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The Communist manifesto, 150 years later

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Antonio Gilman
Antonio Gilman*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, California State University, Northridge CA 91330, USA
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Extract

The Communist manifesto does not have much to say about the pre-capitalist societies most archaeologists deal with, and still less about the primitive societies that interest most prehistorians. (Nothing from the Manifesto makes its way, for example, into the useful compendium brought together by Godelier (1973).) Much of what Marx and Engels had to say directly about antiquity consists of unpublished sketches and passing references, and even the systematic treatment of The origins of the family, private property and the state (1884) must be considered provisional: the changes that reading Morgan (1877) had on the discussions of the Formen (1857–58) and the Anti-Dühring (1878) can only suggest that the accumulation of positive evidence in the course of a century and a half of archaeological research would have caused Marx and Engels to revise substantially every one of their specific claims.

Keywords

MarxEngelsCommunists1848
Type
Special section: A celebration of 1848
Information
Antiquity , Volume 72 , Issue 278 , December 1998 , pp. 910 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1998

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