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 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 self-realization, 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.
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
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:
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.”
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 from the means of production or the products of their creative activity, for pre-capitalist 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 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 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 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 wage-workers— 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)
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 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)
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 self-actualization of human potential—the self-determination or self-realization of the social individual. Marx, like Hegel before him, believed that history began with 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
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 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 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.
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 use-values 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 (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 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 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 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 native-born 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 Petroviæ (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 (Petroviæ 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 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.