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Marxist Anthropology: Principles and Contradictions
New Perspectives in the Science of Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
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Any anthropology that calls itself Marxist must have as its starting point the intermediation of labor between human society and nature. The labor is abstract labor; as concrete labor it is work. The society in question is not society in general or the human community in abstracto, but a particular, historical society, whether primitive or civilized. The question that is posed thereby is twofold: first, it is the problem of the place in nature of the human kind, or the problem of location; second, it is the historical problem of the transition of humanity from the natural to the cultural order. Nature has its history, as does the human society, but the unit that we take for the observation of natural history is far wider than the unit of observation of human history. In the former case it is the biological species whose history is taken up; in the case of human history it is the communal life of the village, and the social life of the tribe, city or nation. The time period of natural history is geological time, which is one or more orders of magnitude greater than the time periods of ethnography and historiography.
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page 424 note 1 The category of culture as the differentia specifica of the human kind is a notable contribution of empirical anthropology in the past hundred years. It is proposed as the species-wide phenomenon of the human kind that is shared by no other species. The defect in the proposal lies in its abstraction, for the human capacity for production of speech or the products of labor in the form of a specific form of speech or product is only partly accounted for in this way. The category of abstract culture, or the abstraction of the human capacity, designates a field of scientific investigation; it does not express the results of that investigation in the form of laws. The interaction between the abstraction and the concretion as the means to these laws has not been developed by the cultural anthropologists.
page 425 note 1 The attempt at a positive science of human society has its history. Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim made their contributions to it; more recently it was propounded by Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., Natural Science of Society (Chicago, 1957).Google Scholar
page 425 note 2 Huxley, T. H., Man's Place in Nature (1863); id., “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society”, in: The Nineteenth Century, 02 1888.Google Scholar
page 425 note 3 Scheler, Max, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928).Google Scholar This line of subjective negativity extends from A. Schopenhauer to the twentieth-century phenomenologists, among whom Scheler was a leading figure. This movement had wrought its effect on existentialism in Sartre, see the following note.
page 425 note 4 Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, p. 104: “En se réservant d'étudier, dans le secteur ontologique, cet existant privilegie (privilégié pour nous) qu'est l'homme, il va de soi que l'existentialisme pose lui-même la question de ses relations fondamentales avec l'ensemble des disciplines, qu'on réunit sous le nom d'anthropologic.” The subjective index in human history is, according to Sartre, the privileged position in nature for us. We have by an imperious grasp accorded the privilege of position in nature to ourselves. The question is not: quo warranto, by what right, do we grasp; the question is, how is this imperious grasp arrived at, not its moral justification or denunciation. Further, the imperious grasp by the human kind that is here implied is. the subjective evaluation of the ecological dominant, the human species in nature. That is a mere projection back onto the past of the imperial grasp of political society (witness Rome) and the imperialist grasp of modern capitalist societies. If it is a privileged position for us, then it can only be the product of political society; primitive society knows no privilege. The doctrine of Sartre is as bad ethnology as it is bad ecology. In the latter sense it is a pseudo-natural science of humanity, the projection of the viewpoint of the naturalist onto the human being, not his proper object; distancing of the observer from the observed, as though the two were not of the same order of nature and culture. This is positivism, it is a defective dialectic because it is onesided, it does not link the positivity with its negation, and it does not repair the omission of the objective side of its thesis.
page 426 note 1 Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte, op. cit., p. 83: “Das Produkt der Arbeit ist die Arbeit, die sich in einem Gegenstand fixiert, sachlich gemacht hat, es ist die Vergegenständlichung der Arbeit. Die Verwirklichung der Arbeit ist Vergegenständlichung.” This thesis was conceived by Marx concretely in reference to capitalist society and production therein. It had been the thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach that man objectifies himself in creating a world of objects; it is held by many that Marx took over this thesis from Feuerbach in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts. (We will return to the problem of objedification at the end of this article.) The attribution of a Feuerbachian position to Marx as of 1844 is faulty because Marx had already gone beyond Feuerbach in the chapter “Die Entfremdete Arbeit”, ibid., pp. 81–94. There the concept of mankind as an abstraction is overcome, and the Gattungswesen of humanity is taken up concretely. The alienation of labor from its product takes place in the concrete, historical society of Marx's observation, capitalist society. (The Gattungswesen is the generic being of humanity: see Kapital, Vol. 1, op. cit., p. 67, note). Marx had even gone beyond Feuerbach in 1843 when he composed his critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, for in 1859 Marx referred to his own preoccupation with the material relations of life in this connection (MEW, Vol. 13, p. 8).
page 427 note 1 Kroeber, A. L. and Kluckhohn, Clyde, Culture, A Critical Appraisal (1952);Google ScholarLévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, 1962);Google Scholar id., Mythologiques. Le Cru et le Cuit (Ouverture) (Paris, 1964);Google Scholar Sartre, op. cit. See also Schmidt, Alfred, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Karl Marx (Frankfurt, 1971);Google ScholarArendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
page 427 note 2 In the most primitive forms of society there is no separation of the relations of labor in the family, in the small band of kinsmen, and in society. We will leave open the question whether social labor on the one side and the division of social labor on the other can be ascertained in those circumstances. Engels thought that they could be so ascertained (MEW, Vol. 23, p. 372).
page 428 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 61. On cultural beginnings ibid., pp. 194, 353, 535.
page 428 note 2 Marx, Capital, Friedrich Engels ed., English tr. S. Moore, E. Aveling, E. Un-termann (New York, 1936), pp. 54, 207. Hannah Arendt, op. cit, writes in this connection, p. 322: “The German Arbeit applied originally only to farm labor executed by serfs and not to the work of the craftsman, which was called Werk.” This is a rural-urban opposition, or of labor in the field and work in the town or indoors; it is implicit in the distinction between the labor of the body and the work of the hands. Both conditions were bound in the European Middle Ages, when all were pro forma unfree, even kings.
page 429 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 57, 198f. See Vol. 3, op. cit., p. 828.
page 429 note 2 Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen ökonomie, op. cit., p. 592.
page 429 note 3 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government (1690), ch. V, § 27.Google Scholar
page 429 note 4 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations, Cannan, E. ed. (New York, 1937), pp. 7, 86.Google Scholar
page 429 note 5 Hegel, , System der Sittlichkeit, in Sämtliche Werke, VII (1913), pp. 422ff.Google Scholar (here mechanical labor as negative, practical is distinguished from living labor); id., Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, in Werke (Frankfurt), X, § 524.Google Scholar Further to this theme see: Beyer, W. R., “Der Begriff der Praxis”, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophic, VI (1958);Google ScholarDubský, I., Hegels Arbeits-begriff und die idealistische Dialektik [Rozpravy československé Akademie Věd, LXXI, 14] (Prague, 1961).Google Scholar
page 429 note 6 Hegel, , Philosophic der Geschichte, in Werke, XII, p. 295.Google Scholar
page 430 note 1 Marx, , Grundrisse, p. 559;Google Scholar Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 128, 134.
page 433 note 1 The alarm over depletion of oil resources is but one phase of a worldwide depletion of the stocks of nature. See Brown, Harrison, The Challenge of Man's Future (New York, 1954).Google Scholar Written from a Malthusian point of view, this book raises the problem of the extraction of the natural resources for profit. As useful product the trees of the forest are hewn, as surplus product the forest is depleted.
page 433 note 2 Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin, who declined the offer because of the feelings of his family. International Review of Social History, IX (1964), p. 465.Google Scholar
page 433 note 3 It appears to be a widespread notion that Darwin owed the idea of the struggle for life to Herbert Spencer; this has been most recently published by Monod, Jacques, Le hasard et la nécessité (Paris, 1970), pp. 135f.Google Scholar But Darwin himself attributed the idea of survival of the fittest, together with its expression, to Herbert Spencer, and brought out the idea of struggle for life in connection with Thomas Malthus's notion of the geometric increase of population. On Marx's opposition to Darwin, see letter to L. Kugelmann, 27 June 1870, in Marx, and Engels, , Selected Correspondence, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1965), p. 239.Google Scholar
page 433 note 4 Marx, letter to F. Lassalle, 16 January 1861, ibid., p. 123.
page 433 note 5 Marx, letter to Engels, 18 June 1862, ibid., p. 128.
page 434 note 1 Darwin, The Origin of Species, op. cit. Against fixed species, passim; on accumulation, pp. 66, 33, 36, 52; on natural selection, pp. 14, 29, 367; against personification of nature, p. 64; on struggle for existence as metaphor, pp. 52, 66.
page 434 note 2 Marx, Capital, English tr., op. cit., p. 375, note.
page 435 note 1 Darwin, op. cit., p. 112.
page 435 note 2 Ibid., pp. 64, 112. On advantage and utility of variations, p. 98; on Darwin's own utilitarianism, p. 146.
page 435 note 3 Ibid., pp. 444f. There is at present a controversy over “non-Darwinian” evolution, i.e., evolution by random processes rather than selection and fitness. But Darwin had already drawn attention to maintenance as opposed to change by natural selection. It would therefore be in point to speak of randomness in maintenance as well as in evolution and change.
page 435 note 4 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 614.
page 435 note 5 Ibid., p. 386.
page 436 note 1 Ibid., p. 591. “The economic character mask of the capitalist is attached to the person such that his money functions as capital.” Professor Robinson appears to have sought in vain for the inner determinant of capitalist accumulation, while criticizing Rosa Luxemburg for maintaining the thesis of an external accumulation process (“economic imperialism”). See Robinson, Joan, Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York, 1951).Google Scholar On valorization see Le Capital, op. cit., pp. 257, 279.
page 436 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 363f. Contrary to a widely held notion in certain socialist circles and elsewhere, primitive reproduction is an economic process and has nothing to do with biological-sexual reproduction.
page 436 note 3 Tylor, E. B., Anthropology (1881), I, ch.Google Scholar VIII; id., Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation (1865). Cf. Marx, Kapital, Vol. 2, in MEW, Vol. 24, p. 437.
page 436 note 4 Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963),Google Scholar has imagined that orderly time-keeping was invented in medieval European monasteries, and that Eastern civilizations “flourished on a loose basis of time”. The appreciation of time-keeping in Asia is other in Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, 1954 and on),Google Scholar and in his Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar In civil or political society, of both Europe and Asia, concrete labor time and abstract time-keeping come increasingly under human control; both are contrasted with loose or non-existent time-keeping, or its control by natural processes, as noted in Tylor and Marx (see preceding note).
page 437 note 1 Hodgskin, Thomas, Labor defended against the claims of capital; or the unproductiveness of capital proved (London, 1825).Google Scholar
page 437 note 2 Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, op. cit., pp. 259ff., 285ff. The storage is unrelated to abstinence, which is falsely associated with early capitalism, Puritanism, etc. Cf. Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 620ff.; Marx has many sarcastic comments on asceticism, etc. On cumulation of stock (contra Adam Smith) see Marx, Kapital, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 142 and note. On storing up (ante-Darwin) see Marx, Grundrisse, p. 7: No production without stored-up past labor, even if this labor is but the dexterity accumulated and concentrated in the hand of the savage with repeated practice. (This is the caricatured presentation by the “modern” economists.)
page 437 note 3 Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, p. 289.Google Scholar
page 439 note 1 Marx is putting his own formulations into Hodgskin's mouth: Hodgskin is given a fully developed Darwinian interpretation of accumulation and hereditary descent 34 years before the appearance of Darwin's work, and is also the master of the dialectic ot subject and object (see Marx, ibid., p. 290, in reference to the capitalist as personified capital).
page 439 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 599.
page 440 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 358; Le Capital, op. cit., p. 147.
page 440 note 2 Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 360.
page 441 note 1 Ethnological Notebooks, op. cit., p. 183; Introduction, pp. 14–16.
page 441 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 388.
page 441 note 3 Ethnological Notebooks, p. 255.
page 442 note 1 Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 16. It is not that human science is like natural science because the latter is unalterable. On the contrary, natural is like human science because each has its history, just as nature and humanity are one in that each has its history: to this extent they are unlike the law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not.
page 442 note 2 Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums.
page 443 note 1 Lukcs, Georg, “Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats”, in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923).Google Scholar
page 443 note 2 Lawrence Krader, “Verdinglichung und Abstraktion in der Gesellschafts-theorie”, in Ethnologie und Anthropologie bei Marx, op. cit., pp. 178ff.
page 443 note 3 Hannah Arendt, op. cit., pp. 122, 148; Herbert Marcuse, “Re-examination of the Concept of Revolution”, in: Diogenes, No 64 (1968), p. 25.
page 444 note 1 Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 3rd ed. (1968), pp. 146ff., 489ff.Google Scholar Weber ought to have separated these thoughts, but did not do so.
page 444 note 2 Marx, , ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte, p. 83.Google Scholar
page 444 note 3 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, ch. 1, section 4; Vol. 3, pp. 835f., 838f.
page 444 note 4 It is easier to find the earthly core of the abstract relations, to show the material basis of the relations between persons; this is the task of criticism, of analysis, science and materialism. It is more difficult to evolve out of these earthly relations the mystifications, abstractions. Why do we perform the more difficult task instead of the easier one ? The etherealization or hypostatization is the abstraction of the human being, his transformation into a juridical person, etc. The social usefulness of this has already been seen. Disclosure of the material relations between persons is a process that leads in two directions. First, it is the critical analysis itself; the human being has been made into an abstract, juridical person, the representation of a relation that has its material base. Second.the human being has been made into a material of the process of production, the source of labor power, whose labor time as living labor is converted into dead labor. This is the reification of the human being; it is the second dialectical moment of another process as well: the etherealization, hypostatization, abstraction of the human individual is the preparatory stage for the reification. See Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 393, note.
page 447 note 1 Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966).Google Scholar He writes, p. 365: “Dass der Kategorie der Verdinglichung, die inspiriert war vom Wunschbild ungebrochener subjektiver Unmittelbarkeit, nicht langer jener Schlüsselcharakter gebührt, den apologetisches Denken, froh materialistisches zu absorbieren, über-eifrig ihr zuerkennt, wirkt zurück auf alles, was unter dem Begriff metaphysi-scher Erfahrung geht.”
page 447 note 2 The putative etiology of reification, which Adorno identified as its inspiration or the “wish-thought of unbroken subjective immediacy” (see the preceding note), is a symptom of the ailment first identified by Marx. Having taken the phenomenon out of society and deposited it within the domain of metaphysics, it is fitting to derive it as Adorno has done. What this derivation has to do with the phenomenon is clear: Adorno correctly distinguished between reification and objectification, but he made reification into a subjective metaphysical category instead of what it is, the elimination of the subject and of subjectivity, the substitution of relations that are external to the human being for the gap created, and the creation thereby of a new Adam and Eve who are only partly conscious of their loss. To the extent that we are unconscious of what we have undergone we are a simulacrum, the combination of pseudo-human, pseudo-subjective conditions. The processes of the elimination, substitution and new construction differ with each social class. The intellectuals, by their power of abstraction and hypostasis, which results from their abstract relations in society, can, like the bees, gather their pseudo-nectar from the flowers of evil of the other social classes. If Adorno meant Lukács by the reference to apologetic thinking, he should have said so; otherwise this remains a hidden attack; it is an argu-mentum ad hominem even if the target is not named. Reification is not a concept of metaphysical experience, but the effect on the human body, brain and consciousness of relations in society. The relations in primitive society, as recounted in the mythology, point to a primary reification; those ol capitalist society point to class-divided modes of reification. On the former, see my article “Primary Reification in Primitive Society”, in: Diogenes, No 56 (1966).Google Scholar
Reification has been taken up as a problem not of metaphysics but of history by Krahl, H.-J., Claussen, Detlev, Negt, Oskar et al. , Geschichte und Klassen-bewusstsein Heute (Amsterdam, 1971).Google Scholar Krahl speaks of the opposition reifi-cation-emancipation (p. 39); reification and abstract labor (p. 28); and reification in connection with legitimation theory (p. 40); Negt, Claussen and Krahl of reification and party organization (pp. 26, 41f.). The discussion moves in a direction 180 degrees counter to that of Adorno. The organization of political parties is a historical phenomenon of bourgeois-capitalist society; it is historically conditioned. The reification of the party organization does not come from metaphysics, nor from the historical conditions directly; several steps were omitted from the discussion. Reification in politics comes from the reified relations in economy and society, which set forth the political relations of paity organization in reified form. Lukács's theory of reification was an explanation of the given state of the class conflict (1920–23) in Central Europe; it was conditioned by the reification of the historical relations of economy and society at that time; it is a reified theory insofar as it posited, but did not criticize, its own historical foundation. A complete theory, or the step toward one, should carry these criticisms forward. Krahl (p. 19) mentions the reification of social relations and the subjectification of objective labor conditions. If by this juxtaposition a systematic connection is meant, then it should be amended: reification is the elimination of the human subject and the substitution of thing for object in the economic relations and the historical process of society. Thing and object are not the same, reification and objectification are not the same; thing and subject are not the same, reification and subjectification are not the same.
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