole rather than distinct entities with their own roles to play. Lewontin (2000: jacket), for example, rejects the idea that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to its environment. He argues instead that the individual organism is a unique consequence of the interaction of genes and the environment, and that individual organisms, “influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and choose the environments in which they live.” Marx would have appreciated how Lewontin and Levins have conceptualized and framed issues concerned with human natural beings and how we came to be the way we are, because of the non-reductive and dialectically interactive aspects of their argument.
Human Natural Beings: Bodies That Walk, Talk, Make Tools, and Have Culture The title of this section derives from David McNally’s (2001) insightful essay, “Bodies that Talk: Sex, Tools, Language, and Human Culture,” in his Bodies of Meaning. We saw in the preceding chapters the three distinctive markers Enlightenment writers used to characterize human beings: they reasoned, they made tools, and they talked. The anatomists and physicians of that era had a fourth characteristic: they walked upright. These are legacies from the Enlightenment. They were part of Marx’s intellectual inheritance as well. However, as we saw in the last chapter, he did not frame his answer to the question of what human beings are precisely in these terms. He emphasized instead that human beings were sensuous, active creatures;
Human Natural Beings • 75 that there was a dialectical interplay between their corporeal organization and the ensembles of social relations that shaped their activities; that their bodily organs were transformed into instruments of labor and production; that they objectified the world and the resources it provides to satisfy established needs and to create new ones; and that their conscious life activity in contrast to that of animals was increasingly determined by social relations and culture. As Raymond Corbey (2005: 93) correctly observes, scientific definitions of the genus Homo (that is, modern human beings and their ancestors) established in the late 1940s and early 1950s—e.g. erect bipedalism, a well-developed thumb, or rapid expansion of cranial capacity associated with craniofacial remodeling and reduction in jaw size—often incorporate or imply philosophical understandings of humanness, such as upright gait, tool-making, large brains, language, and culture. In the 1950s, it was possible to believe that these traits appeared roughly at the same time. We now know that they did not appear simultaneously, but rather sequentially over a period of time that spanned 5–7 million years for some scholars or 2–3 million years for others. The result of this is that the biological definition of Homo clashes with popular and philosophical views of what it means to be human. Consequently, some paleoanthropologists have argued that the genus contains both “animal” hominids and “human” hominids, and that the transition from ape to human occurred some time since the late Tertiary. This refracts in some complex way the criterion or criteria that particular individuals select to define “human.” Another potential complicating factor results from the fact that geneticists have found that chimpanzees and, to a lesser extent, gorillas are the closest living animal relatives of human beings. The primatologists who study these apes often stress their similarities with human beings rather than their differences. Thus, they portray the apes as conscious, active, and social creatures who vocalize, communicate, occasionally use tools, and have distinctive personalities; when they talk about ape language and culture, the discussion becomes murkier and the audience more skeptical. For our purposes here, the question is not whether the answers provided by present-day scientists are fundamentally different from and thus incommensurate with those of Marx, but rather how do or might Marx’s views articulate with contemporary perspectives and practices. A relatively unknown essay by Frederick Engels, Marx’s friend and collaborator for more than forty years, provides additional clues for contemplating the linkages.
Engels’s “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” The publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871 was the impetus for Engels (1876/1972) to set down his own views on the transition from non-human primate to human natural being. It is useful to keep in mind a few facts about the context in which Engels wrote his essay, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from
76 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Ape to Man.” While the first remains of “Neanderthal man” had been found in 1856, their significance was neither recognized nor appreciated until the early years of the twentieth century (Delisle 2007: 70–124). While writers speculated about whether human beings had lived at the same time as extinct animals, the first incontrovertible evidence was only uncovered in 1859; it consisted of stone tools and fossil animal bones sealed beneath an unbroken stalagmitic deposit in Brixham Cave in southern England. As a result, Engels’s argument was a deductive one, as were those of his contemporaries (Trigger 1967/2003). Engels argued that the ancestors of human beings were social, arboreal apes who lived in the Old World tropics toward the end of the Tertiary period, which we now know occurred between about 2 and 23 million years ago. He was clear that both human and non-human primates were behaviorally highly complex, and structurally integrated organisms. Even though he had no conception of the microevolutionary processes described above, he was also clear that a change in one behavior would ultimately be linked with changes in other organs (sensory and anatomical structures) and behaviors. Through reading and possibly even trips to the zoo, he argued that the arboreal primates of the present day used their forelimbs and hindlimbs differently when they climb. On this basis, he suggested that the decisive first step in the transition from ape to human involved upright walking, an erect gait. This change in the locomotor behavior and structures was accompanied by other changes, most notably in the hand. These changes involved the development of greater dexterity and of a precision grip involving an opposable thumb long before the first flints were fashioned into knives and these early humans began to manufacture tools. The development of the hand and all that this entailed were linked, in turn, with the development of the brain and other sensory organs, with new relations to the objects of nature, with increased dependence on others and the formation of new ensembles of social relations, and importantly with the development of language. The latter was facilitated by changes in the hand, speech organs, and brain—a combination that enabled these early humans to undertake more complex activities and to change the environments in which they lived in planned, conscious ways. Marx and Engels often forged and refined ideas in their letters. However, in none of these, to my knowledge, did they discuss Engels’s essay about the transition from ape to human, even though they may have done so in conversation. Moreover, there is no evidence that Marx disagreed in any way whatsoever with Engels’s conclusions in this regard. While parts of Engels’s argument could be stated with more precision today in light of the vast quantities of information that have been gathered, especially since the late 1950s, the basic timeline—erect posture, tool-making, and language— is still correct. In fact, it was adopted by paleoanthropologists, most prominently Sherwood Washburn (1911–2002) in the late 1950s (e.g. Washburn 1960; Washburn and Howell 1963; Woolfson 1982). The issues debated today are not whether the steps outlined by Engels occurred, but rather where and when they took place.
Human Natural Beings • 77
Fossils and Proteins In Marx’s day, the empirical evidence for the evolution of human beings was provided by the comparative anatomy of living species. Today, that evidence is provided by fossilized bones and their associated environments, by the similarities and differences of DNA or protein sequences that exist among different species, and by the molecular clock that the various sequences provide (Marks 2002: 7–31). The issues that paleoanthropologists explore and resolve are still upright walking, toolmaking, language, and culture; however, the terrain of the debates has shifted in the last fifty or so years because of the vast quantities of new information. According to molecular anthropologists, the last common ancestor shared by modern human beings and chimpanzees, our closest relative in the animal kingdom, lived 10 to 5 million years ago, and gorillas diverged from that group around 11 to 9 million years ago (Patterson, Richter, Gnerre, Lander, and Reich 2006). Together with earlier discoveries of fossil hominids in South Africa, this finding helped to focus attention since the 1960s on the tropical regions of Africa, especially those east of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Here, there were fossil-bearing deposits that dated to the end of the Tertiary—that is, the Pliocene Era, which occurred roughly 5 to 2 million years ago. In the mid 1990s, paleoanthropologists began to look for ancestral chimpanzees and gorillas on the west side of the Rift Valley, where the extant species live today. In Chad, they found a number of fossil hominids in late Miocene and early Pliocene deposits that ranged in age from about 7 to 3.5 million years ago. No one questions that the various early hominid species on both sides of the Rift Valley were bipedal walkers, keeping in mind that anatomical clues for this form of locomotion are scattered over the body: toes, ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, neck, and hands, to name only a few. Thus, at the present time, it seems that human natural beings appeared first in the tropics, perhaps in the triangle formed by Chad, Ethiopia, and South Africa. The fossil evidence has raised a number of questions: Did all of them share the same locomotor pattern? Were they bipedal all of the time or only part of the time? Are some individuals ancestral chimpanzees instead of precursors to the genus Homo? Did some of the earlier individuals belong to one of the later ancestral species shared by chimpanzees and early hominids? Did any of these individuals belong to species that stand in the direct ancestral line of modern human beings (Delisle 2007: 326–8; Gibbons 2006)? Besides the fact that ancestral ape and hominid species resided in tropical Africa 5 to 10 million years ago, what were the circumstances in which quadrupedal, treeclimbing primates became bipedal? Paleoanthropologists have described a number of potential advantages of upright walking that might have served them well: visual surveillance against predators, hunting, carrying food and other objects, feeding on low branches, and reducing the energy costs of traveling long distances because of scarcity of resources, and even display (Delisle 2007: 327). Marx would have been
78 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist fascinated, I suspect, by the changing circumstances in which this fundamental change occurred. Let us look briefly at two recent works. First, Pierre Sepulchre and his associates (2006) argued that the 6000-km-long escarpment created 12 to 10 million years ago by tectonic uplift associated with the formation of the Rift Valley in East Africa altered the prevailing patterns of atmospheric circulation, which brought moisture and precipitation to the interiors of Kenya and Ethiopia. The reorganized atmospheric circulations brought less moisture to the region, and, by 8 to 6 million years ago, the environmental conditions were beginning to shift from woodland to savanna grassland habitats and species; this transition occurred between 5 and 3.7 million years ago. A second argument, made by Geoffrey King and Geoff Bailey (2006), is that the ancestral apes and hominids of tropical Africa lived in the broken, hilly country created by the formation of the Rift Valley. Moreover, these complex, environmental mosaics with their diverse and variable resources were the primary habitats of the early hominids rather than the emerging savannas that were inhabited by new kinds of ungulates and a rapidly expanding diversity of terrestrial monkeys—the ancestors of modern baboons and macaques. This broken, hill country, they argue, continued to be the preferred habitat for human beings along their entire dispersal route of dispersal as they then began to move into the Eurasian landmass about 2 million years ago. The relation of these changes to the evolution of human beings will become apparent in the next few pages. Engels’s second inferred step in the gradual appearance of human natural beings involved changes in the anatomy and manual dexterity of the hand. This was closely associated with upright posture and gait. While all primates manipulate objects to varying degrees with their hands (as do raccoons and squirrels), the hands of modern human beings are quite distinctive in several respects—e.g. they can open a jar lid or thread a needle. Chimpanzees and other apes cannot do either easily, if at all. Modern human beings have power and precision grips and a much greater range of motion and rotation in their fingers, wrists, forearms, and shoulders than do nonhuman primates. These capacities are reflected in both anatomical structures and the ranges of motion they exhibit; they include long, opposable thumbs relative to the length of the other digits and the ability to rotate the index finger toward the thumb. These features contrast with those of modern chimpanzees, which have a restricted range of motion of the thumb; curved digits that are relatively long with respect to the length of the thumb; and powerful grasping muscles in both their hands and wrists (Trinkhaus 1992). The manufacture and use of stone tools has been taken as an indication of manual dexterity, a sign that “man the tool-maker” has arrived on the scene. The earliest stone tools now known are chipped cobbles and flakes from 2.5-million-year-old deposits in Ethiopia. These are probably not the oldest tools in the world; right now, however, they are the oldest ones we know about. We know that modern chimpanzees will break off twigs and use them to fish for termites, and we can safely presume, I
Human Natural Beings • 79 believe, that at least some hominids used sticks or rocks, for example, earlier than 2.5 million years ago. What we do not know about the tools from Ethiopia is who made them. There were two genera of early hominids in Ethiopia between about 2.5 and 1.0 million years ago: Australopithecus and Homo. We suspect that the latter made the tools, because the configuration of the fingers, hand, wrists, and forearms more closely resemble those of modern human beings. The australopithecines had hands with long curved fingers, thumbs and little fingers with a restricted range of rotation, and heavily muscled fingers and wrists adapted for grasping. Some paleoanthropologists argue that both genera manufactured and used stone tools; others suggest that only some australopithecines had the manual dexterity to make tools; a third group claims that stone tool-making was restricted to the genus Homo. Tool-making, of course, is a marker for something else. In this instance, as Engels indicated, it is linked with the development of the brain. All of the early hominids that lived before 2.5 million years ago had brain volumes that resembled those of chimpanzees. A significant increase in brain volume began to appear about 2.0 million years ago in the genus Homo and continued until about 100,000 years ago. The brain volumes of modern human beings are roughly three times larger than those of their Plio-Pleistocene ancestors. Paleoanthropologists have suggested a number of reasons for the expansion of brain size: the need for increased brain power to facilitate complex manipulative tasks like making stone tools; increased hunting; social cooperation; food sharing; language; and heat stress. Two issues emerge. First, what is the relationship between increased brain size and the structural organization of the brain itself? Second, was this increase in brain size gradual and continuous, or was it punctuated with episodes of growth followed by periods of relative stasis (Delisle 2007: 328–30)? The development of the brain was, of course, Engels’s third step in the evolution of human corporeal organization (Schoenemann 2006). There are three facts about the brain that it is useful to keep in mind. The convolutions on the brain’s surface leave their imprint on the interior surface of the skull; consequently, by examining the endocasts of the imprints left on the skulls, it is possible to learn about the surface organization of the brain. The second fact is that the endocasts of human and nonhuman primates—that is, chimpanzees and modern human beings—are different from one another. The third is that brains consume enormous amounts of energy; human adults, for example, use about 20 percent of the metabolic energy they have to regulate the temperature of their brains. Heat regulation is accomplished by the circulation of blood through a complex network of arteries and veins that crisscross their brains. Dean Falk (2004: 161) has suggested that the vascular system of the hominid brain was reorganized to deal simultaneously with “the changed hydrostatic pressures associated with erect posture” and with the changes mentioned earlier in this section that were taking place in the habitats of the African tropics in general and, more specifically, in the habitats in which the early hominids lived 7 to 2 million years ago.
80 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Examining the endocasts of apes, the large and small species of australopithecines, and early members of the genus Homo, Falk learned (1) that the surface organization of the brains of large australopithecines resembled those of modern chimpanzees, and (2) that they were different from those of the later, small australopithecines and early species of Homo, both of which had features resembling the brain surfaces of modern human beings. In her view, the dentition of the large australopithecines, as well as associated paleoenvironmental evidence, indicated that they continued to live in wooded habitats. In contrast, the teeth and paleoenvironmental data indicated that the small australopithecines and early species of Homo moved into more open country, possibly savannas, but as likely the environmental mosaics described earlier in which patches of trees, grasslands, and water dotted the landscape. The heat stress induced by spending more time in open country created another set of selection pressures along with gravity and the changes in hydrostatic pressures that accompanied bipedal locomotion. More important, until the vascular system of the brain was able to regulate temperature more efficiently in those hominids that had moved into more open habitats, brain volumes remained low—that is, roughly similar to those of apes. Once the vascular system of the brain became more efficient, brain volumes increased. This process became apparent in the remains of H. habilis about 2.5 million years ago. It seems to have been a fairly continuous process until about 100,000 years ago, when the growth curve flattened out (Lee and Wolpoff 2003). The vascular system is not the only organ of the human body involved in heat regulation; others include sweat glands, the distribution of hair, and skin. Two of the truly distinctive features of modern human beings are that they have about 2 million more eccrine sweat glands than non-human primates, and that these glands are distributed over the entire surface of their bodies. What makes sweating an effective evaporative, cooling mechanism is that human beings are relatively hairless in comparison to the living apes, even though they have about the same number of hair follicles as chimpanzees. The reason for their appearance is that their hair shafts are much smaller than those of apes; hence they appear hairless except for the tops of the heads. In this regard, Adrienne Zihlman and B. A. Cohn (1988: 404) note that “hair retention on the head is probably important in protecting the scalp from the sun’s ultraviolet rays and may assist in stabilizing the temperature of the brain.” One inference that might be drawn from this extended argument is that even the earliest of our big-brained ancestors probably appeared relatively hairless in comparison to their primate contemporaries. This inference has some additional implications. As you will recall, hominid populations began to move out of the African tropics and onto the Eurasian landmass about 2 million years ago. Their remains have been found at deposits that are about 1.8 million years old at Dmanisi, which is located north of the Caspian Sea, where winter temperatures occasionally plunge below 0 °F (–17.8 °C). So, what does this imply for a relatively hairless hominid? Brian Fagan suggests an answer:
Human Natural Beings • 81 For Homo erectus to be able to adapt to the more temperate climates of Europe and Asia, it was necessary not only to tame fire but to have both effective shelter and clothing to protect against heat loss. Homo erectus probably survived the winters by maintaining permanent fires, and by storing dried meat and other foods for use in the lean months. (Fagan 1990: 76)
Thus, the elaboration of culture, Engels’s fourth step in the transition from ape to human being, is not unrelated to the development of the brain and other sensory organs. It also involved extending the body’s instruments of production and objectifying the world around them in new ways as they appropriated new kinds of external objects to satisfy new needs that were essential for their survival and reproduction in their new circumstances. The final step mentioned by Engels was the development of language. Both modern human beings and non-human primates, especially chimpanzees, are quite vocal. Both use vocalizations and gestures to communicate information, which suggest that our common ancestors 10–5 million years ago probably did the same. Nevertheless, the vocalizations and gestures of non-human primates are not the same as language, which is unique to the human species. Language, as you know, has three central features: (1) basic sound units produced in the oral cavity, which lack innate or intrinsic meaning; (2) rules for combining and recombining these sounds into larger units, like words (morphology) and sentences (syntax), have the capacity to communicate enormous ranges of information and meaning (semantics); and (3) symbolic reference involves both the arbitrariness of the utterance with regard to what is being represented and the ability to refer to things that are not immediately present or exist only in some abstract sense (Deacon 1992a). These features distinguish human language from other forms or systems of communication—such as the dances of honeybees, seasonal whale songs, or the calls of monkeys—which, respectively, are referential but not symbolic, involve mimicry, and express ranges of immediate feelings like fear, anger, or pleasure. There are important neuroanatomical differences between the vocalizations of non-human primates and the speech of modern human beings. Terrence Deacon describes them in the following manner: [Non-human] primate calls are controlled by neural circuits in the forebrain and midbrain that are also responsible for emotion and physiological arousal, but not the motor cortex, even though this area can control the muscles of the larynx and mouth. Stimulation of the vocalization areas in a monkey brain often produce other signs of arousal—such as hair standing on end, display postures, facial gestures and even ejaculation. Human speech uses a very different set of neural circuits. It depends on the region of the motor cortex that controls the mouth, tongue and larynx and the areas that are in front of it. Repeated efforts to train primates to mimic even simple speech sounds have had little success. The unique skill in learning to speak suggests that this facility may reflect some critical neurological difference. The ability to combine a larger number of
82 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist component sounds to form larger units, words and phrases, makes possible to syntactic complexity of speech. Common brain areas may be involved in speech production and grammatical processes because defects in grammar and speech production caused by brain damage often occur together. (Deacon 1992b: 119)
Two regions of the human brain involved in speech production are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. The former is a motor speech area associated not only with sensorimotor control of the structures of the oral cavity, the varied positions of the tongue, and their coordination with movements of the respiratory system, but also with manipulative and gestural abilities; it is typically located on the left hemisphere of the cortex and also seems to be associated with right-handedness—the tendency shared by about 90 percent of the human population today (non-human primates typically do not show a preference for left- or right-handedness). The latter, Wernicke’s area, which controls understanding and formulating coherent speech, is located on the cortex amid areas that are associated with seeing, hearing, and feeling (Gibson and Jessee 1999: 205; Tobias 1998: 72). All normally developed human brains have Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Since they are located on the surface of the brain, they leave imprints on the interior surface of the skull and thus appear on endocasts. While there are no endocasts currently available for hominids that lived before about 3 million years ago, both appear on endocasts of H. habilis (c.2.5 million years ago). An endocast from a late, small australopithecine, A. africanus (c.3.1 to 2.6 million years ago), has an ape-like pattern but shows evidence of Broca’s area. Thus, the earliest representatives of the genus Homo seem to have had the neural capacity for spoken language. The configurations of their brain surfaces resembled those of modern human beings rather than apes. This development coincided in time with the initial expansion of brain volume, the appearance of stone tool making (culture in the broadest sense), and preceded by a half million or so years the initial movements of hominids out of the African tropics (Tobias 1998). Between 7 million and 2 million years ago, a set of complex, interrelated changes occurred in the heads of our human and pre-human ancestors. A few of these were: the brain was reorganized as both the vascular and neural systems evolved; the surface topography of the cerebral cortex became more folded and complex; asymmetric hemispherical specialization of the brain appeared; the anatomy of the craniofacial region was significantly shortened, and, toward the end of that period, the volume of the brain itself expanded, particularly in the frontal area. In other words, the brains of our ancestors who lived 2 million years ago were quite different from the brains of their ancestors who lived 5 million years earlier. With regard to the evolution of language, the faculty seems to have been an emergent phenomenon that was a byproduct of other developments, rather than one that was built on a pre-existing structure or structures shared with other primates. That is to say, there is not a single structure that is concerned exclusively with language and speech production; instead
Human Natural Beings • 83 there seem to be several areas—one associated with emotions, another with sensation and motor control—that have become, in the course of the last 5 million or so years, interconnected by neural circuitry that was evolving simultaneously in response to selection pressures that had nothing to do with the development of language and only a little to do with other systems of communication more broadly defined. The interconnections between the faculties of language and tool use in human natural beings were confirmed more than seventy years ago. Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria (1930/1994) assessed studies that compared the development of speech and practical intelligence in individuals, both apes and human children; these studies showed (1) that the practical behavior of apes is independent of any speechsymbolic activity, and (2) that tool-use by apes was analogous to that of human beings who were either pre-verbal children or deprived of the ability to speak (aphasics). While the tool-using abilities of apes remained essentially unchanged throughout their lives, those that children manifested at different stages of psychological development changed dramatically, especially after they began to talk, first to themselves and then increasingly to others when they were confronted with a problem to solve. While practical intelligence (tool-use) operates independently of speech in young children, practical activity and speech are increasingly interconnected as the child matures. The egocentric, inner speech of four-year-olds becomes increasingly communicative as they turn to peers and adults for information and insight about the issues they confront. As the human child matures, speech increasingly moves from solving the problems that are immediately at hand to a planning function that precedes their actions; that is, speech and interpersonal relations begin to guide and dominate what they will do in future. In a phrase, practical activity (tool-use in this case) and language began to be linked increasingly in the development of human natural beings, not only in their evolution over the past 7 million years but also in the maturation process of the each individual human being. It is part of the complex process by which natural beings became human natural beings. As we have just seen, there are significant differences in the growth and development patterns of non-human primates and human beings. For example, ape neonatal infants have about 50 percent of the brain volume of adults of the same species, and their brains typically grow to roughly the same size as the adults by the end of their first year of life. In contrast, human infants are born with brain volumes that are about 25 percent of the size of those of adults; their brains double in size during the first six months, are about 75 percent the size of adults by two and a half, 90 percent by age five, and 95 percent in their tenth year. This protracted process of growth and development of humans has a number of implications: (1) brain development occurs much more rapidly in apes and through a seemingly smaller number of developmental stages; (2) the growth rate in brain volume extends beyond well beyond the first year of life in human beings; (3) human infants are relatively helpless in comparison to ape infants during the first years of life; (4) this prolonged period of maturation coincides with growth and developmental stages that witness not only the formation
84 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist of new neural connections but also the related elaboration of practical activity and speech; and (5) the changes in the neural circuitry of human infants and children are, in fact, associated with the elaboration of practical activity and speech. Paleoanthropologists have discerned the ape and human patterns of brain growth and development in the fossil remains of early hominids, provided that cranial and pelvic bones are present in their sample. An important limiting factor with regard to brain volume at the time of birth is the cross-section of the mother’s birth canal. The size and shape of the neonate’s head cannot be greater than the width and height of the birth canal. For example, an early hominid—H. rudolfensis that lived about 2.5 million years ago—had a brain volume of 800–900 cc but a birth canal that was only able of passing a fetal head with brain size of about 200 cc (Stanley 1998: 160–3). Thus, they infer that the human rather than the ape pattern of growth and development was already in existence at that time. This implied that the infants also exhibited the same pattern of prolonged maturation and dependence that exist in modern human beings. These traits coincided in time with the appearance of tool-making and language; they also coincided with the expansion of those stages of brain growth and psychological development when new neural connections are being formed as tool-use and speech become increasingly social activities embedded in ensembles of social relations. With more than 130 years of hindsight, it appears that “Engels got it right!” The broad outlines of his argument have stood the test of time. Nonetheless, the accumulation of diverse sorts of empirical evidence during that period has added unimaginable detail and enriched our understanding of the process. On the one hand, neither Marx nor Engels ever questioned that human natural beings were also social beings. As Engels (1876/1972: 251) put it, our primate ancestors “lived in bands.” On the other hand, they never considered in any extended manner the implications that the life histories, fertility, and mortality patterns of the early hominids might have on the demography and population structures of those groups.
Demography and Population Structure Neither Marx nor Engels ever wrote systematically about the relation between population and political economy (Seccombe 1983). Marx (1863–7/1977: 784) suggested that “every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are historically valid only within that particular sphere. An abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man.” He refused to abstract population from historically specific social structures or ensembles of social relations. His comment is part of a larger discussion about the relation between the capitalist mode of production and the formation of a reserve army of labor. Marx was certainly aware of differences in mortality and fertility, the effects of the movement of workers from
Human Natural Beings • 85 the countryside to industrial cities; and the deleterious effects of industries, like pottery-making, on the health and life expectancies of the individuals engaged in those activities. Marx (1863–7/1977: 471) certainly recognized that age and sex were important factors structuring the division of labor in capitalism, and that they were potentially implicated in structuring discontinuities from one mode of production to another. He also implied that the determination of population dynamics is situated in the inner workings of particular modes of production, and that “population forces will periodically come into contradiction with themselves and with other elements of any given socio-economic system, and will tend to make their own contribution of time to the developmental propulsion of particular modes through time and space” (Seccombe 1983: 33). As you will recall from earlier discussions in the last chapter and this one, labor and thus the division of labor were characteristics that, in Marx’s view, distinguished human natural beings from natural beings. Biodeterminists, drawing on liberal social theory (notably John Locke), rooted the division of labor and the nuclear family in biology; in their view, sharing or exchange occurred because of the biological differences between males and females, which resulted in different dispositions and activity patterns. Females, whose mobility was periodically constrained by infant care, remained in close proximity to home bases and foraged for vegetable foods, while larger, more aggressive males hunted for meat, which was essential for survival, and shared this prize both with their offspring and with the mothers of those offspring (e.g. Washburn and Lancaster 1968). However, there are three problems with this perspective: (1) most non-human primates, including chimpanzees, forage individually most of the time; (2) the perspective does not explain how individuals of both sexes transformed themselves from self-feeders to producers; and (3) Engels (1884/1972) argued that families, as we construe them today, developed out of “bands.” Marx and Engels never doubted that our primate ancestors were social beings. Not surprisingly, they did not speculate about the demographic aspects of the transition from social natural beings to human natural beings, nor did they ever comment on the potential implications of mortality, fertility, and age structure in that transition; however, other writers have thought about these issues. The early hominids were sexually dimorphic—that is, adult males were larger than adult females—but these differences were not as great as the sexual dimorphism found in non-human primates, such as chimpanzees or gorillas. The males and females of sexually dimorphic primates have roughly the same growth rates until puberty; the males continue to grow for several years after reaching this stage, while the females stop. Lila Leibowitz (1985, 1986) argued that the larger body size of adult males was not related to dominance and sex roles, but rather to reproductive and foraging advantages; it was correlated with either solitary existence (orangutans) or transient group membership (chimpanzees and gorillas). The larger body size of adult males gave them a greater chance for survival outside a social group; it also meant that both males and females engaged in the same foraging activities but in different places.
86 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist There is a great deal of variability not only in male and female roles but also in the relations between the sexes with groups of non-human primates (Leibowitz 1985, 1986). There is even variation between social groups of the same species—e.g. baboon troops in which food resources and concentrated vs. those where resources are dispersed. Chimpanzees probably show the greatest flexibility and diversity of relations. The core members of chimpanzee social groups are adult females and their juvenile and infant offspring. Adult males join these core groups temporarily for greater or lesser periods of time, before wandering off to forage in other localities, either alone or in all-male groups. Thus, self-feeding is the rule in the core and allmale groups, except at those rare times when a small animal is killed and the meat is shared with individuals foraging nearby. As we have seen, the maturation pattern of our primate ancestors who lived 3 million years ago was essentially the same as that of modern human beings. They reached reproductive age at about the same rate as we do. Paleodemographic studies indicate that infant and juvenile mortality was high, that about half of the individuals died or were killed before they reached reproductive age, and that the average life span of the survivors was about twenty years. Assuming that females had their first infants shortly after reaching puberty, when they were twelve or thirteen years old, and that they did not ovulate for the three or so years when they were lactating and nursing, their second infant would have been born when they were fifteen or sixteen years old, and their third when they were eighteen or nineteen. Such a demographic profile has several implications. First, few, if any, females were alive when their offspring reached puberty. Second, most of the members of a social group were prepubescent individuals who had not reached reproductive age. Third, many of the juveniles were orphans who had to fend for themselves in order to survive. Fourth, they were exposed to prolonged learning in a social group that was composed largely of other prepubescent individuals. The conclusion that Leibowitz drew from this evidence is that age or stage of maturation may have been more important than sex in structuring the social relations of early human populations. Her observations and arguments suggest a model of early hominid society. The social groups were small and composed mainly of individuals who had not yet reached reproductive age. Within these groups, prepubescent males and females of the same age were roughly similar in size; they foraged for themselves from a young age and shared food with other individuals, when there was more than any one of them could consume. In the process of growing up in a small group, they learned to use and make simple wooden and stone tools from their peers. They shared information about the world around them through language. Their understanding of their world was gained through practical activities and experiences, the successes and failures of everyday life. Food sharing involves a degree of cooperation that does not exist in contemporary non-human primates and presumably did not exist among their ancestors, except on the most limited bases. It is an attribute that involves cooperation among individuals as well as new levels of understanding, trust, and
Human Natural Beings • 87 confidence in the motivations of others. However, cultural understandings and ways of doing things changed slowly. There were so few individuals in these early groups that new ways of seeing and understanding the world or making new tools were often not validated because of the absence of an appreciative audience. It appears that H. erectus populations living between 2 million and 500,000 years ago may have exhibited less sexual dimorphism than their immediate ancestors. This evidence, coupled with their movement into new landscapes in Eurasia and the changes that had already been taking place and that were continuing to occur in Africa, suggest that diminished sexual dimorphism was likely associated with new forms of social organization. Leibowitz suggests that adult males may have been integrated into the juvenile, adult female, and infant groups on a full-time basis. Their integration coincided with two other changes that facilitated both new forms of cooperation and further development of human natural beings themselves: (1) systematic hunting and hence the increased consumption of meat (a high energy, protein-rich food source); and (2) appearance of spatially organized, hunting and hearth-centered activities that were carried out more or less simultaneously in different places. If this change refracts new relations based in some complicated manner on sex differences, then shifts in the ensembles of social relations refracting changes in the age structure of human populations occurred much more recently. Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee (2006) have argued that significant changes in the numbers of individuals surviving to adulthood—i.e., the ratio of older to younger individuals in a population—did not occur until the last 50,000 years or so. This change, they argued, was not a biological one but rather one rooted in culture and social relations. In practical terms, it means that there were then grandmothers and grandfathers, repositories of practical knowledge, who could share that information with the younger generations of the social groups.
Marx on the Naturalization of Social Inequality Compare the following statements made by Marx about Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The first was made less than a month after its publication. The second was made two and a half years later. Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method. (Marx 1859/1983: 551) I’m amused that Darwin, whom I’ve been taking another look, should say that he also applies the “Malthusian” theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr. Malthus’s case, the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but—only with
88 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist its geometric progression—to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes [i.e., war of all against all] and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which civil society figures as an “intellectual animal kingdom,” whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society. (Marx 1862/1985: 381)
What stands out in both quotations is Marx’s critique of the naturalization of social inequalities, the transposition of capitalist social relations to nature, and their reappropriation into capitalist society as “natural” relations. One target was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the seventeenth-century materialist and political theorist who had argued that human individuals always act out of self-interest to satisfy their appetites and avoid their aversions, and that, in order to avoid being thrust back into a state of nature during the time of the English Civil War, they should submit their own individual wills to, or at least not resist, that of the sovereign in exchange for self-preservation and avoiding death (Wood and Wood 1997: 94–111). A second target was Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) who also assumed that self-interest and competition were the foundations of modern society, that poverty was a natural outcome of social relations, and that the tendency to over-reproduce far outstripped the capacity of society to produce food, which led to a limited food supply and a “struggle for existence” among its members. It is important to note here that Marx believed that “human nature” was not fixed but varied from one historical epoch to another, and that his concept of class struggle was different from those of Darwin who viewed struggle between different individuals of the same species in terms of differential reproduction and survival, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), and Malthus who viewed struggle in terms of limitations imposed on society as a whole by its environment (Bowler 1976: 639, 647–50). In 1875, Frederick Engels made a similar point with regard to “bourgeois Darwinians” who saw only struggle for existence in nature where only a few years earlier they “laid emphasis on co-operation”:1 All that the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence boils down to is an extrapolation from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the bellum omnium contra omnes and of bourgeois-economic theory together with the Malthusian theory of population. Having accomplished this feat . . . these people proceed to re-extrapolate the same theories from organic nature to history, and then claim to have proved their validity as eternal laws of human society. (Engels 1875/1991: 107–8)
The questions are: What happened in the thirteen years that intervened between Marx’s letter and that of Engels? What were the relationships of the liberals and socialists that Engels called bourgeois Darwinians to the development of anthropology?
Human Natural Beings • 89 When Darwin was composing The Origin of Species in the 1840s and 1850s, many of the concepts (e.g. evolution) and metaphors (e.g. “struggle for existence” or “survival of the fittest”) that he would eventually use had already been employed by others. In a real sense, they had entered into the public domain and were being deployed by naturalists, political economists, and social commentators at a time when the popularity of reductive materialist arguments was on the rise in some circles and challenged in others, especially in those with strong religious convictions. The advocates of this reductionist standpoint were attempting to explain the development of human society as well as human psychology and social organization in terms of natural laws that were derived from biology or even physics; their perspective frequently emphasized the naturalness of hierarchy, gradualism, or equilibrium. What many but not all of the advocates of this standpoint attempted to do was replace the notion of divine intervention with the “laws of nature.” Moreover, their efforts were facilitated by the fact that they also used the same conceptual frameworks and drew on the same analogies and metaphors to describe the human and natural realms. As a result, it was not uncommon by the 1850s for writers to slip between claims that human beings had a nature, and that nature had a moral economy (Jones 1980: 1–9). These tendencies became increasingly common in many countries after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 (e.g. Glick 1988). Twelve years later, Darwin (1874/1998) published his views about the human species and the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of primitive and civilized peoples in The Descent of Man. Darwinism and evolutionism were concerned with the individual, with the evolution of the human psyche and intelligence, and with the evolution of human social and social organization. While they were liberal reactions against entrenched aristocratic and conservative understandings of the world, they also became part of emerging discourses about individualism, meritocracy, the struggle for existence, and scientific racism that came to be called Social Darwinism after 1879; however, many features and metaphors, like “the struggle for existence” or “nature red in tooth and claw,” associated with Social Darwinism were in use before Darwin wrote either The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man. While it is possible to argue that Darwin was a Social Darwinist, it is also clear that some of his followers were socialists and others were not. Anthropology—an emerging discipline concerned with human variation, the evolution of human societies, and the cultural practices and beliefs of marginal peoples—also began to coalesce rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s (e.g. Hammond 1980; Harvey 1983; Kelly 1981; Stocking 1987; Weikart 1999; Weindling 1989: 11–59). Its early practitioners often had the same understandings of human beings, human diversity, and societal evolution and made use of the same analogies and metaphors as Darwin and his followers. However, anthropology was never a politically homogeneous discipline even at its inception. Some early figures in the history of anthropology—like Franz Boas (1858–1942) or Robert H. Lowie (1883–1957) in the United States—were socialists who rejected the positivism of the
90 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist social evolutionary perspectives and replaced them instead with empiricist-inspired and grounded studies of the cultural practices of particular communities, populations rather than types of individuals, the weaknesses of scientific racist arguments, or the politics of science (Pittenger 1993). For example, Lowie was highly critical of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who was one of the leading exponents of Darwin’s thought in Germany; at the same time, he praised the writings of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), especially his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Kropotkin 1904/1989) and of the socialist Alfred Russel Wallace. For our purposes in this book, it is worth noting that discourses which naturalize social hierarchy and power relations have been and continue to be pervasive and influential in anthropological practice and theory and their appropriations by states including socialist ones (e.g. Patterson and Spencer 1995; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). It is also clear, as the letters quoted above indicate, that Marx and Engels were early opponents of the naturalization of cultural categories. In this chapter, we examined how Marx’s materialism was an outcome of his efforts as a student to bring together the arts and sciences and then, a few years later, to address questions concerned with the emergence and development of human natural beings and their relationship with the worlds in which they lived. For Marx, the attraction of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was precisely its materialist foundations. One can only presume that Marx would have applauded subsequent clarifications of the underlying mechanisms of descent with modification and speciation as well as of the historically contingent and ever-changing structure of the world in which these mechanisms operate. We then moved to an examination of Engels’s essay on the role of labor in the transition from non-human primate to human natural being and suggested that Marx agreed with the views of his longtime friend. We also saw that the broad outlines of Engels’s argument have stood the test of time, although the kinds of detailed information available today are infinitely richer than when he wrote. Engels linked the emergence of human natural beings with a series of interconnected changes in the corporeal organization of our ancestors that involved bipedalism, changes in the anatomy and dexterity of the hand, expansion and reorganization of the brain, tool-making, language, and the elaboration of culture. We then examined data clarifying these developments; some of the data derived from the investigations of neuroanatomists, while others came from paleoanthropological inquiries in African and Eurasia. Finally, we raised questions about the kinds of social relations that might have existed in these early communities, and how issues of mortality, fertility, life expectancy, and life history might have effected and produced diverse social structures. There is, however, another set of linkages between Marx, Darwin, and their successors that we explored: the naturalization of social inequalities through the use of folk categories that are understood as the biological categories of Western modernity.
– 4– History, Culture, and Social Formation Marx read widely in anthropology and history in the 1870s. He filled fifty notebooks about Russia and, between 1879 and 1882, took more than 450 pages of notes interspersed with commentaries on topics as diverse as prehistoric Europe, the history of India, Dutch colonialism, family and gender in Roman society, and American Indian societies (Anderson 2002; Smith 2002). Only about a third of the notes were transcribed and published by Lawrence Krader in The Ethnological Notebooks (Marx 1880–2/1974). It was the second time in his career that Marx read extensively about non-Western societies; the earlier one occurred between 1853 and 1859 when he wrote articles about India, China, and the Ottoman Empire for the New York Tribune (Avineri 1968). Marx’s interest in anthropology and history raises two interrelated questions: If his overriding concern was capitalist society, as some have claimed, then why did he read so extensively about non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies? Did his theoretical standpoint and understanding of these societies change in significant way between the 1850s and the 1870s? The presupposition underlying the first question is that Marx saw the study of non-capitalist or pre-capitalist societies in the 1870s as distinct from and unrelated to that of capitalism. For later commentators, it was alternatively a grander project, a diversion from the really important project, pedantry, a sign of depression over the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, and even an indication of encroaching senility. In contrast, David Smith (2002: 78–9) has argued that it is difficult to sustain either the presupposition or the conclusions drawn from it, since Marx was still actively working on the second and third volumes of Capital in the 1870s, and, at the same time, was preparing a new edition of the first volume as well as a French translation which combined elements of the first and second German editions of that volume (Anderson 2002: 87). Smith further suggests that Marx’s turn to anthropology and history had a lot to do with the subject matter that the latter was planning to discuss in the second volume. In volume one, as you will recall, Marx (1863–7/1976: 711– 61) discussed the “simple reproduction of capital” and drew most of his examples from the British Isles. In the second volume, he would discuss the “accumulation and reproduction of capital on an expanded scale” (Marx 1865–1885/1981: 565–99). Smith writes that, at this point, Marx needed to delve further into the multicultural specificity of the world that capitalism was seeking to conquer. . . . Now he needed to know concretely, in exact detail, what
91
92 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist capital could expect to confront in its global extension. So it should not be surprising that Marx chose to investigate non-Western societies precisely at this point. Euro-American capital was speeding into a world dense with cultural difference. To understand this difference, and the difference it makes for capital, Marx needed to know as much as possible about noncapitalist social structures. (Smith 2002: 79)
In other words, Marx’s turn to anthropology and history was not distinct from his concern with capitalism but rather was an integral part of that project. With regard to the second question, Marx’s theoretical standpoint and understanding of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies did change during his career (e.g. Krader 1975). The changes are perhaps most apparent in his discussions of transition, especially the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx developed one explanation in the 1840s, which relied heavily on Adam Smith’s writings; it suggests that human society had developed through a progression of stages from primitive communism through feudalism to capitalism (e.g. Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 482–5). In this perspective, the motor driving the evolution of class and property relations was set in motion by the growth of trade and competition and involved the structural differentiation of roles within the labor process (Brenner 1989). This has frequently been characterized and criticized as a unilinear and Eurocentric perspective. However, as Kevin Anderson (2002: 86) notes, Marx’s “references to [European] colonialism as a source of civilization and progress had largely disappeared” by 1857, when he began to develop a second explanation of transition. This explanation was elaborated in works written from that date onward—notably the Grundrisse, Capital, and The Ethnological Notebooks (Marx 1857–8/1973, 1863–7/1977, 1880–2/1974). In these, he abandoned the earlier model and viewed social change in historical-dialectical terms. He paid more attention to the variability of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist communal societies, made the concept of modes of production the centerpiece of his analysis, suggested that the various modes of production were differentially or variably resistant to change, and implied that not all societies formed in the same way or passed through the same succession of modes of production. Moreover, he continually clarified and refined his argument about transition. For example, in the 1867 English edition of Capital, vol. 1, Marx (1863–7/1977: 91) wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” When the French edition was published eight years later, he had modified the passage and made the implications of his analysis of capitalist development more transparent: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those which follow it on the industrial path [échelle], the image of its own future” (Marx 1875/1963: 549 quoted by Anderson 2002: 88 with emphasis added). Thus, Marx was already explicitly clear about the possibility of alternative pathways of development for capitalist societies by the 1870s and for non-industrial and non-Western societies more than a decade earlier.
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 93 The goals of this chapter are to look at Marx’s conceptual framework especially with regards to the diversity of human societies and of the modes of production that constitute them (including those that might be residual, dominant, or emergent in any given society); his notions of historical trajectories and the historically determined contingency of transitions; and how, given this standpoint, he might have dealt with the enormous amount of information about pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies that archaeologists, sociocultural anthropologists (ethnologists), and historians have gathered in the last 150 years.
Marx’s Historical-Dialectical Conceptual Framework Marx’s empirical anthropology was underpinned by a historical-dialectical notion of society. In this regard, his views bore a generic resemblance to those of Hegel. Both saw human society as a process of becoming. In Hegel’s view, the dialectical progression of human history and society toward emancipation culminated in Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the constitutional monarchies of the early nineteenth century. In Marx’s view, the realm of individual freedom, which Hegel claimed had already been fully realized in the Prussian state, actually “lies . . . in the future as a real possibility of the present” (Fetscher 1991: 228) As Iring Fetscher put it, The dialectic of the productive forces and productive relations which effects [sic] historical progress offers in contrast to Hegel’s dialectic of world spirit no guarantee that the realm of freedom will be realized; it presents only the objective possibility of such a development. Should the historically possible revolutionizing of society not come about, then a relapse into barbarism (Luxemburg) or the “common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx) is also possible. (Fetscher 1991: 228)
This led Marx (e.g. 1852/1979) to consider factors such as contradiction, the balance of force among opposed groups, cultural beliefs, and historical contingency in his empirical studies of particular societies. Marx was also indebted to Hegel’s critique of the distinction that Kant drew between appearance and reality. Kant, as you will recall, had claimed that human beings only know things by their appearance, and that the real essence of the thing, the “thing-in-itself,” was unknowable. Hegel did not think that there were limits to the application of human knowledge; in contrast, he claimed that appearance and essence belong together, and that unfolding of consciousness or knowledge of the thing-in-itself is a dialectical process that self-corrects its own claims (e.g. Hartnack 1992). Marx (1857–8/1973: 100–8; 1861–3/1971: 536–7) addressed the relation between appearances and reality in the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value, where he provided a framework—a point of departure—for clarifying problems in order to gain practical understanding of everyday life in capitalist society. The
94 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist method he developed was analogous to peeling an onion layer by layer, revealing its internal structure with each successive layer until reaching its core, and then reassembling the whole. The technique involved looking behind and beneath superficial appearances, moving from the perceived concrete appearances by a process of abstraction (breaking the whole into mental constructs) and then back to the newly appreciated concrete whole with a greater understanding both of the unity of parts and whole and of the inner dynamics, structure, and contradictions of that totality. Marx’s ongoing historical analyses of particular societies underwrote a general conception of society which provided both a framework and a set of questions for further detailed, empirical sociohistorical studies of those and other historically specific societies. My goal in this section is to consider the conceptual underpinnings of his dialectical anthropology and some of its implications for anthropology today.
Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production Marx recognized the significance of the diversity of human societies. He also recognized the significance of the similarities and differences among them and attributed these to underlying structures that constituted an inner core beneath their surface appearances. He called these underlying structures modes of production. In a famous, often-cited passage, he described a mode of production in terms of an architectural metaphor: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a definite stage in development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. . . . At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure (Marx (1859/1970: 20).
Marx distinguished and contrasted the capitalist mode of production from a series of pre-capitalist modes of production. In his view, the four most distinctive features of industrial capitalist societies were commodity production; private ownership of the means of production; the social division of labor between a class whose
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 95 members owned the means of production and the direct producers who sold their labor power in order to produce and reproduce the conditions of their existence; and the appropriation by the owners of the surplus value created by the wage-workers. Due to these features, the emergence of industrial capitalism ushered in a whole new rhythm of history—an accelerated history—that was a consequence of continual innovations in the productive forces and the organization of production as well as continual disruption of social institutions and practices. Marx and Engels had already described this in the Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 486–7)
Both in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and in the Grundrisse, Marx (1858–8/1973: 471–514, 1859/1970: 21) mentioned six precapitalist modes of production—communal (original), Asiatic, ancient, Germanic, feudal, and Slavonic.1 He sketched in varying detail the structural features of each, portraying the last five as alternative pathways away from the conditions of the original primitive community. He phrased these developments in terms of the dissolution of communal property and the consequent development of new forms of property relationships and social divisions of labor. He would elaborate this in subsequent works, most notably The Ethnological Notebooks. Primitive communism Natural communities of human beings were essential for the original form of landed property. These communities were “a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land” (Marx 1857– 8/1973: 472; emphasis in the original). The communality of these groups—their shared customs, language, and kinship—combined with various external factors— such as environmental conditions and the circumstances in which they lived—to shape their character, beliefs, and practices. Thus, culture and nature itself provide the bases for the appropriation of the objective conditions of life for their members as well as foundations for their activity. This meant that “each individual has the status of proprietor or possessor only as a member of the community” (Lefort 1978/1986: 143). Another way of saying this is that all members of the community participate in the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods, and that if sharing breaks down, the community ceases to exist (Leacock 1982: 159). Another feature of these original communities—i.e. primitive communities in a temporal rather than developmental sense—was that they were diverse (Patterson 1988). As Marx (1857–8/1973: 472) put it, “this form, with the same land-relation as its foundation, can realize itself in very different ways” (cf. Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 22–3).
96 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist The common thread of human society, in Krader’s (1976: 223) view, is life in the community, where the opposition between the private and the public is non-existent or very poorly developed. This thread is broken, however, with the appearance of social classes, when men begin to pursue individual or individual-class interests in the context of the continuing public institutions of the communal society. These institutions and the community itself are transformed in the process, as the structures of the old mode of production are displaced by those of the new. This focuses attention on the dual character of the relations of production and how they are transformed. It compels us, on the one hand, to consider how the society was organized for the production, circulation, distribution, and consumption of goods. It forces us, on the other, to examine how the organization in which the production of goods, knowledge, and human beings took place was itself reproduced or transformed. It also focuses attention on the contradictions that emerged within the relations of production and how these were resolved. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond (1951/1996) referred to these tensions as kin/civil conflict and pointed to the fact that their resolution was potentially always a two-way street. In some instances, the contradictions were resolved through leveling mechanisms that inhibited social differentiation within the community, through emigration by part of the community, and even through murder. In other instances, they were resolved by the simultaneous dissolution of the old social relations and the emergence of new ones, whose appearance was often obscured or disguised by the fact that they were dressed up in old, familiar ideological clothes—i.e., socially and culturally meaningful categories, practices, and beliefs (Marx 1852/1979: 103–4; 1880–2/1974: 164, 329–30). In a phrase, the dissolution of the primitive community involves either internal differentiation within the group and the formation of the state, or alternatively encapsulation by and enmeshment in societies that were already classstratified and state-based—i.e., civilized. Read has observed that The presuppositions of any mode of production are the conditions that constitute a mode of production but are not produced from them. Their original appearances are unimaginable or unexplainable according to the particular protocols and practices of that mode of production. Thus, . . . the very question of these presuppositions is concerned with the question of what could be called “ideology,” or the manner in which a particular mode of production justifies itself by rewriting, or over-coding, its own emergence. (Read 2003: 39–40)
The Asiatic mode of production and the Slavonic transition As small communities pass from one or another variant of primitive communism to societies manifesting the Asiatic mode of production,2 they retain ownership or control of the land and do not develop distinctions between food production and manufacture or between town and countryside. The members of a community have access to its resources by virtue of their membership in the community and participation in its activities (Marx
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 97 1857–8/1973: 472–4, 494; 1863–7/1977: 477–9). Because of its self-sufficiency, the community is relatively impervious to the effects of exchange, which, when it occurs, takes place along the borders with other communities and is limited to surplus goods or labor that ultimately satisfy the collective needs of its members (Lefort 1978/1986: 152). Marx described the resiliency of communal property in Asiatic communities when he wrote: In the oriental form, the loss [of property] is hardly possible, except by means of altogether external influences, since the individual member of the commune never enters into the relation of freedom towards it in which he could lose his (objective, economic) bond with it. He is rooted to the spot, ingrown. This also has to do with the combination of manufacture and agriculture, of town (village) and countryside. (Marx (1857–8/1973: 494; emphasis in the original) The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name—this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their neverceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic units of society remains untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 479)
Marx discerned two variants of the Asiatic mode of production. In the more democratic form, rural village communities existed independently side by side; they were based on an amalgamation of food production and handicraft production and a fixed division of labor. Besides the mass of the members of each community who were occupied in much the same way, there were perhaps a dozen or so individuals who were maintained at the expense of the community as a whole—the headman, the scribe, the teacher, a few artisans, a poet, and a prayer leader were only a few of the specialists mentioned by Marx (1863–7/1977: 478–9). In the more despotic form of the Asiatic mode of production, several of the independent villages were enmeshed in a larger state-based society that claimed ownership of the land and resources of which the village communities were merely the possessors. The state, which represented the unity of the wider society, was an excrescence on the village communities; its officials were supported by tribute in the form of surplus goods and labor appropriated from those rural communities. Cities, to the extent that they appeared at all, developed in areas favorable to external trade, where the heads of state or their representatives could exchange the goods and services they had appropriated from the communities for goods or services that were not produced locally (Marx 1857–8/1973: 472–4; 1880–2/1974: 329). Marx typically characterized societies manifesting the Asiatic mode of production as relatively impervious to change. There was oscillation between the democratic and
98 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist despotic forms because of the relative instability of the state forms, on the one hand, and resistance by the autonomous communities that had become enmeshed in their webs of tributary relations, on the other (Gailey 2003). However, he also portrayed the Slavonic mode of production as a transitional form resulting in serfdom; it occurred in those circumstances where the headmen of Asiatic societies were able to modify the communal property of the villages and appropriate it for their own, potentially creating serfs who, while they had effective possession of the land, were compelled by extra-economic means to transfer goods, labor, or both to the lords (Marx 1857–8/1973: 472–4, 497; Hilton 1991; Ste Croix 1981: 135–6, 210–11). The ancient mode of production A second form of property was that found in many of the diverse societies that constituted the social mosaic of the classical Greek and Roman worlds (Marx 1857–8/1973: 474–6; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 33; Finley 1973, 1991; Hindess and Hirst 1975: 80–108; Ste Croix 1981). Community was once again the precondition for their existence; however, in these instances, it was a community composed of independent, self-sufficient landowners who maintained their equality as citizens by participating in the activities of their city-states, such as the protection of its public (state) lands, waging war with neighboring groups, and managing relations with the outside world. Marx put it in the following way: The commune—the state—is, on one side, the relation of these free and equal private proprietors to one another, their bond against the outside, and is at the same time their safeguard. . . . The presupposition of the survival of the community is the preservation of equality among its free self-sustaining peasants, and their own labour as the condition for the survival of their property. . . . The survival of the commune is the reproduction of all its members as self-sustaining peasants whose surplus time belongs precisely to the commune, the work of war etc. The property in one’s own labour is mediated by property in the condition of labour—the hide of the land, guaranteed in turn by the existence of the commune, and that in turn by surplus labor in the form of military service etc by the commune members. It is not cooperation in wealth-producing labour by means of which the commune member reproduces himself, but rather cooperation in labour for communal interests (imaginary and real) for the upholding of the association inwardly and outwardly. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 475–6)
In other words, the independent peasant-citizens cooperated not as direct producers but rather as citizens with particular obligations to the state and rights that derived from their citizenship. For example, citizens were obliged to protect state property or wage war, but only they had the right to appropriate surplus labor or goods resulting from plunder or tribute. Social-class distinctions between direct producers and nonproducers in the ancient communities were defined in terms legal statuses, such as slave or citizen. These statuses were often further complicated, because they could also intersect with groups that were defined either by kinship, place of residence within the city-state, or historical circumstances (Marx 1857–8/1973: 478).
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 99 Marx was acutely aware of historical contingency and the specificity of the sociopolitical dynamics that shaped these ancient communities: The commune, although already a product of history here, not only in fact but also known as such, and therefore possessing an origin, is the presupposition of property in land and soil—i.e., of the relation of the working subject to the natural presuppositions of labour as belonging to him—but this belonging [is] mediated by his being a member of the state—hence by a presupposition regarded as divine etc. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 475; emphasis in the original) The difficulties which the commune encounters can only arise from other communes, which have either previously occupied the land and soil, or which disturb the commune in its own occupation. War is therefore the great comprehensive task, the great communal labor which is require either to occupy the objective conditions of being there alive, or to protect and perpetuate the occupation. Hence the commune consisting of families initially organized in a warlike way—as a system of war and army, and this is one of the conditions of its being there as a proprietor. The concentration of the residences in town [is the] basis of this bellicose organization. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 474)
The expanded reproduction of these communities involved wars of conquest, plunder, increased reliance on slave production on state lands, possibilities for the concentration of property ownership by some citizens at the expense of other citizens, the fragmentation of estates, the growth of foreign (overseas) trade, the monetization of the economy, and even the appearance of wage-workers which created contradictions that resulted, at times, in the restructuring of social relations even in circumstances where the forces of production were poorly developed (Banaji 2001). The Germanic mode of production In an effort to understand the Germanic tribes on the periphery of the Roman State, Marx considered a third route away from primitive communism. In his view, Germanic society manifested a communal form of production in which the social and political-economic relationships that joined its members together had to be continuously renewed (Bonte 1977: 174–6). The individual was a private proprietor of the land and had access to the commons through participation in periodic gatherings of the community. Here, the relations of production are based in the household. Social continuity as well as the use of common lands and other resources depended on the household’s participation in larger community structures and activities. Marx conceptualized this mode production in the following way: Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests, long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in periodic gatherings-together (Vereinigung) of the commune members, although their
100 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, and history, etc. The commune thus appears as the coming-together (Vereinigung) not as a being-together (Verein); as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unit. The commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or a political body, as in classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city. For the commune to come into real existence, the free landed proprietors have to hold a meeting, whereas e.g. in Rome it exists even apart from these assemblies in the existence of the city itself and of the officials presiding over it. True the ager publicus, the communal or people’s land, as distinct from individual property, also occurs among the Germanic tribes. It takes the form of hunting land, grazing land, timber land, etc., the part of the land which cannot be divided if it to serve as means of production in this specific form. But this ager publicus does not appear, as with the Romans e.g. as the particular economic presence of the state as against the private proprietors, so that these latter are actually private proprietors as such, in so far as they are excluded, deprived, like the plebians, from using the ager publicus. Among the Germanic tribes, the ager publicus appears rather merely as a complement to individual property, and figures as property only to the extent that it is defended militarily as the common property of one tribe against a hostile tribe. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 483; emphasis in the original)
Thus, the diverse forms of Germanic society were focused on the land. This contrasted with the emphasis of ancient societies on the city; of Asiatic societies which exhibited a unity of town and countryside; of feudal societies which began with land as “seat of history [and] whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction between town and countryside; [and of] the modern [age which] is the urbanization of the countryside, not the ruralization of the city as in classical antiquity” (Marx 1857–8/1973: 479). Marx (1881/1983: 108; emphasis in the original) would later add that “the agricultural rural commune therefore emerged in Germania from a more archaic type; it was the product of spontaneous development rather than being imported ready-made from Asia. It may also be found in Asia—in the East Indies— always as the final term or last period of the archaic formation.” It is important to keep in mind, as Pierre Bonte (1977: 176) remarked, that Marx’s comments on the historic specificity of Germanic societies have been placed in a different context by societal evolutionists who, when they mention it at all, see this mode of production as a developmental stage between primitive communism and feudalism. Antonio Gilman (1996) has also contrasted Marx’s view of Germanic societies with conceptualizations of hierarchically organized chiefdoms that have tended to dominate anthropological and archaeological discussions of social stratification from the 1960s onward. These notions have also been questioned by Carole Crumley (1987) and Christine Gailey (1987) who respectively emphasized the importance of heterarchy and ambiguity in kin-stratified, communal societies. The feudal mode of production Marx’s discussion of feudalism was neither straightforward nor systematic, as Perry Anderson (1974a: 411–28), Eric Hobsbawm (1964:
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 101 41–9), and others have observed. 3 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 33–5) described feudalism as starting during the Middle Ages in the countryside; its genesis involved the transformation of structures that occurred with the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire—the deterioration of agricultural production, the collapse of industry and trade, and the decrease of both urban and rural populations. In their words, These conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, together with the influence of the Germanic military constitution, led to the development of feudal property. Like tribal and communal property, it is also based on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of landownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as just as much as the ancient communal property, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production. This feudal structure of landownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of the trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual [organized into guilds]. (Marx and Engels 1845– 6/1976: 34; emphasis in the original)
Marx and Engels often linked feudalism with serfdom. Marx (1868/1987a: 557) portrayed feudal society as a “struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom.” Engels (1876–8/1987: 164–6; 1884/1972: 213–5) stressed the importance of smallscale agriculture in feudal society as well as the internal stratification that existed in rural communities during the European Middle Ages with freeholders at one end and serfs at the other. In addition, both saw small-scale craft production and trade in the towns as developments that would eventually erode the feudal class structure and pave the way for capitalism (e.g. Marx 1864–94/1981: 443–52, 751–4, 917–38; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 484–9). Feudalism, for historian Guy Bois (1976/1984: 398), was a combination of smallscale individual production and “the seigneurial levy secured by a constraint of political (or extra-economic) origin.” Agricultural production was predominant in the total economy. It was small-scale production because of the constraints imposed by the limited development of agricultural technology; thus, investments in agriculture rested on the shoulders of the peasant producers. There was social stratification within the village community between those peasant production units that owned ploughs and those smallholders who eked out a livelihood with their inadequate landholdings and labor. The various layers of the village community were joined together by the shared possession of pastures, woodlands, and other resources; the artisans and merchants in the towns were also organized into communities
102 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist (guilds) that strived to protect the interests and knowledge of their members from the exactions of the lords. The manorial estates of the nobility were worked with the same agricultural implements and techniques as those of the peasant landholders and sat like an excrescence on the whole system of rural production. “The levy was the principal aspect of the lord’s economic role” (Bois 1976/1984: 396). The levy imposed on the peasant producers by the lords provided the former with rent and had a constant but varied indirect impact on the activities of the latter. Since the agricultural technology and techniques were relatively stable, the growth of feudal society involved the addition of new production units in the countryside; its decline entailed a reduction in the number of production units. In Bois’s view, when the possibilities for expansion were exhausted, the contradictions that had accumulated during the process of growth were honed, the existing forms of exploitation disintegrated, and the relations of production were reorganized (Bois 1976/1984: 393–408). In this regard, the decline of the feudal mode of production in Europe mirrored its crystallization in the tenth century, which involved not only the disintegration of an earlier mode of production still rooted to some extent in the productive activity of slaves but also the adoption of more productive agricultural techniques and technology, the growth of trade, and the appearance of a market for land. It involved a new dynamic, one that was based on interdependence and inequality with new forms of surplus extraction (Bois 1989/1992: 88–93). In the mid 1970s, economist Samir Amin (1973/1976: 13–16) drew a distinction between the primitive communal mode of production, on the one hand, and the other pre-capitalist modes of production discussed above, on the other. He grouped the latter into a single category, which he called the “tribute-paying” mode of production. Amin then asked whether the feudal mode of production was merely a “borderline” case that was peripheral to a more “central” tributary mode of production. In posing the question, he was attempting to deal with the historic specificity of the European case. His standpoint implies the coexistence or articulation of the feudal and other modes of production as it is manifested in historically specific societies. In this regard, for example, Marx had written that Since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form, or even travestied. . . . In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 105–7) In Western Europe, . . . the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to the antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 931)
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 103 This has two implications. First, societies are “concrete combinations of different modes of production organized under the dominance of one of them” (Anderson 1974b: 22n6; emphasis in the original); this perspective was subsequently adopted by anthropologist Eric Wolf (1982: 79–88) and historian John Haldon (1993: 63–9) among others. The second implication is that it is possible to speak, as literary critic Raymond Williams (1977: 121–8) has done, of each historically specific society as a combination of residual (antiquated), dominant, and emergent cultures or modes of production.
Societies and Cultures Modes of production have been described as the “bare bones of a Marxist analysis of historical process” (Hilton 1985: 6), and as “the base of our understanding of the variety of human societies and their interaction, as well as of their historical dynamics” (Hobsbawm 1984: 46). They consist of the unobservable processes and relations that are simultaneously revealed in the everyday life of a given society and obscured or concealed by that phenomenal world of appearances. They are the “bare bones” or the inner layers of historically specific societies that are covered by muscle, flesh, skin, and even warts. Another way of saying this is that historically particular societies are totalities that exist at different levels; they are structured and historically determined complexes, whose parts are not only continually changing but are also linked to one another by constantly shifting, changing, and dynamic sets of relationships and contradictions. Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 36) developed the base–superstructure model of a mode of production in The German Ideology in the mid 1840s, a model that Marx made famous in the passage from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy cited earlier in this chapter. Here, as you will recall, Marx wrote about the “the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social consciousness” (1859/1970: 20). This passage has been interpreted in three ways. One is that the associated forms of social consciousness are mere reflections of the economic base. A second interpretation is that the forms of social consciousness constitute a superstructure parallel to the legal and political superstructure. These are reductive arguments that make it difficult to consider art and philosophy, for example, as anything but epiphenomena of the economy or the state. A third interpretation is that the associated form of social consciousness—that is, culture—is intertwined with praxis and social relations as these are manifested in particular societies. This view also derives from The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels wrote The production of ideas, conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life.
104 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men [and women] are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men [and women], as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. . . . Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer the retain semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men [and women] developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. (Marx and Engels 1845– 6/1976: 36–7; emphasis added)
This third interpretation allows us to make sense of passages that do not employ a reductive base–superstructure model: for example, those in The Eighteenth Brumaire, which refer to French social structure in the mid nineteenth century, or in the Grundrisse, which are concerned with Greek art and myth in classical antiquity and the fascination of the German bourgeoisie with those forms. Consider the following: Upon the different forms of property [i.e., big landed property and capital], upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class [both the aristocratic and capitalist fractions] creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they are the real motives and starting-point of his activity. (Marx 1852/1979: 128) Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. (Marx 1852/1979: 103–4) In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are all out of proportion to the general development of the society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization. . . . But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 110–11)
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 105 In these passages there are not only correspondences between culture, on the one hand, and the forms of production and social relations, on the other, but also reciprocal interactions between them. Culture is the expression of life as it is shaped by historically specific forms of production and ensembles of social relations (Williams 1983/1989). It involves both objectification (the process of rendering human needs into material objects that satisfy needs) and materialization (the embodiment within those objects of social relations) (Jones 2002: 12). It is “bound up with an existing state of affairs and . . . is a condition which makes it possible to change that state of affairs” (Outhwaite 1991: 128). As Marx put it, In order to examine the connection between spiritual [i.e., intellectual] production and material production, it is above all necessary to grasp the latter not as a general category but in definite historical form. Thus for example different kinds of spiritual production correspond to the capitalist mode of production and to the mode of production of the Middle Ages. If material production itself is not conceived in its specific historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other. (Marx 1861–3/1963: 285)
Here, the relation between culture, on the one hand, and the economy or the state, on the other, is complex not simple and multi-directional rather than a one-way street. In a phrase, culture is the arena in which the ambiguities, antagonisms, and contradictions of everyday life are expressed, reproduced, and occasionally resolved.
Pre-Capitalist Societies: Limited, Local, and Vital Marx was struck by the diversity of human societies, past and present. He suggested that a relatively small number of modes of production, representing alternative pathways out of the archaic or primitive communal forms of society, underpinned this diversity. In his words, The archaic or primary formation of our globe itself contains a series of layers from various ages, the one superimposed on the other. Similarly, the archaic formation of society exhibits a series of different types. . . . These older types all rest upon natural kinship relations between members of the commune. (Marx 1881/1983: 103) The history of the decline of the primitive communities has still to be written (it would be wrong to put them all on the same plane; in historical as in geological formations, there is a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary, and other types). (Marx 1881/1983: 107)
Moreover, societies manifesting one or another of the pre-capitalist modes of production were only “limited” and “local developments of humanity” (Marx 1857–8/
106 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist 1973: 409–10), but they possessed “an incomparably greater [natural] vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman, and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies” (Marx 1881/1983: 107). He believed that “we should be thoroughly acquainted with all the historical twists and turns” of the archaic formations (Marx 1881/1983: 106–7). One reason for his interest was the spread of capitalism from the mid nineteenth century onward and its articulation with various kinds of pre-capitalist societies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas; the diversity of these articulations provided alternative snapshots into what potentially could happen in the future. Let us briefly consider two points that are relevant to this discussion of pre-capitalist societies and cultures. First, Marx characterized the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist societies in terms of the relentless drive of the former toward universality, its constant development of the forces of production, its continual creation of new needs, its exploitation of both workers and nature, its continual destruction of local or national barriers and traditions, and its reworking of old ways of life. He also pointed to the contradictions reproduced in capitalist society and to the resistance they provoked. He wrote that capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life. It is destructive toward all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since, every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 409–10; emphasis in the original)
Thus, the development of capitalist society was fraught with contradictions that were concrete and historically specific (context-dependent) to the capitalist mode of
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 107 production (e.g. wage-laborer vs. capitalist, the use value of commodities vs. their exchange value, or the clash between capitalist and small peasant property). On the one hand, they have contributed to the universal development of the forces of production and the productive power of labor; on the other hand, they have done so at a tremendous cost to the members of the societies experiencing that development. Marx (1868/1987b: 552) saw the development of large-scale industry and all that it implies as “the mother of the antagonism, but also as the producer of the material and intellectual conditions for resolving these antagonisms.” Second, dialectical contradictions were the motors of historical movement. For Marx, these internal antagonisms had the capacity to erode and dissolve old social forms and to underwrite the crystallization of new ones (Bhaskar 1991a; Godelier 1966/1972: 345–61). They were historical, structural, and context specific. They appear under historically specific circumstances and obscure the conditions in which they were formed. While the interactions of these countervailing structures and relations with one another and with other parts of the social whole in particular historical contexts can reinforce, hinder, subvert, transform, or resolve the antagonisms over time, they do not always do so. Whether or not change occurs depends on the balance of forces that exist at a particular moment in the production and reproduction of a given society. As historian John Haldon notes, Different modes of production place different constraints upon the possibilities for change, on the one hand, and upon the structures of political power, on the other, which are particularly important for understanding the internal dynamic of a given historical social formation. (Haldon 1993: 57) A mode of production cannot of itself give rise to a different mode of production, but it can generate at times the conditions that may lead to its break up or transformation. (Haldon 2006: 193; emphasis in the original)
This is why Marx (1863–7/1977: 479; 1881/1983: 107) spoke not only about the vitality and resilience of primitive communal societies—their apparent unchangeability and tendency to reproduce existing social relations—but also about the relentless drive of capitalism to transform nature, itself, and other societies around it. It also accounts for Marx’s comments about the “continual retrogressions and circular movements” of history and the low regard he had for ideas of progress, especially those that ignored the ordinary peoples of society (Engels and Marx 1844–5/1975: 83–4). Third, Marx used abstractions that operated at different scales and levels of generality in his discussions of sociohistorical change. In some instances, he seems to have been using a telescope to capture the “big picture” in a sentence or two—e.g. his highly abstract claim that “changes in the economic foundation lead soon or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” (Marx 1859/1970: 21).
108 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist In other instances, he seems to have employed binoculars or even a microscope to examine and depict almost day-to-day changes in the balance of force in France in 1848–51 and again in 1870–1, both of which were particularly volatile moments in its history (Marx 1852/1979; 1871/1986). Each perspective allowed him to organize information and to grasp the particularities of society in a different manner. Each allowed him to open up a distinctive line of inquiry. Shifting from one level of abstraction to another allowed him to explore the sociohistorical dynamics of various societies, to compare their similarities and differences to examine the conditions in which they were produced and reproduced, and to develop more general arguments about the significance of the insights he gained. Studying these dynamics at local or regional levels also yields a much more complicated picture of sociohistorical development than ones that project them either as a unilinear succession of stages leading from barbarism to civilization or as the unfolding of some natural potential for internal differentiation and the formation of structure, and that avoid altogether the issue of contingency.
Human History is Messy Archaeologists, historians, and historically minded anthropologists study past societies. While archaeologists rely on material remains and spatial associations that have survived to the present to reconstruct the tempo and mode of everyday life in some past society, historians use written records and historical anthropologists use interviews of living peoples combined with traditions and documents to accomplish that goal. Once we move beyond the specificities of the kinds of evidence and methods they use, all of them are concerned with the kinds of society and the varieties of social relations, processes, and contexts that produced those particular patterns of objects—including artifacts, texts, and traditions—recovered from the archaeological and historical records. The archaeological record provides virtually all of the evidence of human history until the last 5,000 years, when writing systems appeared in isolated parts of the world. These areas of limited literacy were like small islands in a vast sea. It has only been in the last century or so that literacy spread to many other parts of the world. As a result, archaeologists continue to provide much, but not all, of the evidence for human history well into the twenty-first century. During the twentieth century, many archaeologists have focused their efforts on three questions: (1) the origins of early human societies, which is typically viewed in relation to the development of tool-making; (2) the origins of pastoral and agricultural economies, which involves both the transformation and the development of the productive forces and the appearance of sedentism; and (3) the origins of states, which is often glossed as the rise of civilization or the appearance of cities.4 At the most general level of abstraction, they have confirmed that kin-communal societies both preceded and were contemporary with pre-capitalist states, and that
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 109 industrial capitalism appeared rather late on the world stage, only during the last 500 or so years. They have demonstrated rather convincingly the diversity of societies across time and space, the diversity of their relationships with the natural world they inhabited, and the diversity of the trajectories of sociohistorical development in different parts of the world. They have found evidence that suggests the existence of social inequality in some societies and not in others. At a more concrete level, they have examined the internal dynamics and external relationships of some of these developmental trajectories, and have identified similar processes, conditions, or historical moments in some but not all of them. Given the messiness of human history, these are significant contributions to our understanding of what happened in the past. Let us highlight a few of the more salient ones. While there are some broad similarities between humans and modern chimpanzees, sharing seems to be a distinctly human feature. For example, there are published examples of modern chimpanzees making tools, cooperating during hunting, and even sharing prey with other participants and bystanders. What distinguishes these behaviors from human sharing is that they are independent or separate events, which are neither integrated into a cultural system nor are they regular, everyday occurrences (Ichikawa 2005: 151–7). For the most part, contemporary apes do not share with other members of their bands, and presumably our common ancestors 3–5 million years ago also did not share food regularly with one another either. Thus, there was conceivably a period in human history when our ancestors made stone tools, perhaps talked with one another, and even harvested or scavenged food side by side but did not share the products of their labor with one another. The advent of sharing dissolved this proto-mode of production; precisely when that occurred, however, is still hotly debated by archaeologists with estimates ranging from about 2 million to 50,000 years ago (Binford 1985; Isaac 1979). For most of history, human beings lived in small groups of individuals with whom they interacted on a regular basis for most of their lives. These bands ranged from a couple of hundred individuals during those parts of the year when they concentrated in particular localities to a dozen or so individuals when they dispersed; there were both ecological and social reasons for this pattern of aggregation and dispersion. Their mode of production was based on sharing the foods they foraged, trapped, hunted, or fished. Food was consumed immediately, either on the spot or shortly thereafter. While movable property—like carrying bags, clothing, or spears—might have been individually owned, land in a general sense and its resources were held in common with complex rules of access and equally complex and strict obligations to share with others written into the ethical fabric of everyday life (Barnard and Woodburn 1988). Because of the unity of the production process and the direct participation of all members in the band in the production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of socially produced goods, each individual was dependent on the group as a whole, and there was no structural difference between producers and non-producers. Such a distinction would exist for only a moment in time, and only
110 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist from the perspective of an individual who was too young for, too old for, or not a participant in a particular labor process. The distinction disappeared when the focus extended beyond the particular moment, the particular individual, or the particular work activity; it was inverted as a direct producer in one activity became a consumer in the next. Moreover, membership in these mobile bands was likely to have been fairly flexible as males, females, or both moved into and away from the core group during the course of their lives for various reasons, including interpersonal ones. Leadership, as Richard Lee (2005: 19) noted for a different context, was likely “subject to the constraints of popular opinion. . . . The leader of a band could persuade but not command. This important aspect of their way of life allowed for a degree of freedom unheard of in more hierarchically organized societies.” It is likely that there were probably also status distinctions in these communities reflecting age, gender, kin relations, and life experience among other things. It is also possible that the members of these ideologically egalitarian societies occasionally experienced individuals or groups among them who attempted to forge hierarchically ordered social relations; these efforts were likely tolerated briefly in some instances and resisted in others. Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, new modes of subsistence—pastoralism and plant cultivation—were grafted onto existing economies in various parts of both the old and new worlds (Balter 2007). Following herd animals and cultivating plants involve new relations between human communities and their natural environments. One of the most important is the delay between labor investments—e.g. preparing the land, planting the crop, and tending it—and the time at which they are actually consumed. During that period, other modes of subsistence must be productive enough to sustain the incipient herders and farmers. It is likely that agriculture, herding, and cultivation were only a few of a number of subsistence strategies during their initial phases of development, and that, as they grew more productive, their relative importance in terms of the amount of time and energy devoted to them increased relative to other subsistence practices in their communities (Flannery 1968). In the process, subsistence activities that were once important now became minor activities or were dropped altogether as steadily more time was devoted to the preparation of fields, the construction and repair of walls and canals, to tending the crops, or to moving herds from one seasonal pasture to another. In a phrase, their members reorganized and rescheduled the time they devoted to particular subsistence particular practices; in some instances, they may even have begun to specialize in certain activities at the expense of others creating new spatially organized, intraregional technical divisions of labor as a result of the new forms of cooperation which were emerging (e.g. Patterson 1999). These communities elaborated delayed-return economies that relied increasingly on the further development of food preservation and storage techniques (Testart 1982). Thus, foods that were acquired at one time of the year were processed and stored in order to be shared, consumed, or exchanged at a later time. The capacity to
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 111 store food and other resources for long periods underwrote formation of permanent settlements—that is, villages that were occupied on a year-round basis. In many but not all parts of the world, the appearance of sedentary villages was closely associated with the development of food production technologies such as plant cultivation in Mesopotamia or highland Mexico or net-fishing in coastal Peru (Moseley 1975). More importantly, these communities seem to have elaborated practices that involved the actualization of extra-domestic forms of social groups, such as clans or lineages, that were corporate landholding groups whose members placed new emphases on property rights and shared only with close kin or affines. As Alan Barnard and James Woodburn (1988: 11) note, these social relations were “usually but not always linked with delayed yields on labour.” They point out that the kinds of property rights that might have been elaborated include those over certain bodies and practices of knowledge, land and water sources, movable property, and the labor or reproductive capacities of particular categories of individuals (such as unmarried women). Archaeologists have shown that societies with these concerns regarding property, status differences, and some degree of centralized decision-making existed side by side with ones, like those described above, that exhibited little internal differentiation. Mesopotamia was an area where two forms of egalitarian, foodstoring agricultural societies with different spatial distributions coexisted during the sixth and fifth millennia BC (Flannery 2002; Frangipane 2007: 153). Their relations with each other and with contemporary pastoral peoples living around them were complex and shifting as social conditions changed. In the fishing-foraging and early farming communities on the central Peruvian coast of the fourth to the end of the first millennia BC, the relations of production that developed involved the elaboration of community-level relations and their articulation with the domestic level, where the real appropriation of raw materials continued to take place. The emergent community-level relations linked a new, spatially organized technical division of labor with traditional age- and genderbased activities. They also underwrote labor processes and activities—such as the construction of fish-drying terraces, monumental platform mounds, and irrigation systems—that were well beyond the capacities of a single or even a small number of cooperating households, and that constituted the conditions for the reproduction of the society. The reproduction of these societies depended on the continued participation of households in community-level structures and activities. The results of this were (1) that each member of the community was dependent on the group as a whole; (2) that all adults participated directly but differently in the production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of the social product; and (3) that it is difficult to discern status or wealth differences from the goods associated with human burials (Patterson 1991: 14–20). By 1000 BC, the societies on the central Peruvian coast were also linked with nearby communities that had similar but not necessarily identical forms of sociopolitical organization and with more distant societies in the Andes that potentially had quite different forms of surplus appropriation (Burger 1992).
112 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist The formation of social-class structures and state-based institutions never appear in isolation from one another or from other changes in a society. They involve the simultaneous dissolution of old community-level relations of production and their reconstitution along lines that facilitate the extraction of the labor or goods of one group by the members of another group. The appearance of exploitative social relations is related to other changes in the society and to the creation of new sociohistorical circumstances and balances of force within the society. Class and state formation are always contingent processes, one lane of a two-lane street—the other being the state/non-state transition or the disintegration of class structures as well as the institutions and practices of the states they support. They are often linked with violence, conquest, repression, and cooption, especially from the standpoint of peoples that become enmeshed in their relations. The appearance of social-class structures is always linked to the institutions, practices, and legal codes of the state, which simultaneously represent the interests of the dominant class and afford an arena of struggle for fractions within the ruling class. States ensure that bodies are counted for taxation and conscription, both of which require records (the origins of writing systems); that internal dissent is suppressed or deflected outward toward other communities; that bureaucracies are formed and overseers are selected; that stationary or moving capitals are established; that production is reorganized to satisfy new patterns of distribution and exchange; and even occasionally that new distinctions are created between town dwellers and their rural kinfolk. Customary authority, exercised in the context of these processes, is often transformed into the exploitative exercise of power. Hierarchical social relations, that facilitate the exploitation of one group by the members of another, have undoubtedly appeared in a variety of ways. All involved the ability of rulers, their families, close kin, and retainers to extract tribute in the form of labor or goods from the direct producers in the society. Drawing on different bodies of evidence, archaeologists have placed this original extortion of the community in the political realm of Early Dynastic society in Mesopotamia in the late third millennium BC, where the lands of the temples were sequestered from the community and became in effect the property of the temples, which used surplus variously as a source of income, as a fund of goods for exchange with other communities, and as insurance for the community in times of emergency. In this view, the original extortion resided in the custodians of the shrines who arrogated or were granted privileges, powers, and restrictions that distinguished them from the rest of the population; they were “able to exploit their position crystallizing differences in rank and privileges between themselves and the rest of the population and adding political elements to their ritual offices” (Southall 1988: 75; Diakonoff 1972). A second trajectory, outlined for a slightly earlier period in Mesopotamian history, argues that ad hoc and provisional, political authority that was granted for a limited period of time was usurped and transformed into power (Jacobsen 1943, 1957; cf. Gearing 1961). A third trajectory has been discerned by Michael Blake and
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 113 John Clark (1999), archaeologists working on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico. They suggest that the appearance of internal social differentiation toward the end of the third millennium BC was linked with the appearance of big men—individuals whose social position did not rest on traditional kinship and the customary rights and obligations that were moored in kin relations—during conditions that were shaped by the increased exchange of goods, especially exotic ones, with other communities. These big men manipulated social relations to create personal followings, to gain control over the production of others, and to appropriate goods that enhanced their own position as well of those of their followers. They redistributed the exotic goods they obtained during village feasts, and they supported part-time craft specialists in their households. From the perspective of Marx’s base–superstructure metaphor, the social categories that regulate the relations of production are cultural or superstructural rather than ones formed in the economic base. As a result, the economic aspect of the society is concealed or masked by these structures. Since the cultural or superstructural moments are dominant during the process of class formation, the social classes that emerge will be defined largely in ideological terms. Thus, the true nature of the economic is obscured; the emergent class structure consists of a hierarchy of social categories that cannot be reduced directly to economic class relations. This hierarchy of non-economic social categories disguises both the real economic class relations and the real contradictions that emerge from them. In such a situation, the economic class relations appear different from their real nature, while the hierarchical social categories of the class structure appear as “natural” relations. The formation of the class structures is, in the last analysis, based on the economic order of the society—the unequal accumulation of surplus product by the various social categories that make up the hierarchy. The formation of the class structure is the condition for the formation of economic class relations to the extent that this process determines the place of the different social categories in the production process and the reorganization of the labor processes to incorporate exploitation and extortion by one or more of these categories. The reorganization of the labor processes, which involves the progressive differentiation of the activities of these categories, provides the conditions for the further development of the contradictions based on the appearance of exploitation and extortion. The ruling classes of pre-capitalist states live on the tribute in the form of labor, goods, rents, or taxes that they are able to extract from the direct producers. As a result, they have little interest in changing property relations, since these were the bases from which their incomes are derived. In other words, the kin-organized communities of class-stratified, state-based societies continue to be the dominant units of production even though their survival is continually threatened by the claims and exactions of states that are unwilling or unable to reorganize production on a non-kin basis (Patterson 2005). While the state can intervene in the production and reproduction of the local kin communities, its survival depends on their continued
114 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist existence. In these societies, production is organized for use rather than exchange, and the items and goods kept by the direct producers as well as those appropriated by the state and the dominant classes are also used or consumed although some portion of the tribute may enter into market exchange networks as it did in Aztec Mexico (Hicks 1987, 1999). Building on Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 472–4) notion that exchange occurs on the borders between societies, archaeologists have pointed to differences among tributary states, most notably those based on extracting tribute from subject farming communities, like the Inca Empire of Peru, and mercantile states, like the Aztecs, that were organized to exert military control over trade routes and administrative control over those groups involved in the production and circulation of goods (Amin 1973/1976: 37–52; Thapar 1981). The ruling classes of mercantile states exploited the direct producers of other societies rather than their own. Merchants are the intermediate agents in the process of surplus extraction; they transfer to their own state and ruling class the surplus goods appropriated by the ruling classes of other societies or goods that they themselves extracted directly from the producers. By itself, trade does not cause state formation; however, “monopolies over imported prestige goods can play an important role in the growth of social stratification and centralization of political-economic control” (Gledhill 1978: 241). Since subsistence production is not a major source of state revenues, local peasant, pastoral, and farming communities retain a great deal of autonomy and are only weakly linked with the state. Mercantile states are often urban-based. Their cities are inhabited by the ruling class, various state officials, merchants, and artisans engaged in the production of goods for exchange. Different consumption patterns occur between the city and the villages and hamlets of the surrounding countryside (Brumfiel 1991). Archaeologists have long been concerned with the interconnections of craft production and specialization, on the one hand, and the processes of social differentiation associated with class and state formation, on the other (e.g. Costin 1991, 2001; Patterson 2005). One of the earliest was V. Gordon Childe’s (1950/2004) historically contingent thesis of combined and uneven development. Childe argued that (1) agriculture facilitated surplus production and underwrote both technical and social divisions of labor; (2) the ruling classes of lowland Mesopotamia used part of this surplus to support full-time craft specialists, notably metalsmiths who relied on ores obtained from the periphery; and (3) since the initial costs were born by the lowland elites, development occurred on the margins of civilization with significant local investments. In his view, the development of full-time craft specialization was linked with increasing social structural differentiation, the emerging interdependency of food-producers and artisans, and the growth of market exchange. Craft production was linked with production for exchange and the activities of individuals who were removed at least spatially from their natal communities. Elizabeth Brumfiel and Tim Earle (1987) drew a distinction between independent artisans and those attached to patrons. Joan Gero and Cristina Scattolin (2002: 69) pointed out that the
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 115 distinction frequently drawn between domestic and specialized production makes the two incomparable and relegates household divisions of labor to “background work.” Edward Harris (2002: 86) raises the issue of whether specialized production was intended for local consumption or for export. Other archaeologists—Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (2004) among others—have examined how craft production was organized in particular socioeconomic settings in Central America on the southeastern periphery of the Maya states. The processes of class and state formation generate contradictions and conflicts between the demands of the ruling class and the state on the community, on the one hand, and the rights and obligations that community leaders have to their kin and neighbors, on the other (Zagarell 1986: 157–60). These local authorities were caught on the horns of a dilemma, which Stanley Diamond (1951/1996) has called kin/civil conflict. These local leaders simultaneously had rights and obligations toward the members of the communities they represented and toward the state. They had to be generous and concerned with the well-being of their communities at the same time that they appropriated goods and labor from its members as representatives of the state. Their positions were fraught with contradictions. They could find themselves pitted against the state or, alternatively, their own kin and neighbors. They could pit their kin against other the members of other communities. They could find themselves opposed by their kin, other groups, and the state. The contradictions and their resolutions were often violent as in the case of Teotihuacán in central Mexico during the seventh century AD, when 95 percent of the public buildings and its civic center were burned and the inhabitants of the palace were slaughtered by the residents of the city (Millon 1988). These antagonisms and the alliances they could engender constitute the historical contingency of the formation and collapse of precapitalist states. This resistance accounts for the apparent stability of pre-capitalist societies, for their tendency to reproduce existing social relations, and for what is often seen as repeated cycles of growth and collapse, progress and retrogression, in ancient civilizations. As Marx put it, the history of pre-capitalist societies was marked by “continual retrogressions and circular movements” (Engels and Marx 1844–5/1975: 83–4). In this chapter, we saw that Marx drew a sharp distinction between pre-capitalist and capitalist societies; he viewed the former as limited, local, and vital and the latter as universalizing and ridden with antagonisms. At the same time, Marx was emphatic about the importance of understanding the structures underpinning the precapitalist forms, the historical-dialectical dynamics of those structures, the processes that underwrote change in those societies, and the apparent resiliency of those societies under historically specific conditions. He also realized the importance of sociohistorical and cultural differences—that is, different societies were organized on the basis of different modes of production and forms of property relations. We also saw that Marx had a more textured appreciation of culture than is commonly assumed; in his view, culture—the associated forms of social consciousness—were
116 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist intimately intertwined with praxis and the social relations manifest in historically specific, historically contingent societies. Finally, we looked at the messiness of history—the fragmentary nature of the evidence as well as the complexity and the diversity of the sociohistorical record itself—to see what archaeologists and historians have discerned about human historical development. In the next chapter, we examine in more detail Marx’s views about capitalism and the historicity of the modern world.
–5– Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World Marx’s lifelong fascination with history and how it merges with the present has its roots in first-hand observations about and experiences of the places he lived. Over the years, these snapshots would inform his analyses of various moments or stages in the development of capitalism. They ranged from the collapse of rural cottage industry in Trier during his teenage years through the explosive growth of Berlin’s population and burgeoning construction industry in the early 1840s or the fragmentation of the French peasantry and the presence of 85,000 German workers in Paris (roughly an eighth of the city’s 650,000 residents) by the mid 1840s to the enormous pools of skilled and unskilled workers employed in the gradually changing industries of London after 1849. The transition to the factory system . . . was not a clear-cut process. For a long time there were branches of manufacture virtually untouched by mechanization, while others were experiencing a revolutionary transformation. More than that, within the same field of enterprise, old and new methods of production often coexisted, neither strong enough to overcome the other, though time was clearly on the side of innovation. (Hamerow 1969: 16)
Marx’s understanding of the subtleties of capitalist development in different areas would deepen in the years to come. This was partly due to his own historical anthropological research and partly to his acquaintance with the work of others, including Engels’s (1845/1975) The Condition of the Working Class in England and the sources he used for a series of articles about British colonial rule in India and local reactions to it that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune between 1852 and 1862 (Habib 2006; Husain 2006; Patnaik 2006). Marx (1880/1989) was not only concerned with collecting information about actual social conditions—as evidenced, for example, by the 100 questions in his “Enquête Ouvrière,” which was sent via labor unions and political groups to 25,000 workers in 1880—but also, and more importantly, with disseminating this knowledge both to the workers themselves and to the wider public through venues like the Tribune, which had a weekly circulation of about 200,000, making it the most widely read paper in the United States at the time (Husain 2006: xiii; Weiss 1936/1973).1 The research for the Tribune articles provided him with
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118 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist a window on colonial rule, capitalist development, and local resistance to those processes in South Asia and in other parts of the world. The term “capitalist” is typically used in two different ways. In the first, it refers to a set of economic institutions—such as private ownership of the means of production, the employment of wage labor, production for the market, free enterprise, the profit motive, and competition between firms—and, by extension, to those political institutions, cultural beliefs, and practices that accompany or promote the activities carried out within this institutional framework. This is the capitalist mode of production with its economic base, superstructure, and associated forms of social consciousness. In the second usage, it describes “a society, taken as a whole, in which institutions or a mentality described as capitalist are predominant” (Rodinson 1966/1978: 4–5). Capital, in Marx’s view, is a social relation that takes the form of a thing and ensures both “making a profit” as well as reproducing the property relations that underwrite the process. He wrote that Capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. . . . It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power which are rendered autonomous vis-à-vis this living labour-power, and are personified in capital through this antithesis. It is not only the workers’ products which are transformed into independent powers, the products as masters and buyers of their producers, but the social powers and interconnecting form of this labour also confront them as properties of their product. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 953–4)
Marx distinguished three forms of capital—usurers’, merchants’, and industrial (Marx 1863–7/1973: 914–26; 1864–94/1981: 442, 744–5). Usurers’ capital involves individuals lending a sum of money to others with the expectation that the latter will return a greater sum at some predetermined point of time in the future. Merchants’ capital involves the process in which individuals purchase a good for one sum of money and then sell it for a larger sum of money. In Marx’s view, both usurers’ and merchants’ capital antedated the development of capitalist society and the capitalist mode of production. While they may have been necessary conditions for the formation of capitalist society, they were not sufficient conditions by themselves. The appearance of industrial capital provided these conditions. Industrial capital involves individuals (or firms) purchasing the raw materials and tools required to make a commodity, employing the labor-power of wage-workers (also a commodity) to manufacture the good, and then selling the items produced by the workers for a price that is greater than the total cost of the inputs. Part of the money received by the employers after the sale is reinvested to purchase materials and labor-power for the next cycle of production and circuit of capital; the other part is used by them to
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 119 satisfy their own personal needs or those of the firm. In industrial capitalist societies, production is geared to exchange rather than immediate use by the producers; there is a social-class structure based on distinction between those who own the means of production and wage-workers who sell their labor-power; and exploitation occurs at the point of production where the owners appropriate the surplus value created by the workers. As you will recall from the last chapter, Marx (1857–8/1973: 409–10) argued that there were differences among pre-capitalist societies and variations within the pre-capitalist modes of production; in addition, he argued that there were significant differences between pre-capitalist and capitalist societies. The former were local and limited, while the latter continually transformed the forces of production, created new markets for the commodities they produced, and dissolved or reworked traditional ways of life as peoples on the margins were incorporated into capitalist relations of production. The goals of this chapter are threefold. The first is to outline Marx’s views about the transition to capitalism and its subsequent development. The second is to explore in more detail the notions of articulation and combined and uneven development that are implicit in his later writings. These have important implications, theoretical and practical, for his anthropology. The third is to consider what he might have thought about the structures of contemporary capitalism and their relations to the modern nation-state.
The Transition to Capitalism and Its Development Industrial capitalist societies and the capitalist mode of production developed out of earlier social formations and tributary modes of production of which the feudal mode of production is one variant. This truism is not a trivial statement. The question it raises is: What processes were involved in the transition? As we saw in the second chapter as well as the preceding one, Marx was well aware of both broad similarities and differences within and between the tributary societies of Asia and the Americas as well as their resemblances to the feudal societies of Northwestern Europe and the Slavonic societies of Eastern Europe. Another way of saying this is that they were subject to different internal constraints; what was potentially an opportunity for development in one society may well have been an impossibility given the constraints for another. As a consequence, Marx recognized multiple pathways of historical development in both pre-capitalist and capitalist forms that involved internal developments, external linkages, and historical contingency. Therefore, it should not be surprising that Marx presented two different accounts of the origins of industrial capitalism and hence of capitalist societies.2 One viewed it as the fruit of merchant capitalists who forged commercial networks, promoted commodity production, and dissolved the natural economy that dominated the countryside by restructuring labor processes and organizing rural putting-out
120 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist industries as well as altering the division of labor; this removed production from the control of the town-based guilds (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31–4, 66– 74; 1848/1976: 485). The other saw the rise of industrial capitalism in terms of the technical development of small owner-operated establishments that became merchants themselves and produced directly for the market. In the first account, expanding commerce, the shift of commodity production from the town to the countryside, and the development of the division of labor in terms of both specialization and cooperation were the motors of change. In the second account, the engines were class struggle and technical changes in the productive forces. The first focused on the role of external relationships; the second was concerned with the internal dynamics of change (Marx 1859/1970: 21; 1864–94/1981: 449–55; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 485). While the two perspectives were not necessarily mutually exclusive, Marx grew increasingly skeptical by the late 1850s about the capacity of the development of trade and merchant capital by themselves to effect the breakdown and reorganization of the old, tributary or feudal modes of production, since the merchants themselves were typically fractions allied with the ruling classes and the money they accumulated through trade or usury remained largely in the sphere of circulation. In Capital, he wrote that The development of trade and commercial capital always gives production a growing orientation towards exchange value, expanding its scope, diversifies it and renders it cosmopolitan, developing money into world money. Trade always has, to a greater or less degree, a solvent effect on the pre-existing relations of production, which in all their various forms are principally oriented to use value. But how far it leads to the dissolution of the old mode of production depends first and foremost on the solidity and inner articulation of this mode of production itself. And what comes out of this process of dissolution, i.e., what new mode of production arises in place of the old, does not depend on trade, but rather on the character of the old mode of production itself. In the ancient world, the influence of trade and the development of commercial capital always produced the result of a slave economy; or, given a different point of departure, it also meant the transformation of a patriarchal slave system oriented towards the production of the direct means of subsistence into one oriented towards the production of surplusvalue. In the modern world, on the other hand, its outcome is the capitalist mode of production. It follows that this result is itself conditioned by quite other circumstances than the development of commercial capital. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 449–50)
Marx came to see that, unlike the paths dominated by merchant capitalists, those in which the owners of small production units were able to create markets for the commodities they produced had the capacity to dissolve and transform the socialclass relations of the existing feudal or tributary social orders. As noted earlier, in all of the pre-capitalist forms of society where production was geared toward use rather than exchange, communities of direct producers retained control of their means of
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 121 production and subsistence, while the politically dominant classes whose members lived off the goods and services they appropriated from the direct producers pressed to reproduce those exploitative social relations. Marx put it this way, The aim of this work is not the creation of [exchange] value—although they may do surplus labour in order to obtain alien, i.e., surplus products in exchange—rather, its aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total community. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 471–2; emphasis in the original) The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. (Marx 1864– 94/1981: 927)
Under these conditions, there was no particular incentive or compulsion for either the direct producers or their exploiters to increase productivity beyond subsistence levels. Moreover, the direct producers—i.e., the owners of small production units— remained marginal to the dominant fractions of the pre-capitalist, class-stratified societies, whose very maintenance and reproduction depended on non-economic means of extracting goods and services from them. Marx was well aware that tradition played an important role in setting the levels of surplus that were extracted by the ruling classes from the direct producers of the community. The demands could not be so high that they threatened the well-being and survival of the direct producers themselves; as a result, it was “in the interest of the dominant section of society to sanctify the existing situation in law and to fix the limits given by custom and tradition as legal ones” (Marx 1864–94/1981: 929). These caps effectively regularized demands from one year to the next at least in the short run even though the harvests undoubtedly varied considerably. There were also sanctions in the rural communities of some but probably not all tributary societies that served as leveling devices which impeded or limited the accumulation of property and the process of rural social differentiation or at least channeled them in particular directions. Nevertheless, Marx believed that, while there may have been marked inequalities in the distribution of wealth among the rural producers of some tributary societies, there may have been relatively little internal social differentiation among the members of those ruling-producing classes. That is, the basic social cleavage in the societies was that between the direct producers and the classes that extracted surplus from them. There were a few wealthy rural producers who had the capacity to produce surplus goods beyond their own subsistence needs and the rents demanded by their communities or local lords; there were many who could satisfy their own needs and meet obligations but had little or no capacity to produce regular surpluses. Although he cited no specific historical evidence, he wrote the following with particular reference to Europe:
122 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist It is still possible for this villein or serf to develop independent means of production of his own and even become quite wealthy. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 929) in the feudal period the wealthier peasant serfs already kept serfs of their own. In this way it gradually becomes possible for them to build up a certain degree of wealth and transform themselves into future capitalists. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 935–6)
Subsequent historical research in the tributary societies of Europe, especially England and France, has confirmed that there was some degree of internal social differentiation among the rural producers, and that, as a class, its members were engaged in a long-term struggle with the local lords to reduce their annual exactions (e.g. Bois 1976/1984, 1989/1992; Hilton 1978/1990). This has also been shown in the tributary Inca state of the central Andes, for example, where (1) the wealthy were those individuals with many kin and the poor were orphans who lacked kin; and (2) important shrines seemingly possessed property in both land and herds as well as service obligations that were distinct from those of the Inca state, local tribal entities, or other corporate landholding groups in the region (Patterson 1984; Spalding 1984). An important distinction that Robert Brenner (1997: 38–9) and Ellen Wood (2002) have made is the one between market involvement and market dependence. Terence Byres (2006: 18–20) notes that market involvement means voluntary and perhaps irregular participation in the market to sell surpluses either for cash or other goods and to acquire goods that are not produced locally. By contrast, market dependence means that the direct producers must participate in the market since they no longer have non-market access to all of the subsistence goods they need. Market dependence is rooted in the profit motive and requires marketing on a regular basis. Markets now exist for subsistence goods, raw materials, land, labor, and money. The logic of the former is pre-capitalist, whereas the latter is a capitalist logic. That the distinction was not always immediately apparent is evident by the formation, for example, of the market economy of Mughal India or Aztec Mexico (Habib 1968/1995; Hicks 1987, 1999). Hence, the distinction is of considerable, but probably not primary, importance in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. What processes are set in motion? In one of those instances where the direct producers (that is, wealthy peasants) were able to create and expand markets for their goods, they became increasingly dependent on the market for their own livelihoods as well as for the maintenance and reproduction of their production units. These circumstances brought a new dynamic into play that was concerned, in the last analysis, with expanding production and increasing productivity. The elements of this dynamic included, for example, the prolongation and intensification of the work day; differentiation of the labor process; the development of new forms of cooperation and production; and, most importantly, the continual transformation of the instruments of production including the introduction of machines which both made workers appendages of those
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 123 machines and eventually displaced human beings from the production process (Marx 1863–7/1977; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 487). This continual development of the productive forces and the concomitant reworking of the social relations both at home and abroad constituted the universalizing tendency that Marx (1857–8: 409–10) saw in the rise of industrial capitalism. It was a highly uneven process that occurred on a world scale over a period of several centuries. Industrial capitalism thrived in some regions, it was thwarted or distorted in others; and it never occurred in still others even though the social relations among peoples in those areas were inextricably altered as they simultaneously resisted and were enmeshed in emergent capitalist exchange relations. In one of his descriptions of the process, Marx wrote: The number of men condemned to work in coal and metal mines has been enormously swollen by the progress of machine production in England. . . . Along with the machine, a new type of worker springs into life: the machine-maker. We have already learnt that machinery is seizing control even of this branch of production on an ever-increasing scale. As to raw materials, there can be no doubt of the rapid advance of cotton spinning not only promoted as if in a hot house of the growing of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade, but also made slave-breeding the chief business of the so-called border slave states. . . . On the other hand, it is no less certain that the blossoming of English woolen factories, together with the progressive transformation of arable land into sheep pasture brought about the conversion of the agricultural labourers into “supernumeraries” and drove them in their masses from the land. Ireland, having during the last twenty years reduced its population by nearly one-half, is at the moment undergoing the process of further reducing the number of its inhabitants to a level corresponding exactly with the requirements of its landlords and the English woolen manufacturers. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 570–1)
One way of conceptualizing the early stages of the appearance of industrial capitalism is to imagine it as the gradual eruption of a few volcanic islands from a vast sea of societies dominated by kin-communal, tribal, or tributary social relations. The transition from feudalism to capitalism took place on a world scale beginning in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. It was firmly set in place by the rise of industrial capitalist in Northwestern Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century. This historically contingent structure which steadily spread over the entire planet developed variably or differently from one part of the world to another. Three intersecting conditions were necessary for the transition to occur: (1) the existence of a rural social structure in which the peasants no longer constituted one or another form of unfree labor; (2) the existence of independent artisans who produced nonagricultural commodities; and (3) an accumulation of monetary wealth derived from commerce, usury, and plunder (Hobsbawm 1964: 46–7; 1962). It is also necessary to explain why industrial capitalism emerged first in Northwestern Europe and not elsewhere, even though peoples in other parts of the world—notably Africa, the Americas, and South Asia—played important roles in that development.
124 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Marx sketched the rise of industrial capitalism in the famous section in the first volume of Capital that dealt with “primitive accumulation.” He was clear that it involved the separation of rural producers from their means of production, and that it proceeded along developmental pathways that were different from the one that occurred in England, which served as his example for analytical purposes. He said that The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 876)
This process gave rise to both wage-workers and the capitalists who employed them. He was aware that serfdom had all but disappeared in England by the end of the fourteenth century and that the majority of the population in the fifteenth century were free peasant proprietors, many of whom supplemented their needs by wagework on the large estates and by using the resources of the common lands that were held by the local community. The commons provided pasture, manure, timber, and firewood to name only a few of its resources. Such communal property was always distinct from both that of the state and the large estate holder (Marx 1863–7/1977: 877–95). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the feudal lords drove the free peasants from the lands and homes and seized the common lands, transforming both into pastures for sheep which could be tended by a relatively small number of individuals and whose wool could be sold either to Flemish wool manufactures or to local merchants or firms that hoped to gain from the rise in prices. The Reformation provided an additional impetus for the expropriation of the agricultural population. At the time when the properties of the Catholic Church were seized, it held most of the land in England. As Marx noted After the restoration of the Stuarts [1660–88], the landed proprietors carried out, by legal means, an act of usurpation which was effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the state, “indemnified” the state by imposing taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the people, established for themselves the rights of modern private property to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement on the English agricultural labourer [which meant that they could be pursued for five years and forcibly returned when caught]. . . . The “glorious Revolution” [1688] brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landed and capitalist profit-grubbers. They inaugurated a new era by practising on a colossal scale the theft of state lands which had hitherto been managed more modestly. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 883–4)
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 125 Marx was clear about the role played by the state as an agent of the new landed class, both with regard to the expropriation of peasants from their lands as well as the forcing down of wages and the criminalization of beggars and vagabonds throughout the sixteenth century—processes that Michel Foucault might have called disciplining and punishing the proletariat. Integral to Marx’s account of the transition during the sixteenth century is the progressive fall in the value of precious metals. He wrote that The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 915)
Enormous quantities of gold and silver poured into the coffers of merchant houses and the Spanish government. They poured with almost equal rapidity out of the governmental coffers of Spain to pay for an army and colonial administration, to purchase weapons, cloth, and other commodities in Northern Europe that were not produced in the new Iberian state, or to purchase royal and noble titles in Central Europe—all ultimate acts of conspicuous consumption by the monarchy. Some idea of the amount of specie that flowed into Europe can be gleaned from the fact that, in 1535, the Spanish conquistadors of Peru ransomed a claimant to the Inca throne for 13 tons of silver and more than 6.5 tons of pure gold (estimated value US$83 million in 1990), and this was only an infinitesimally small fraction of 1 percent of the precious metals that reached Europe from Peru alone in the sixteenth century (Patterson 1991: 3, 166–7). This order of magnitude contrasts markedly with that of the investment of a group of Dutch merchants who put up 6.5 million guilders (the equivalent of about 4 tons of gold) in 1602 to form the United East India Company, which was one of the world’s largest merchant houses at the time and had more than 12,000 employees (De Vries 1976: 130–2). The decline in the value of precious metals and money effectively lowered wages, which were already being set by law, raised prices, and swelled the profits of capitalist farmers (Marx 1863–7/1977: 903–13). Marx (1863–7/1977: 909–13) pointed out that the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which turned peasants into wage-workers and their means of subsistence into commodities, also created a home market for both labor power and raw materials. The capitalist farmers who employed farm workers had incentives to improve the productivity of their lands by adopting new forms of labor organization, new regimens of work, and new methods of cultivation. The rural proletarians now had to purchase the very food, clothing, and other necessities of life that their parents and grandparents had produced for themselves only a few decades earlier. Rural
126 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist industries—such as spinning and weaving—were also destroyed as the peasants were driven from their lands and homes. Those parts of the rural population that remained in the countryside were transformed into wage-workers on capitalist farms; those parts that were forced out of homes and off their lands became a large reserve army of labor that would be absorbed into the textile factories that were appearing on rivers in the vicinity of the new market places that were beyond the control of the old towns and their guilds. The intermittent expulsion of rural producers from their lands created a home market for the subsistence and other goods that they could no longer produce for themselves. Once the feudal constitution and guild organizations of the towns were dissolved, it is clear that some members of the old craft guilds became small capitalists who employed wage-workers to produce particular commodities as did some merchants and some cottage artisans. However, it is also clear that some individuals began to bring together or concentrate all of the materials and labor power that was needed to produce a commodity like linen. They acquired the flax, rented or purchased the machines for spinning and weaving thread, they hired the workers, brought them together in a crowded factory, and then sold the cloth they produced, keeping the profits for themselves in order to meet their subsistence needs, to consume conspicuously, or to reinvest in the maintenance of their factory and to purchase new inputs of materials, machinery, and human resources. In the early stages of industrial capitalism, the woolen manufacturers of England not only competed with one another but also with Irish producers for a share of the market. The drive for profits, an increasing share of the market, and even expanding the market itself underwrote the continual transformation of the machinery and organization of the productive process toward greater productivity. The formation of overseas colonies facilitated the concentration of capital. As Marx observed: The colonies provided a market for budding manufactures, and a vast increase in accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flow back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there. Holland, which first brought the colonial system to its full development, already stood at the zenith of its commercial greatness in 1648. It was “in almost exclusive possession of the East Indies trade and the commerce between the south-east and the north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, its shipping and its manufactures surpassed those of any other country. The total capacity of the Republic was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe put together.” . . . By 1648 the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together. Today, industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant role played by the colonial system at that time. . . . It proclaimed the making of profit as the ultimate and sole purpose of mankind. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 918)
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 127 Thus, Marx points out that the colonies served not only as sources of raw materials that were exported to the mother countries but also as the ultimate destination of exports for goods that were produced or finished in the metropoles; frequently, colonial production and even inter-colony trade were forbidden, which meant that raw materials were shipped from the colonies to the home country and were processed into commodities that were then shipped back to the colony from which the raw materials originated or to nearby neighboring colonies. He acknowledges what anthropologists, like Stanley Diamond (1974: 1), have long recognized: “civilization [capitalist in this case] originates with conquest abroad and repression at home.” Marx further argues that the maritime trade and commercial wars which were integral parts of the colonial system promoted a system of national debt and public credit. He remarks that The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital, without the risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state’s creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But furthermore, and quite apart from the class of idle rentiers thus created, the improvised wealth of the financiers who play the role of middlemen between the government and the nation, and the tax-farmers, merchants and private manufacturers, for whom a good part of every national loan performs the service of a capital fallen from heaven, apart from all of these people, the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 919; emphasis in the original)
Marx’s discussion of the primitive accumulation of capital is an analysis of the transformation of one kind of tributary society into a capitalist society rooted in industrial capitalism. This theory of history also embodies a notion of directionality, which is reflective of contradictions in the domain of production as they are manifest in the wider society. Societies underpinned by the capitalist mode of production exhibit this directionality because of their continual efforts at expanding markets for the commodities they produce and their continual attempts to improve the productivity of the machines and labor processes they employ in the manufacture of those items. What his discussion also shows are the close relationships fueled by commerce and colonial settlement that existed between those parts of the world where industrial capitalism developed and those that provided loot, human bodies, and natural resources which fueled the growth of the manufacturing centers in northern Europe. What were the manufacturing centers like? Marx’s short answer was that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were composed of a number of relatively small firms, some of which, for example, produced cotton textiles
128 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist while others engaged in more specialized processes or items, like bleaching, dyeing, printing, or the production of looms, which they sold to one or more of the textile manufacturers in the region. Those firms that were able to increase their productivity by adopting more efficient machines, by lengthening the work day of their employees, or by paying them lower wages had the capacity to gain a greater share of the market for their goods and hence to increase their profits. This, however, also threatened the very existence of their competitors who continued to produce in more traditional or less efficient ways; this forced many of them not only to adopt the new machines or practices but also to seek ones that were even more productive. Marx viewed this era as one of competitive capital. By the 1850s, however, many of the smaller firms found the cost of continually upgrading the machines they used to be increasingly prohibitive, and they began to close their doors as their shares of the markets declined. The result of this was simultaneously a decline in the number of firms producing a particular good combined with a significant increase in the value of the firms that survived. Marx (1863–7/1977: 774–81) called these processes the concentration and centralization of capital. He also noted other changes in the mid nineteenth century. One was a shift in the relative importance of firms from those that produced goods, like cotton textiles, to those that produced steel, for example, which was essential for the construction of railroad tracks, locomotives, and other machines. A second was the increased wealth available to firms like steel factories, for example, which were incredibly expensive and were often the property of joint stock companies with large numbers of investors rather than single owners. A third resulted from the combination of increasingly more sophisticated machinery that required fewer and perhaps even less-skilled workers to produce particular goods and the ongoing dispossession of people from their lands, which forced massive migration—from Ireland, for example; together, they created a large, unemployed or underemployed reserve army of labor.
The Articulation of Modes of Production In the preceding section, we examined Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and the role it played in the dissolution of feudal (tributary) society in England and in its transformation into a social formation based on the production relations of industrial capitalism. Two processes were involved in primitive accumulation. The first process was proletarianization—that is, the formation of a class of free wageworkers who were systematically denied access to land and who ultimately had only their labor-power, their capacity to work, to sell in order to provide for their subsistence and that of their families. The second process involved the creation of a system of overseas colonies that yielded plunder, taxes, and surplus goods that were often produced by various forms of unfree labor—such as indentured servants and slaves in the British colonies or individuals with labor-tax obligations in the Spanish colonies.
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 129 We also saw that the state underwrote both processes of primitive accumulation. It used political and legal forms of compulsion, and sometimes force, to drive rural producers from their homes and lands and then to criminalize their poverty. In England, this dispossession simultaneously created the conditions for the formation of (1) a class of wage laborers and a labor market, as well as (2) a class of unfree workers composed of debtors, criminals, and indentured servants who toiled for varying lengths of time to repay their obligations. While the former underwrote the steady expansion of production and hence provided the basis for the continual transformation of the productive forces, the latter did not participate directly in either wage labor or the labor market. In other words, the forms of surplus extraction were different for the two classes. For the wage-workers, exploitation occurred at the point of production and involved the appropriation of the surplus value they created by the capitalist. For the unfree workers, exploitation involved extra-economic forms of compulsion and surplus extraction. Many of the goods from the North American and Caribbean colonies that were prized by English merchants—tobacco, sugar, cotton, and rum to name only a few—were produced by unfree labor—indentured servants and increasingly African slaves after the 1690s; other prized items—such as furs—were produced by indigenous and other peoples who lived on the margins of the colonies and were enmeshed in the colonial system by means of their exchange relations with merchants or their local representatives. While Marx (1863–7/1977: 873–940) formulated his concept of primitive accumulation largely in relation to the transition to capitalism in England, he was already well aware from his own observations and research that capitalism did not develop everywhere in the same manner that it had in England. The reason was that England was merely one historically specific instance of the transition, albeit the earliest one. Robert Miles noted that The historic specificity of the transition to capitalism in England must be emphasized. The subsequent expansion of the capitalist mode of production cannot be considered to have proceeded by a series of transitions in precisely the same way as in England because the particular combination of circumstances that led to this emergence were transcended by it. Because the historical context has been transformed by the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the latter must be expected to have had effects upon extant, non-capitalist modes of production as a result of the inherently expansionary nature of the accumulation process. (Miles 1989: 39; emphasis in the original)
Primitive accumulation was the connective tissue that linked the various trajectories with each other. Miles (1989: 40) and others observed that primitive accumulation is “a historically continuous process of transformation of relations of production and not a single, unique event in seventeenth-century England.” This process continues to the present day, side by side with proletarianization (the spread of wage labor relations), the privatization of community and state property, plunder, and other
130 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist forms of the appropriation of value from peoples living on the peripheries of the industrial capitalist world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a phrase, primitive accumulation has been and continues to be a permanent feature of capitalist development; one only need consider its predations in the United States, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, or Mexico, for example, during the last twenty years. As we saw earlier, Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 271–2n3, 446, 480, 570–1, 876n1, 915–17, 932–4, 1039–40, 1076–80) already had a comparative perspective on the development of capitalism in different countries. He had also commented on the interconnections between different parts of the world: for example, of the factory workers in England, slaves in the American South, serfs in Eastern Europe, village communities in India, and immigrants to areas, like the United States or Germany, that were experiencing the growth of industrial capitalism. For example, with regard to the interdependence of Manchester textile factories, slaves in the American South, and commerce, he wrote Direct slavery is as much a pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. (Marx 1846/1982: 101–2). While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 925)
While the transition to capitalism in England involved primitive accumulation through the dispossession of producers from their lands, proletarianization, and the creation of home markets, those that occurred elsewhere involved variously the intensification of pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction, new forms of unfree labor, slave-raiding, new relations between indigenous elites and the colonial administrators, new forms of taxation and other means of indirect exploitation by the colonial and metropolitan states as well as the separation of producers from their means of production and the appearance of new contradictions within the colony and between its residents and the metropolitan state. Marx described the dynamic forged by the articulation of capitalist country and non-capitalist colony in the following way: In Western Europe . . . the process of primitive accumulation has more or less been accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 131 whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. . . . It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime constantly comes up against the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as the owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist. The contradiction between these two diametrically opposed economic systems has its practical manifestation here in the struggle between them. Where the capitalist has behind him the power of the mother country, he tries to use force to clear out of the way the modes of production and appropriation which rest on the personal labour of the independent producer. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 931–2)
These comments focus attention on Marx’s belief that historically specific societies are totalities manifesting diverse articulated combinations of different modes of production.3 They also indicate that the structures of relations between the capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction as well as the contradictions they engender may vary and be reproduced and transformed differently in historically particular societies such as India, the Tongan Islands, or the United States. In other words, they bring into awareness his view that capitalism and what lies beyond it were developing and will continue to develop along different historical trajectories. The possibility of alternative trajectories of development in the future was one of the reasons why Marx devoted so much of his time and energy to historical anthropological studies in the 1870s. What was conceivable and possible, given the balance of forces that existed in a particular society? This was clearly a question he was pondering as he wrote about the Paris Commune and his famous drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich toward the end of his life (Marx 1871/1986, 1881/1983). It is also the reason why political activists he influenced—V. I. Lenin (1899/1960), Rosa Luxemburg (1913/2003), Leon Trotsky (1930/1980: 3–15), Antonio Gramsci (1926/1967, 1933/1971), José Mariátegui (1928/1971), Mao Zedong (1930/1990), and Amilcar Cabral (1963) among others—were not only students of history but were also concerned with the lessons it taught. Many anthropologists have shared their concern with the issues of articulation and alternative pathways of sociohistorical development during the twentieth century.4 While Marx laid the foundations for a theory of articulation, his formulation of it was inchoate, and he did not elaborate many of his observations in any great detail. This task would fall to his successors in the twentieth century. Let us look briefly at a few of those insights and their implications in order to see directions in which they were or might have been developed. First, Marx’s theory of articulation draws on his discussions of colonialism, nationalism, expanded reproduction, and transformation, the latter two being important concerns in the second and third volumes, respectively, of Capital. His writings on colonialism and nationalism, which began in the late 1840s and early 1850s, should be understood as an interconnected project or a “continuum” (e.g. Marx
132 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist 1848/1976; Ahmad 2001: 9). Marx wrote extensively about two British colonies, Ireland and India, the latter which he characterized once as the “Ireland of the East,” because of the similarities he saw in the implementation of English colonial policies in the two countries (Marx 1853/1979a: 125).5 These can be described briefly as the destruction of local industry, the creation of local markets for goods manufactured in England, the dispossession of people from their lands, the development of capitalist agriculture (which in India at least was accompanied by the development of railroads in the early 1850s to move raw cotton to ports where it could be shipped to the home country), and massive emigration within the country as well as to other parts of the world. In 1813, India, which had exported fabrics manufactured in Dacca and other traditional handloom centers, was inundated with thread and cotton goods made from American cotton in English factories. The English merchants in India undersold the local producers, and the volume of imported English cloth grew from about 1 million yards in 1824 to 64 million yards in 1837. During the same period, the population of traditional textile centers, like Dacca, plummeted from 150,000 to 20,000. However, deteriorating diplomatic relations with the United States combined with a poor harvest in the American South in 1850 led English manufacturers to seek new sources of raw cotton, most noticeably in the interior regions of India; the development of capitalist, cotton-producing farms in these areas during the early 1850s spurred the construction of railroads linking them with coastal cities like Bombay. The importance of the English exports to India should not be underestimated. In 1850, cotton goods constituted more than 60 percent of the total value of English goods traded to India and accounted for one-fourth of all of its foreign trade, one-twelfth of its national revenue, and one-eighth of its total employment. In addition, the British government collected taxes from the colony and possessed monopolies over the manufacture or distribution of certain items, most notably salt and opium which was sold to the Chinese (Marx 1853/1979a, 1853/1979b: 154, 1853/1979c: 219–21, 1853/1979d: 316–17).6 In sum, it was an exploitative relationship based partly on unequal exchange and partly on the ability of the Colonial Office to impose its will. Second, Marx was impressed with the impact of political fragmentation initially through first-hand experience in Europe, especially Germany and Austria, during the late 1840s and a few years later in India as a result of his investigative journalism for the New York Herald Tribune. In Europe, he and Engels confronted the classic problems of national consolidation—namely, the political unification and independence of nations that were highly fragmented and often dominated by neighboring powers (Ahmad 2001: 4, 10–11). Engels (1849/1977a) distinguished “historic nations,” like Poland, that were sizable and had already gained some degree of sovereignty and smaller nationalities, “peoples without history,” like the southern Slavs, that were incorporated into larger political entities, the Hapsburg Empire in this case (Rosdolsky 1980). He also pointed out that conflicts along national lines were relatively unimportant so long as the ruling classes in each
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 133 national group continued to share their common goal of “preserving the monarchy,” in order to maintain their own positions against the emerging bourgeois classes (Engels 1849/1977b: 229). Marx was also aware of the consequences of political fragmentation of India. As Ahmad (2001: 19) points out, that segments of the traditional classes in India— displaced peasants, ruined artisans, and aristocratic landowners whose properties had been confiscated—reacted to the exactions of the British in the 1850s did not escape Marx’s attention (e.g. 1857/1986a, 1857/1986b, 1857/1986c). However, as Habib notes: Marx’s sympathy for the rebels shows itself in a number of ways: his scornful skepticism of the claims of an early British capture of Delhi from the mutineers; his detection of exaggeration in the horror stories of atrocities committed by the rebels and his justifications of these as events inescapable in such revolts anywhere; and, finally, his denunciations of the atrocities committed by British officers and troops. However sympathetic by natural instinct, Marx was with the 1857 rebels, he was clear enough in his mind that the rebellion was a response of the old classes to the process of pauperization of a large mass of the Indian people and the dissolution of a whole old way of life, it was not the product of the Indian “regeneration” that he himself looked forward to. He admitted in respect of the Mutiny that “It is a curious quid pro quo to expect an Indian revolt to assume the features of a European revolution.” (Habib 2006: xlix)
Nonetheless, Marx saw the similarity between the Indian insurrection of 1857–8, which he called a national revolt, and the nationalist movements that had swept across Europe a few years earlier. Not only was it geographically widespread, but it also cut across caste, religious, and social-class divisions. The groups challenged by the mutineers were the British financiers and mill owners, the colonial government, and their local agents and representatives (Marx 1853/1979c: 218). What the Indian rebels lacked, in Engels (1857/1986: 392) view, was “the scientific element”—that is, centralized political and military leadership or, as Ahmad (2001: 19) put it, the basic features of twentieth-century national liberation movements. From the late 1850s onward, Marx (e.g. 1881/1992a: 63–4) was aware of tendencies that might facilitate the development of centralized leadership in Indian society and the threat that this would potentially pose to British rule. Moreover, any thoughts he might have harbored in the early 1850s about the progressive character of colonialism in India were long dispelled by the time he wrote about the plunder of India and primitive accumulation in Capital. Marx (1853/1979c: 221–2) wrote not only about “the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” and “the devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India,” but also that “the Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
134 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist altogether.” As Ahmad (2001: 20) has noted, no Indian reformer of the nineteenth century took such a clear position on the question of Indian independence, and all twentieth-century Indian nationalists accepted Marx’s claim that “colonial capitalism did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India” (emphasis in the original). Third, Marx knew that the rise of industrial capitalism and the linkages spawned by it triggered massive emigration, mostly from the colonies and the peripheral regions of the home countries. For example, he realized that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of persons were displaced in India in the 1830s and 1840s. In Ireland, he noted that more than a million of the colony’s roughly 7 million inhabitants— that is, 15–20 percent of its total population—emigrated elsewhere (to England, Australia, and the United States) in the five-year period between 1847 and 1852, and that, by the mid 1860s, its population had fallen by half to about 3.5 million persons (Marx 1853/1979e: 528–32; 1853/1979f). Marx frequently mocked the “public-opinion slang of England,” which attributed the plight of dispossessed Irish workers to “aboriginal faults of the Celtic race” or to the “shortcomings of Irish nature” instead of to British misrule; he certainly did not see the Irish as the London Economist did: a “redundant population” whose departure was necessary before any improvement could occur. Instead, he saw their circumstances as historically conditioned, partly by the policies of capital and the state, and partly by their own efforts to ameliorate those circumstances given the prevailing balance of force at the time (Marx 1853/1979e: 528, 1853/1979f: 159, 1859/1980: 489; cf. Curtis 1997: 148–80). He was well aware that Irish farmers driven from the land went to the cities—including London, where the vast majority of those who were employed worked as unskilled day-laborers in the towns or as day-laborers in the surrounding countryside. He also knew that Irish workers were often paid lower wages than their English counterparts, and that English linen manufacturers were closing factories in the Midlands and relocating them to towns in Ireland where they could pay lower wages (Marx 1857/1986d: 257, 1863–7/1977: 866; Engels 1844/1975; Robinson 1983: 38–59; Thompson 1963: 429–43). In addition, he was sympathetic to the plight of the Irish emigrants who were separated from their natal communities as they settled in distant and often hostile places, like the United States, where large numbers had the most menial and undesirable of unskilled jobs, occupied the lowest rungs of the social-class structure, and daily confronted increasingly racialized discrimination and the possibility of violence because of their creative maintenance and ethnogenesis of a rural heritage and national identity in the new country and their adherence to Catholicism (e.g. Ashworth 1983: 181–2; Curtis 1997; Foner 1980: 150–200). Fourth, Marx explored the interconnection of nationalist politics and diasporic communities with an increasingly textured appreciation of their complexities from 1860 onward as a result of his investigations of Ireland and the Irish question and the United States and its civil war (Marx 1972; Marx and Engels 1972). In his view, the English landed aristocracy and the capitalist classes had a shared interest in
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 135 maintaining English domination over Ireland and in promoting emigration. Irish farms seized earlier in the century by English landlords were turned into pastures that (1) provided English markets with cheap meat and wool, (2) ensured a reserve army of labor that drove down wages and the morale of the English working class, (3) pitted English workers against the Irish immigrants, and (4) guaranteed security to some extent by scattering some of the more disgruntled members of Irish society around the world and by insulating others from any radical or revolutionary ideas they might have held (Marx 1869/1988a: 398–9; 1870/1988). The resolution of the Irish question ultimately depended on the political independence of Ireland; minimally, Marx (e.g. 1870/1985: 118–21) thought, this would entail breaking the grip of the landed aristocracy in Ireland, linking the struggle over land with social issues, and forming coalitions with working classes around the world and most especially with those in England. The issue was how to achieve it. This was the question that underwrote his analyses of the goals and class interests expressed by various Irish nationalist groups and partly by the tactics that each advocated to accomplish its aims. The purpose of his analyses was not to idealize or romanticize the various Irish national movements but rather to assess as accurately as possible their strengths and weaknesses. Marx (e.g. 1867/1985, 1881/1992b) was sympathetic, publicly at least, to the various groups or individuals within the Irish national liberation movement, notably the Fenian (Irish Republican) Brotherhood and later Charles Steward Parnell (1846–91), and condemned the sentences imposed by the English on Irish (Fenian) prisoners in 1867. Nevertheless, in correspondence and confidential reports, he and Engels were critical of them and paid close attention to both the class position and ideologies of their members and to their actions. Engels (1869/1988) described the tactics of the groups as ranging from spontaneous democratic and revolutionary actions of peasants forced from their lands to the liberal-national opposition of the Irish urban bourgeoisie. They were particularly critical of the views and tactics of the Fenians, who focused almost exclusively on the issue of political independence, neglected both land and social issues, were narrowly ethnocentric, and not only failed to make alliances with democratic working-class groups in other countries, especially England, but also failed to understand the importance of these contacts.7 As a result, neither Marx nor Engels was especially sympathetic with cultural nationalism in the narrow sense of the term regardless of what either said publicly. Fifth, Marx (1863–7/1977: 711–23, 1865–85/1981: 468–599) was aware that the extent of capitalist markets and the processes of capitalist production, including those associated with the production of the capitalists and workers themselves, were not only in a constant state of flux but were also incessantly renewed on an ever-increasing scale. He referred to this as accumulation and reproduction on an expanded scale. His commentary about expanded reproduction provoked a number of subsequent writers to critique or work out its implications. For example, Luxemburg argued that
136 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production, and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. (Luxemburg 1913/2003: 368)
Thus, in her view, the capitalist mode of production could not exist in isolation and had to coexist with non-capitalist modes in order for the accumulation and reproduction of the capitalist system to occur; in other words, capitalism could never become a universal form of society. While it repressed its own workers and engulfed non-capitalist societies it also sowed the seeds of economic crises and its own destruction, since it was consuming the very conditions that ensured its existence (Luxemburg 1913/2003: 350, 365–6, 467). Another commentator, Rudolf Hilferding (1910/1981: 228–35, 288–98), had already argued that economic crises were always latent in capitalism because of the imbalances or disproportionalities that exist among the various sectors of the capitalist economy, the declining rates of profit associated with the increased use of machines relative to human labor, and the inter-capitalist competition in the market (the anarchy of the market)—all of which contributed to the periodic overproduction and underconsumption of both commodities and capital. Both Luxemburg and Hilferding realized that Marx’s views about expanded reproduction and economic crises were also parts of his theory of social-class relations. Marx saw that social-class structures were expressions of exploitative social relations. He was also aware that social-class structures, both in the capitalist countries and their colonies were continually reworked during the processes of expanded accumulation and reproduction. This is perhaps most apparent in his discussions of how young women and children constituted an enormous reserve army of labor in England that was repeatedly moved into and out of the labor force in order to depress wages and to extend the length of the working day (Marx 1863–7/1977: 340–416). For example, In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means for employing workers of slight muscular strength, or whose bodily development is incomplete. . . . The labour of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and for workers, the machine, was immediately transformed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the worker’s family, without distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of children’s play, but also the independent labour at home, with customary limits, for the family itself. . . . Machinery, by throwing every member of the family onto the labour market, spreads the value of the man’s labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates it. To purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may perhaps cost more than it
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 137 formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days’ labour takes the place of one day’s, and the price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one. In order that the family may now live, four people must now provide not only labour for the capitalist, but also surplus labour. Thus we see that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms capital’s most characteristic field of exploitation, at the same time raises the degree of that exploitation. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 517–18)
In other words, improvement in machinery allowed factory owners to substitute at lower wages less skilled workers for those with more skills, children for adults, and women for men. Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 345, 354–5, 364–5, 521) also knew that the increased rates of exploitation had deleterious effects on the health of workers both in the capitalist countries and the colonies. He described in detail the effects that intensified production for the capitalist market had on human beings. These included but were not limited to: (1) the high incidence in the 1840s of pulmonary diseases and lower than average life-expectancies of men employed in the potteries, many of whom had begun working fifteen-hour days, six days a week when they were eight years old; (2) the story of a twenty-year-old woman employed as a dressmaker in one of London’s finest millinery shops who frequently worked twenty to thirty hours without a break with sixty other young women in an overcrowded room that lacked ventilation; (3) the high infant mortality rates in factory and agricultural districts where mothers had to work away from their homes; or (4) slaves in the American South who were so overworked that their bodies were effectively used up in seven years. More importantly, he understood how workers were segmented and isolated from one another by servile status, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and nationalism. As a result, he perceived similarities in the exploitation of workers in different parts of the world. After relating an account of the slave trade, the unremitting toil of slaves on plantations, and their low life expectancies, Marx wrote the following: “Mutato nomine de te fibula narrator [this could be thy story under a different name]. For slave trade, read labor market; for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and agricultural districts of Scotland, and Wales; for Africa, Germany.” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 377–8) Marx clearly understood the historicity of social-class structures under conditions of expanded accumulation and reproduction. They were continually being constituted and reworked—but not always in the same ways or at the same pace—in both the industrial capitalist societies of the West and non-capitalist societies on their peripheries (e.g. Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003: 245–82). The differences, he knew, were due, at least partly, to the opposition and resistance of peoples in the home countries and of those on the margins who, while they might have had contact with capitalist merchants (often on their own terms), had not yet been enmeshed in capitalist social relations. Another way of saying this is that class structures were made historically by peoples who were striving exist under circumstances
138 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist passed down by earlier generations and who occasionally were able to change those conditions. He also clearly understood that the inhabitants of some regions—like the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the gold mines of California, or the cotton plantations of the American South—provided raw materials that could either be exported for direct sale or for processing in the home country. In these regions, there were small commodity-producing economic sectors geared to export, large sectors of the local populations that reproduced workers outside the labor market, and often wage-workers that often sought to exclude indigenous peoples or immigrants from entering the labor market; these have sometimes been called dual economies. Other regions—Ireland, the border states in Antebellum America, West Africa, or eastern Europe—were labor reserves whose primary export was human labor-power, which had long-term devastating effects on the local communities in spite of the fact that they often engaged merchant capital on terms shaped by their own social relations. He also knew that the societies on the margins had their own internal dynamics that were shaped but not entirely formed by their relations with the capitalist countries. This informed his views about the importance of alliances between the industrial workers in capitalist states and progressive elements of the working masses in societies on the periphery of the capitalist world system (e.g. Marx and Engels 1882/1989).
Property, Power, and Capitalist States Marx began his examination of the interconnections of law, economy, and civil society in the 1840s. His investigations were provoked by ongoing discussions of land thefts, debates on free trade and protective tariffs, and polemics about the condition of the peasantry in Moselle as well as by the distinctions Ferguson, SaintSimon, Hegel, and others drew between civil society and a political state that stood outside of society (Showstack Sassoon 1991). Property was a central concern in these arguments. Marx saw property as rights of access, use, and disposition—that is, as political relations between classes of persons that were mediated by things; consequently, property was also a statement about power viewed variously as agency (the capacity of action), the ability to realize objective interests, or compulsion over the actions of others (e.g. Macpherson 1971; Bourdieu 1980/1990).8 If the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state of power “maintaining injustice in property relations,” which is determined by the modern division of labour, it is not creating it. The “injustice of property relations” which is determined by the modern division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., by no means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production. (Marx 1847/1976a: 319; emphasis in the original)
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 139 Society itself—the fact that man lives in society and not as an independent, self-supporting individual—is the root of property, of the laws based on it and of the inevitable slavery. (Marx 1861–3/1963: 346)
Marx initially framed his discussions of property in terms of Hegel’s distinction between civil society and the state—the former as the sphere of individual (private) economic desires and the latter as public expressions of the common concerns of society as a whole, a category which stood above those of individuals and of which political organization was only one aspect (e.g. Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 3, 89–91; Draper 1977: 32–4). Dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the terms and the distinction implied between natural man and abstract citizen, Marx (1843/1975c: 166–7) virtually stopped using the notion of civil society by the 1850s and narrowed the meaning of the concept of the state. He increasingly saw the state as an excrescence of society rather than an expression of the common concerns of its members (Marx 1880–2/1974: 329). For Marx (1843/1975a), the state was not an abstraction or an ideal; it referred instead to the historically specific, actually existing political entities that claimed to rise above the differences of particular socioeconomic interests by relativizing them and portraying them as equivalents. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still play a part and there exists a mixture, where consequently no section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. . . . Since the state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised, it follows that all common institutions are set up with the help of the state and are given a political form”. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 90)
Later, he would write that the legal relations and the political forms of a society “originate in the material conditions of life;” that “the anatomy of civil society . . . has to be sought in political economy;” and that “the economic structure of society, [is] the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Marx 1859/1970: 20). Or, in the kinds of capitalist societies that were crystallizing at the time, The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case
140 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers—a relation whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state in each case. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same in its major conditions—from displaying infinite variations and gradations in appearance, as a result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analyzing given conditions. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 927–8)
Marx’s views about politics, power, and the state were already well developed by the mid 1840s (Marx 1843/1975a; Colletti 1975; Miliband 1977, 1991). They were typically elaborated in the context of writings whose central concerns were the state, class struggle, or the reproduction of society through time. If modern civil society was the realm of competitive individualism mediated by the market, then the modern (capitalist) state was an expression of the antagonisms and contradictions resulting from alienation, exploitation, and the historically contingent processes of domination and subordination of groups inherent in class-stratified societies. The institutions and practices of the state sought to contain conflict and to preserve the social-class structures and political relations that prevailed among their citizens and subjects. These political relations were, of course, also manifestations of property and power. States and their agents were representatives of the dominant social classes whose members owned and controlled the means of production; states were also arenas of struggle within and between classes (Marx 1843/1975a, 1852/1979; Marx and Engels 1848/1976). For Marx (1847/1976b: 212), “political power was precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.” What modern civil society had accomplished was to simplify the expression of these struggles. In this perspective, while the ethnic, religious, national, and other kinds of rivalries and conflicts generated within and between modern societies have their roots in socialclass relations, they are not simply reducible to purely economic arrangements. In other words, politics and culture were important arenas of struggle, even though their forms of expression and intensity were often diverse. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the rise of national states—England, Germany, or the United States, for example—coincided in time and was inseparably linked with the development of industrial capitalism, the formation of colonies, and the creation of both domestic and overseas markets (Marx 1863–7/1977: 914–40; Engels 1884/1990).9 As a result, the class struggles that occurred in one national state were typically both spatially and organizationally distinct from those taking place in other countries. They still are in some respects. Marx and Engels (1848/1976: 517; 1882/1989) were acutely aware of the complex culture-historical, political, and
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 141 economic roots of the ethnic, national, and racial differences that fragmented the working classes of particular national states (like England or the United States) and of the chasms that separated the proletarians of one country from those of another when they wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and called for the “working men of all countries, [to] unite!”—a sentiment they repeated once again in 1882 when they pointed to possible linkages between Russian peasants and industrial proletarians in the capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America (Benner 1995). They repeatedly insisted that, strategically, democratic movements in one country needed to be aware of and to seek the support of similar groups in other states. Aware of the common interests of workers, Marx and Engels belonged to political groups that had representatives from a number of national states. Attempts to organize workers politically within national states as well as across their boundaries were often resisted by both the capitalist classes of those countries and the state apparatuses, whose institutions, laws, and practices were shaped to varying degrees by the dominant classes. Marx (1843/1975a: 22–3) knew that the political unity of a national state was, as Erica Benner (1995: 31) put it, “realized only in times of external crisis and war, on, in times of peace, through political repression. In either situation, the appearance of unity had nothing to do with the conscious commitment of a state’s members. It depended, in fact, on denying them opportunities to express any political preferences of their own.” Moreover, he thought that one should evaluate the reasons why particular national identities were imposed on a people from above and that these should be distinguished from those that arose in the community and addressed real human needs as opposed to the abstract concerns of the state and of the monarchs, representatives, and civil servants who viewed the state as their own private property (Marx 1843/1975a: 38, 49–54; Benner 1995: 32). In other words, the modern national states emerging in Europe and North America, for example, were fragile, because even the limited benefits of “political emancipation” were distributed unevenly in society, since they derived “from the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and attains general domination,” so that a particular class “proceeding from its particular situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society [Marx 1843–4/1975: 184]. This “partial revolution” left a potentially explosive tension between the inclusive, egalitarian premises of democratic constitutions and the social inequalities they declined to address. (Benner 1995: 34)
Thus, expressions of national identity by national states—like the United States (America), for example—were simultaneously assertions of unity vis-à-vis other states and manifestations of the failure of a class-stratified society to achieve any real sense of community or internal unity by other means. The conflict between the capitalist classes of different national states usually pitted one country against another—e.g. the United States and England in the 1850s
142 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist and 1860s or France and Germany during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. More recent examples are the First and Second World Wars of the twentieth century. These conflicts typically involved the creation of cross-class alliances that yoked the interests of peasants and workers with those of the capitalist classes under the hegemony of the latter. Patriotism was often the glue that cemented these historically constituted blocs (e.g. Dower 1986; Gramsci 1926/1967, 1933/1971). These alliances set the working classes of one country against those of another. The conflicts between capitalist states also pitted them against non-capitalist societies—such as India or China, about which Marx wrote extensively in the 1850s as we saw earlier in this chapter. In the wake of the Second World War, these conflicts were often referred to in terms of imperialism, decolonization, national liberation movements, as well as distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries, the capitalist countries of the First World and the newly independent but poor nations of the Third World, the North and the South, or the core and the periphery (e.g. Brewer 1990). Marx wrote extensively about the contradictions of industrial capitalist societies from the 1840s onward. The two forms of contradiction described above—those between capitalist states and those between capitalist states and non-capitalist societies—have persisted to the present day; they exist alongside and articulate with a fundamental antagonism in capitalist societies—the one that pits capitalist against worker. In the last forty years, the capitalist classes of different countries have also joined together to form regional or international institutions—such as the North American Free Trade Agreement or the World Trade Organization—designed to facilitate the flows of commodities and capital between different countries. These are aspects of what is now globalization—i.e., the rapid development of global financial markets; the adoption of flexible production strategies; the adoption of new information technologies; cheap transportation; movement of vast numbers of people as migrants, refugees, and tourists; and the spread of capitalist culture through global media and telecommunications. At the same time that national states have hindered the formation of transnational unions and attempted with varying intensities to regulate the flow of workers across their borders, broadly constituted movements have organized to protest and resist their efforts—the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa since 1999; the 220,000 or so labor disturbances that occur annually in China; or the massive immigrant rights protests that took place across the United States in 2006 are only a few instances (Walker 2006: 26n18). The focus of the highly diverse, anti-globalization movement is as often a protest against the institutions of global capitalism as it is opposition to the practices of particular national states. Marx wrote about these contradictions from the 1840s onward, which suggests that he would have been intrigued by their manifestations today. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 237), for example, argue that these attempts to regulate the global market signal an “epochal shift in contemporary
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 143 history” and use the term “empire” to refer to the new form of sovereignty that they suggest has crystallized as a result of efforts to unify the world market. They see a fundamental contradiction “between the deterritorialising logic of capital and the territorialising nature of nation-states” (Green 2002: 40; cf. Hardt and Negri 2000: 42–6, 237). This contradiction was mediated through imperialism, which allowed the capitalist firms of Europe and North America to expand under the protection of the national state both at home and abroad. However, imperialism “also created and reinforced rigid boundaries among the various global spaces, strict notions of inside and outside that effectively blocked the free flow of capital, labor and goods—thus necessarily precluding the full realization of the world market” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 332). In their view, the weakening of the old imperialist powers in the wake of the Second World War, the pre-eminence of the United States and its rivalry with the USSR, and the success of decolonization movements were conditions that promoted the re-creation of the world market and the formation of a new global division of labor in the 1970s. As Paul Green (2002: 43) has noted, the unification of the world market did not involve homogenization but rather the uneven development of capitalism, the decentering of industrial production from the old industrial capitalist countries to former colonies, “the entry of great masses of workers into the disciplinary régime of modern capitalist production, and the emergence of new patterns of labour migration . . . even as some parts of the globe, especially Africa, remain peripheralised in the traditional sense of relying on exports of one or two primary commodities and the import of manufactures.” For Hardt and Negri, what persists in the global structure at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the conflict between transnational corporations and the power of the state, albeit in a new form: Although transnational corporations and global networks of production and circulation have undermined the powers of nation-states, state functions and constitutional elements have effectively been displaced to other levels and domains. . . . Government and politics come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational command. Controls are articulated through a series of international bodies and functions. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 307)
Their claim is a provocative one that challenges state-centered approaches to understanding the world today; however, not everyone agrees with it for any number of reasons. These include but are not limited to: there are alternative historical explanations of the developments Hardt and Negri describe; the world is not as seamless or smooth as they suggest, since the income gap between the North and the South continues and may even be widening; the crisis of the 1970s was not as different from those of 1873–96 and the 1930s as they imply; there are still ongoing and emergent rivalries between national states; there is a profound contradiction between the globalization of markets and states using different currencies; the
144 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist deterritorialization they describe is accompanied by reterritorialization—e.g. the border between the United States and Mexico; their approach to the issue of power in terms of binary oppositions is problematic; or, far from opening up a political space for the voice of the multitudes as they suggest, the intensification of competition in the market has seemingly strengthened patriarchal, racist, and national-chauvinist sentiments and dispositions (e.g. Balakrishnan 2003; Smith 2005: 51). In this chapter, we have looked at three issues. The first was Marx’s views about the development of industrial capitalist social relations and its intersection with primitive accumulation, the formation of domestic and overseas markets, and colonization. The second was concerned with the processes of combined and uneven development along different historical trajectories that resulted from the encapsulation and articulation of societies manifesting different modes of production that were differentially resistant to change. The third focused, on the one hand, on his discussions of the interrelations of property and power, and, on the other, on the implications of his writings for understanding what is happening at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is perhaps fitting to recall Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 409–10) comments in the Grundrisse about the universality towards which capital strives, on the one hand, and the obstacles that it erects that hinder this process, on the other.
–6– Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century Marx was indeed an anthropologist. His anthropology was empirically grounded in the changing realities of everyday life in his own society broadly conceived and in accounts of other societies—initially past societies in the West and increasingly contemporary societies in other parts of the world. The rich detail of his empirical anthropology is perhaps most evident in his journalistic accounts and his analyses of capitalist society and the capitalist mode of production. His anthropology was also rooted in a life-long exploration and elaboration of the ontological categories—i.e., the essential or core features—that characterize and structure human existence. Marx honed his philosophical anthropology in the 1840s after completing his doctoral dissertation and continued to refine his views in subsequent writings like the Grundrisse. These inquiries buttressed his critical analyses of both the contradictions of modern society and the possibilities and contingencies of alternative pathways of social change in the immediate future. Marx’s anthropology was therefore cautiously optimistic. He clearly realized that societies were different from one another; that they change; and that they will keep on doing so. As we saw in earlier chapters, Marx argued (1) that individual human beings engaged in creative and self-creative activity and enmeshed in webs of social relations are the fundamental entities of society, and (2) that both the nature of the individuals and their social relations with each other change historically (e.g. Archard 1987; Brenkert 1983: 227; Gould 1978: 6). Another way of saying this is that human beings create themselves through praxis, and their sociality creates them as social individuals in a community. These social individuals are shaped by their history and plot the course of their actions within the constraints imposed by their bodies and their social relations with others. Nevertheless, they experience both their everyday life and history as individuals. In Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 84) terms, they are “dependent belonging to the greater whole” and “can individuate [themselves] only in the midst of society.” Moreover, since their social relations are neither fixed nor immutable, the particular form they assume at any given moment “is a historic product [that] belongs to a specific phase of their [sociohistorical] development” (Marx 1857–8/1973: 162). In the same context, Marx (1857–8/1973: 158, 161–3) also argued logically that “relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms,” and that in pre-capitalist societies “individuals, . . . although their
145
146 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist relations appear to be more personal, enter into connection with one another only as individuals, imprisoned within a certain definition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf, etc., or as members of a caste etc. or as members of an estate etc.” He then proceeded to point out that the social relations associated with industrial capitalist society were different. They were based on exchange and exchange value (commodities), which had appeared in historical-developmental terms at the interstices of communities rather than within them. These relations depersonalized connections between individuals and used things to express the linkages. He described the “isolated individuality” and “reciprocal independence and indifference” of the social individuals in capitalist societies. He called them “universally developed individuals” and then suggested: The degree and universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible presupposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite to himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond the antithesis of itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end. (Marx 1857– 8/1973: 162; emphasis in the original)
In other words, the rise of capitalism provided the stage for the self-realization of truly universal social individuals—that is, of free individuality. All preceding communities, by contrast, were limited developments of humanity, and individuals, who either had personal (intimate but not necessarily harmonious) ties or stood in a distributive relation to one another, fulfilled only the personal and social roles that existed in those groups.1 While exchange value opened up possibilities for both creating and expanding individuality as it inserted itself between communities, capitalism has produced a truly peculiar kind of individual and set of social relations in the process. In this concluding chapter, I want to examine three interrelated themes. The first is broadly concerned with the self-actualization of social individuals in the context of historically specific sets of social relations. The second focuses briefly on selfrealization, how it relates to Marx’s notion of freedom, and how they are relevant in today’s world. The third deals with the issues that confront us at the beginning of the twenty-first century as anthropologists and, more importantly, as human beings. More specifically, I want to examine Marx’s relevance for framing and addressing today’s issues and to consider some of the range of problems he addressed more than a century ago that are pressing concerns now.
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 147
Social Relations and the Formation of Social Individuals The cornerstone of Marx’s (1844/1975a) views about the formation of social individuals is his theory of alienation in capitalist society, which he presented in detail in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. As István Mészáros (2005: 78–9) and Bertell Ollman (1976: 131–5) have pointed out, his theory of alienation is most importantly a theory of internal relations. On the one hand, it explores the contradictions between culture, political economy, the natural sciences, and ethics. On the other, it examines the contradictions that exist between human beings and their activity, because these are mediated by the division of labor, property, and exchange. Marx’s investigation is framed not only in terms of revealing the internal relations and contradictions but also with reference to transcending, superseding, or overcoming the self-alienation of human beings. He was well aware that alienation had economic, political, moral, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions. He was also aware of its connections with social stratification, domination, exploitation, and resistance. Let us briefly consider these in more detail.
Alienation Alienation has been described as the “loss of control [of one’s humanity and] its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power” (Mészáros 2005: 8; emphasis in the original); as the “splintering of human nature into a number of misbegotten parts” (Ollman 1976: 135); and as “the negation of productivity” (Fromm 1961/2004: 37; emphasis in the original). Marx (1843/1975a, 1843/1975b, 1843–4/1975) sketched his initial views about alienation in the early 1840s; however, after meeting Engels for the first time in 1844 and discussing conditions the latter had observed in England where industrial capitalism—i.e., the capitalist mode of production—was more fully developed than it was on the Continent, Marx (1844/1975a) sharpened his analysis in The 1844 Manuscripts (Mészáros 2005: 66–76). He now distinguished between those features of alienation that were an integral part of the human condition and those that were particular to specific sociohistorical formations, most notably capitalist society. He was also clear that forms of alienation found in pre-capitalist societies were different from those characteristic of capitalist ones—a point he would elaborate in subsequent writings like the Grundrisse or The Ethnological Notebooks (Marx 1844/1975a: 266–7; 1857–8/1973, 1880–82/1974). As you will recall from the discussion in Chapter 2, human beings are a part of nature. They have physical needs and must engage in productive (creative) activity in order to satisfy them. In the process, they create additional non-physical needs whose gratification becomes a necessary condition for the satisfaction of the original needs (Mészáros 2005: 14–5, 79–82). Another way of saying this is that
148 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Human activities and needs of a “spiritual” kind thus have their ultimate ontological foundation in the sphere of material production as specific expressions of human interchange with nature, mediated in complex ways and forms. . . . Productive activity is, therefore, the mediator in the “subject-object relationship” between a human mode of existence, ensuring that he does not fall back into nature, does not dissolve himself into nature. (Mészáros 2005: 80–1; emphasis in the original)
Thus, when human beings objectify nature, they not only identify objects and others but also estrange or alienate themselves from them as they apprehend the natural and social worlds in which they live, establish their own identity and individuality in the process, and use these exterior objects and beings as they act creatively to fulfill socially defined needs and desires. This form of self-alienation, which entails the differentiation of subject from object and the estrangement from nature, is an essential feature of the human condition in all societies. Marx proceeded to argue that, in capitalist societies, human beings were also alienated from the products of their activity, from one another, and from the ability to satisfy their creative potential—i.e., their humanness or species-being. However, as Mészáros (2005: 78–9) points out, these are second-order mediations that arise as historically specific, alienated forms of productive activity that involve—in this instance—private property, the division of labor, exchange, and wage labor. It is worth recalling that Marx viewed property as a relationship between individuals. Three distinctive features of industrial capitalist society, as we saw earlier, are (1) that the members of the capitalist class own or control access to the conditions or means of production, while those of the producing class (proletariat) have property only in their labor-power or ability to produce; (2) that the members of the two classes meet as isolated, independent individuals in the market where they treat each other as equals and assert that they have both legal title to the property they propose to exchange (sell), and then the capitalist employs the labor-power of the direct producer in return for a wage, usually but not always in the monetary form of capital; and (3) that the illusion of equality which seemingly existed at the moment of exchange in the market vanishes in the production sphere when the capitalist appropriates the commodities created by the labor-power of the worker and then sells them for a profit to buyers who in turn use the goods and services to satisfy their needs, wants, and desires. Here the workers are alienated from their productive activity, from the products of that activity, from other human beings, and even from the very qualities that make them human (Ollman 1976: 136–56). Let us now look at the four aspects of alienation in capitalist society in more detail. First, the labor-power of workers is purchased for a wage to produce a commodity; hence, this capacity for productive activity is also a commodity, albeit a peculiar one, because the labor-power of the workers is purchased in a buyer’s market by the capitalist who then also claims property rights to the products of that capacity. Marx described productivity activity in capitalist society as “active alienation” and wrote:
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 149 the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind, The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. . . . The external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs to himself, but to another. . . . As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. (Marx 1844/1975a: 274–5; emphasis in the original)
In a phrase, the creative capacities and productive activity of the capitalist worker are consumed like fuel, and “the qualities that mark him as a human being become progressively diminished” (Ollman 1976: 137). Second, capitalist workers are also estranged from the commodity they produce in the context of alienated productive activity. Their labor has become an object that exists outside of them in the sense that they cannot use the goods they produce either to keep alive or to engage in productive activity; in fact, they have no control over the products of their labor or how or by whom they might be used (Ollman 1976: 143). As Marx put it the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends on himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself— his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. . . . The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks. Whatever the product of his labour, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (Marx 1844/1975a: 272; emphasis in the original)
As Ollman (1976: 147) notes, “the hostility of the worker’s product is due to the fact that it is owned by the capitalist, whose interests are directly opposed to those of the worker.”
150 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Third, members of capitalist society—workers and the capitalists alike—are alienated from one another. The workers are estranged from the capitalists by virtue of the fact that the commodities produced are independent of the individuals who actually made them, and that the capitalist owns—i.e., has private property in—the objects produced by someone else. Thus, the workers are not only alienated from their creative activity and the objects they produced, but also from the capitalists who appropriated them (Marx 1844/1975a: 279). However, there is still more to estrangement of one human being from another in capitalist society. Because of their isolated individuality, growing self-interest, and mounting indifference to others, human beings in these conditions understand others as objects and begin to see themselves as increasingly or continually in competition with them. The capitalists compete with one another for shares of the market and hence profits. The workers compete with one another for employment and for better-paying jobs to purchase the commodities they need for survival. While the capitalists who control the conditions of production remain indifferent to workers except as a commodity that produces surplus value, the competitive nature of capitalism itself requires that they appropriate surplus value with ever-increasing efficiency. These alienated relations between human beings refract the existence of private property in the means of production, which distorts other expressions of everyday life as well (Ollman 1976: 147–9, 153–6, 202–11; Fracchia 1995: 360). Fourth, in capitalist society, human beings are estranged from their “species character”—i.e., from the very qualities that make them human: their sociality, their curiosity and imagination, their faculty for self-contemplation, their capacity for creative productive activity, and their ability to put themselves imaginatively into the shoes of another and to recognize both the similarities to and differences from themselves, to name only a few. These were distorted and deformed as social life turned into a means of individual life and spontaneous productive activity metamorphosed into a means of mere physical existence. Marx (1844/1975a: 277) wrote that alienation “estranges man from his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect” (emphasis in the original). However, this species character is not some transhistorical, abstract essence but rather is a historically specific consequence of the capitalist constitution of labor” where abstract labor becomes the measure of value, mediates social relations and creates a “‘a society’ that assumes the form of a quasi-independent, abstract, universal Other that stands opposed to the individuals and exerts an impersonal compulsion on them” (Fracchia 1995: 360; Postone 1993: 159). As we indicated earlier in this section, Marx (1844/1975a: 266–7) was well aware that different forms of alienation prevailed in pre-capitalist societies, where “the social distribution of labor and its products is effected by a wide variety of customs, traditional ties, overt relations of power, or conceivably, conscious decisions . . . [i.e.] manifest social relations” (Postone 1993: 149–50). For example, neither the slaves (war captives) of classical antiquity nor the serfs of feudal society were separated
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 151 from the means of production or the products of their creative activity, for precapitalist societies in all their variety were characterized by “relations of dependence” (Marx 1857–8/1973: 158). They were not isolated individuals but rather members of a community, albeit legally and politically subordinated ones, who in spite of their status and position had rights of access to and use of communal resources as well as social and interpersonal relations with one another by virtue of their participation in the activities of the collectivity. Nonetheless, they were alienated from a portion of the goods they produced, often a significant portion, through various political and other extra-economic forms of surplus extraction, and they were certainly estranged from the lords and rulers who not only objectified their social status but also depended on them for the goods and services they provided. Slave and master, serf and lord constituted forms of state-based society that were not only vital but also local and limited; they were also not inexorably driven toward their own suspension or toward the formation of some universal or free individuality as happens under capitalism. In a commentary on Marx’s view of state-based societies as alienated forms of social life, John Plamentz wrote perceptively that Alienation was never worse than in bourgeois society, nor men ever more the victims of circumstance. The medieval serf, though he lived poorly, was more secure than the wage-worker under capitalism; the medieval burgher though he could not amass wealth in the way open to the capitalist, was less exposed to total ruin. Manual work was never as dull or precarious as it has come to be for most people in the economy in which labour is freely bought and sold. Inequalities of wealth were never greater or the poor more constrained to accept the terms offered to them by the rich in the [capitalist] society that proclaims the equality of men before the law and the rights of man. (Plamentz 1975: 297)
Domination, Exploitation, and Forms of Social Hierarchy The close connection Marx saw between alienation and relations of social domination and exploitation were already evident when he wrote The 1844 Manuscripts. Social domination is a relationship that refers to the ability of the members of one group to constrain the agency of another group and to secure the compliance of its members. It has been called “the asymmetrical distribution of social power [where] relations of domination and subordination comprise a subset of power relations, where the capacities to act are not distributed equally to all parties to the relationship” (Isaac 1987: 83–4). Here, power viewed as the capacity both to affect something and to actualize that ability, depends not on the capabilities of individual or collective agents but rather on the places they occupy relative to each other in a relational system that structures, maintains, and transforms not only their interactions but also occasionally even the relational system itself. In a phrase, social domination is a relation that involves control over the actions of groups “by means
152 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist of control over the conditions of their activity” rather than a causal determination of social action itself (Gould 1978: 135–6). Marx was also clear by the late 1850s if not earlier that the forms of social domination were diverse and varied from one kind of society to another, that the different relational structures were historically constituted, and importantly that not all societies manifested social structures that supported relations of domination and subordination. The form of social domination that prevails in capitalist societies is abstract and impersonal. As Moishe Postone (1993: 3–4) writes, it “subjects people to impersonal structural imperatives and constraints that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of concrete domination (e.g. personal or group domination), and that generates an ongoing historical dynamic.” In order to earn wages with which they can purchase commodities, workers who do not control the conditions of production are continually compelled to sell their labor power to capitalists who control those conditions. The capitalists appropriate the surplus value created by the workers in the process of production and realize that value as profit over and above the cost of production when the commodities are sold. The capitalists are continually compelled to invest in new technologies and forms of regulation (management) that simultaneously increase productivity, reset the amount of value produced in a fixed amount of time, redefine the amount of time workers are required to expend on reproduction, and worsen (immiserate) the circumstances of the workers regardless of the amount of their wage (Marx 1863–7/1977: 799). At the same time that capitalism creates wealth, it remains tied to the expenditure of human labor (Postone 1993: 342). Every time workers sell their labor power or capitalists purchase it, they underwrite the reproduction of capitalism with its hidden forms of social domination and exploitation, its proclamation of freedom and equality before the law, and its more or less overt forms of social hierarchy based on historically constituted differences that refract the structure of its labor markets. A major difference that Marx discerned between capitalist and pre-capitalist societies is that in the case of the latter the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear[s] as dependent, belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antithesis and fusion of clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in “civil society,” do the various forms of social connection confront the individual as a mere means toward his private necessity, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 84)
The key, in this view, is membership in a community, and the rights and expectations that prevail among those individuals who constitute the social relations of the group and participate in its activities. Social domination is not a factor in some kin
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 153 communities where status differences reflect age, gender, locality, or life experience; where resources are held in common; where sharing and hospitality are expected; where power or ability of one individual or group to constrain the agency of another is non-existent; and where political decisions are often reached by consensus after lengthy discussion. Lewis Henry Morgan (1881/2003: 1–103) characterized these communities as “communism in living.” There are also kin communities, like those in Hawaii or on the Northwest Coast, that have hereditary chiefs, hierarchically ranked clans, nobles and commoners, and wealth differentials; however, these too are characterized by communal control and use of resources and by fiercely held expectations of sharing, generosity, and hospitality (e.g. Lee 1992: 77). Even in the pre-capitalist tributary states described earlier, where social domination was overt, personal, and concrete rather than impersonal and structural, noble and commoner alike were members of the same community, albeit divided into distinct dominant and subordinate layers. While the lords certainly had the capacity to constrain the agency of commoners who actually controlled the conditions of production, they also depended on the latter for the surplus goods, rent, and labor time that ultimately constituted much of the nobility’s livelihood and actually underwrote their continued existence as a social group. The commoners, in turn, continually pressed the lords to fulfill their obligations and to be generous especially in times of strife or famine. Exploitation has been described variously by different authors. One especially clear definition is that it occurs “when the primary producer is obliged to yield up a surplus under the influence of compulsion (whether political, economic or social, and whether perceived as compulsion or not), at any rate at the stage when he no longer receives a real equivalent exchange . . .” (Ste Croix 1981: 37). A second, slightly more elaborate account is that exploitation [occurs] when the use of the surplus by a group (or an aggregate) which has not provided the corresponding labour reproduces the conditions for a new extortion of surplus labour from the producers. Thus, according to Marx, in the capitalist system, at the end of the labour process the proletarian finds himself obliged once again to sell his labour power which the capitalist will then exploit (more intensely) thanks to the surplus he has appropriated during the labour process. (Dupré and Rey 1968/1980: 196)
The most distinctive feature of any society, for Marx (1864–94/1981: 929), was the way in which the dominant class(es) whose members owned or controlled the conditions of production extracted surplus goods and labor from those classes that were directly engaged in production. This relationship underpinned not only the economic basis of the community but also the entire social structure, including the particular political forms of sovereignty and dependence that shape the institutions and practices of the state. Marx was also aware that exploitation could be either direct or indirect. That is, individual wage-workers, peasants, slaves, serfs, or tenant farmers could be exploited directly by individual employers, landlords, or
154 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist moneylenders, or could be exploited indirectly through taxes, military conscription, or forced labor levied disproportionately on them by the state, which he viewed as both the collective agent of the ruling class and an arena for class struggle (Ste Croix 1981: 43–4). With particular reference to the exploitation of the French peasants from 1848 to 1850, Marx wrote The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that there exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury; the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant’s title to property is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. (Marx 1850/1978: 122; emphasis in the original).
The obvious difference between direct exploitation in capitalist and non-capitalist societies is the locus of exploitation. In capitalist societies, exploitation occurs in the production process as the employer appropriates surplus value from the wageworkers—i.e., it takes place in an indirect, impersonal, continuous, and abstract manner at the economic level. By contrast, in those pre-capitalist societies—such as tributary states like the Inca Empire—where direct exploitation occurs, the appropriation of surplus goods and labor-time is typically overt and periodic. While the demands may be framed in terms of reciprocal exchange, they are ultimately backed up with threats of force. As a result, the locus of exploitation in pre-capitalist societies resides not at the economic level but rather in their social or political moments. Exploitation, which occurs at the economic realm of society even when the overt means of enforcing it derive political acts or legal practices, underwrites the formation and reproduction of social-class structures. Geoffrey de Sainte Croix has written that Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which appropriation is embodied in a social structure. . . . A class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labour of production) and to other classes. . . . It is the essence of a class society that one or more of the smaller classes, in virtue of their control over the conditions of production (most commonly exercised through ownership of the means of production), will be able to exploit—that is, to appropriate a surplus at the expense of—the larger classes, and thus constitute an economically and socially (and therefore probably also political) superior class or classes. (Ste Croix 1981: 43–4)
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 155 In the “classless” societies manifesting variants of the communal mode of production, the social categories that regulate the relations of production are not economic ones, and the economic aspects of the community are masked or concealed by them. Since these relations are dominant during the processes of class formation, the social classes that emerge when individuals or groups of individuals begin to pursue their own interests in the context of the continuing public institutions and practices of the community are defined largely in cultural terms. Thus, the true nature of the economic is obscured, since the emergent class structure consists of a hierarchy of social categories that cannot be reduced directly to economic class relations. This hierarchy of non-economic social categories disguises both the real economic class relations and the real contradictions that emerge from them. In such a situation, the economic class relations appear different from their real nature, while the hierarchical social categories of the class structure appear as “natural” relations. The formation of the class structure is ultimately based on the economic order of the society—the unequal accumulation of surplus product by the various social categories that make up the hierarchy. It is the condition for the formation of economic class relations to the extent that this process determines the place of the different social categories in the production process, and that it determines the reorganization of the labor processes to incorporate exploitation by one or more of these categories. The reorganization of the labor processes, which involves the progressive differentiation of the activities of these categories, provides the conditions for the further development of the contradictions based on the appearance of extortion (Bonte 1981: 51–5). By the mid 1840s, Marx and Engels (e.g. 1845–6/1976: 46–8, 76–85) had already worked out the class theory of the state (Draper 1977). They argued that the constitution of the state was connected with the conditions for the constitution of the class structure and with the conditions for the reproduction of the dominant class as real economic class relations appear.2 The agencies of the state subsume the administration of justice, the conduct of war and diplomacy, and other activities that were previously carried out by the community. They do this in the interest of the state and of the society as a whole. This, however, is the basic contradiction of civil society. The state is simultaneously the representative of the class in whose interests it was organized and the mediator of the oppositions between individuals of that class and between the opposing classes of the society as a whole (Krader 1978: 94–6). In Marx’s (1880–2/1974: 329) terms, the state was an excrescence of society. The autonomy of politics and of the state was the product of modern times. The state stood above society only when the economic class relations of appropriation have become dominant. This involves the objectification of individual human beings; they cease to exist as real people and appear instead as formal entities—legal or civil personalities—in the eyes of the state. Marx did not argue that other sociohistorically constituted categories—such as gender, ethnicity, or race, which also place individuals and groups in social
156 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist hierarchies in capitalist societies—were unimportant, reducible to class position, or could only be understood in terms of class (Brodkin 2000; Postone 1993: 321).3 While these forms of hierarchy were not well developed in his work, he did, however, often consider them in terms of how they intersected with social-class structures. For example, in Capital, he quoted a public health report for 1863 and commented on its observations and remarked angrily on its justification for gendered inequities in food consumption: “the insufficiency of food on agricultural labourers fell as a rule chiefly on the women and children ‘for the man must eat to do his work’” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 809); in the same volume, he described vividly the effects on the 140,000 or so women and children employed in the domestic production of lace (Marx 1863–7/1977: 590–1, 595–9). In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (1845/1975: 389–92) had already described both the ways in which capitalist employers used Irish, Scottish, and English identities to construct an ethnically stratified labor force in Manchester and the slums inhabited by the Irish workers whom he characterized as the poorest of the poor. Over the years, both he and Marx (e.g. 1869/1988b) would lament the chauvinism of the different national groups that made it difficult for them to see their common cause as workers. In The Ethnological Notebooks, Marx (e.g. 1880–2/1974: 324, 335, 349) ranted against the racial classifications and hierarchies that were being constructed by social scientists in the wake of massive immigration in the late nineteenth century and used to legitimize the construction of working classes that were being stratified in terms of racialized identities (Gailey 2006: Patterson and Spencer 1995).
Resistance and Protest It is worth noting that Marx thought that slaves, peasants, and workers were never completely powerless, and that struggle is “the fundamental relationship between classes (and their respective individual members), involving essentially exploitation, or resistance to it” (Ste Croix 1981: 44). Over the years, he would comment on various forms of protest ranging from religion and the ongoing tensions between communities and the states in which they are enmeshed to various forms of resistance, reformist efforts, and open rebellion. For Marx, raised in a predominantly Catholic region oppressed by a state whose official cult was evangelical Protestantism, religion was always more than “the ideological expression of the powerful [including the state], legitimating social hierarchy;” it was also ”an active moral agency, especially for the deprived and despised” (Raines 2002: 5). In Marx’s own words, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” (1843–4/1975: 175; emphasis in the original)
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 157 In this view, religion provides a sense of community and meaning to existence in times of increasingly atomization as human beings feel steadily more isolated from one another, especially in capitalist society (Marx 1844/1975a: 377). From the mid 1840s onward, Marx sought out contemporary, historical, and ethnographic accounts of protest and resistance. His earliest effort was an analysis of the revolt of the Silesian weavers in June 1844 (Marx 1844/1975c: 202–6). The protest was launched when a weaver employed as a domestic worker was arrested for singing a song lamenting the starvation wages paid by the factory owner. Within hours, a crowd of 5,000 weavers ransacked his house and destroyed the account books. The following day, “a crowd of 3,000 marched on a neighboring village (Langebielau), where similar scenes occurred” (Löwy 2003/2005: 83). The army intervened, killing or wounding a number of weavers; the crowd responded and drove off the military. Reinforcements arrived on the following day and dispersed the crowd into countryside where they were pursued by the soldiers. Thirty-eight were arrested and given long prison sentences. Toward the end of the year, other industrial workers in the region reported that their problems were the same as those of the weavers. As Michael Löwy (2003/2005: 85) pointed out, Marx recognized the relative weakness of the working class at the time and raised two important questions: (1) what was the balance of force among the workers, the dominant class, and the state; and (2) what were the possibilities for alliances between the workers and other groups both within and beyond the national state? These would guide his analyses of subsequent protests and revolts—for example, the failed revolutions of 1849, the Indian Mutiny in late 1850s, and the Paris Commune in 1870 (Marx 1850/1978, 1852/1979, 1857/1986b, 1857/1986c, 1857/1986e, 1871/1986). Marx (e.g. 1880–2/1974: 204, 261, 300–3, 328) also paid particular attention in The Ethnological Notebooks to what anthropologist Stanley Diamond (1951/1996) later called “kin/civil conflict”—that is, the contradictions arising from exploitation that exist between the priorities of the dominant class, the state, and the subject communities, and how the ongoing dynamics, turmoil, and resistance they engender are played out in everyday life. As Gailey (1987: 16–7, 42–4) notes, when kinship relations are distorted and become attached to non-kin-based state institutions, such as local chief or tax collector, individuals whose prestige is rooted in kinship are threatened, and the new local representatives of the state and its dominant class find themselves in the position of having to negotiate whole new sets of relations with their kin and neighbors at the same time they are dealing with the demands of the state. Kin/civil conflict often spills over into active revolt (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959; Patterson 1991: 98–128). Even when conditions are quiescent, the conflict continues as subject communities engage in various forms of passive resistance—lying, theft, foot-dragging, or evasion to name only a few (Bodley 1982; Scott 1985). Let us briefly return to the issue posed at the beginning of this section: the selfactualization of human potential—the self-determination or self-realization of the social individual. Marx, like Hegel before him, believed that history began with
158 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist human existence, and that, because it is historicized, the particular kinds of human existence that prevailed in different moments in the past were different from those of today. Individual human beings struggled both with the world in which they lived and with their inner selves. They had an existential need for a sense of community, for connection with reality, for a meaningful understanding of the worlds they inhabited, for creative expression, and for a feeling of wholeness (Brian 2006: 233–5). At the same time, they recognized “the disparity between thought and being, ideal and fact, hope and accomplishment, ‘ought’ and ‘is’” (Rader 1979: 205). In other words, they lived in crisis, and their crises had both external and internal dimensions and dialectics. We live in crisis as well. Marx, more like Hegel than Adam Smith, believed in a notion of progress— that is, human beings continually struggle to overcome the internal and external contradictions in their daily lives (Plamentz 1975: 322–56). Sometimes the pace of change was relatively rapid; sometimes it was much slower. In a sense, the resolution of those contradictions involved putting into practice those capabilities that could be realized given the opportunities and constraints that prevail in historically given circumstances. Marx, like a number of his predecessors, recognized that capitalism created a variety of occupations that had not existed earlier, and that this diversity was a manifestation of circumstances that did in fact offer new opportunities. At the same time, he also recognized capitalism condemned large numbers of peoples to lives of drudgery, long working hours, and few opportunities for creative activity beyond the satisfaction of immediate physical needs. Another way of phrasing this is that the structure of capitalist society made it increasingly unlikely that human beings living under the conditions it creates would have the freedom from alienation, domination, and exploitation to actualize their potential. As a result, Marx saw the project of self-actualization as a revolutionary goal to be achieved in the future on the basis of conditions that were created and contested in the present. He did not specify in any great detail what the structures of those communities would be like—even though, as he and Engels had advocated in the Communist Manifesto, it might involve among other things several forms of income redistribution, equal liability for work, state ownership of public utilities and banking, new power relations, forging a social safety net, a more equitable distribution of justice, and creating conditions of material abundance and freedom that allow all human beings to actualize themselves as social individuals (Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 505).4
Anthropology: “The Study of People in Crisis by People in Crisis” Let us now turn to the second goal outlined in the introduction to the book: namely, given the topics Marx addressed at length or in passing in his writings, what is his legacy, both actual and potential, to issues of importance in anthropology today? Here, it is important to keep in mind that he was a political activist whose aim
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 159 was not merely to describe and interpret the world but rather to change it (Marx 1845/1976: 5). Like any political activist worth his salt, Marx was acutely aware of the importance of accurate assessments of the social groups involved and their capabilities under historically specific conditions, their relations, the balance of force among them, and the possibilities for building alliances to change that balance, as well as opportunities for maneuverability in those circumstances. Needless to say in these appraisals, he was far more interested in the real than in self-representations that put the best possible “spin” on things and always have the capacity to distort actually existing relations and conditions. As a result, Marx’s anthropology was an engaged anthropology. If he were alive today, he would probably agree with Stanley Diamond’s observation that Anthropology, reified as the study of man, is the study of men in crisis by men in crisis. Anthropologists and their objects, the studied, despite opposing positions in the “scientific” equation, have this much in common: they are both, if not equally, objects of contemporary, imperial civilization. . . . Unless the anthropologist confronts his own alienation which is only a special instance of a general condition, and seeks to understand its roots, and subsequently matures as a relentless critic of his own civilization, the very civilization which objectifies man, he cannot understand or even recognize himself in the other or the other in himself. (Diamond 1969/1999: 401–2)
Marx’s anthropology of engagement would broadly include ongoing critical considerations of at least the following issues: (1) the relations, presuppositions, and practices of one’s own society; how they came to be; and how they impinge on and interact with those of other communities; (2) the sociohistorical developmental trajectories of other societies as well as of their complex, shifting articulations with one another and with our own society; (3) the conditions of constitution and historicity of analytical categories that are presumed to be ontological, and that distinguish phenomenal (superficial) forms from the essential relations that underlie them; and (4) the dialectical interplay of theoretically informed questions, which shape empirical observation, and the empirical evidence itself, which necessarily forces the refinement, modification, or rejection of theoretical understanding. As you will recall, Marx (1837/1975) lamented in a letter to his father the fragmentation of knowledge that was taking place in the university when he was a student. Hence, there is good reason to believe that his anthropology today would be integrating and integrative rather than one that balkanizes appreciation of the human condition and, in the process, actively promotes indifference, intolerance, or even contempt for the work of others among the diverse practitioners attempting to understand it. There are a number of perspectives or themes that Marx examined which retain their relevance today. Plausibly these include: the historicity of human beings both as natural and social beings and their changing relations; capitalism and its transformations on an increasingly global scale; social-class relations and their
160 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist intersection with racism, nationalism, and sexism; the health and well-being of human individuals; culture as an arena of social reproduction, creativity, and resistance; language, communication, and social relations; and the transition to more just forms of society. Let us briefly consider each of them in the pages that follow. First, Marx’s anthropology would be a theoretically informed, historical anthropology whose objects of inquiry were concerned with ensembles of social relations and culture per se rather than with the particular methodologies that archaeologists, historians, or ethnographers use to recuperate information about societies and the individuals who compose them that either existed in the past or live in contemporary communities whose day-to-day realities may be located in one part of the world while their centers of gravity and reference may be situated elsewhere. His anthropology was also sensitive to the diversity of those societies in time and space. It would pay attention to the historical development of human beings as both biological and social beings. Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 340–416) knew that the human body simultaneously afforded certain opportunities and imposed certain limitations on what individuals could accomplish given the circumstances in which they lived and the arrays of cultural knowledge, practices, and things that were available to them at those particular times and places. He also knew that existent social relations, cultural knowledge, dispositions, and practices as well as their materialized manifestations not only shaped how the members of particular communities understood the worlds in which they live but also influenced the significance and meaning their members attached to its constituent elements. Both the social and biological dimensions of human beings are implicated in the metabolism that exists between their communities and the natural worlds they inhabit; both are involved in the changes to those metabolisms as is the natural world—changes that have the capacity at least to transform not only how human beings themselves live in their worlds but also to modify the human body itself. His anthropology would be concerned with the everyday lives of individuals, their social relations with one another, and the cultural beliefs and dispositions they share or contest as these are both replicated and transformed in the course of their day-to-day actions. Society and culture are processes that reflect and interact not only with the particular combinations of modes of production that underlie them at a different level of reality but also with contingent events and the tide of history. While many events, like brushing one’s teeth in the morning, may be fairly inconsequential, others, like the Russian Revolution of 1917, have had profound effects and were, in fact, chains of events set in motion months or even years earlier. They reflect decisions made as well as the intended and the unintended consequences of those choices that promote particular historical trajectories selected out of wider arrays of initial possibilities. This is what is sometimes meant by phrases like “tide of history,” whose course and outcome are often frighteningly foreseeable quite early in the process as events begin to unfold with almost law-like predictability and regularity, like those in the wake of the USA’s invasion of Iraq.
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 161 His anthropology would deal with the issues of change understood both as transformation within particular combinations of modes of production and as transition from one mode of production to another. For example, the former might include developments internal to tributary or capitalist societies, while the latter might focus on the transition from feudalism to capitalism or the dual processes involved in the simultaneous dissolution of kin-based relations and the formation of social-class relations during the transition from primitive communism to some form of tributary society (e.g. Gailey 1987; Lee 2003; Leone and Potter 1999; Orser 1999). This anthropology would continue to appreciate his concern with the balance of force or power that exists among the disparate groups of a society as well as the changing circumstances that variously underwrite, reproduce, erode, alter, and even occasionally erase that balance. It would stress the historically contingency of change and underscore the fact, contrary to the beliefs of the evolutionists, that particular outcomes are never guaranteed even as groups struggle to secure them. This anthropology would also recognize, as Marx did in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the existence of dominant, residual, and emergent modes of production and cultures in particular societies—sometimes perceptively and presciently, sometimes by “studying history backward” to borrow a phrase from Bertell Ollman (1993: 133). Marx’s anthropology would also engage what Eric Wolf (1972) called “political ecology.” He realized that “the earth . . . [together with human beings] is active as an agent in the production of use-values, a material product” (Marx 1864– 94/1981: 955) and that “labour-power itself is, above all else, the material of nature transformed into a human organism” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 323). Elsewhere, Marx (1863–7/1977: 134) described the metabolism of human beings and nature in the following way: “Labour is not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the usevalues it produces. As William Petty says labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.” He recognized that the relationship between people and their environment, as well as the production of use values, always occurred under specific sets of social relations, and that the latter had a shaping effect on how people humanized nature and how they were, in turn, naturalized by their worlds (Soper 1996: 87). That is, the conditions and relations of capitalist production had different consequences on the natural world than those that prevailed during earlier phases of sociohistorical development or in societies manifesting other modes of production (e.g. Marx 1857–8/1973: 604–5; 1861–3/1971: 301; 1865–85/1981: 321–3; 1864–94/1981: 195). In other words, while Marx was acutely aware of environmental degradation and sustainability under historically specific conditions, he also recognized the dependence of society on natural conditions and relativized both the notions of ecological limitations and overpopulation. As a consequence, he would undoubtedly be fascinated with current discussions such as those touching on the anthropology of built landscapes, overpopulation, global climate change, the property relations and governmental policies that sustain man-made natural disasters and famines, environmental degradation, and pollution to name only a few
162 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist (cf. Burkett 1999; Davis 1999, 2001; Franke and Chasin 1980; Grundmann 1991; Hughes 2000; Panitch and Leys 2006; Steinberg 2000). Second, Marx’s anthropology would retain a focus on the ongoing historical development of capitalism and the periodic crises, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, that are integral, necessary features of its growth. This focus would necessarily have several dimensions. Marx was impressed by the ability of the capitalist mode of production to produce wealth; in this regard, it was unlike any of its predecessors. By the 1860s, he had discerned that capitalism was developing along different trajectories, for example, in England, the United States, and Germany. He had written that there were alternative possibilities or options for the kinds of capitalist development that might occur in the immediate future in those national states. He was aware that there had already been several phases of industrial capitalist development broadly reflecting shifts from production of the means of consumption (the competitive capitalism of textile production, for instance, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) to the production of the means of production (the manufacture in the mid nineteenth century that yielded a commodity—steel for instance which could be used to make other commodities like railroad tracks or steam engines; this shift also involved the concentration and centralization of capital, the formation of joint stock companies, and the emerging distinction in the workplace between managers, engineers, and administrators, on the one hand, and skilled and less-skilled workers, on the other). He was aware of imperialist development, which involved the acquisition of raw materials from colonies or former colonies, the production of commodities in the factories of the capitalist state, and the sale of those goods in overseas markets created in the colonies; moreover, he would consider those commodities and their impact (e.g. Mauer 2006; Mintz 1985). Marx would undoubtedly have been fascinated by the development of industrial capitalism and its peripherals in the twentieth-century—such as the rise of finance capital and increasing interdependence of firms and industries in the early years; the Fordist compromises and guarantees between capital and labor after the Second World War underwritten by Keynesian state welfare policies and mass consumerism; the breakdown of those agreements with the advent of flexible accumulation in the 1970s; the dependent industrialization in parts of Latin America and East Asia; further fragmentation of the working class, the emergence of permanently unemployable peoples, the increased importance of financial markets following the partial abrogation of the Bretton Woods agreements; innovations in transportation and communication; or the impact of computer, information, and robotics technologies on the management, surveillance, and structure of production in the last thirty years to name only a few. Marx devoted considerable attention to the structural features, the conflicting tendencies, underlying the periodic crises and business cycles of the capitalist mode of production. His analyses began with the unequal exchanges that occur between those firms engaged in the manufacture of steel and other means of production
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 163 and those that are involved in the manufacture of consumer goods. They involved the tendencies of the rate of profit to fall in industrial sectors and of investment to move from less to more profitable sectors of the economy with one consequence that the weaker firms in any given sector were destroyed through the concentration and centralization of capital. He took notice of episodes of the over-accumulation of capital—that is, of periods when it was not being invested because the rates of return on investments were deemed too low. He also noted that the anarchic relations prevailing between firms producing means of production and those producing consumer goods result not only in the periodic overproduction and under-consumption of those goods but also in episodes of underemployment, which adversely affect both workers and the profitability of firms that sell commodities targeted for the working classes. Besides unemployment, these crises have also underwritten emigration and yielded shortages, rapidly rising prices, bank closures, savings and loan scandals, the collapse of sub-prime mortgage markets, fiscal shortfalls for multiple levels of government, as well as the implementation by national states of various Keynesian and neoliberal policies, often at the same time, in an effort either to resolve the crises of capitalism or to shift responsibility and the burden to the more affected and less powerful. Anthropologists, with varying degrees of consciousness of the fact, have long been aware that there is a significant spatial element in capitalist development that simultaneously involves both the uneven development of space and the incorporation or encapsulation in different ways of societies or peoples residing in those spaces or regions into the processes of capitalist production. When the human sciences were professionalized in the late nineteenth century, anthropology’s object of inquiry in that emergent technical division of labor consisted of peoples living on the margins of the capitalist world or in one of its diasporic communities or internal colonies—e.g. Ireland, the Low Country of Georgia and South Carolina, or the Pueblos of the American Southwest. Marx noted that the process of capitalist accumulation was always embedded in particular combinations of social relations and ecological circumstances; it often involved the dispossession of local inhabitants or the devaluation or destruction of their assets (like the textile industry of India in the late eighteenth century or the buffalo herds of the Great Plains after the American Civil War); efforts to embed the process of accumulation and create the physical and administrative infrastructures (the built environment) required for its success frequently involved tensions, conflicts, the emergence of social movements, and even the destruction of local communities as well as their articulation into the regional division of labor and entry into and participation in market exchange relations (cf. Harvey 2006: 69–116). It is clear that both individuals and communities on the peripheries of capitalism frequently entered into these relations on their own terms—terms that made sense to them (e.g. Sahlins 1993/2000). It was also apparent to Marx that the reproduction of capitalist accumulation on an expanded scale necessarily involved the continual absorption of peoples living in non-capitalist
164 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist regions into capitalist social relations—a process that began more than two centuries ago and has continued virtually unabated to the present as evidenced by the vast numbers of young men and women emigrating today from the rural regions of western China to find wage-labor in the factories of the new industrial cities of Guangdong Province. There has been an intimate and complex relationship between the crystallization of the capitalist mode of production, the rise of capitalist societies, and the formation of national states from the mid seventeenth century onward. In Capital, for example, Marx (1863–7/1977: 594, 877–907) discussed the state’s role in the dispossession of small holders from their lands, the expropriation and redistribution of property, and the criminalization of vagabondage as well as its foot-dragging and active opposition both to legislation and to the enforcement of laws that would have been beneficial to the health and well-being of workers. Elsewhere, he commented on the role played by the state in the transformation of agrarian landscapes in nineteenth-century Scotland into pasturage, the expulsion of their inhabitants, and the subsequent conversion of the displaced persons into seasonal subsistence fishermen, littoral harvesters, foragers, poachers, rustlers, thieves, and beggars who lived on the margins of capitalist society and whose activities were often of questionable legality (Marx 1853/1979g: 492–4). The relationship of capitalism to the national state is indeed a complicated one especially in the former colonies of capitalist states and in areas, like Afghanistan, where the legitimacy of the colonial regime was routinely challenged and its authority was weak under the best of circumstances. Marx would probably not be surprised by the resilience of capitalist enterprises and the capitalist mode of production in the years since his death; after all, national states have historically protected capitalist enterprises located in their territories and suppressed resistance to the actions of those firms and to those of the state itself (e.g. Kapferer1988; Reyna and Downs 1999; Weis 1998). Third, Marx’s anthropology would want to examine social-class structures viewed in terms of the relations of production and their intersection with hierarchies socially and culturally constructed in terms of race, national, ethnic, and gendered identities. What these identities or categories share is that they always relate to some essence or element of a collectivity of individuals that is viewed both as natural and as unchanging (e.g. Mullings 2005; Winant 2004). As Peter Wade (2002: 20, 25) indicates, these categories create identities that are both oppositional and relational and that serve to include some individuals and exclude others. What we know about these analytical categories is that they vary significantly in time and space and even from one neighborhood to the next in a city like Detroit. We also know that the ones that prevail today developed historically under circumstances shaped, on the one hand, by the formation of colonies, national states, and capitalism and, on the other, by the mapping of elements which were understood by their cartographers to reflect “essential” differences in collectivities of human bodies (e.g. Orser 2001, 2004). We have seen that, while these essences may be portrayed as either biological
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 165 or cultural, the characteristic they share is that they are immutable or fixed. As you will recall, Marx’s view of human nature was that it was mutable, had changed, and reflected the particular ensembles of social relations that prevailed during different historical epochs; for example, he once wrote What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relations. (Marx 1849/1977: 211; emphasis in the original)
While Marx was both disbelieving and contemptuous of claims made about innate differences between races and nationalities, he also realized that racism, nationalism, and sexism were real. They were important dimensions of social organization and cultural meaning that not only labeled individuals and collectivities but also had the potential to underwrite discrimination, domination, and exploitation. He was certainly aware that slaves lacked the rights of free men and women, that women and children typically received lower wages than men in factories, and that immigrants identified as one of the marked categories, like the Irish, were paid less than nativeborn workers. Contemporary scholars have elaborated this understanding. Karen Brodkin (2000) has perceptively shown that categories constructed in terms of race, nationality, ethnicity, and gender structure capitalist labor markets. Etienne Balibar (1988/1991, 1989/1994) has further shown that racism and sexism are frequently intertwined with nationalist projects that attempt to control not only the movement of people within a national state but also their ability to work or even to exist within their borders (e.g. Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Hinton 2002a, 2002b; Silverstein 2005; Warren 1998). In a phrase, the issues of racism, nationalism, and sexism and their articulation with class structures on local, national, and global scales continue to be problems that Marx recognized and addressed often in inchoate form; they would undoubtedly be a feature of his anthropology in the twenty-first century. Fourth, his anthropology would certainly consider the health and well-being of communities, especially in relation to the conditions in which individuals work and live their everyday lives, and how these experiences are inscribed in their bodies through repetitive performance. As you recall, there are lengthy sections in Capital where Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 320–411, 517–43, 610–42) discussed the impact of work and pollution from lead, petroleum, persistent organic compounds, toxic air, noise, and others on the health and well-being of communities (Schell and Denham 2003). Data processors who toil over computers, miners who inhale coal dust during their work shifts, linemen on professional football teams whose life expectancies are significantly shortened by long-term acute obesity and traumas, or people who reside in neighborhoods poisoned by toxic wastes can certainly attest to the ways in which such habitual activities affect their bodies and impair their daily lives (e.g.
166 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist Bourdieu 1972/1977: 72–95; Buikstra and Beck 2006; Schulz and Mullings 2006; Williams 2001). Health and life insurance companies are even more acutely aware of the effects. They know that risk, illness, the availability of treatment, and even understanding are unequally distributed in societies stratified by class and other socially constructed categories. Marx would have agreed with the observation that social-class position was an important factor in determining morbidity and mortality. From his own life experience, he knew that people often treated themselves using folk remedies derived from a variety of medical traditions and saw physicians and other medical practitioners; he also knew that medical practitioners were not only members of particular social strata but also that they were “a primary interface between the ruling and subordinate classes” (Waitzkin 1979: 603). Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that he would concur with the interests of critical medical anthropologists who are concerned with the social origins of disease and poor health; the health policies and role of the state in providing health care; the interrelations among the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the state, and health care providers—i.e., the political-economic contexts of health, work, and everyday life; the interactions of different medical traditions in national and transnational contexts; and the social relations between different layers of the medical hierarchy (Singer and Baer 1995: 61; cf. Baer, Singer, and Susser 1997). While capitalism has continually striven to reduce human beings to creatures whose species essence is to work, eat, and reproduce the next generation of the labor force, Marx recognized that they also engaged in an array of activities and behaviors and did things with and to their bodies that capitalism did not control. They ornamented or modified the surfaces of their bodies, sometimes permanently (tattoos, dental implants, or trepanations for instance), in ways that conveyed not only their lived experiences but also symbolic information about who they were, their intentions and identities as well as their place in society (e.g. Joyce 2005). Personal ornaments passed from one generation to the next embody the identities and experiences of deceased or older individuals and have the ability to make these sentiments, dispositions, and even desires available intergenerationally—something Marx noted in his comments on the role of tradition in the preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire. Fifth, as you will recall from earlier in the book, Marx was already working by the late 1850s with a sophisticated notion of culture as the forms of social consciousness that are intertwined with praxis and social relations as these were manifested in particular societies. It seems reasonable to assume that these would be integral to his empirical and philosophical anthropology if he were alive today. In his view, culture is interwoven with material activity, objectification (the rendering of human needs into material objects that satisfy those needs), materialization (the embodiment within those objects of social relations), and the inscription of those needs and forms on and within the bodies of human beings enmeshed in particular ensembles of social relations. Hence, culture is neither a one-way reflection of the views of the
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 167 dominant classes or those of the state nor reducible to them, but rather is the product of ongoing, complex, reciprocal interactions. While parts of culture are widely shared in any given society, other parts—both expressions and practices—are laden with diverse meanings. Culture is learned within the domestic unit and outside of it. It is simultaneously mechanical and critical. It is ambiguous and contested. It is the locus of practical activity, strategy, creativity, improvisation, and innovation. It is also the theater where social relations are worked out as well as the arena where contradictions manifest themselves, where antagonisms are displaced to other times or places, and where they are occasionally even resolved. And, most importantly, it changes. In recent years, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) has developed a number of themes about culture that are inchoate in Marx’s writings. He has done so by interrogating them in light of subsequent works by Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Erving Goffman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Erwin Panofsky among others (e.g. Fowler 1997; Hanks 2005; Schwartz 1995: 15–51). Marx would undoubtedly be intrigued with Bourdieu’s standpoint, which has been described in the following way: Culture provides the very grounds for human communication and interaction; it is also a source of domination. The arts, science, religion, indeed all symbolic systems—including language itself—not only shape our understanding of reality and form the basis for human communication; they also help establish and maintain social hierarchies. Culture includes beliefs, traditions, values, values and language; it also mediates practices by connecting individuals and groups to institutionalized hierarchies. Whether in the form of dispositions, objects, systems, or institutions, culture embodies power relations. Further, many culture practices in advanced societies constitute relatively autonomous arenas of struggle for distinction. Intellectuals—the specialized producers and transmitters of culture—play key roles in shaping those arenas and their institutionalized hierarchies. (Schwartz 1995: 1)
In other words, culture consists of the historically constituted and learned habits of the mind and their materializations that derive from the habitual practices and ways of doing things in everyday lived experience. It reflects the underlying unity of everyday life. It is interconnected with but not directly reducible to economic or social spheres of activity. It relates the dispositions, sentiments, habits, and aspirations of individual agents to the wider social institutions and hierarchies they create and reproduce through their everyday activities. It is a response to the experiences and relations of individuals in social-class structures and hence is reflective of their class position and, thus, involves not merely the relations of production but also considerations of age, gender, status, education, property, and even the dialects they speak. Culture reflects the inequalities reproduced by these class structures. Struggles over the meaning of culture are waged in the context of these structures or fields, as antagonisms are reproduced or changed (e.g. Bourdieu
168 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist 1964/1979, 1979/1984, 1980/1990, 1984/1988, 1989/1996, 1991, 1993; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977/1990; Crehan 2002). Sixth, Marx’s anthropology would certainly examine the interconnections of language, consciousness, communication, and social relations, on the one hand, and language and ideology, on the other. For Marx, as Marnie Holborow (2006: 4–7) has pointed out, language and consciousness are dialectically intertwined, and both have their bases in the relations of human beings to one another and to the worlds they inhabited. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me. . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 44; emphasis in the original)
Thus, in his perspective, there is a dialectical relationship between language and human beings in society. Language is historical, creative, and dynamic; it is a means for conveying information and emotions, planning, and perhaps even changing one’s relations with others and the world they inhabit; as those relations change, so do language and consciousness. Holborow proceeded to argue that Valentin Vološinov (1895–1936) and Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) developed Marx’s notion that language was part of human consciousness in different ways. Vološinov (1927/1976: 15; 1929/1986) argued that consciousness (inner speech and a social event as he described it) was “bathed by and suspended in” spoken utterances, and that the meaning of these utterances could only be understood in terms of the contexts in which verbal interactions occurred. Since words are social signs that have a number of potentially different meanings for different social classes or in different social contexts, it is important to understand who said what, how he or she said it, and how the other participants in the interaction understood what was said as well as the milieu in which it was made. This has come to be called “the ethnography of communication” by linguistic anthropologists (Hymes 1967/1986). It recognizes that, while language is shared, it is also contested, that words are signs, and that “wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too” (Vološinov 1927/1976: 10). Vygotsky (1934/1962) focused instead on Marx’s notion of language as practical consciousness—i.e., how the processes of problem-solving, reflection, generalization, and thought are socially formed. As you will recall from Chapter 3, he saw parallels between the use of tools and signs. The former mediated human activity oriented toward managing nature, while the latter were geared toward mastering one’s own behavior. The first provided the means for satisfying human needs; the other for developing higher mental processes and internalized abstract thought.
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 169 For Vygotsky, signs (inner speech) had a different function from oral utterances, even though there was a back and forth relationship between word and sign. Inner (egocentric) speech was a critical step in the processes of concept-formation and decision-making and whose structure was “highly context-dependent” (Holborow 2006: 23). He also noted that when the thoughts and experiences of speakers and listeners coincide, verbalization is often reduced, incomplete, and disconnected. Importantly, Vygotsky was concerned not only with the development of inner speech itself but also with how the intellectual (thought) and communicative (speech) functions were combined and elaborated during the sociohistorical development of human beings as a species and of their relations to one another and to the worlds they inhabited. Seventh, Marx’s anthropology of today would also include considerations of morality and of such central moral issues as justice, fairness, rights, and freedom (emancipation). Morality is a public system of rules, ideals, or virtues that govern behavior that affects others; it is, as Marx (e.g. 1843c/1975c: 162–4; 1880–2/1974: 329) noted from the 1840s onward, dependent not only on material circumstances but also reflects the prejudices and ideology of the dominant classes. Consequently, he was typically critical of discussions of morality, yet he has been described as a “moralist” when writing about the alienation, domination, and exploitation of workers in capitalist societies (Thompson 1978: 363–4). Steven Lukes (1987: 26–7) provides a resolution to this seeming paradox: Marx did not think of morality as a system of individual rights deriving from membership in civil society or a political community but rather as emancipation from rights that had been honed and imposed by the members of politically and economically dominant classes. This perspective led Marx to focus on issues such as freedom and justice. It is worth noting in this context that Marx was a strong advocate for the abolition of slavery, the implementation and enforcement of child labor and occupational health and safety regulations, freeing political prisoners, and democracy among others; he also publicly opposed the torture and mistreatment of slaves in America and British war crimes in India. These and other themes in his writings and public statements are either identical or similar to ones that have been addressed by anthropologists for at least the last forty years (e.g. Diamond 1970; González 2007; Kapferer 2004, 2005; Paley 2002; Price 2007; Wakin 1992; Wilson 1997). Marx (e.g. 1857–8/1973: 705) was clear that the wage-relation between capitalist and worker in capitalist societies was not just and used terms like “exploitation,” “theft,” or “plunder,” to describe it. The capitalist, as Ziyad Husami (1978/1980) points out, does not believe that he steals from his workers, because after all they have entered into a contract which applies the standards of justice underpinning capitalist society and assumes that the capitalist owns the means of production. He proceeds to argue that Marx applied a different ethical standpoint, which claims that the labor contributions of the workers are not adequately rewarded. As Gary Young (1981) further notes, Marx distinguished between the spheres of exchange
170 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist and production. While workers as the owners and sellers of their labor power may “freely” enter into contracts with the capitalist in the labor market, they become “a living component of capital” owned by the capitalist in the production sphere. Hence, the freedom of the workers is illusory, “an ideological appearance . . . veiling and mystifying the [extraction and] transfer of surplus value, which is the essence of capitalist production” (Lukes 1987: 53–4). In a phrase, Marx saw the relation between worker and capitalist as neither just nor equitable. The issues of justice, equality, and property and their presuppositions have also been examined by anthropologists since the late nineteenth century (e.g. Bohannon 1957; Hann 1998; Malinowski 1926; Mauss 1925/1990; Morgan 1881/2003; Nagengast 1994; Verdery and Humphrey 2004; cf. Cohen 1988: 286–304; 1995, 2000). From the mid 1840s onward, Marx was also concerned with the issue of freedom or emancipation. By freedom, as Gajo Petrović (1965/1967: 119–27) has argued, Marx did not mean either the “absence of external impediments to movement or activity” or power over nature and self resulting from “knowledge of internal and external necessity.” Rather, he viewed freedom in terms of self-determination: Human beings are free only when they determine their own deeds; when their creativity and actions reflect an integral, many-sided personality that is not tied to special thoughts or emotions; and when what is creative in them determines not only their deeds but also contributes to the extension of the humanity itself (Petrović 1965/1967: 126–7). For Marx, the struggle for a free, more democratic society was also part of the struggle for emancipating the individual from the constraints imposed by alienation, domination, and exploitation. This was the appeal of socialism and communism—first as theorized and then described in detail by Morgan (1881/2003). Marx was concerned throughout his life with the questions: How do we actualize a more democratic society? And, how do we transcend the limitations of our own society, which proclaims inalienable rights and equality at the same time that it is riven by structural inequities, poverty, intolerance of difference, and intense nationalist or fundamentalist sentiments? Marx was shrewd enough to realize that one does not start by creating something de novo, but rather with relations, conditions, and contradictions as they already exist. This, in his view, was the importance of emergent tendencies in societies in the context of dominant structures. Once again, anthropologists have contributed to our understanding of emerging tendencies in societies throughout the twentieth century—for example, the Ghost Dance, the cargo cults that appeared in Melanesia from the 1880s onward, the civil rights struggles, the women’s movement, indigenous activism, or the Zapatista movement that formed in southern Mexico in the wake of the NAFTA accords in the early 1990s (e.g. Collier 1994; Marable 1995; Mooney 1896; Mullings 1997; Stephen 1997; Warren 1998; Worsley 1968/1970). In sum, Marx’s anthropology is concerned with Kant’s question: “What are human beings?” It recognizes the importance of totality—the sometimes contradictory unity—of various approaches to understanding the human condition. It has a finely
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 171 tuned sense of historical temporality that makes change as normal as reproduction. It takes account of the existence and potential significance of the variability and diversity of human beings as both social and natural beings in space, place, and time. It provides culture, ensembles of social relations, and even the human body itself with sociohistorical contingency. It does not separate the historical development of human societies or the human species from the events, contradictions, and forces that shaped their development in time and space. It knows that human activity can effect significant change as witnessed by the diverse array of societies that existed in the past and continue to form in the present. It acknowledges the complex interrelations of consciousness, communication, and the subjectivity of individuals in particular sets of social relations. It engages rather than shies away from the critical social, moral, and political issues of the day. It knows that people occasionally do make their own history, and that some trajectories of change potentially have better outcomes than others.
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Notes Introduction 1. For example, the contrast between Renaissance and sixteenth-century anthropology can be drawn by the emphasis on language and then archaeology in the former and the concern with comparative ethnology in the latter (Pagden 1982; Rowe 1964, 1965). 2. Anthropology was clearly taught in different university faculties—e.g. law, theology, and medicine—by individuals with diverse backgrounds and philosophical presuppositions (Kelley 1984: 247; Vermeulen 1995). It also is doubtful that the empirical and philosophical strands were ever entirely separated in anthropology courses taught in the German states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, judging by the content of Kant’s lectures (Kant 1798/1978; Stark 2003).
Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology 1. Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 181–204) discusses “the God of philosophers and scientists” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As he points out, the shift in conception was complex; describing it as solely in terms of “a growing hostility to Christianity which drove many into deism and some into outright materialism and atheism,” while accurate at one level, misses the nuances and subtleties at other levels (Bowler 1974: 161). 2. The imprimatur of the Royal Press was important for two reasons. It made the volumes official publications of the Crown. It also allowed Buffon to avoid censorship, which was a continual threat faced by his contemporaries, notably Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau (Fellows 1963a: 608–9). 3. Rogers (1963/1997: 259–60) describes the doctrines of preformationism and preexistence of germs in the following way. Preformationists argued that the actual generation of a living being occurred in the body because of its ensoulment by the seed of the male parent. This seed contained an entirely formed or preformed individual, and embryonic development consisted merely of the enlargement of the already existing parts. Advocates of the pre-existence of germs argued that the germ contained in the seed was not produced by the male genitor but rather by God at the beginning of the world and had merely been preserved in the adult male until the moment of development.
173
174 • Notes 4. While Buffon conceptualized descent with modification, he did not accept the idea of transformism—i.e., one species developing into another. He reasoned that no new species were known to have appeared, that the infertility of hybrids constituted a barrier, and that, if one species did evolve from another, then the process was a gradual one (Mayr 1982: 330–6). Buffon’s friend, Denis Diderot (1713–84), crystallized the idea of transformism in 1753, when he argued that: “(1) each species has had a history; (2) it has evolved over a long period of time; (3) new species appear through a process of variation, but maintain a relation to each other” (Crocker 1959: 131; Fellows 1963b; Lovejoy 1959a). 5. Ronald Meek (1967: 35–7, 48) characterized the Scottish historical school as Smith (1723–90), Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), William Robertson (1721–93), Adam Ferguson (1723–1815), and James Millar (1740–1805). David Hume (1711–76)), who was a close associate of Smith, and James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714–99), whose views were outside the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, might also be included as well. Marx mentioned Smith, Hume, and Ferguson by name in his own writings and cited works that mentioned Millar. 6. My understanding and appreciation of Enlightenment social thought have benefited generally from the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Crawford B. Macpherson, Ronald Meek, Roy Pascal, and Robert Wokler, and especially from Asher Horowitz’s pathbreaking analysis of Rousseau’s anthropology, Peter H. Reill’s studies of historicism and the importance of history in the formation of the social sciences in the late eighteenth century, Robert Louden’s discussion of Immanuel Kant’s “impure ethics,” and Frederick Barnard’s explorations of Herder’s ideas about culture and history. 7. Rousseau’s relationship with Buffon and their contemporaries, notably PierreLouis de Maupertuis (1698–1759) and Diderot, is discussed by Bowler (1974), Fellows (1960), and Mason and Wokler (1992). 8. While Rousseau was not the first to argue that apes occupied an intermediate position between human beings and animals, the Origins of Inequality sparked an interesting debate that linked the origins of language with what Robert Wokler (1978) called “perfectible apes.” Wokler (1978, 1980, 1988) describes the debate in the following way. Comparative anatomist Edward Tyson (1650–1708) argued in the 1690s that, while apes were intermediate because of physical characteristics they shared with human beings, they were nonetheless not human beings because they lacked the mental powers of humans—i.e., they did not possess language which, at the time, was taken to be the true mark of rationality. Buffon agreed and further suggested that only men had souls. In the late 1740s, the gap between man and animal closed briefly. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) argued that souls were fictitious, and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1714–80) claimed that the cries of animals were evidence of thought. In contrast, Rousseau argued that the development of language was part of the perfectibility of human beings, which occurred in the context of contingent social relations, and that apes, even
Notes • 175
9. 10.
11.
12.
though they did not speak, were still a variety of human being, because of their behavior. Lord Monboddo developed Rousseau’s ideas concerning the humanity of apes and historically contingent nature of language; like Rousseau, he stressed the importance of the capacity for language rather than its attainment. In the 1770s, social critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and physiologist, comparative anatomist Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), often claimed as a founder of physical anthropology, disagreed with Rousseau and Monboddo. They argued instead that the anatomical differences between apes and humans were too great to permit considering the former as part of the human species. By 1795, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) wrote his essay on the origins of language, the whole question had once again become dehistoricized (Stam 1976: 182–9). Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), by contrast, argued that self-interest alone was the sufficient basis of society. Kant did not champion the rights of women in the public sphere. He argued that women did not think independently and thus should work behind the scenes in the private sphere (e.g. Louden 2000: 84–5). Kant’s (e.g. 1775/2000, 1788/2001) views on race, developed from 1775 onward, played an important role in distinguishing species and races and in developing a historical interpretation of species (Lenoir 1980; Sloan 1979). While Kant was skeptical about the possibility of physiognomy (i.e., judging the dispositions or thoughts of individuals from their visible or exterior forms), he practiced it with some regularity (Bernasconi 2001). Winckelmann is arguably one of the founders of both art history and classical archaeology as we know them today, and Blumenbach has been portrayed for more than a century as the first, truly modern physical anthropologist.
Chapter 2
Marx’s Anthropology
1. Marx’s views about human nature have been discussed by a number of authors, especially during the past thirty years (e.g. Archibald 1989; Geras 1983; Heyer 1982; Lewis 1974; Lichtman 1990; Márkus 1978; McMurtry 1978; Sayers 1998; Soper 1981, Venable 1945/1966). They do not always agree with one another. In this section, I generally follow the persuasive arguments set forth by Joseph Fracchia (1991, 2005) and David McNally (2001). 2. The geologists Marx had in mind were Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875) (Foster 2000: 116–20; Greene 1982: 19–68). He had studied with Henrik Steffens, one of Werner’s students. Both Werner and Lyell were concerned with empirical evidence for geological change and with the mechanisms that underpinned those changes. 3. Kosík (1963/1976: 24) observed that Marx’s notion of totality differed from both the atomist-rationalist conception, which asserts that “reality [is] . . . a totality
176 • Notes of simplest elements and facts,” and the organicist view, “which formalizes the whole and emphasizes the predominance and priority of the whole over the parts.” Marx’s view, instead, is a dialectical conception “which grasps reality as a structured, evolving and self-forming whole.” 4. I am indebted in this section to the insights of Karl Kosík’s (1963/1976) Dialectics of the Concrete and Richard Bernstein’s (1971) Praxis and Action.
Chapter 3
Human Natural Beings
1. The “bourgeois Darwinians” specifically mentioned by Engels were Ludwig Büchner (1824–99), Karl Vogt (1817–95) and Jakob Moleschott (1822–93). The first was a physician and the latter were physiologists. All were scientific materialists and reductionists who believed the properties or forms of behavior exhibited by human beings should be sought in the laws of physics. In the political sphere, their politics were reformist, and they concentrated their attention on education and popularizing rather than political action (Gregory 1977a, 1977b).
Chapter 4
History, Culture, Social Formation
1. Later anthropologists inspired by Marx and Engels—e.g. Eleanor Leacock (1972), Richard Lee (1988), or Eric Wolf (1982: 88–100) to name only three—refer to Marx’s original communal (tribal) form as primitive communism or the kinordered mode of production. Lewis H. Morgan (1881/2003: 63ff.) coined the phrase “communism in living” in his Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. 2. The concept of Oriental or Asiatic society had a substantial history before Marx wrote. Marx’s conceptualization of the Asiatic mode of production relied not only on analyses of societies in India, Persia, and China but also on those of Peru and Mexico (Bailey and Llobera 1981; Krader 1975). 3. Hobsbawm also remarked that Engels (1850/1978, 1876–8/1987, 1882/1989, 1882/1990, 1884/1972) wrote more systematically about feudalism than Marx, and that there is no indication that the latter disagreed with what Engels wrote. 4. V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957), arguably the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century and a political activist of the Left for his entire life, described the origins of agriculture and the rise of states in terms of the “Neolithic Revolution” and the “Urban Revolution.” He was aware that the former involved a changing metabolism between people and the natural worlds they inhabited, and that the latter involved new forms of surplus extraction, social-class structures, conquest, repression, and craft specialization as well as literacy, monumental architecture, and new forms of settlement (Childe 1936/1983, 1950/2004, 1954).
Notes • 177
Chapter 5
Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World
1. Engels’s (1845/1975) study of the conditions of the workers in Manchester was arguably the first urban ethnography. While Marx began with the available sources on India, including Hegel, he was already impressed by 1853 with the shaping effects of common property in the village community rather than religion in the organization of Indian society. Marx and Engels discussed the bases of this view and its implication in letters, and the former mentioned it in one of the early Tribune articles (Marx 1853/1983a: 332–4, 1853/1983b: 347–8, 1853/1979a; Engels 1853/1983: 339–41). Marx (1857–8/1973: 473, 1863–7/1977: 477–9) elaborated his views on the communal ownership of land and the village community in the Grundrisse and Capital (Habib 2006; Patnaik 2006). 2. The two accounts were polarized to some extent by informed commentators on Marx during the debates on the “transition question” after the Second World War (e.g. Brenner 1977, 1989; Byres 2006; Dobb 1947; Hilton 1953/1976, 1978/1990; Sweezy 1950/1976; Wallerstein 1974). 3. Marx’s views about articulation generated a significant debate in the 1970s and 1980s among anthropologists who were coming to grips with the linkages between capitalist and non-capitalist relations of production and reproduction in former colonies. This discussion, which was launched by Pierre-Philippe Rey (1971, 1973/1982, 1975, 1979) and Claude Meillassoux (1971/1980, 1975/1981), was soon joined by Harold Wolpe (1980, 1985), Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera (1981), and Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (1985) among others. 4. Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945/1954), Eric Wolf (1959, 1969,1982), Peter Worsley (1961, 1968/1970), June Nash (1979), Joel Kahn (1980, 1993), Michael Taussig (1980, 1987), Peter Rigby (1985, 1992), Christine Gailey (1987), Marshall Sahlins (1988/2000), and John Gledhill (1991, 1995) are only a few of those who come immediately to mind. 5. As Aijaz Ahmad (2001) notes, Marx, and Engels to a greater extent, wrote about the issues of nation and nationality in the eastern and southeastern parts of the Hapsburg Empire and the Crimean War. They did so at the same time that the Marx was also writing about China, India, the independence question in Ireland, condemning slavery in the United States, and denouncing the caste system (e.g. Marx 1846/1982: 101–2, 1853/1983c: 339–42; Engels 1851–3/1979: Benner 1995). 6. Long-term monopolies over the sale of particular items seem to have been a common practice for the English. In 1884, English bondholders gained control over a railroad built in southern Peru in the 1870s to facilitate the transport of wool from the southern highlands to the port city of Mollendo. In exchange for the cancellation of the debt, the bondholders received a 66-year monopoly on the railroad as well as monopolies on the sale of coca, matches, and playing cards (Spalding 1975).
178 • Notes 7. The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in 1858 by members of the Irish-American petit bourgeoisie who desired political independence for Ireland and whose goal was fueled by hatred of the English landlords which appealed to many of the Irish immigrants. In the wake of the American Civil War, some of its leaders, former officers in the Union army, organized raids into Canada in 1866 and 1870. Others sailed for Cork, Ireland in 1867 where they planned to organize and lead an army that would overthrow the British. Many were quickly arrested, imprisoned, and deprived of habeas corpus, much like the prisoners held unconstitutionally by the government of the United States at Guantanamo today. Their supporters attempted to blow up a prison in London but succeeded only in destroying nearby houses. The British press used this to whip up anti-Irish sentiment. Some of the prisoners were eventually executed; others served their sentences in Australia. 8. Dick Pels (1998: 18–73) has argued that the concepts of property and power are enmeshed in disciplinary and intellectual politics. Today, it is commonplace to treat property and power as distinct—the former concerned with socially acquired things, their possession, use, and disposition, and the latter with command over the actions and activities of persons. He also pointed out: (1) the bases for this dichotomy were already present in the writings of seventeenth-century theorists; (2) the boundary between the two concepts has often been blurred; (3) one concept has frequently served as the limiting case of the other; and (4) the prominence of one category relative to the other not only depends on national traditions (Scottish and French vs. German and Italian) but also has shifted over time (power being the more prominent of the two in late twentieth-century intellectual discourse). 9. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 73, 89) saw nationality as an attribute of existing states rather than ethnic communities defined exclusively in terms of language and culture or language and blood or as peoples aspiring to self-determination. This form of nation or nationality had pejorative connotations for them and was not a substitute for the formation of communities from the bottom up that genuinely dealt with the needs of their members. In their later writings, they sometimes also used the term “nation” to refer to peoples, like the Irish or the Russians. As Erica Benner 1995: 45) put it: They saw pre-political forms of ethnicity, language community, and territorial attachments as unthreatening to their revolutionary project so long as these were not pressed into the service of aggrandizing authoritarian states. What worried them, and what they wanted most urgently to discredit, were the “political claims” of such states to represent what Hegel had called the “genuine nationality” or patriotism of “the people.”
Notes • 179
6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century 1. I use the term “intimate” as a synonym for “sharing” in order to indicate the relationships among those with whom one shares with no particular expectation of immediate or future return. In this sense, sharing is distinct from reciprocity, where there is some expectation of return. John Price (1975: 4) notes that sharing is the glue that holds together the members of intimate societies are which are typically “small in scale and personally in quality, such that the members have extensive knowledge of each other, interpersonal sentiments have developed, and changing the identity of the persons would change their relationships. There is usually face-to-face interaction of the same people over an extended period of time. In an intimate economy the particular patterns of personal interdependency significantly influence the patterns of economic production and distribution.” Anthropologists—Eleanor Leacock (1982) among several others—have pointed out that the social units forged by sharing are often larger than households or families, which of course are not necessarily the same thing. While sharing is certainly not a predominant form of economic behavior in capitalist societies, the sense of community embodied in the practice clearly exists; moreover, people continually struggle to maintain and re-create it in these and other contexts (e.g. Gailey 1987). 2. What distinguished one kind of pre-capitalist state from another, as Eric Wolf (1999: 5) noted, were kinds of relational structures that resulted from the capacities to control that inhered in groups, how these were manifest in interactions with others, the contexts in which they were activated and realized, and how the relationships operated in and organized those settings. While 3. August Nimtz (2000, 2003) provides textured discussions of Marx’s views about slavery, racism, and race in the North America from the early 1850s onward as well as his active participation in abolitionist and democratic political movements in the United States. 4. In 1971, Noam Chomsky (1928–) and Michel Foucault (1926–84) engaged in a debate with one another about human nature and with the proposals made by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Chomsky and Foucault 1971/2006: 37–66).
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Index alienation, 59, 147–51 anthropology, 89–90, 158–71, 173 and the Enlightenment, 5–6 as social critique, 2–3 corporeal organization of human beings, 16–17, 24–5, 41–6, 65–87, 176 critical-dialectical perspective, 5 dialectical interplay of human natural and social beings, 16–20, 24–7 diversity and historicity of societies, 17–21, 27–8 empirical, 1–2, 5 ensembles of social relations, 46–50 institutionalization at Göttingen, 23–4, 31–2 philosophical, 2, 4–5, praxis, 40–6, 57–62, 158–71 articulation of modes of production, 128–38 Buffon, Comte de, 5, 13–15, 174 combined empiricism and rationalism 13–14 development of human society, 15 historicism, 13–14 on human reproduction 14–15 on diversity of human species, 15 capitalism, 7, 117–44, 175–8 and health, 136–8, 165–6 commodity production, 58 defined, 118–19 development of capitalism, 56, 117–44, 162–4 difference from precapitalist societies, 105–8, 119, 152–4 dynamism of, 55, 137–8
emigration, 134 formation of domestic and overseas markets, 122–3, 126–8 overseas colonies, 127–8, 131–2 social reproduction of, 135–8 transition, 119–28 chance, 53 class and state formation, 114–15, 136–7 class defined, 154–5 health, 136–8 colonialism, 131–2 community, 16–20, 22–3, 26, 28–30, 33–6, 41–50, 152–3 consciousness, 47–50, 57, 147–58, 164–8 contingency, 53–4, 137–8 culture, 15–21, 22, 27–9, 48–9, 103–5, 160, 166–8 Darwin, Charles, 6, 66–70, 89–90 and Marx, 89–90 theory of evolution, 66–70 use of metaphors, 66–70 development of human society and natural world, 15–17, 31 Montesquieu, 12–13, 31 Rousseau, 17–21 Scottish historical philosophers, 21–3 distinctive features of human beings, 7 diversity (see also variation), 12–15, 105, 158 domination, 151–6 economic determination Marx on 48–9 Engels, Frederick, 6, 62, 88, 117–18 chronology, xi–xiii transition from ape to human, 6, 75–84
219
220 • Index Enlightenment, 5–6, 9, 36–7 anthropology, 15–37 Early Enlightenment thought, 10–15 historicization of nature, 11–15 historicization of society, 12–13, 15–23 evolution, 67–74 Darwin, 67–71 modern synthesis, 72–4 transition from ape to human, 75–84 exchange 114, 120 exploitation, 151–6 Fraachia, Joseph, 6, 41–6 genetics, 70–2 Göttingen, 23–4, 31–2 health, 136–8, 156, 165–6 Hegel, Georg F. W., 5, 33–6, 93 and individualism, 33–4 history, 33–6 on civil society, 35–6 on labor, 34–5 teleology, 7, 33 Herder, Johann, 5, 27–30 concept of culture, 28–9 distinction between culture and civilization, 29 diversity and cultural relativism, 27–8 on language, 29 philosophical anthropology, 28 hierarchy forms of social hierarchy, 151–6 historicization nature and development of society, 31 of human society, 12–13, 15–23 of nature, 10–15 historicism, 5, 9–36 defined, 11 holism (see totality) Horowitz, Asher, 16–21 human beings and praxis, 57–62 as individuals, 17–19, 31–2, 41–50
as moral beings, 25 as natural beings, 16–17, 24–5, 41–6, 65–87, 176 as social beings, 18, 34, 44, 46–50, 74–86 Marx on, 41–50, 158 human evolution, 77–84 brain, 82–4 demography and population structure, 84–7 language, 82–4 tool-making, 17, 78–80 human history, 8 alternative pathways, 108–15 as dialectical unfolding, 17–21, 28–9, 33–5, 54 as progress, 21–3 chance, 51 contingency, 51 directionality, 53 Kant 26–7 Marx’s premises, 8, 51–7 relation to nature, 31 Rousseau, 17–18 human nature Buffon, 14–15 Rousseau on human nature, 16–17 Scottish historical philosophers and immutability of human nature, 21–3 human society Montesquieu on development, 12–13 Rousseau on successive forms, 17–18 Scottish historical philosophers and natural laws of development, 21–3 human species Buffon, 14–15 language and tool-making as markers, 16–17 Rousseau, 16–17 India, 117, 132–8, 177–8 individual, 36–7, 41–50 formation of social individuals, 147–51, 158
Index • 221 individualization, 50 inequality, 87–9, 121–2 and health, 136–8, 156 Marx on naturalization of social inequality, 87–9 Ireland, 132–8, 178 justice, 169–71 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 24–7, 175 concept of race, 26 distinction between human beings as natural and moral beings, 24–7 theory of history, 26–7 kin/civil conflict, 157–8 labor, 6, 34–5, 43–6 language, 17, 28–9, 43, 81–3, 168–9 and toolmaking, 17, 81–3 Leibniz, Gottfried, 10 Lewontin, Richard, 6, 53, 67, 71–4 markets, 122–3 Marx, Karl alienation, 59 and Darwin, 89–90 anthropology, 1–5, 6, 40, 145–6, 158–71 corporeal organization of human beings, 41–6 dialectical interplay of human natural and social beings, 65–6 diversity and historicity of societies, 50 ensembles of social relations, 46–50 praxis, 40 premises of human history, 8 biographical information, 1, 5, 39–40, 62–3, 65–7, 91–3, 117–18, 145–6, 158–9 chronology, xi–xiii consciousness, 59, 147–68 critical-dialectical perspective, 5 debates over interpretation of work, 3–5 historical-dialectical perspective, 40, 93–104
historicity of individual, 7, 41–50 mode of production, 7, 51–7 on historical development, 7, 53–4, 56–7 philosophical anthropology, 40 McNally, David, 6, 74–5 Mendel, Gregor, 70 mode of production, 7, 103 ancient, 98–9 as forms of cooperation and social structure, 54–6 Asiatic, 55, 96–8, 176 capitalist, 117–44 distinction between capitalist and precapitalist, 54 Germanic, 54, 99–100 feudal, 100–2 dissolution, 119–28 precapitalist, 54–5, 92–105 primitive communism, 95–6, 102–3 transition, 56, 92, 105–15 Montesquieu, Baron de, 5, 11–13 development of society, 12 nationalism, 132–5, 175, 178 national-states, 140–4, 164 naturalization of social inequality, 87–9 nature and historical development of society, 31 Marx and Engels, 52–3 needs, 42–6 objectification, 43–6, 58, 148 defined, 44 philosophical anthropology, 11–13, 15–22, 25–6, 28, 33–6, 40 Platner, Ernst, 31 power, 138–44, 178 praxis, 40–6, 57–62, 158–71 defined, 57 precapitalist modes of production, 7–8, 93–105 precapitalist societies, 105–15, 179 difference from capitalist societies, 105–8, 119, 152–3
222 • Index primitive accumulation, 119–30 progress, 158 property, 138–44, 178 race and racism, 15, 26, 179 reductionism, 51 resistance, 133, 156–8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 174–5 and individualism, 17–19 critique of modern civil society, 16 development of human nature, 17–19 development of human society and its rise in nature, 20 historical-dialectical anthropology, 16–21 stages in development of society, 17–21 Saint-Simon, Henri, 35–6 Scottish historical philosophers, 21–3, 174 concern with natural laws of social development 21 immutability of human nature, 21–3, 36–7
Smith, Adam, 5, 21–3 social relations, 147–58 society, 16–20, 22–3, 26, 28–30, 33–6, 41–50, 103–5 Spinoza, Baruch, 10 states capitalist, 138–44 precapitalist, 112–16, 122–4, 128–31, 133 subjectification, 43 subjectivity, 46–7 teleology, 33 tool-making 79–80 totality, 28, 31–2, 51–2, 131, 175–6 truth as determination of reality, 60–1 theories of, 61 variation, 52, 105 genetic, 71–2 and inheritance, 70–2
