【马克思】人类学笔记 PDF

Karl Marx, Anthropologist
This page intentionally left blank

Karl Marx, Anthropologist
Thomas C. Patterson
Oxford • New York

First published in 2009 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Thomas C. Patterson 2009
All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Patterson, Thomas Carl.

Karl Marx, anthropologist / Thomas C. Patterson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-511-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-511-1 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-509-6 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-509-X (cloth)
1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Anthropologists—Germany—Biography. 3.
Anthropology—History. 4. Anthropology—Philosophy. I. Title.
GN21.M2575P38 2009
301.092—dc22
[B]
2009000314
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 184520 509 6 (Cloth)

ISBN 978 184520 511 9 (Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group
www.bergpublishers.com
For Friends, Colleagues, and Students
Contents
Preface ix
Chronology xi
Introduction 1
Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints 3
Organization of the Book 5
1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology 9

Early Enlightenment Thought 10
The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment 15
The Institutionalization of Anthropology 23
2 Marx’s Anthropology 39
What are Human Beings? 41
History 51
Truth and Praxis 57
3 Human Natural Beings 65

Charles Darwin and the Development of Modern Evolutionary Theory 67
Human Natural Beings: Bodies That Walk, Talk, Make Tools, and
Have Culture 74
Marx on the Naturalization of Social Inequality 87
4 History, Culture, and Social Formation 91

Marx’s Historical-Dialectical Conceptual Framework 93
Pre-Capitalist Societies: Limited, Local, and Vital 105
5 Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World 117

The Transition to Capitalism and its Development 119
The Articulation of Modes of Production 128
Property, Power, and Capitalist States 138
viii • Contents
6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century 145

Social Relations and the Formation of Social Individuals 147
Anthropology: “The Study of People in Crisis by People in Crisis” 158
Notes 173
Bibliography 181
Index 219
Preface
This book is an exploration of a form of social theory that has a long history of
suppression in the United States. The high points of this were undoubtedly the
Palmer Raids of the 1920s and the McCarthyism and the House Un-American
Activities of the 1950s, although the antipathy of the vast majority of academics to
anything but mainstream social thought in the decades that followed has been only
slightly less deadening. The red-baiting of scholars who saw Marx only through the
lens of anti-communism has gradually been replaced by scholars who assert that
Marx is really passé, especially after the dismantling of the Soviet Union. While the
sentiments underlying such statements are often conveyed by rolled eyes or knee-
jerk red-baiting, they are as often backed up by claims that one or another of the
latest fads in social theory provide the bases for more textured analyses of what has
happened during the last twenty years or even by declarations that history is over
since the whole world is now, or should be, on the road to capitalism. What rarely
happens, however, is any direct engagement and extended dialogue with what Marx
actually said. More common are statements that rely on what someone claimed
Marx said or that engage with the commentators on Marx, sympathetic or otherwise,
rather than Marx himself.
My goal is to engage directly with Marx’s works rather than those of subsequent
writers in the Marxist tradition. Nevertheless, I am acutely aware of the difficulty
of disengaging from the arguments and insights of subsequent commentators
on Marx’s views, both sympathetic and otherwise, since my own thoughts and
actions were shaped in part in the same intellectual and social milieu in which they
wrote and were read. Keeping in mind Marx’s quip that he was not a Marxist, the
book is Marxian rather than Marxist. Hence, it is not a book about Marxism and
anthropology or Marxist anthropology; several of those have already been written.
While Maurice Godelier’s (1973/1977) Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Ángel
Palerm’s (1980) Antropología y marxismo, Marc Abélès’s (1976) Anthropologie et
Marxisme, and Randall McGuire’s (1992) A Marxist Archaeology are a few that
come immediately to mind, there are others as well.
My first direct acquaintance with Marx’s writing occurred in 1959 in an intro-
ductory course in Western civilization with a selection from The Communist
Manifesto. Two years later in Peru, I realized that broadly leftist newspaper writers
in Peru provided accounts that better fit with my perceptions than those of their
more mainstream contemporaries, and that they gave me a clearer and deeper
understanding of what was happening there at the time. Over the next five years in
ix
x • Preface
Peru, I would occasionally buy at a kiosk in Lima and read pamphlets containing
articles Marx had written about capitalism. I also purchased the English-language
edition of his Pre-capitalist Economic Formations shortly after it arrived in a Lima
bookstore. The latter provided the inspiration and means for beginning to think
in new ways about the societies, past and present, that were the object of inquiry
for anthropologists. At various times from the late 1960s or early 1970s onward,
I participated rather regularly in reading groups or university courses variously
concerned with the writings of Marx, Engels, or their successors. These groups
ranged from ones composed entirely of political activists through those with mixtures
of activists, anthropologists, and students from different universities to courses and
seminars with student and occasionally other faculty participants.
Writing is a social rather than a solitary venture for me. I read passages to friends
over the telephone and share drafts of manuscripts with them, hoping they have
time to comment on them and feeling exceedingly appreciative when they do. I also
try out ideas in courses to see if they are expressed clearly in ways that students
can understand and use constructively to build and refine their own views. Since
I have been doing this for quite a few years at this point in my life, the list of
people, living and dead, who have helped me clarify my own ideas is a long one.
Instead of attempting to list all of them, and undoubtedly missing a few in the
process, let me mention just a few: Karen Spalding and Richard Lee who have been
there almost since the beginning; Christine Gailey, John Gledhill, Karen Brodkin,
Bob Paynter, Peter Gran, and Kathy Walker who have regularly helped me clarify
my ideas and prose since the 1980s; Edna Bonacich, Joseph Childers, Stephen
Cullenberg, Michael Kearney, and Juliet McMullin who have helped me to look
at Marx through different lenses since I arrived at UCR in 2000; and, most of all,
Wendy Ashmore—my colleague, friend, and wife—who sets high standards and has
provided instantaneous feedback, constructive criticism, happiness, and contentment
for more than a decade.
Chronology
1818 5 May: Karl Marx born in Trier, Westphalia in the Rhineland of Prussia.
1820 28 November: Frederick Engels born in Barmen, Westphalia in the
Rhineland of Prussia.
1830 Marx enters high school in Trier.
1835 Marx’s essay on choosing a vocation; Marx enters the University of
Bonn.
1836 Marx transfers to the University of Berlin.
1837 Marx writes about fragmentation of curriculum and begins to grapple with
Hegel’s writings.
1838 Engels drops out of high school to work as unsalaried clerk in Bremen.
1841 Engels joins Prussian army and attends lectures at the University of
Berlin.
1842 November: Marx and Engels meet at Cologne office of the Rheinische
Zeitung; Engels goes to work at family textile firm in Manchester, England,
where he meets Mary Burns who introduces him to English working-class
life and with whom he has lifelong relationship; Engels begins collecting
materials for The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845),
arguably the first empirical anthropology of an urban community.
1843–4 Marx resigns from the Rheinische Zeitung; marries Jenny von Westphalen;
emigrates to Paris in search of employment, and writes Economic and Phil-
osophical Manuscripts (1844); Marx and Engels meet for second time and
begin lifelong collaboration, the earliest product of which was The Holy
Family (1845), a critique of the Young Hegelians.
1845–8 February 1845: Marx expelled from France by the Minister of the Interior;
Marx, his wife and children move to Brussels; Marx argues in Theses on
Feuerbach (1845) for the importance of the practical activity of corporeal
human beings as social individuals bound together by ensembles of
social relations. April 1845: Engels arrives in Brussels; in The German
Ideology (1845–6), Marx and Engels lay foundations of their materialist
theory of history and refine the philosophical anthropology Marx sketched
earlier; both devote energies to organizing workers and join the German
Communist League. 21 February 1848: German Communist League
publishes Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. 3 March 1848:
King of Belgium deports Marx, who returns to Cologne and launches the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
xi
xii • Chronology
1849 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung suppressed by Prussian government; Marx

and Engels arrested and subsequently released; Marx deported and deprived
of citizenship. June: Marx and family arrive in Paris, are placed under
police surveillance in July, and leave in late August for London; Engels
participates in armed uprising in South Germany, escapes as refugee,
returns to England, re-enters family firm in Manchester as clerk.
1851–3 Marx and Engels analyze the failed revolutions of 1848–9; Marx’s The
Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Engels’s Revolution and Counter-
Revolution in Germany (1851–3).
1853–7 Marx writes series of articles for New York Daily Tribune on colonialism
and plunder of India, destruction of Indian textile economy, complexity of
Indian society, village communities, and subversion of traditional property
relations and creation of new property relations during colonial rule.
1857–9 Marx synthesizes his philosophical anthropology, critique of political
economy, and notions of pre-capitalist modes of production in Grundrisse
(1857–58) and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859).
1861–3 Marx historicizes and further refines his views on labor, the importance and
appearance of surplus values, and the role of competition and monopoly in
creating dependence in an increasingly international capitalist economy in
his early drafts of the three volumes of Capital.
1864 Formation of the International Workingman’s Association (i.e. The First
International) in which Marx and Engels would play prominent roles until
it was disbanded in 1876.
1867 Marx publishes first volume of Capital (1867), which analyzes the simple
reproduction of capital and primitive accumulation using anthropological
and historical information.
1870 Social relations and contradictions of the Paris Commune analyzed by
Marx in The Civil War in France (1871).
1875 Marx circulates his Critique of the Gotha Program, a proposal put forward
by socialists and communists in the German Democratic Workers Party
who advocate social reform rather than revolution.
1876 Engels writes The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to
Man.
1877–82 Marx writes large part of second volume of Capital, including section
on the circuits of capital and expanded reproduction of capital; this was
buttressed by readings of rural social organization in Russia, changes in
global property resulting from colonialism and intrusion of capitalism
into non-Western, non-capitalist societies in order to understand inter-
connections of cultural diversity and capitalist expansion; Marx circulates
Workers’ Questionnaire (1880).
Chronology • xiii
1880 Engels writes Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

1883 13 March: Marx dies in London.
1884 Engels publishes The Origins of the Family Private Property and the State:
In Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. Morgan (1884), which was based
partly on Marx’s notes on Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877); Engels’s book
translated into Italian, Rumanian, Danish, and French during next four
years.
1893 Engels elected honorary president of International Socialist Congress (i.e.
Second International).
1884–95 Engels prepares the second and third volumes of Capital for publication.
1895 5 August: Engels dies in London
Introduction
Karl Marx was an anthropologist. This may seem an unusual claim, since he is
more frequently identified as a political radical, an economist, a journalist and,
occasionally, even a philosopher. When Marx (1818–83) lived in the nineteenth
century, knowledge had not yet been divided into the academic disciplines found on
college and university campuses today. While anthropology as an academic discipline
and a profession would not appear until the 1870s or 1880s, courses on anthropology
had already been taught in some universities for more than a century by a variety of
persons—physicians, historians, theologians, and philosophers, like Immanuel Kant
who lectured annually on the subject for more than twenty years beginning in 1772.
We know that Marx took an anthropology course taught by Henrik Steffens during
his first year at the University of Berlin in 1837, and that he attended lectures by the
anthropogeographer Carl Ritter (Finkelstein 2001; Kelley 1978, 1984; Ryding 1975:
7); however, we also know that taking a course in a subject is not a rite of passage
that automatically or necessarily makes students into anthropologists or physicists
at the end of the term. Thus, we need to look at the claim more carefully. Precisely
what does it mean to assert that Marx was an anthropologist? What evidence and
lines of argumentation support this contention?
Anthropology has a dual heritage. One strand, which we will call “empirical
anthropology” for the moment, examines both the external characteristics of
human beings and their cultural achievements, including how they communicate
symbolically, the activities that define their social lives and relationships, and the
material evidence for their history both social and as a species (Diamond 1980:
13). Over the centuries, various writers have contributed to this strand of anthropo-
logical thought; these include Herodotus’s description of Egyptian society in
the fifth century BC, Li Ssu’s analysis of tributary relationships during the Ch’in
Dynasty, Domingo de Santo Tomas’s sixteenth-century grammar and dictionary of
the Inca language, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy, or Mary Leakey’s
fossil and archaeological discoveries in East Africa, to name only a few. Empirical
anthropology has had a very discontinuous distribution in time and space, and this fact
has fueled a number of long-running debates concerned with whether anthropology
originated in classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the late
nineteenth century; whether it was quintessentially a European activity; and whether
there might be non-European traditions of empirical anthropological practice. In
my view, it is possible to talk about a number of distinct traditions of empirical
anthropological inquiry, such as those fostered in classical antiquity, Renaissance
1
2 • Karl Marx, Anthropologist
Italy, sixteenth-century Spain, or the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment (e.g.

Pagden 1982; Rowe 1964, 1965; Wokler 1993).1
The other strand, often called “philosophical anthropology,” is concerned with
the presuppositions of the various traditions of empirical anthropology, especially
with what its practitioners believe to be the core features, or ontological structures,
that constitute human beings. As Michael Landmann (1969/1974: 18) put it: “Are
we looking for properties that must be manifested in all men who have ever lived or
will live, in all cultures, or, in other words, for a criterion enabling us to determine
whether or not a being is a man at all?” Since its scope is different, philosophical
anthropology operates at a different level from the empirical strand and articulates in
different ways with social critiques as well as with other discussions or disciplines.
It arguably has a more continuous distribution in time and space. While I am not
claiming that there is only a single tradition of philosophical anthropology, I would
argue that, at any given moment, it resembles a cable with multiple, intertwined and
interacting strands. Moreover, empirical inquiries have episodically forced changes
in philosophical anthropology.
While Marx was undoubtedly aware of both empirical and philosophical anthro-
pology during his student days at Berlin,2 he was seemingly concerned initially at
least with the former, judging by his 1842 critique of the philosophical underpinnings
of influential faculty members, who constituted the “German historical school of
law” and who argued among other things that laws typically develop organically
from the community without the interference of authorities (Marx 1842/1975). His
association with Frederick Engels, which also began that year, would soon bring
the empirical strand and its ongoing importance into sharp focus. Shortly after
they met, Engels would spend two years in Manchester, England where he worked
in a family-owned mill and assembled the information for The Condition of the
Working Class in England, which has a legitimate claim to being the first urban
ethnography (Engels 1845/1975). In a similar vein, Marx and Engels’s (1848/1976)
Communist Manifesto, which appeared in 1848, can be viewed as a set of policy
recommendations not unlike those made today by applied anthropologists concerned
with the well-being of the peoples with whom they work. It was an early effort at
anthropological praxis—the merging of data, theory, and practice.
These were followed from the early 1850s onward by the thick descriptions
and analyses of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France, which
depict the dynamics of mid nineteenth-century class struggle in France and the
organization of the Paris Commune in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of
1871 (Marx 1852/1979, 1871/1986). Interspersed with his more empirical studies
were theoretically informed, historical analyses of different forms of pre- or non-
capitalist property relations and the development of capitalism—i.e. The Grundrisse
of 1857–8 and Capital, which he wrote in the mid 1860s (Marx 1857–8/1973,
1863–7/1977, 1864–94/1981, 1865–85/1981). Marx also continued his explorations
of the philosophical underpinnings of a variety of subjects ranging from his critique
Introduction • 3
of the socialists’ Gotha Program to the new ethnology of Lewis Henry Morgan and
others, which he outlined in his Ethnological Notebooks in the early 1880s just
before his death (Marx 1875/1989, 1880–2/1974).
This book has two aims. The first is to examine what one social theorist, Karl
Marx, made of the anthropological discussions that had taken place since the mid
eighteenth century and that, in many ways, had formative or shaping influences on
his thought. For more than a century, commentators have customarily acknowledged
that Marx drew inspiration from the writings of British political economists, German
philosophers, and French socialists (e.g. Engels 1878/1987; Lenin 1913/1963).
However, it is clear from citations and casual references that Marx read more widely
than those commentators suggested. While trained as a philosopher, Marx was
also an anthropologist by nineteenth-century standards if not by modern ones. The
question here is: What were the sensibilities of his philosophical anthropology and
what might it look like today?
After contextualizing Marx’s work and elaborating his anthropology, I want to
consider what his legacy actually is or could be to the issues of anthropological
importance today—not just the obvious or the easy ones such as the transition to
or the effects of capitalism but also issues about which he said little if anything
directly. In other words, given what we know about his philosophical anthropology,
what might he have said today about such issues of empirical anthropology as the
evolution of humankind, the origins and consequences of symbolic communication
with and through language, the development of personhood, state formation, and,
perhaps most importantly, the question of where anthropology goes from here.
Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints
This book is a polemic. I have a perspective or standpoint on Marx’s writings and their
relations with authors who employ and advocate other social theoretical traditions as
well as with subsequent writers within the Marxist tradition who have been influenced
to varying degrees and in different ways by Marx and his successors. Controversies
have swirled around interpretations of Marx and his writings for more than a century.
These result partly from different political and philosophical commitments and
partly from disagreements over political tactics in particular concrete situations.
There are diverse external critiques of Marx’s thought and that of his successors (e.g.
Giddens 1981; MacGregor 1998; Rorty 1989) as well as even more numerous and
diverse disagreements that are internal to the Marxist tradition (e.g. Cohen 1978;
Cullenberg 1996; O’Neill 1982; Thompson 1978). Some of the debates reflect the
availability of Marx’s writings at the time they were written. For example, the third
volume of Capital was not published until 1895; the Theories of Surplus Value did
not appear until 1911; The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which
were published first in German in 1932 and then in Russian in 1956, only became
available in English in 1960; and the Grundrisse was largely unknown in the West
until Martin Nicolaus’s English translation appeared in 1973. In practical terms, this
means that someone writing in 1910, for instance, might not even have been aware
of the existence of the unpublished works and would certainly not have been able to
assess either their content or potential significance at the time.
A number of things are at stake in the debates. These include but are not limited
to the following questions: Did Marx hold a linear theory of social (r)evolution, or
did he have more textured appreciation of the possibilities of diverse trajectories
of historical development and the importance of historical contingency? Was he an
economic determinist who held to a strict base–superstructure model of society and
believed in the economic determination of society, culture, and history in the last
instance, or did he have a more nuanced understanding of the mutual interconnections
of ensembles of social relations, culture, practical activity, and the capacity of people
to make their own history on occasion? Did he argue that people were merely the
bearers of economic, political-juridical, and ideological structures that shaped their
beliefs and actions, or did he believe that human beings possessed agency and
had the capacity to change those structures? Did he hold that human beings acted
always as economically rational individuals and that the cultural norms of a society
were reducible to individual choice, or did he think that people make their own
history under circumstances not of their own choice but rather under those which
they confronted? Did he accept a notion of society that was merely the sum of its
individual parts, which existed prior to and independent of the totality (a Cartesian
totality which could be reduced atomistically to those parts); did he adopt a more
holistic (Hegelian) notion of society in which neither the parts nor the whole were
reducible to the other and whose essence unfolded dialectically, successively, and
teleologically throughout history; or did Marx see the sociohistorical totality as
something that lacked a beginning (essence) or end (telos) and was instead “the
ever-pre-givenness of a structured complex unity” as Louis Althusser (1963/1970:
199; emphasis in the original) claimed? Did Marx suppose that thinking and being
were distinct from one another and that the latter had an ontological priority over the
former, or did he believe that they were mutually constitutive of one another and hence
both irreducible to and overdetermined by the other? Were social-class structures
expressing domination, oppression, and exploitation universal features of the human
condition, or were they historically constituted under particular circumstances
and conditions? Were Marx’s social individuals—defined by their positionality in
particular ensembles of social relations—also fragmented, contradictory subjects?
Were they alienated individuals whose subjectivities were partly constituted through
the perceptions of others; were their subjectivities self-constructed, situational, and
impermanent; or did they only come into existence through the interplay of language
and power lodged in impersonal institutions?
The answers to these and similar questions are not exclusively academic concerns,
since they may have immediate consequences for what you as a human being
Introduction • 5
believe, for how you choose to live your life, and for the kinds of practical activity,
commitments, and political action with which you are able and willing to engage. As
an activist friend, born and bred on the Lower East Side of New York, used to say:
“The path to radical social change is like riding the Broadway local from the Staten
Island terminal (a subway line that runs from Staten Island to the Bronx). Some
people get off at the first stop; others will ride to Times Square or even Harlem; and
a few will stay all the way to the end of the line.”
This book has a standpoint with regard to these and other issues. Among other
things, I will argue that Marx adopted a critical-dialectical perspective that historic-
ized both nature and human society—a perspective that began with Montesquieu,
Rousseau, and Buffon in the mid eighteenth century, and that ultimately had a
significant impact on Scottish Enlightenment writers like Adam Smith as well as
German critics of Enlightenment liberalism like Herder and Hegel. In the late 1830s
and early 1840s, Marx began to develop a philosophical anthropology that included
the corporeal organization of human beings, ensembles of social relations, the
relation of the individual to society, the diversity and historicity of human societies,
alienation, objectification, production, reproduction, labor, freedom, practical
activity, and the historicity of dispositions and social relations commonly attributed
to human nature. These informed the empirical anthropology he developed from
the 1840s onward: his studies of the failed revolutions on the European continent in
1848–9, the Indian mutiny of the 1850s, the critique of capitalism in the 1860s, and
the impact of imperialism on societies and cultural practices on the periphery of the
capitalist world in the 1870s.
Organization of the Book
Marx was a prodigious reader. He was familiar with the writers of both classical
antiquity and the Enlightenment. Since neither were ever monolithic intellectual
movements, this means that he had greater or lesser familiarity with various
philosophical perspectives that were developed first in antiquity and then were
recycled, refined, and superseded from the late seventeenth century onward. More
importantly, he was familiar with the arguments they produced and with the ways in
which they were inscribed in the cultural patterns, traditions, and politics of his day.
Chapter 1, “The Enlightenment and Anthropology,” examines how nature and
then human society were slowly historicized from the 1670s onward, culminating
in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Buffon’s Natural History, and Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, all of which were published around 1750.
These path-breaking works had marked influences on subsequent writers. It is
reasonable to say that the Scottish historical philosophers like Adam Smith as well
as central European philosophers like Kant, Herder, and Hegel engaged in a dialogue
with the historical-dialectical and critical anthropology outlined by Montesquieu,
Buffon, and Rousseau. An anthropological perspective, combining both its empirical

and philosophical dimensions, crystallized at the University of Göttingen in the
late eighteenth century; the importance of this, from our standpoint, was that this
perspective served as the model for university reform in Europe and elsewhere, most
notably at the University of Berlin where Marx was a student in the late 1830s.
Chapter 2, “Marx’s Anthropology,” outlines the major features of his philosoph-
ical anthropology—the corporeal organization of human beings, the significance of
ensembles of social relations, the diversity and historicity of human societies, and
the importance of praxis in the production, reproduction, and transformation of those
communities. Unlike Rousseau, Hegel, and others, Marx did not distinguish between
the physical and moral character of human beings and thus separate the human
history from the realm of nature. He saw a dialectical interplay between a biological
substrate—the corporeal organization of the body, which endows all members of the
human species with certain potentials—and the sets of social relations that shape
everyday life in the worlds in which the social individuals of historically specific
communities live and acquire their consciousness. Thus, human nature is not only
historicized but also plural. Marx’s view of the world was profoundly historicist, and
history involved the intertwined development of human beings, ensembles of social
relations (societies), and nature itself. Finally, the chapter considers Marx’s notion of
praxis, the most basic and characteristic feature of human beings, by means of which
they establish relations with objects of the external world and with one another.
Chapter 3, “Human Natural Beings,” considers the bases for Marx’s agreement
with and positive evaluation of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859/1964).
These included Darwin’s rejection of teleological arguments in the natural sciences,
his adoption of a notion of historically contingent change, his concern with variation,
and his view that individual organisms are the consequence of interactions with
their environments. This provides a foundation for considering in more detail real
or potential connections between the materialist and naturalist positions put forth
by Marx and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century—a process which has been
set in motion by Joseph Fracchia, Richard Lewontin, David McNally, and others in
recent years. The chapter then explores concepts elaborated by Marx in the 1840s,
which he subsequently honed in later works: the corporeal organization of human
beings, objectification (how they came to be aware of the world through sensory
experience while living in social groups that transformed given natural and pre-
existing sociocultural worlds into human worlds), and dispositions (the capabilities
and constraints embedded in those thinking bodies). Labor is an embodied process
as are instruments of labor like the hand, the human perceptual system, the brain, and
the anatomical structures associated with speech. Using this conceptual framework
as well as Engels’s (1876/1972) essay on the role of labor in the transition from ape
to human, it examines the human fossil record in order to discern the interplay of
changing dispositions and anatomical structures, the emergence of practices such as
tool-making and language, and how these might have happened.
Introduction • 7
Chapter 4, “History, Culture, and Social Formation,” explores the alternative

Marx developed from the late 1850s onward to the societal evolutionism of the
Enlightenment theorists of agrarian capitalism or to Hegel’s teleological views
about the actualization of the human mind and the unfolding of free subjectivity.
Marx focused instead on the historicity of the individual and of social relations
rather than a human nature that could be reduced largely to its psychobiological or
spiritual dimensions. In his view, the distinctive features of humankind—creative
intelligence realized through and manifested in labor, sociality, language, culture, the
production of use values (items that satisfy human needs), and the creation of new
needs—were neither timeless nor persistent but rather were constituted, reproduced,
and transformed in particular sociohistorical contexts. Marx began his analysis of
how societies produced the material conditions for their own reproduction not with
exchange, supply and demand, or the allocation of scarce resources (the starting
points for classical political economists) but rather with production itself. Using
the concept of a mode of production, he developed a commentary on alternative
pathways in the development of property relations away from those of the original
kinship-based communities. In effect, he argued that not all historically specific
societies developed in the same way or even passed through the same succession
of modes of production. Here, we examine both the theoretical framework Marx
sketched as well as how archaeologists and historians have contributed to the
clarification of its implications.
Chapter 5, “Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World,” considers
what Marx thought about the processes underlying the transition to capitalism and
the subsequent development of industrial capitalism on an ever-expanding scale
through the formation of domestic and overseas markets, and colonies that supplied
not only raw materials but also customers for the commodities produced. While it
is a story of the plunder of primitive accumulation and the relentless subordination
of ever-increasing numbers of people both at home and abroad into the disciplinary
relations of capitalism, it is also a story of resistance, uneven development along
different trajectories as a result of articulation of capitalist societies with societies
with different modes of production that were differentially resistant to change, and
the imposition of colonial rule by capitalist national states. The story also involved
massive emigration, the rise of nationalist politics and its interconnections with
diasporic communities, political fragmentation, creation of new colonial territories
and national states, and the development of new forms of political institutions and
practices. Marx was aware that there were state-based societies in which commodity
production was not well developed and market exchange had not penetrated into all
corners of everyday life. What distinguished them from capitalist societies and from
one another were the forms of social property relations and production as well as
the specific forms in which goods or labor power were appropriated from the direct
producers by the members of non-producing class(es)—e.g. through extra-economic
means such as coercion, taxes, laws, or rent or the exploitation of various categories
of unfree labor and wage-workers. He recognized that property was a relation

between classes of individuals that was mediated by things. He also recognized that
political power entailed maintaining injustice in and through property relations. This
recognition underpinned his writings about the state from the 1840s onward both
in general works and in accounts of particular cases, like France, Germany, or the
United States. His views on these topics provide the foundations for a historical and
critical-dialectical anthropology for the twenty-first century.
Chapter 6, “Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century,” begins with Marx’s first
premise of history: the existence of real, living human individuals. In The German
Ideology, he identifies three additional premises: (a) the activities by which the
individuals satisfy their needs; (b) the creation of new needs; and (c) the reproduction
of the individual in the family. Marx also claimed that reality does not reside in
the idea of society but rather in the reality of the individual, and that, while there
can be no relation between the individual and society, there are relations among
individuals. Moreover, history is experienced phenomenologically in the lives of
living individuals. This raises a number of questions. For example, how do personal
conditions and experiences become general ones? How do individuals realize needs
and desires, create new needs, and reproduce themselves? What is involved in the
self-realization of these capacities, and what constrains their self-actualization?
The problems we confront in the twenty-first century have not changed: the need
for social justice in its myriad dimensions, discrimination (based on racism, sexism,
xenophobia, and the intolerance of various nationalisms and fundamentalisms),
the inequities marked by class struggle, and the degradation of the world on which
we live, to name only a few. Marx might even argue that the celebration of diverse
identities in the absence of inequality and discrimination is probably not such a bad
idea. The issue is how do we eliminate discrimination in circumstances in which
diversity is continually reconstituted in order to perpetuate inequalities? Marx’s
political activism and sense of social justice were always combined with continuous
critical investigation. He was acutely aware of how unforgiving the consequences of
political action can be; he also knew how important it is to understand as accurately
and completely as possible the forces involved and in getting political action right.
After all, some stories or visions of the future have better endings than others!
–1–
The Enlightenment and Anthropology
The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” was a tumultuous period. It persisted,

according to some, from the early 1600s to as late as the 1830s. It was marked by a
series of processes that mutually shaped and reinforced one another. These included:
(1) the formation of merchant empires and overseas colonies in the Americas, Africa,
and Asia established by Holland, Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Russia from
the mid fifteenth century onward combined with the creation of increasingly large
domestic markets in England and other parts of Europe (McNally 1988; Tracy 1990);
(2) the rise of anti-authoritarian sentiment, skepticism, and the appeal to reason or
rationality which challenged and ultimately eroded the divinely ordained authority
claimed by the churches and the aristocracy during and after the Reformation
(Israel 2001; Popkin 1979); (3) the “scientific revolution”—also characterized as
the “conquest of nature” or the “death of nature”—which involved the assimilation
of a new understanding of nature into the wider culture and society, because of the
desire of the emerging commercial classes for technological innovations and the
erosion of barriers separating intellectuals and artisans (Forbes 1968; Jacob 1988;
Merchant 1980; Zilsel 2003); and (4) the rise of industrial capitalism, analyzed later
by Marx in Capital, which involved the appearance of new forms of manufacture
from about 1750 onward that were based on the continual adoption of technological
innovations, the transformation of social relations, the construction of factories, and
the growth of cities across northern Europe (Hobsbawm 1968).
The Enlightenment was also marked by continuous conflicts between Catholics,
Lutherans, Calvinists, and various Protestant fringe movements from the 1520s
onward. Some claim that this “war of the Churches constituted Europe’s prime
engine of cultural and educational change” until the mid seventeenth century when
“major intellectual turmoil developed first in the Dutch Republic and the Calvinist
states of Germany” (Israel 2001: 23). Besides the ideological and political strife
that formed the backdrop to everyday life, there were probably no more than a few
decades between 1600 and 1830 when peace prevailed and battles or wars were not
being waged somewhere in the world. The impact of the Enlightenment was not
limited to the soldiers and sailors who died in these wars. It was felt by all layers of
society. More than one aristocrat and preacher of the day lamented that “even the
common people were susceptible to new ideas” (Israel 2001: 1, 8–9).
While Europe is often portrayed as its center of gravity, this is not precisely correct.
Enlightenment thought was discussed and deployed in the Americas, the Middle
9
East, and Asia. For example, the rhetoric of the American Revolution was rooted in
the ideas of Enlightenment writers. The contents of Mercurio Peruano, published in
Peru during the 1790s, included articles ranging from Newtonian science and natural
history through commentaries on political economy to discussions of philosophy, the
French Revolution, and the idea of the nation. Commercial minorities that connected
the Ottoman state, India, China, and Japan to Europe were familiar with the scientific
and social-theoretical contributions of the Enlightenment (e.g. Chatterjee 1986:
54; Gran 1979; Habib 1990; Mauro 1990; Rossabi 1990; Wang 1990). What the
Enlightenment provided were analytical categories and a conceptual framework—a
language, if you will—for discussing issues of the day. Political reformers and
leaders of nationalist or revolutionary movements in areas as widely separated as
Latin America, the eastern Mediterranean (including Egypt and Greece), and Japan
used this language from the late eighteenth century onward to express and buttress
their plans and goals. Moreover, virtually every nationalist movement of the last two
centuries has made use of concepts originated by or derived from Enlightenment
writers.
This chapter has three goals. The first is to comment briefly on early Enlighten-
ment thought in order to provide a background to standpoints that appeared around
1750 and affected social commentators, including Marx, who wrote after that date.
The second goal is to examine both the philosophical and empirical foundations of
the new anthropology of Enlightenment writers as well as the contexts in which it
emerged in the mid eighteenth century. The third goal is to examine the subsequent
development of anthropology and to consider the various manifestations of
anthropological sensibilities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Early Enlightenment Thought
The standpoints of Enlightenment thinkers never constituted a unified, fixed body

of ideas and arguments. The movement can be described as a spectrum of warring
factions engaged in heated debate, whose perspectives, boundaries, centers of
gravity, and even membership shifted as they developed through time. At one end
were the traditionalists who argued for the divinely inspired authority of the existing
aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The other, radical end of the spectrum
was occupied by a number of individuals, the most notable of whom were Baruch
Spinoza (1632–77) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The former, a Dutch lens
grinder, challenged knowledge claims based on revealed religion and argued, among
other things, that nature creates itself in accordance with rules which govern its
operation, that the creations of nature are produced in a fixed order, and that human
values (e.g. good and evil) do not exist in nature but are human creations instead
(Allison 2005; Garrett 1995). The latter, a German mining engineer and civil servant,
laid the foundations for seeing nature historically as a dynamic world in flux that had
The Enlightenment and Anthropology • 11
the capacity to change continually through time (Garber 2005; Glass 1959: 37–8;
Sleigh 1995). Arrayed between the traditionalist and radical extremes were a series
of intermediate, “moderate” standpoints—such as Cartesianism (rationalism) and
empiricism. Each position had theological, scientific, political, and philosophical
dimensions. The arguments among their advocates “rarely referred directly to the
political and social conflict but did so in a mediated way. These conflicts were about
the nature of fundamental boundaries, like that between mind and body, human and
animal, living and non-living, male and female” (Jordanova 1986: 33). They also
gave rise to enduring terms like “materialist,” “liberal,” “romantic,” “conservative,”
and “socialist” not to mention the words “ideology” and “scientist.”
The most striking features shared by a majority of the factions of the Enlighten-
ment, but not always the same ones, were arguments about the autonomy of the
individual, the importance of rationality or the use of reason, the existence of a natural
world constituted outside of human beings, and rather mechanistic views about what
nature was like. It is also clear, however, that they did not always necessarily see or
understand the individual, rationality, and nature in quite the same way. This was
true as well of their views on the importance of toleration, equality, property, and
contracts, which were also widely discussed. For our immediate purposes here,
the debates about nature and history from about 1670 to 1750, fueled in significant
ways by Spinoza and Leibniz, laid the foundations for the development of a new
way of perceiving and understanding nature and the place of human beings in it. As
Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 366) observed, “Like the thought it was combating, the
new scientific philosophy was to rest upon a general conception of man, nature, and
God.” This perspective emphasized the importance of observation and reasoning; it
asserted that mechanistic explanations which viewed nature as a huge machine were
too simple to account for its complexity; and it transformed God from a creator who
intervened directly in nature into an artisan who either acted indirectly or not at all.1
The World Historicized
Both nature and human society were slowly historicized after the 1670s. By this,
I mean that understanding the history of some thing was absolutely necessary for
truly knowing that thing, regardless of whether it was nature, human society, or a
commodity. Here, history involved the concepts of both process and succession.
This historicized perspective of the world and its inhabitants crystallized in the
mid eighteenth century with the appearance in rapid succession of Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, Buffon’s Natural History in 1749, and Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755. Let us consider each writer in more
detail.
The Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755), was an
astute social commentator and critic who had read widely in the travel literature
of the day and recognized the diversity of manners and customs that existed from
one society to another. For our purposes, he wrote three books of note. The earliest
was the Persian Letters (Montesquieu 1721/1973), in which two imaginary young
princes from Persia travel throughout France and comment in letters they send
home about the incomprehensibility of French mores and traditional values as they
existed in the early eighteenth century around the time of Louis XIV’s death. In
this work, Montesquieu saw “society as a reality that was external to the individual,
constraining him to act and think in certain ways” and that “prevents him from
evaluating his position in society with any degree of objectivity, . . . [since] his
understanding of its values, norms and institutional structures are purely subjective”
(Baum 1979: 43).
In his second work, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans
and Their Decline (1734/1965), Montesquieu rejected theological arguments and
began to work out the methodological foundations for a historical standpoint that
would neither view human history as one accident or error after another nor see the
diversity of manners and customs of peoples around the world as signs of human
weakness or irrationality (Althusser 1959/1982: 20–1). He sought instead to discover
the particularities of Roman history. With regard to the former, he wrote:
It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence
of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence
of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical,
which act in every monarchy, elevating it. Maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.
All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if by chance of one battle—that is, a
particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for
that state to perish in a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular
accidents. (Montesquieu 1734/1965: 169)
Thus, as Raymond Aron (1965/1998: 15) put it: “behind the seemingly accidental
course of events, we must grasp the underlying causes which account for them.”
Montesquieu distinguished two phases of Roman historical development: one when
the government and the society were in harmony or equilibrium; the other when
there were contradictions between the aims of the state, on the one hand, and values,
principles, or spirit that unified the populace, on the other. These crises were the
dialectic of history, its motor.
Montesquieu refined his concept of the underlying causes of development in his
third work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748/1965). He argued that the diversity of laws
and manners, i.e., forms of government, found in societies around the world could
be reduced to a few types—republics, monarchies, and despotisms. Each type had
its own distinctive nature, which was shaped by both the number of individuals who
possessed sovereignty and the ways in which they exercised it; each type also had
distinctive sentiments—such as morality, honor, or fear—that promoted harmony
among its citizens. In other words, Montesquieu saw a connection between the form
of government, on the one hand, and the style of interpersonal relations, on the other;
he argued that social life is shaped by the way in which power is exercised. As he
had shown earlier, when there were contradictions between the spirit (sentiments)
of the people and the aims of the state, crises emerged which eroded the form of
government. Montesquieu also considered the material or physical causes—like
climate or soil—have on the customs, manners, and laws of diverse peoples. He
argued that there was a correlation, for example, between the incidence of polygamy
and warm climates, and that the laws and forms of government of nations reflect
those material influences. Thus, there was a second dialectical relationship between
the environment broadly defined and the customs and institutions of people. He
was also adamant that the spirit or will of the people was determinant in the final
instance. There is a continuous dialectic throughout The Spirit of the Laws “between
absolute values which seem to correspond to the permanent interests of men as
such, and those which depend upon time and place in a concrete situation” (Berlin
1955/2001: 157).
The project of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88)—super-
intendent of the royal botanical gardens in Paris—was more expansive than that
of Montesquieu. In the first three volumes of his Natural History, which appeared
under the imprimatur of the Royal Press in 1749,2 Buffon covered diverse topics
ranging from the history and theory of the earth and the formation of planets
through biological reproduction and embryonic development to the natural history
of human beings. There was a ready audience for his work, which was composed of
a curious, sophisticated, and politically influential public that wanted to be usefully
entertained without having to invest too much effort as well as the savants and
natural philosophers of the various royal societies and academies of science. This
audience was fascinated with the steady stream of unknown plants and animals
from the far reaches of the earth that arrived each year in Amsterdam, Paris, and
the other commercial centers of Europe; its members flocked to lectures illustrated
with various scientific experiments, anatomical dissections, and opportunities to
peer at specimens through one of the new, powerful microscopes fashioned in the
1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723). As a result, Buffon’s theories were
widely read and critically discussed almost from the moment they appeared (Roger
1989/1997: 68–78; Sloan 1979, 1995). “Buffon made the study of natural history
everybody’s pastime” (Mayr 1982: 101).
The opening essay in the first volume, “Discourse on Method,” established
a backdrop. Here, Buffon dealt with three issues: human reason, whether or not
there is an order to nature, and man’s place in nature (Roger 1989/1997: 81–92).
With regard to the first, the two dominant views concerning reason were those
of Descartes and Locke; the former argued rational thought would yield truth;
the latter claimed that the mind combined ideas derived from sensory experience
in new ways. Buffon merged the two perspectives. Science was more than the
description of mere facts, since it also involved the use of reason—comparison,

analogy, and generalization. With regard to the second question, he argued that there
was indeed an order in nature, but that the mathematicians and taxonomists, like
Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), had simply failed to capture its complexity, because it
was too complicated for their equations (Sloan 1976). In this discussion, Buffon’s
model of the natural historian was Aristotle, the naturalist of living systems, organic
diversity, and internal, teleological processes. Like Aristotle, Buffon took human
beings as his starting point; however, he also added Leibniz’s recently published
views about continuous gradations, or chains of being, in nature.
In the next two essays, Buffon tackled the history and theory of the earth and the
formation of planets (Roger 1989/1997: 93–115). Here, history meant a description
of the present distribution of oceans, mountains, and strata, while theory was viewed
as an attempt to explain the physical causes or past organization that produced the
present distributions (Haber 1959; Porter 1972; Rossi 1984; Rudwick 1985). Buffon
argued that the processes of planetary formation as well as the cyclical ones that
operated on the earth’s surface after it formed erased virtually all traces of the original
events. Thus, a proper theory of natural history had to combine natural causes with
accidents. Jacques Roger (1989/1997: 114) described his theory in the following
way: “The normal sequence of natural causes only generated an eternal repetition of
the present, [while] chance alone could create the unique and irreversible event, after
which nothing would remain as it was before.” The importance of Buffon’s theory
was twofold. First it was a theory of transformation and change. Second, it freed
studies of the history and formation of the earth as well as its antiquity from reliance
on or even reference to the biblical account.
Buffon’s underlying concern in the second volume of Natural History was to
change the direction of natural history as a field of inquiry (Roger 1989/1997:
116–50). To do so, he distinguished living beings, animals and plants, from non-
living matter—a classification that recognized animal, vegetable, and mineral. The
focus of the new natural history would be the study of reproduction; he further
argued that it was necessary to start at the simplest level—the living (organic) matter
that was shared by both animals and plants. This argument seemed to combine
the materialism of the Epicureans and Leibniz. Buffon argued that living beings
reproduce; the question in his mind was how rather than why they did so. This
materialist formulation of the question, which was quite similar to the way he wrote
about the formation and subsequent history of the earth, stirred some controversy,
because it seemed to talk about internal molding forces while excluding two forms
of creationism—preformationism and pre-existence—that had been popular among
religious traditionalists and the mechanists since the late seventeenth century. 3
Buffon observed animal reproduction in a variety of species in order to establish
regularities through comparison. The conclusions he drew were that the first develop-
ment, the fetus at conception, was a production of parts that appeared for the first
time, whereas subsequent embryonic development was merely growth of those parts.
In other words, living matter (organic molecules) was combined and recombined to
produce successive generations of individuals of the same species.4
Buffon’s third volume of Natural History picked up where the first one began—
with man. Its concern was the natural history of the human species (Blanckaert
1993; Roger 1989/1997: 151–83). Buffon clearly placed human beings in nature and
argued that all of their propensities—their capacities for speech, intellectual activity,
and creative innovation, which underpin the rise of civilization—were also natural.
Moreover, there was an unbridgeable gap between human beings and the rest of the
animal kingdom, and Buffon simply refused to humanize the latter as some of his
contemporaries did. Since human beings lived in the physical world, they had to
appropriate the resources of that world in order to cope with the uncertainties of their
own cultures and ultimately to survive. In the opening chapters, he examined the
history of the individual and the different stages of human development—childhood,
puberty, adulthood, and old age; he relied on differences in climate, environment,
dietary regimes, and nationality to account for the physical and physiological
differences noted in travel accounts. As Claude Blanckaert (1993: 33) remarked,
it was necessary, after Buffon, to take account of the physiological demands and
to consider the disruptive, initiating, or dynamic role played by customs, modes of
subsistence, and education of peoples living in different climatic regions. Buffon
also argued that the human species had been relatively uniform (and archetypically
white-skinned) in its early stages, and that, as its members moved out from their
mid-latitude homeland, their physical appearance, customs, and abilities were slowly
altered (degenerated in his words) and diversified under the influence of climate into
the varieties that are seen today.
While Buffon’s empirical anthropology was rooted in the travel literature, medico-
anatomical investigations, and biases of his day, his philosophical anthropology was
materialist. It put human beings in nature and attempted to account for changes in
the species in terms of its concrete interactions and relationships with the rest of
the natural world at particular times and places. This led him to consider in new
ways factors like climate, geography, diet, reproduction, or customs. The long-term
impact of Buffon’s work rests on his capacity to integrate studies that ranged from
cosmology and the history of the earth to animal reproduction. His analyses cut
across different levels ranging from the molecular to the cosmological, historicized
nature in the process, and integrated seemingly disparate ideas and information into
a more or less coherent whole. More importantly, they influenced later writers (e.g.
Reill 2005; Richards 2002; Sloan 1979).
The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Montesquieu and Buffon provided a “green light” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam

Smith, and other commentators of the Scottish Enlightenment to write about the
history of human society.5 Although Locke and the natural law theorists had written
about the origins of the ownership of private property in the late seventeenth century,
Rousseau and the Scots historicized discussions about the origins and expansion of
property rights and relations after 1750.6 Their accounts were conjectural histories
concerned with the development of human nature and the progress of society as
reflected by changes in modes of subsistence. In spite of the fact that they drew from
the same ethnographic and historical accounts, their philosophical anthropologies as
well as their views about contemporary commercial society differed in significant
ways. The aim of this section is to consider both their differences and some of their
shared concerns.
Rousseau’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was critical of modern, civil society, which was
based increasingly on commerce and industry. In A Discourse on the Moral Effects
of the Arts and Sciences, he charged that people were morally corrupted both by
the civilizing process and by life in the commercial societies that were slowly
crystallizing across the globe, as their elites steadily severed customary, mutually
recognized obligations to the members of the lower classes and replaced them with
social relations based on market exchange. He wrote that “the politicians of the
ancient world were always talking about morality and virtue; ours speak of nothing
but commerce and money” (Rousseau 1750/1973: 16). History, in his view, provided
a corrective to what politicians said by focusing on what they actually did. It also
furthered “people’s reflective self-identification and self-location within time, space,
and a context of others,” and it had the potential of expanding their vision of human
possibilities, of thinking of themselves not as “passive observers” but rather “as
active participants” (Barnard 2003: 162).
Rousseau (1755/1973, 1755/1992a) outlined his critical, philosophical anthro-
pology in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, published in 1755. Some of the
distinctive features of his historical-dialectical perspective were: (1) human nature
as a historical process associated with the emergence of human beings from nature
through the creation of culture and their transformation of nature through social
labor; (2) the interactions of human beings with one another and with their external
(natural) world as shaped by successively different, historically specific sets of social
relations; (3) a recognition of both the existence and anteriority of social forms other
than modern bourgeois society; and (4) a historicized conception of “man” as a
subject who was not always identical with “bourgeois man” of modern society.
Rousseau saw human beings as part of nature (Rousseau 1755/1973: 37–8).7
While he declined to speculate on whether the first human beings were “covered
with hair,” or “walked upon all fours,” he was certain that successive transformations
in the constitution of the human species had occurred since its inception: “changes
which must have taken place in the internal as well as external conformation of
man, as he applied his limbs to new uses, and fed himself on new kinds of food”
(Rousseau 1755/1973: 47). Rousseau (1775/1992a: 81–3) also believed that the
great apes were a variety of human being, because they had similar biological and
psychological dispositions;8 however, unlike savage and modern man, the ape had
not “develop[ed] any of its potential faculties.” He inferred that there might be “a
temporal and sequential relation” between apes and human beings, one reflecting
“genetic continuity” (Frayling and Wokler 1982: 113–14; Wokler 1997a, 1997b).
In his view, the test for determining whether apes and human beings were varieties
of the same species would take more than one generation to answer; it involved
determining whether they could produce hybrids that could continue to reproduce.
Asher Horowitz (1987: 31) described this dimension of Rousseau’s philosophical
anthropology in historical-dialectical terms: “As a biological species, humanity
is the product of a process of evolution. The evolution of the human species is
inseparable from the inauguration of its own history, and humanity’s biological
evolution is a result of its own historical activity.”
Let us consider more closely what was involved in emergence of history—i.e., the
creation of culture—from nature. Rousseau began his historical account with “savage
man” who initially was virtually indistinguishable from other animals, which he
viewed as little more than “ingenious machines” whose demands were established
and satisfied through “inherited repertoire[s] of instinctual behavior” (Horowitz
1987: 68). To the extent that proto-humans possessed an inherited repertoire, they
were like other animals; what distinguished them, almost imperceptibly at first, from
other animals was a capacity to learn from their experiences of and interactions
with the external world. This process of free agency slowly released them from the
constraints of their behavioral repertoire and laid the foundations for further learning
and the development of truly social relations as opposed to the atomized, independent
behaviors of animals like ants or bees. It also led gradually to what Rousseau called
perfectibility or self-transformation: an increased consciousness of desires and needs,
which in turn set the stage for the transformation of the external world through labor
and the creation of new needs. Language and tool-making were early but essential
steps in the process of perfectibility (Horowitz 1987: 60–76; Rousseau 1755/1973:
47–61). Thus, the development of both free agency and perfectibility was part and
parcel of the sociohistorical development of human nature and of the transformation
or mutilation of nature, both of which occurred within historically specific forms
of social relations. This “self-constitutive practical activity” involved “the creation
of a cultural, superorganic realm in the social process of labour” (Horowitz 1987:
86–7).
Rousseau recognized three successive forms of society in the Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality, each with its own distinctive socioeconomic relations, internal
contradictions, and incomplete realization of freedom and happiness. These were
primitive society, traditional pre-capitalist society modeled after the Greek polis,
and modern, civil society. Rousseau (1755/1973: 72) also believed that “many of the
differences between men which are ascribed to nature stem rather from habit and the
diverse modes of life of men in society.”
The historical development of primitive society rested on the growing import-
ance in society, rather than in nature, of the bonds that were created by mutual
affection, dependence, self-esteem, and self-interest; he called these sentiments
amour propre and believed that the development of self-esteem and pride occurred
as a result of public recognition of personal qualities of excellence that were valued
by the community (Horowitz 1987: 92–4).9 Thus, amour propre played a crucial
role in both the formation and control of behavior in primitive society, and prim-
itive society itself was not entirely based on a system of needs, as the empiricists
had claimed. In his view, communal life was an expression of the abilities of its
members, who were further bound together by sharing. What internal differentiation
existed in the community reflected a nascent division of labor based on age and
sex, rather than a division in which the members of one or another group enforced
order or monopolized the use of force. Life in primitive society was disrupted
when production begins to be based on forms that the community could no longer
replicate. The development of functionally differentiated forms of production was
always historically contingent rather than necessary from Rousseau’s perspective.
When new divisions of labor appeared, they undermined and ultimately dissolved
both communal life and the existing social relations of production. The motors
driving this change were the adoption of agricultural and metallurgy as well as the
consolidation of new forms of amour propre that increasingly emphasized vanity
rather than pride, competition for public esteem, and the life of the individual as
opposed to that of the community. What emerged in their wake was a society that
was simultaneously structured by newly forged sets of needs, by exchange relations
rather than generalized reciprocity, by internal social differentiation, and by the
institutionalization of separate spheres of activity. In a phrase, the emergent society
was no longer a unity (Rousseau 1755/1973: 76–85; Horowitz 1987: 89–107).
Rousseau’s second stage of sociohistorical development was constituted by the
city-states of classical antiquity. Conceptually, they were midway between primitive
society and the kind of commercial society that was emerging in the mid eighteenth
century. The distinctive feature of Athens and the Roman Republic was that certain
individuals had a new relationship with the community. They were citizens, because
they fulfilled the obligations required of members of the community, such as serving
in the army or as a state official. A right of citizenship was access to the productive
resources of the community, which, while owned by the community, were held
privately so long as the beneficiary discharged his duties to the state. These privately
held resources were not worked by the citizen himself but rather by slaves or serfs
who, as a result of their status, were not citizens. The goals of the productive activity
of this servile class were neither production for the market nor the accumulation of
profit; it was aimed instead at the production, maintenance, and reproduction of the
citizen in his new relation to the community. This relationship was predicated on the
organic unity of the citizen and his community. Amour propre was transformed in
the process of forging this new relationship. Virtue came to be viewed increasingly
in terms of “glory and public esteem in directly social endeavors,” and individuals
strived for “the cultivation of personal qualities, so that communal virtue becomes
the condition and occasion for personal virtue” (Horowitz 1987: 105). In sum,
freedom and equality were realized only by individual citizens in the community,
who cultivated virtue, on the one hand, and saw no distinction between the
universality of their claims and the particularity of their social position, on the other.
These early civilizations were exceedingly fragile and contained the seeds not only
for their own destruction but also for their own transcendence. The possibilities for
destruction included enlightenment (the capacity to think and speak for oneself), the
further growth of individualism based on the distinction between public and private,
increasing conflicts between the individual citizen and the state-based community,
the expansion of commercial relations, the emergence of despotism, militarism, and
defeat in war. The road taken for transcendence involved a further metamorphosis
of amour propre, increased individuation, and alienation (Horowitz 1987: 102–7;
Rousseau 1755/1973: 85–105; 1755/1992b).
Civil society was Rousseau’s third stage of sociohistorical development. He
viewed it as a vast system of needs, a form of society in which each
man must now, therefore, have been perpetually employed in getting others to interest
themselves in his lot, and in making them, apparently at least, if not really, find their
advantage in promoting his own. Thus he must have been sly and artful in his behaviour
to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a kind of necessity to ill-use all
the persons of whom he stood in need, when he could not frighten them into compliance,
and did not judge it his interest to be useful to them. Insatiable ambition, the thirst of
raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass
others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret
jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its
point with greater security. (Rousseau 1755/1973: 86–7)
Rousseau’s conceptualization of the “dynamic of civil society,” as Horowitz

(1987: 109) noted, “compel[ed] all the actors to foster actively the proliferation
of the needs of others.” This system of social relations constructed as exchange
relations promoted a condition characterized by “universal disorder, competition,
and exploitation” (Horowitz 1987: 116). The historically contingent tendencies that
underwrote the development of civil society emerged from the increasing conflicts
between the individual citizen and the state-based community and the consolidation
of individualism. These were buttressed by the simultaneous liberation of property
from the community and the assertion of exclusive property rights (rights of
ownership, use, and disposal) by individuals, and by the formation of the state,
which claimed to guarantee the safety, freedom, and equality of property owners—
“the constituent elements of their being” (Rousseau 1755/1973: 92).
For Rousseau, money was one of the characteristic features of civil society. The
use of money facilitated exchanges initially between property owners producing
different goods and later between property owners and those who lacked property.
Its use was increasingly universalized. Not only was money equated with work
itself, it was also pursued for itself, because it had became a sign of accumulated
wealth. In civil society, “money was the prime necessity, and thus the immediate
object of labour; and . . . in consequence all labour incapable of earning money was
necessarily neglected” (Rousseau 1765/1986: 309–10). This impoverished everyday
life and underwrote both the erosion of the last vestiges of community as well as the
growing objectification, alienation, and repression of its members. In civil society,
amour propre had become Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” one individual’s quest
for power gained at the expense of others.
Rousseau’s focus in his historicized account of humanity was its rise in nature, its
slow creation of nature as a category, and its subsequent sociohistorical development,
which he viewed as the continuous, but always historically contingent, transforma-
tion of the individual in society and of the simultaneous, related transformation
of society itself. From his perspective, the existence of human beings outside of
society was simply unthinkable. The motors driving his account were agency and
perfectibility. He was also aware of the significant differences that existed between
primitive society and modern civil society.
The savage and the civilized man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and in their
inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness for the one would reduce the
other to despair. The former breathes only peace and liberty; he desires only to live and
be free from labour. . . . Civilized man, on the other hand, is always moving, sweating,
toiling and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations. . . . He pays court
to men in power, whom he hates, and to the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at
nothing to have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his
own meanness and their protection; and, proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of
those, who have not the honour of sharing it. . . . [T]he source of all these differences is
. . . [that the civilized or bourgeois] man only knows how to live in the opinion of others.
(Rousseau 1755/1973: 104)
Moreover, Rousseau knew that the political life of the city-states of ancient Greece
was no longer a model for politicians in modern society. In 1764, he wrote the
following to the citizens of Geneva:
The ancient peoples are no longer a model for the moderns; they are too foreign in
every respect. You, especially, Genevans, stay in your place. . . . You are neither Romans
nor Spartans; you are not even Athenians. Leave those great names alone; they do not
become you. You are merchants, artisans, bourgeois, always occupied with your private
interests, your work, commerce, profits; you are people for whom freedom itself is only
a means toward untrammeled acquisition and secure possession. (Rousseau, 1764/1962:
284, quoted by Löwy and Sayres 2001: 47)
While the presuppositions of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology were fund-

amentally different from those of the Scots as well as those of German commentators
from the 1770s onward, his influence on them was nonetheless substantial.
The Scottish Historical Philosophers
Through their travels, the Scots were acutely aware of what is now called uneven
development. Their country was less prosperous than England, and there were
significant differences within the country between the north and the south or between
the Highlands and the Lowlands. In 1750, a day’s ride into the countryside from
a commercial center like Glasgow with its shops and burgeoning factories must
have seemed like a journey into a past era replete with clan chieftains, backwoods
subsistence farmers, herders, and roving foragers on the margins, all of whom bartered
the goods they owned. A sincerely felt moral concern among Scottish intellectuals,
like Adam Smith (1723–90), was to determine how they could make a backward
country prosper (Waszek 1988: 30–7). To accomplish this goal, they argued, it was
necessary to have accurate empirical information derived from experiment and
observation, comparison and analysis; they could then synthesize the information
and use the results to formulate the natural laws of economic development (Forbes
1982). The methodology was Newton’s applied to human society rather than
inanimate objects. To do so would be a virtuous act that would benefit the nation
and meet with the approval of others; they knew the act was virtuous, because it in-
volved sympathy (i.e., empathy), the capacity to put themselves imaginatively into
the situation of others and to intuit what the others instinctively feel (Broackes 1995:
380). The concepts of spectatorship and sympathy played prominent roles in Smith’s
(1759/1976) Theory of Moral Sentiments and guided the conjectural histories of
society that Smith and his contemporaries wrote between 1757 and 1777.
The Scots did not believe, as Hobbes and Locke had, that society was constituted
by a rational act, a social contract among individuals, in order to protect life,
liberty, and property. They argued instead that the formation of society could not
be predicated on reason. In their view, emotion preceded reason and reflection,
and awareness of the advantages of life in a community only emerged later. David
Hume (1711–76) argued that the sociability of human beings was natural and rested
on sexual impulse and desires that linked generations together and shaped their
habits regarding the distribution of beneficial but scarce goods. For him, protecting
property rights to goods was the main condition for society and preceded notions
of justice. Taking a slightly different tack, Smith argued that human sociability
underpinned the development of morality, since individuals serve as mirrors for one
another. The exchanges that occurred among individuals in the mirroring process
were not only the means by which they gained the approval of others and satisfied
their mutual needs, but they were also the way in which those individuals were
constituted as individuals in the society. More importantly, they were the foundation
of human sociability itself.
Hume, Smith, and the other Scots had a common perspective on human nature
that was intimately linked with their views on sociability. Despite the diversity
of human actions, institutions, and customs—reflecting variously the influence
of education, government, and environment as well as peculiarities of particular
cultures and individuals—there were also stable characteristics, motives, and
instincts that were shared by all human beings. That is, human beings have in
common certain predispositions, such as “the natural effort of every individual to
better his own condition” or “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing
for another” that distinguish them from other species (Smith 1776/1976: 17). These
dispositions were fixed characteristics of the species that were invariant from one
society to another or from one individual to the next; this view, of course, contrasted
markedly with Rousseau’s.
Besides their views about natural sociability of human beings, property, scarcity,
exchange, and the immutability of human nature, the Scots also believed in progress,
the idea that society was developing in a desirable direction. Smith and the others
saw progressive development in areas of society as diverse as language, astronomy,
jurisprudence, government, and, most importantly, the mode of subsistence. In his
Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–3/1982), Smith argued that the progress of society
was a natural, law-driven process tied both to the natural dispositions shared by
all human beings—e.g. to better their own circumstances—and to the increasing
division of labor, which was associated with population growth and changes in their
modes of subsistence. From his perspective, the first societies were composed of
small numbers of individuals who provisioned themselves by hunting and foraging.
As their numbers increased, they domesticated animals and became pastoralists.
When their numbers increased even further, those in favorable environments
domesticated plants and turned to agriculture. This was followed by a significant
advance in the division of labor, as artisans—carpenters, weavers, tailors, and the
like—ceased to produce their own food and settled instead in towns to pursue their
crafts and to barter or exchange the goods they produced with other members of the
community and then with the inhabitants of other nations. The Scots also recognized
that the culture and values of a societies were linked to their modes of subsistence;
hence, foraging societies were different from those whose economies were based on
commerce and manufacturing. However, the sequence in which the different forms
of society appeared followed from the nature of property, or as Smith (1776/1976:
405) put it, “according to the natural course of things.”
The materialist, conjectural histories of society constructed by Smith and his

associates in Glasgow and Edinburgh with their emphasis on the natural develop-
ment of the economy were merely part of a more general system of morality rooted
in a discussion of imagination and sympathy. They described, and promoted, the
development of commercial society in accordance with natural laws and the natural
propensities that were shared by all human beings. They realized that manifestations
of these natural laws and propensities varied from one time to another, even as basic
human nature itself remained constant. They interpreted the variation as a series of
gradations that reflected not only continuous and uninterrupted historical change
but also the unfolding of some potential or force that was inherent in society itself.
While they historicized society, the Scots separated the study of history from the
study of social dynamics; however, theirs were not the only attempts to historicize
discussions of human nature and society in the mid eighteenth century.
Rousseau and the Scots were concerned with the development of a new kind
of society—commercialized and later industrialized—that came to be called “civil
society.” Their questions were: What was it? And, how did it develop? While the
Scots advocated, with some uneasiness, the growth of civil society as a means to
increase the wealth of nations, Rousseau was openly critical of the effects of modern
civil society on individuals, their outlooks on life, and the social relations that
structured their interactions. The views of Rousseau and the Scots on the trajectory
of human historical development, as well as their philosophical anthropologies,
also differed significantly. While Rousseau blurred the distinction we now make
between the human and the natural realms, the Scots highlighted their differences.
For Rousseau, the motors driving human history were the interplay of free agency,
perfectibility, and the transformation of the external world in contexts shaped by
contingent rather than necessary forms of social relations. For Smith and the Scots,
human history reflected the gradual, progressive development, in accordance with
natural law, of propensities that were common to all human beings, even though they
manifested themselves variously in societies with different modes of subsistence.
The problems addressed by Rousseau, Smith, and the others, as well as their
philosophical anthropologies, both influenced and provoked successive generations
of writers from the late eighteenth century onward. Kant, Herder, Hegel, Jefferson,
Marx, and others wrestled with their views about humanity and how the world in
which they lived came to be the way it was.
The Institutionalization of Anthropology
In the late eighteenth century the lines between disciplines were not as sharply
drawn as they would become, nor were they even drawn in the same places as
they are today. Instead, it was a time when a physiologist–comparative anatomist
(Blumenbach) wrote about epistemology; when a naturalist (Buffon) discussed
mathematics; when a philosopher (Kant) lectured on anthropology, astronomy,

history, and laid the foundations for the modern concept of biological species; when
a poet, novelist, and statesman (Goethe) discovered the intermaxillary bone of the
human skull, collected botanical samples, and drew pictures of Roman ruins; and
when a political revolutionary (Jefferson) conducted archaeological excavations
in Virginia and collected vocabulary lists of American Indian languages. What
united them were curiosity about the world and their quest for enlightenment, for
understanding that world without necessarily having to rely solely or exclusively on
the authority of others. What inspired them, among other things, were authors like
Montesquieu, Buffon, Rousseau, and the Scots, whose writings provoked critical
thought and practice.
The influence of Rousseau and others was already evident in the German princ-
ipalities by the late 1750s. This was a time of massive foreign influence in Central
Europe. East Prussia had been incorporated into the Russian Empire during the Seven
Years War (1756–63), and the president of the Berlin Academy, French naturalist
Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, actively sought to bring the issues of Enlightenment
debate to the “center of German cultural discourse” by offering annual prize comp-
etitions on subjects selected by the Academy (Zammito 2002: 59). This was part
of the cultural and political agenda of King Frederick II, who himself was a long-
time friend of Voltaire. Another aspect of Frederick’s agenda was to reform the
universities and remodel them after the curriculum at the University of Göttingen. A
third aspect of Frederick’s plan was to undermine and displace academic philosophy,
which he viewed as pedantic and out of touch with the real world. The king was
supported in his effort to bring the ideas of the French and Scottish Enlightenments
to the public, especially by that newly emerging layer of society, the “bourgeois
intelligentsia,” whose members were concerned with education not only as a source
of social mobility but more importantly as a sign of social identity (Zammito 2001,
2002: 16–35). Testimonials perhaps to the impact of these intellectual exchanges
were Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1803) claims that “Hume awoke him [i.e., Kant]
from his dogmatic slumbers” and that “Rousseau set him straight.” It was in this
context that Kant and his student, Johann Gottlieb von Herder (1744–1803), began
to grapple with Rousseau’s writings at the University of Königsberg in 1762, that
Kant launched his annual course in anthropology in 1772, and that anthropology was
institutionalized at Göttingen in the 1770s.
Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology
Kant’s early writings were concerned mainly with the natural sciences. Two addi-
tional themes appeared in his writings in the early 1760s. The first was an extended
critique of Cartesian rationalism and the application of mathematical methods to
metaphysical questions; his Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural
Theology and Ethics (1762), which was runner-up for the Berlin Academy’s prize,
shifted the study of human nature from metaphysics toward the natural world. It also
gained him public recognition. The second theme dealt with human equality and
education. By the time that Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(1764) appeared, Kant was already working his way through Rousseau’s comments
about human nature, culture, enlightenment, inequality, and the trajectory of history;
at the same time, he was also forging his own critique of academic philosophy in the
German states (Beiser 1992a). Terms like “freedom” and “equality” slowly crept into
his writings. The alternative he proposed in the mid 1760s was a practical philosophy,
which would not only study “natural phenomena that hinder or contribute to the
development of morality in human life,” but also be useful by helping us distinguish
natural from artificial feelings by stressing what human beings share (Louden 2000:
18). The natural phenomena he had in mind included the diverse experiences of
natural and civilized man, categories clearly derived from Rousseau, that resulted
from differences in sex, age, culture, education, and environment (Zammito 2002:
108–9). In a course description for the 1765–6 academic year, he wrote:
[It] considers man, throughout the world, from the point of view of the variety of his
natural properties and the differences in that feature of man which is moral in character.
Unless these matters are considered, general judgements about man would scarcely be
possible. The comparison of human beings with each other, and the comparison of man
today with the moral state of man in earlier times, furnishes us with a comprehensive
map of the human species. Finally, there will be a consideration of . . . the condition
of the states and nations throughout the world. (Kant 1765/1992: 289; emphasis in
original)
This was one of the building blocks for the anthropology course that Kant taught
each winter semester from 1772 to 1796 and for his Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View (Kant 1798/1978; Louden 2000: 62–4; Stark 2003; Zammito 2002:
221–307); it was apparently paired with an ethics course that he also taught during
that period. While the content of the anthropology course varied somewhat from year
to year, he typically dealt with human beings as sensuous things of nature endowed
with natural talents and temperaments in one part and, in another, considered them
as ethical beings who acted from principles and reason instead impulse or inclination
in social contexts molded by diverse factors. Thus, he distinguished the physical
character of human beings from their moral character. The former was what nature
made of human beings; the latter was an individual achievement formed through
education, moral discourse, reflection, and the ability to think for oneself (Louden
2000: 76–85). For Kant, the formation of moral character was the more fundamental
question, judging by his remark that the proper materials of anthropology were “to
be found neither in metaphysics nor in a museum of natural history in which the
skeleton of the human being can be compared with that of other animals . . . [but]
rather these materials can be found only in human actions, in which the human
character is revealed” (Kant 1785/1991: 211–12; emphasis in original).
For Kant, there was a linkage between the emotional temperaments and physical
states of the human species. He posited psychological differences between men
and women and argued that these were rooted in nature. In his view, women
played the central role in the formation of moral character, because, besides
ensuring the preservation of the species, they were a moralizing force in society
that influenced men, legislated customs, and established how social intercourse
should be structured. It was the natural duty of women to provide individuals with
the skills and discipline required to become rational and ethical human beings.10
Skill and discipline collectively constituted culture. Skills allowed individuals to
use the products of nature; discipline allowed them to free themselves from the
dominance of natural needs and desires. While the process of enculturation was
apparently asocial in Kant’s mind, culture could only unfold and progress in the
context of social relations and could begin to achieve its full potential in a civil
society (civilization), which was composed of free individuals whose actions were
constrained by the lawful authority of the whole. The moralization of civilization
represented another, higher stage of historical development as yet unachieved
(Louden 2000: 79–87, 143–4).
The concepts of races and peoples also played roles in Kant’s philosophical
anthropology. His concept of race, which built on Buffon’s work, was simultaneously
historical, naturalistic, and teleological. Kant viewed race exclusively as skin
color; it was hereditary, and involved the transmission of a latent set of natural
predispositions manifest in all human beings that were activated differentially as
human beings moved into different environmental settings.11 These predispositions
helped the human species achieve its “collective destiny” (Louden 2000: 97). By a
people, he meant the inhabitants of a region who viewed themselves as a civic whole
because of their common descent, customs, and language (Kant 1798/1978: 225).
For Kant, the two were not the same. Races reflected the effects of environment,
whereas peoples reflected culture and history. From his perspective, some peoples
were racially mixed, and races often included numerous peoples. Moreover, some
peoples, mostly Europeans, had developed their natural predispositions, while others,
mostly non-European, had yet to do so, because they lacked culture and civilization,
which, of course, could only emerge in civil society. In sum, Kant historicized the
development of the human species and human society. Like the Scots, he believed
in progress; however, he saw it as moral progress, rather than economic progress.
It was achieved through legal and political means and the “unsociable sociability”
of individuals who simultaneously entered into social relations and fought with one
another (Louden 2000: 146–53).
Kant (1784/1986), 1785/1991, 1786/1991) began to develop his theory of history
in the mid 1780s, building on Rousseau and on the liberal political thought of
Hobbes, Locke, and the Scots; his essays were also responses to Herder’s Reflections
on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784/1968). Kant understood history

teleologically, as motion toward a goal. This movement was characteristic not only
of the natural world viewed as lifeless matter in motion but also of humanity. In the
former, the laws of nature were the motor driving change. In the latter, the underlying
force was the increasing perfectibility of the natural capacity of human beings to
reason. “Restless reason” induced by the constant tendency of human beings to move
toward and away from one another was the initial impetus for movement away from
animality (Galston 1975: 236). The threat of a war of all against all not only drove
human beings into civil society with coercive laws but also promoted education,
freedom, and commerce. Implicit in Kant’s notion of the perfectibility of reason
were the ideas that someday, with freedom, there would be universal agreement and,
hence, the “end of history”—ideas whose actualization he thought were a long way
off. What he did sketch, however, was the kind of empirical information that the
study of history would reveal and that could inform the enlightened peoples of his
day: the advances of each civilization, the evils that led to their destruction, and the
mechanisms of enlightenment that remained. As William Galston (1975: 265) noted,
“morality participates in the universality of Reason, but Reason progresses. The
content of morality is therefore everchanging. Moreover, this change corresponds
to the actuality of history, for the universality of Reason manifests itself in concrete
human affairs.”
As you will recall, Kant distinguished between pure reason, which was independent
of experience, and practical reason, which used empirical data in relation to partic-
ular bodies of experience. In light of this distinction, Robert Louden (2000) described
Kant’s pragmatic anthropology as the study of the “impure ethics” that result when
purely “rational beings” become “human beings” embedded in society.
Herder’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology
In 1765, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Kant’s student at Königsberg only two years
earlier, also began to write about the question of how philosophy could be made
more universal and useful. Herder’s (1765/2002) essay, “How Can Philosophy
Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People,” dealt with a theme
that concerned his teacher as well. Kant’s inspiration was apparent both in the
question itself and in how the essay was conceptualized; Herder also acknowledged
the influence of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Scots. Nevertheless, he set forth
an agenda whose developmental trajectory would increasingly diverge from the
one pursued by his mentor. He argued that “if philosophy is to become useful for
human beings, then let it make the human being its center;” later in the same essay,
he suggested the “restriction of philosophy to anthropology” (Herder 1765/2002: 21,
27). Herder was critical of the views of Hume and Voltaire who saw humankind as
pretty much the same in all times and places and who asserted that history has not
provided us with any new insights. What Herder proposed instead was to allow history
and philosophy to interact and mutually enliven each other in order to learn “about
the spirit of the changes in various ages” (1766/2002: 255; emphasis in original).
In 1769, he stated this cultural relativism somewhat differently: “Human nature
under diverse climates [i.e., the total physical, organic, and humanly constituted,
cultural milieus] is never wholly the same” (quoted by Barnard 1969: 382). From
his perspective, human nature was both malleable and variable. Moreover, each age
and people had its own distinctive customs, ways of life, manners of thought, tastes,
and forms of government; these changed; and what was considered true and useful
for one might be false and useless for another. Moreover, there was less pronounced
diversity among the individuals of the same age or people (culture). Herder would
elaborate these themes for the rest of his life.
For our purposes, three of Herder’s works are important. The first is his essay
“Treatise on the Origin of Language,” which won the Berlin Academy prize in 1771
and established him as a major intellectual force (Herder 1772/2002). The second
is “This Too a Philosophy of the History for the Formation of Humanity” which
appeared in 1774 (Herder 1774/2002). The third is Reflections on the Philosophy
of the History of Mankind, the first volume of which appeared in 1784 (Herder
1784/1968). In them, Herder laid the foundations for a philosophical anthropology
concerned with language, culture, history, and their interconnections.
Herder used the word “culture” in both the singular and the plural. Briefly,
the former referred to the patterns of language, thought, and behavior that were
characteristic of a particular community in time and space; the latter acknowledged
the diversity that existed between communities that were separated from one another
in time and space. For Herder, culture was an integrated whole
a composite or complex configuration which, by virtue of its inherent relational char-

acteristics, is something more than a mere sum total or aggregate. In an aggregate the
parts are separate and unrelated, and their number can be increased or reduced without
having this affect the nature of the total but merely the size. A whole, on the other hand,
is something more than the sum of its constituent parts. The “more” is not contained
in the parts considered in isolation, but rather arises from their inter-relation and the
varying degree of their integration. Herder contrasted the holism characterizing culture
with the atomism characterizing an aggregate, by comparing the former to an organism.
In doing so, he wished to focus on two crucial qualities: functional inter-relatedness and
self-generated activity. (Barnard 1969: 385)
Herder viewed the culture of a community as a complex of interacting organisms.

There were two reasons for this perspective. First, he believed that the different
parts or segments of culture might develop at different rates, which could disturb its
internal cohesion and lead to conflicts and contradictions within the whole. Thus, the
cultural whole was not necessarily in “a state of blissful harmony” but rather was
“a field of tension” (Barnard 1969: 385–6). Second, the diversity existing within
the social and political culture of a community also had the capacity to produce the
kinds of tensions that were characteristic of the human condition. This diversity and
the tensions it produced were consequences of the fact that Herder viewed politics
as human activity rather than a set of practices and institutions that were associated
exclusively with the state. Thus, the coherence of a culture was contingent and
dependent, at any given moment, on the relations that existed among the reciprocally
interacting processes that constituted the whole and on the intrinsic capacity of the
whole to forge new features and integrate them into the fabric of everyday life.
This provided a synchronic view of culture, which was situational and functional;
however, it was clear to Herder that a historical, or diachronic, analysis was also
needed in order to describe content or the purpose of particular cultural segments.
Herder’s notion of history, which involved both persistence and change, was an
interactive, dialectical one that involved the interplay of two processes: Bildung
and tradition. Bildung was a non-repetitive process that entailed the assimilation,
evaluation, and addition of new materials to the distinctive heritage of the community.
Tradition was an ongoing, intergenerational process that entailed sifting through the
stock of institutionalized beliefs and so forth in order to update them and to resolve
the tensions and contradictions created by Bildung. Herder was less concerned with
the antecedents of particular cultural segments or configurations than he was with
their significance once they had been integrated into the heritage of the community
(Barnard 1969: 389–90). He thought of historical development as motion in which
what was already latent in a culture was actualized or made manifest; in other words,
there was teleology in history. Herder’s views about teleology derived inspiration
from both Spinoza and Leibniz.
For Herder, a shared or common language was the cement that held together the
members of a community. To paraphrase Barnard (1965: 57), there was a relation-
ship, an interaction, among the language shared by the members of a community and
the habits of thought and modes of life of its members. It was the means by which
they became conscious of themselves as individuals and of their social relations with
other individuals both inside and outside of the community. Language not only linked
them to the past by revealing the thoughts and sentiments of past generations, it also
allowed them to enrich and perpetuate those views for future generations through the
processes of Bildung and tradition. In his essay on the origins of language, Herder,
in contrast to Rousseau, saw language as a uniquely human attribute that separated
human beings from animals. In his view, human beings were fundamentally different
from animals; they were not simply animals with reason added, but beings whose
energies had developed in an entirely different direction. Language, in his view,
marked the possession of a reflective mind.
At the time Herder was formulating his philosophical anthropology, the idea of
race was being discussed increasingly by Enlightenment writers. Kant, for example,
incorporated it into the core of his anthropological thought. Herder, however, did not
find any utility in the concept. In 1784, he described his thoughts and reservations
about its use in the following way:
Lastly, I could wish the distinction between the human species, that have been made
from a laudable zeal for discriminating sciences, not be carried beyond due bounds.
Some for instance [i.e., Kant] have thought fit, to employ the term races for four or five
divisions, originally made in consequence of country or complexion; but I see no reason
for this appellation. Race refers to a difference of origin, which in this case either does
not exist, or in each of these countries, and under each of these complexions, comprise
the most different races. For every nation is one people, having its own national form,
as well as its own language: the climate it is true, stamps on each its mark, or spreads
over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the original national character. This
originality of character extends even to families, and its transitions are as variable as
imperceptible. In short, there are neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties, on
this Earth, Complexions run into each other: forms follow the genetic character: and
upon the whole, all are at last but shades of the same great picture, extending through
all ages, and over all parts of the earth. They belong not, therefore, to proper systematic
natural history, as to the physico-geographical [i.e., anthropological] history of man.
(Herder 1784/1968: 7)
Herder’s historical-dialectical and critical anthropology built on Rousseau’s

and consequently resembled it in important ways. Both, for example, distinguished
culture from civilization—Herder explicitly and Rousseau more tentatively. For
both, civilization was something mechanical that was associated with the state, and
the civilizing process was one that muted or erased altogether people’s knowledge
and experience of everyday life. Culture, in Herder’s view, was organic, and he
situated it in activities and reflective thought of people who shared a language and
resided in relatively unstratified communities. Culture emerged not from activities
of intellectuals and officials supported by the state but rather from the creativity
and spontaneity of people dealing with everyday issues in the worlds in which they
lived. Herder was by no means an anarchist who advocated the end of the state.
He argued instead that the state should take responsibility for the humanization
of its subjects, for ensuring that they enjoyed a certain level of welfare, and for
providing education so that they might achieve their full potential, and he was
openly critical of those that did not. Herder agreed with the Scots who also argued
that history was an unconscious process rather than a consequence of great leaders
or the result of “restless reason” as Kant would have it. What bothered Herder about
the arguments of many of his contemporaries was their ethnocentrism, their claims
that the commercial society emerging in Europe represented the highest stage of
sociohistorical development, and their concomitant obfuscation of the cultural
diversity that existed among communities in different regions, whose members had
the same mode of subsistence.
Göttingen: Beyond “Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers”
The title of Ernst Platner’s (1744–1818) book, New Anthropology for Doctors
and Philosophers: With Special Consideration to Physiology, Pathology, Moral
Philosophy, and Aesthetics, published in 1772, marked the acceptance of new ideas
about the linkages between the human and natural realms that were proposed earlier
in the century. Unlike Descartes who viewed mind and body as independent sub-
stances—the former concerned with the principles of thought or consciousness and
the latter possessing bulk and physical properties—Platner emphasized the mutual
interdependence of mind and body and the natural forces involved in the process
(Allert 1991; Košenina 1989; Zammito 2002: 237–53). The title also signaled the end
of an era, for it gave no indication that new ideas about the significance of historical
understanding, of organized systems as opposed to aggregates of individuals, of
change through time, of the contexts in which things occurred, and of cultural and
physical diversity were already crystallizing and becoming conjoined with one
another, or that anthropology would be infused with these new perspectives by the
end of the century.
Montesquieu had linked the historical development of human society with
nature (i.e., the environments in which different peoples lived). Buffon, Rousseau,
and the Scots, in different ways, made human history part of nature: Buffon by
looking primarily at the human species as a biological organism; Rousseau by seeing
people, in the process of emerging from nature, as making their own history and
transforming both themselves and the natural world through ongoing, reciprocal
interactions with that world; the Scots by considering the historical development
of humanity as the consequence of natural laws that were analogous to those of
Newtonian physics. Their contemporaries and successors embroidered the fabric
they had woven. The new historical understanding involved explanations of both
the individual and individuality as well as of the development of society (Reill
1998). While Hume strove to develop a “science of human nature” that was applic-
able in all circumstances, Herder and others recognized the diversity of human
societies and argued that the nature of individuals was shaped by the sociocultural
and natural milieus of which they were a part. In a phrase, human nature was the
result of socialization under historically specific and contingent social relations and
circumstances, and it was imperative to take account of and to explain the diversity
of both present and past societies. As Herder and others—like Johann Winckelmann
(1717–68)—noted, there was uneven culture-historical development, and each
era, each society had its own unique configuration of elements that underwrote its
distinctive “spirit” or appearance. By the 1780s, Herder, Kant, and Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752–1840) were noting that sociohistorical and cultural development
as well as the development of the human species itself was genetic in the sense
that they involved both mechanical and teleological processes, and that the latter
could not be reduced to the former.12 Their “fascinat[ion] about the idea of genetic
development was that it assumed the dual existence of individuality and regular
order, without collapsing one upon the other” (Reill 1998: 119). It also required a
new form of explanation, one that relied on narrative rather than reference to some
universally applicable law. History was no longer the chronicles of kings, lists of
dates, or the highways traversed by generals and armies but rather the byways where
everyday folk wandered silently.
An increasingly prevalent idea in the late eighteenth century was the notion that
both the natural and human realms were constituted by more than mere aggregates
of individual parts. Instead, they were organized wholes that resembled an organism.
Unlike aggregates, the distinctive features of such totalities were more than the sum
of their parts and were constituted by the organization of those parts. Writers began
to think of nature and human society, both synchronically and diachronically, as
internally differentiated structures that not only developed through time but also
metamorphosed in the process. Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), for example,
viewed “nature as a dynamically shifting balance of forces,” while other Romantic
writers were fascinated with the diversity manifested in tropical rainforests or the
tangled banks beside English streams (Richards 2002: 295–306). The comparisons,
analogies, and metaphors employed by Herder and others underwrote and supported
new ways of conceptualizing organization, growth or change over time, and diversity
at various levels: the natural world, human society, and the individual human being.
More importantly, they allowed commentators to articulate issues related to human
organization, change, and diversity to their own experiences and to the sociocultural
milieus in which they lived and worked.
The University of Göttingen was a focal point for the convergence of these ideas
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. Beiser 1992b; Denby
2005; Fink 1993; Flavell 1979, Leventhal 1986; Stagl 1995; Vermeulen 1992,
1995). Here, individuals with diverse interests rubbed shoulders with one another on
virtually a daily basis. For example, classical philologist and archaeologist Christian
Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) was Blumenbach’s teacher, Herder’s close friend,
and a colleague of August Schlözer (1735–1809) who wrote extensively about the
history, linguistics, and ethnology of peoples on the margins of Europe and used
statistics to develop the comparative study of states. Moreover, the philological
seminar that Heyne taught for many years had shaping effects on the curricula of
other universities, like Harvard and the Andover Theological Seminary in the United
States. One of Heyne’s students in the seminar was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–
1835), who is hailed as a founder of comparative philology and as the educational
reformer who modeled the curriculum of the newly opened University of Berlin
after that of Göttingen. Marx, as you recall, was exposed to that curriculum and to
Humboldt’s plan for a historically informed, comparative anthropology when he
attended the university in the late 1830s (Bunzl 1996; Leroux 1958). Through the
courses he took, Marx was also exposed to the critical-historical anthropology of
Georg F. W. Hegel, who was the most prominent philosopher and social theorist on
the continent until his death in 1831.
Hegel’s Critical-Historical Anthropology
Georg F. W. Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophical anthropology sought to account for

the actual (concrete) conditions of human existence and to explain how that social
reality had been transformed by the collective (social) activity of human beings.
From the late 1790s onward, he wrote with the ideas of Kant, Herder, Rousseau,
and the Scots as almost continual points of reference. While he addressed themes
that they had already discussed, he was at the same time critical of some of the
conclusions they had drawn. For example, like Kant, Hegel believed that philosophy
should be critical as well as systematic (scientific), that the social problems of the
day were ultimately ethical or moral, and that social change was the product of
human activity; however, unlike Kant, he viewed change from the standpoint of the
community rather than the individual. From Herder, he gained an appreciation of
the importance of historical understanding and the significance of varied cultural
configurations of different historical epochs and civilizations; he also developed
concepts of history and the primacy of collective social activity that were inchoate in
Herder’s writings. Like Rousseau and Herder, he viewed history in terms of uneven
development and the resolution of conflicts and contradictions. Hegel agreed with
Herder and the Scots, notably Adam Ferguson, that the members of a society were
bound together by shared cultural practices and beliefs as well as by the political
institutions under which these habits manifested themselves. Like Rousseau and
the Scots, Hegel was deeply concerned with the development of both modern civil
society and the state as well as with the kinds of transformations they wrought on
human beings. As a result, Hegel’s philosophical anthropology shared important
features with those of his predecessors and diverged in significant ways from them
(Lukács 1966/1976; Rockmore 1992/1993). His empirical anthropology was rooted
in his concern with history and with the formation of civil society (e.g. Berry 1982;
Dickey and Nisbet 1999; Knox and Pelczynski 1964; Waszek 1988).
History, in Hegel’s (1822–30/1975: 11–151) view, simultaneously involved the
interconnected development of the individual and the community in relation to the
realization of a goal—the actualization of the human mind in all its potential and free
subjectivity (Geist) in both. Thus, history was teleological; there was “a rationally
discernible development in history, a development, which, once comprehended,
would change the attitude of people toward their social environment” (Plant 1983:
57; emphasis in original). The clearest embodiment of this goal, which was inchoate
in earlier stages of human history, was manifested most clearly in the latest historical
stage—modern civil society—which was ushered in by the French Revolution.
What emerged in the wake of the revolution was an era in which the institutions
and practices of the old regime, which limited freedom and the capacity of reason,
had been dismantled and replaced by rampant individualism. This was the first time,
according to Hegel, that human beings had the freedom to actualize themselves as
rational, moral individuals; moreover, through their individuality, they could also
actualize themselves as social members of a community. In this particular form of

society, they could step back from their social roles in the community and conceive
of themselves as autonomous, self-determining individuals who possessed rights
as well as interests, ideas, and the capacity to make moral judgments that were
distinct from those of other individuals in the community. They realized themselves
as individuals in their social roles in the family, the market, and civil society and
in their roles as citizens of a political state. States, in Hegel’s view, had evolved,
embodying the positive values of earlier states, to ensure the actualization of the
individuals and to promote the good of the community as opposed to the particular
interests of its members (Hegel 1817–30/1978; 1821/1967).
For Hegel, human beings were social beings. They satisfied biological, social,
and cultural needs in society and actualized their distinctly human capacities—
thought, language, and reason—by virtue of their membership in historically
specific communities (Hardimon 1994: 153–6). Most importantly, they developed
their minds, intellect, and subjective spirit in the context of the social institutions,
practices, and roles—the cultural configurations—that shaped everyday life in
those communities and formed the backdrop to the processes of socialization and
education that took place in them. They not only determined how biologically
given drives and desires were satisfied but also how individuals expressed and
developed their interests, talents, and skills. Another way of saying this is that the
physical, psychic, cultural, and social dimensions of human beings interpenetrated
and articulated with one another, and that how the whole individual was actualized
varied in important ways from one historical stage to the next and even within the
same historical-cultural people.
Hegel saw history as the progressive unfolding of reason and consciousness and
the development of Spirit. As Robert D’Amico has noted, Hegel’s theory of history
is based on
self-production [in which] Spirit (Geist) manifests itself . . . in objectifications, extern-

alizations, and alienations that represent forms of consciousness. Spirit comes to
understand itself through the history of these objectifications. Spirit is ultimately the
reason inherent in history as a teleological process. Hegel calls objectification a power
of negativity because the objectifications of Spirit transform and therefore negate what
is given in reality [i.e., external nature]. Human labor is just such a manifestation of the
power of Spirit. Labor modifies its world and thereby allows man to know it and free
itself from the bonds of natural necessity. . . .
Hegel stresses two aspects of the role of labor as objectification. First, labor is defined
as that which mediates the world. By the term mediation Hegel means that the human
world becomes transformed (mediated by activity and purpose and therefore is no
longer a world of natural objects. Culture or Spirit is precisely the objectification of this
teleology or mediation. Second, practical activity, by giving meaning to its world, creates
a “second nature” which conditions humanity. Since what is conditioning humanity is
the externalization of its own purposive activity, it is conditioned by its own product and
not by an external, natural object. . . . For example, law and morality condition and form
human beings through a process of cultivation (Bildungsweise) or civilizing influence.
(1981: 5–6)
As Hegel put it, “After the creation of the natural universe, man appears on the
scene as the antithesis of nature; he is the being who raises himself up into a second
world. The general consciousness of man includes two distinct provinces, that of
nature and that of the spirit. The province of the spirit is created by man himself”
(1822–30/1975: 44; cf. 1837/1956: 52–3, 241–2). Thus, for Hegel, objectification
is characterized exclusively by consciousness, which has nothing whatsoever to do
with the kinds of determination that occur in the natural world.
History began with the rise of states and ended with the present. While Hegel
acknowledged the existence of pre-state societies in the prehistoric period that had
achieved “a significant development in certain directions” or even experienced
“complications, wars, revolutions, declines,” these did not give rise to history (Hegel
1822–30/1975: 134–7). History progressed unevenly through fits and starts as the
people of a historical era succeeded in resolving the contradictions of their time.
For example, Hegel argued that neither Abraham nor Jesus was able to reconcile
his vision of the independence and freedom of the individual with those of the
wider communities of which they were members; consequently, they felt a sense
of profound estrangement from those societies. The male citizens of the Greek
city-states were able to overcome this kind of estrangement even though they did
not see themselves as independent individuals in the modern sense—i.e., as distinct
from the customs of the city-state or as participants in the market exchange relations
that characterized modern civil society. The separation of the individual from the
community only occurred during the Protestant Reformation (Plant 1983: 55–75).
History was important, because it explained the present and ended in the present.
It accounted for the cultural configuration of modern civil society as well as the
modern state. In civil society, individuals satisfied their needs by pursing their
private interests in the market, where the purchase and sale of goods and services
made them interdependent and connected them in an increasingly dense web of
social relations. The modern state not only reaffirmed the unity of the nation, which
was weakened as individuals pursued their own goals, but also provided the system
of ethical life and social substance that would allow them to reconcile and overcome
the conflicts and contradictions of civil society and thereby ensure that they could
achieve their humanity (Rose 1981). For Hegel, “the rational end of man is life in the
state” (1817–30/1978: 242).
Hegel was not the only theorist to comment on civil society and the state during
the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His contemporary, Henri Saint-Simon
(1760–1825) made a slightly different argument about their connection. Saint-
Simon was concerned with the appearance of industrial society, which, in his view,
marked the both the internationalization of society and the end of the nation state.
While industrial society was built around the institutions of civil society, a point
with which Hegel would have agreed, Saint-Simon viewed the state as opposed to
the development of civil society because of the domination of society by incapable
bureaucrats who were out of touch with the times. Unlike the Scots and Hegel who
viewed the present as the end of history, Saint-Simon had a vision of what society
could become in the future. Saint-Simon died in 1825, Hegel six years later in 1831,
when the young Karl Marx had barely entered his teens. In the 1830s, Marx would
absorb the ideas of both writers as well as those of Montesquieu and Rousseau
among others. He would also absorb the importance of enlightenment, critical
thought, and the difference between faith and reason.
In this chapter, we have viewed the Enlightenment as an ongoing conversation
among individuals who held distinct, theoretically informed views about the world,
about human beings, and about their place in that world. The conversation was often
acrimonious, and it was always threatening to those whose privileged positions in
society rested on the maintenance of tradition and the active repression of critical
inquiry. At times, the conversation was public as when the Scots, Kant, Herder, and
Hegel responded in different ways to Rousseau and to one another. At other times, it
was more private—an exchange of words between friends (Spinoza) or a university
lecture published only posthumously (Hegel). The conversation was fueled by
the conquest of nature, exploration, commerce, colonization, and later industrial-
ization, which provided the grist for the development of an empirical anthropology
that increasingly took cognizance of the history and diversity of human beings
as well as the world in which they lived. This realization paved the way for the
development of new philosophical anthropologies that were distinguished from one
another by the (ontological) beliefs that their advocates held about the nature of
human beings, their relations with one another, and their place in the world. In one
sense, the Enlightenment provided a set of questions that the proponents of different
philosophical anthropologies felt they needed to address. In another sense, the
conversation that ensued can be viewed as a work in progress.
Let us dwell for a moment on some of the issues and lessons that Marx’s prede-
cessors raised for him. First, nature, human beings, and human society had been
historicized and their diversity acknowledged. After Rousseau, it was no longer
possible to argue effectively that individual human beings living in a state of nature
entered into a social contract with the sovereign (Hobbes) or with one another
(Locke) thereby creating society in the process; moreover, it was becoming
increasingly difficult to argue that human beings were ontologically prior to human
society. Second, while many of Marx’s predecessors believed in progress (Smith)
or the dialectical unfolding of history (Hegel), others did not. For some of them,
human nature was fixed and immutable and progress was a consequence of the
passage of time; for others, however, human nature was culturally determined
(Herder and Hegel) and progress, if it occurred at all, resulted from the resolution
of contradictions. Third, Marx’s predecessors were collectively concerned with the
inequalities and individualism that were characteristic of the commercial-industrial

societies that shaped their everyday lives (Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Saint-Simon).
These civilizations, to use a term coined in response to Rousseau, were described as
mechanical, associated with the state, and limited or muted the knowledge acquired
in the course of everyday life in the community (Herder). Fourth, from the time
of Rousseau onward, it was increasingly difficult to maintain that the profound
individualism and kinds of unequal social relations developing in modern civil
society were characteristic of all societies. Fifth, there also was a growing clamor
about the meaning of freedom and the autonomous individual in the context of the
class structure of modern civil society and the state (Hegel). Marx certainly learned
from their writings and carried many of their arguments into his own work. In the
chapters that follow, we will consider what he retained of their views and where he
broke with them.
–2–
Marx’s Anthropology
Marx was a child of the Enlightenment. As a teenager in Trier during the early
1830s, he discussed various writers with his father, his future father-in-law, and
the director of the local high school that he attended (McLellan 1973: 1–16; Seigel
1978: 28–64). The writers ranged from Homer and Shakespeare, on the one hand,
to Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, and Saint-Simon, on the other. The discussions had a
significant impact on the young man; for example, when he was seventeen and still
a student in Trier, Marx (1835/1975) wrote an essay on choosing a vocation which
contained arguments that paralleled those of Rousseau’s Émile, which had been
published in 1762 (Hillmann 1966: 33–48). Marx was also a bookworm. He read
classical, Enlightenment, and contemporary writers with considerable care (e.g.
McLellan 1973: 15, 22, 113, 267, 418). The excerpts he copied from Aeschylus,
Goethe, Winckelmann, and others and his commentaries on those passages would
come to fill fifty notebooks—more than 30,000 pages—by the time he died (Prawer
1978: 348). From early onward, he quoted long passages from favorite authors like
Shakespeare and Homer and easily found quotations in the works of Aristotle and
other writers of classical antiquity. In fact, he made the first German translation of
Aristotle’s De Anima and apparently intended to publish it (Meikle 1985: 58). His
library would eventually include nearly a hundred volumes by Greek and Roman
writers, many in the original language, as well as commentaries on those works by
later authors (DeGolyer 1992: 115; Kaiser 1967).
Marx owed an intellectual debt to Enlightenment writers: the importance of
reason, the centrality of the problem of freedom, the denial of knowledge claims
based on authority, the historicity of things including forms of society, and the
separation of the real world from representations of that world, to name only a few.
However, their influence, as Nigel Davidson (2005: 8–9) perceptively remarked,
did not come exclusively from books. There are two obvious reasons for this. First,
Marx, who was born in 1818, was raised in the Prussian Rhineland, which was
occupied by the French from 1794 to 1814; it was the region in Europe “where
the influence of the French Revolution was most directly experienced. . . . For
Marx, therefore, the French Revolution was not simply absorbed from the works of
French liberals, it was also a historical experience only recently past, whose effects
and unfulfilled promises still defined the politics of the time” (Davidson 2005:
39
8–9). Second, revolutions elsewhere formed an almost continuous backdrop to his

childhood and adolescence: Naples (1820), Spain (1820), Greece (1821), Spanish
America (1808–22), and, a decade later, the Irish Rebellion (1829), Holland (1830),
and Poland (1830–1). The July Revolution in France (1830), the English Reform
Act (1832), and Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829–37) enabled mass politics and
extended voting rights (Hobsbawm 1962: 138–40). The debate about revolution was
not an abstract one. “There was going to be some sort of revolution—everybody but
the dullest Prussian bureaucrat knew that—but what kind of revolution?” (Davidson
2005: 9). Marx’s participation in this debate as well as in the revolutionary politics
of the nineteenth century was continuous from his days as a student at the University
of Berlin in the late 1830s. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 and 1870 forced
him to further hone and refine his analyses and understanding of the world. This
process of continual critique and re-examination persisted until his death in 1883.
This is the milieu in which Marx honed his philosophical anthropology—his
answers to the questions: Who or what are human beings, and what has made them
human? Some writers (e.g. Gould 1978; Henry 1976/1983: 12; Schaff 1965/1970:
50) have argued that the central categories of answers to these questions are the social
individual, praxis, and history. With respect to these categories, Marx insisted that
human beings are “a part of nature” and that they “begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step
which is conditioned by their physical [i.e., bodily or corporeal] organisation”
(Marx 1844/1975a: 276; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31; emphasis in original).
These productive activities or practices always occur in the context of associated
individuals living in specific “ensembles of social relations” that have varied in space
and time (Marx 1845/1976: 4). Simply put, human beings are born into communities
and formed as social individuals through the intersubjectivity (the shared meanings
and activities) of the persons who participate in those sets of relations. Praxis is the
creative and self-creative activity by which human beings shape their world and
themselves; it involves work, the mastering of nature, and formation of the human
individual as a subject and social being (Kosík 1963/1976: 133–7; Petrović 1991).
The temporal dimensions to these processes are fundamental. Human beings are
determined by their history; at the same time, they chart the course of that history
through their actions, within the constraints imposed by their bodies and the societies
of which they are members. In this sense, the human condition has an irreducibly
historical character. This historical understanding—which has the capacity to make
clear the interconnections of the past, present, and future—affords us not only the
opportunity to confront the burden of the past but also, under some circumstances,
to set off on new courses for the future. The goal of this chapter is to explore Marx’s
historical-dialectical anthropological theory.
Marx’s Anthropology • 41
What Are Human Beings?
Marx, like Rousseau and Hegel before him, saw a relationship between human
beings and nature. While his predecessors distinguished between the physical and
moral characters of human beings and thus separated nature from the realm of
human history, Marx did not. While Rousseau and Hegel viewed the relationship
as one of emergence—the creation of culture for the former and the actualization of
free subjectivity for the latter—Marx believed instead that
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human
individuals. The first fact to be established is of the physical [i.e., bodily or corporeal]
organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of
course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural
conditions in which man finds himself—geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic, and so
on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in
the course of history through the action of men. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31)
Thus, Marx rejected the notion of a fixed human nature or essence in the singular
and adopted instead a historicized notion of human natures in the plural. That is, there
is a dialectical interplay between the biological substrate, which endows all members
of the species with certain potentials, and the ensemble of social relations that shape
everyday life in the worlds in which they live and which they themselves produce,
reproduce, and, on occasion, change. On the one hand, as Joseph Fracchia (2005:
40) has argued, the “transhistorical attributes of human corporeal organisation . . .
underlie and make possible the infinite though not unlimited range of those changing
manifestations of human being—that is, of socio-cultural forms.” On the other hand,
the ensembles of social relations not only condition how human beings live but also
shape their relations of production as well as the personalities, consciousness, and
behaviors that are characteristic of each historical epoch (Fracchia 1991: 159–60).
Keeping in mind that Marx was averse to both biological reductionist and culture-
historical relativist perspectives, let us now look in more detail at how he characterized
human beings simultaneously as natural beings and as social and conscious natural
beings, as he discussed the specifically human features, capabilities, needs, and
dispositions shared generically by all members of the species.1
The Corporeal Organization of Human Beings
While Marx made numerous references to the corporeal organization of human

beings throughout his writings, he never systematically developed the idea. Nonethe-
less, the importance of the concept is evident in his remarks. For example, in the
“Theses on Feuerbach,” he mentions “practical, human sensuous activity;” in
Capital, he discusses the corporeal foundations of use values (they satisfy the needs
of human individuals) and the immiserating effects or costs on the human body that
result from lengthening the duration of the work day and thereby diminishing the
time for rest and recuperation (Marx 1845/1976: 4; 1863–7/1977: 125–6, 276–7,
341–416). Fracchia (2005: 41ff.) suggests that enough can be gleaned from these
scattered passages to see the “systematic and foundational logic” underpinning the
remarks; in his view, the organization of the human body is for Marx more than
merely “a simple prerequisite” for being human.
The foundations for Marx’s view that human beings were a part of nature first
appeared in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he wrote early
in his career to begin sorting out his theoretical differences with other writers—
especially Hegel, the political economists, and the socialists. Marx agreed with
Hegel’s view that human beings were part of nature and that they had produced a
“second world.” In the gendered, referential language of the day, Marx wrote:
Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on
the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers—he is an active natural being.
These forces exist within him as tendencies and abilities—as instincts. On the other
hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned
and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts
exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he
needs—essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his
essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being
full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his
being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be
objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature, and sense
outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the
same thing. Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object
outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of
my body for an object existing outside it. (1844/1975a: 336; emphasis in the original)
Marx made several points in this passage. Let us begin to unpack what he meant.
First, human beings are active, sensuous creatures that perceive the world around
them. Their sense organs—their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin—combined with
motor skills that allow them to move their bodies or various parts of them, including
the sensory organs, constitute an interrelated perceptual system. This system
provides sensations of the world; more importantly, they are active mechanisms for
exploring nature—for moving, looking, listening, smelling, tasting, and touching
the various external objects in the world around them. It permits human beings
to feel by providing both passive and active sensations of the external world. It
provides perceptions, assessments, and understandings of the ambient conditions
as well as the animate and cultural elements of the environments the human beings
inhabit. The adjustments resulting from movement of parts of the perceptual
system—e.g. eye, head, or hand movements—constitute modes of attention that

allow human individuals to explore the available information, to form conceptions
of those externalities, to orient themselves and move in relation to them. The human
perceptual system also provides a basis for communication (Gibson 1966/1983).
The human perceptual system, broadly conceived, evolved through time over the
past 60 or so million years. Parts of the human perceptual system are shared to varying
degrees and in different ways with those of their non-human primate relatives and
shared ancestors. Some features of the human perceptual system and the anatomical
correlates associated with them are: upright posture; bipedal locomotion; increased
brain size; emphasis on vision including the related brain centers: stereoscopic color
vision; diminished sense of smell and taste relative to other animal species; ability
to discern intensity and direction of middle-range sounds; hands with opposable
thumbs and enhanced dexterity; relatively small deciduous and permanent teeth;
reduced amounts of bodily hair and increased number of sweat glands; prolonged
life history stages (gestation, infancy, immaturity); menstrual as opposed to estrus
cycles in reproductive females; tool-use; and habitual speech including the vocal
apparatus and related brain centers (Langdon 2005). The structure and organization
of the system and their anatomical correlates, as well as the externalities of their
environments dispose human beings to interact with the worlds around them in
particular ways. For example, human individuals are terrestrial and diurnal—that is,
they typically do not inhabit ocean floors, reside on high mountain peaks, or see very
well at night. The system imposes limitations, some of which have been overcome in
recent years as a result of enormous amounts of cultural intervention; for example,
human beings carrying oxygen and other essentials with them regularly climb to the
top of Mt. Everest or use night-vision goggles to see in the dark.
Second, to say that human beings are part of nature means that they are also
feeling organisms that are actively involved with the world in which they live.
They experience a range of feelings and emotions: fear, joy, love, and hunger, to
name only a few. This engagement begins at the moment of birth and starts from
the individual. The world provides the objects and others that the human individual
internalizes and objectifies. This is the process of subjectification—the formation
and development of the self (Ego)—which underpins the self-expression of the
individual. Subjectification is an active process that involves action, thinking, and
feeling. As Agnes Heller (1979: 11) has noted, feeling “is an inherent structural part
of acting and thinking rather than their mere ‘accompaniment.’” At any moment,
the individual’s engagement with its surroundings may range from minimal (out of
awareness or consciousness), on the one hand, to the center of conscious attention,
on the other. Nevertheless, it is during the process of acting and thinking, of
developing new capacities and reintegrating them into more meaningful wholes, that
the individual’s capacity for feeling also has the potential to expand.
Third, human beings distinguish themselves from the worlds in which they live
through a process of self-objectification—i.e., labor or purposive activity—and
thereby constitute themselves in a world of externalized objects that they have

not only created but also that condition their lives in turn. In other words, objects
are subjected to human purposive activity, and the subject who is objectified in a
world of objects, is transformed in the process. These externalized objects satisfy
needs, like hunger, that are experienced subjectively and whose satisfaction requires
an object outside the self. Objectification, labor in its essential form, has been
described as “the embodiment of human motivation, purpose, and ends” (D’Amico
1981: 3) with the “modes of objectification . . . [being] as many as human capacities
and practices and the results . . . [being] worlds of artifacts—material, social, and
semiotic” (Fracchia 2005: 44). Marx argued that Hegel’s views about labor were
abstract and philosophical, and that his standpoint was that of political economy.
For Marx (1844/1975a: 333), Hegel “grasps labour as the essence of man—as man’s
essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of
labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be himself within alienation, or as alienated man.
The only labour which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstractly mental labour.”
Thus, Marx’s notions of objectification and labor were broader than those of his
predecessor. They were tied not to thought or the movement of Spirit but rather to
human activity and history as these were shaped by specific forms of alienation.
Fourth, what is distinctive, in Marx’s (and Fracchia’s) view, about human
corporeal organization are the bodily organs that were transformed into instruments
of production: most notably, the perceptual system, arms, legs, hands, brain, and the
vocal tract. Human beings deploy them and the objects they created as extensions
of their corporeal organization to mediate, regulate, and control the metabolism that
exists between them and nature. For Marx
The solitary man cannot operate upon nature without calling his own muscles into
play under the control of his own brain. Just as head and hand belong together in the
system of nature, so in the labour process mental and physical labour are united. (Marx
1863–7/1977: 643)
The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in the germ among
certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and
[Benjamin] Franklin therefore defines man as “a tool-making animal.” (Marx 1863–
7/1977: 286)
In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic
nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being. . . . Admittedly animals also
produce. They build themselves nests, dwelling, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But
an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces
one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of
immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need
and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal process only itself, whilst
man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its
physical body, while man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects only
in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst
man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows
how to apply everywhere the inherent standard of the object. Man therefore also forms
objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. (Marx 1844/1975a: 276–7)
We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the
animal level. . . . We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human
characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee
would put many human architects to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells.
But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds
the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process,
a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning,
hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of
nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is
conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must
subordinate his will to it. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 283–4)
Marx referred repeatedly over the years to the centrality of labor as the condition
for human existence and the self-realization of human beings. It is the way human
beings mediate and regulate the metabolism that exists between them and nature.
It is the way they appropriate and alter external objects and transform them into
things that satisfy their needs. More important, however, is the fact that all labor or
work involves physical activity as well as thinking and other mental activities. As
a result, this development of all the human productive forces is a process of both
self-creation and self-affirmation, one that entails aesthetic as well as utilitarian attit-
udes toward human activity. It is a mode of objectification involving intentionality
rather than instinct; it makes the life activity of the individual an object of will and
self-consciousness. Marx saw this as a process of emergence, “the creation of man
through human labour and the emergence of nature for man” (1844/1975a: 304); the
motor for the developmental and directional change in human corporeal organization
was labor which he described as “the living, form-giving fire” (1857–8/1973: 361).
Fifth, human beings work to satisfy existing needs and to create new ones in the
process. Labor, for Marx, involved the articulation of physical and mental activities
directly or indirectly through thought and language. While the objects made by
human beings may be utilitarian in the broad sense of the word, they may more
importantly be aesthetic expressions—for example, the beauty of a finely chipped
stone knife, the splendor of a poem, or the exquisite taste of a carefully prepared
meal in contrast to fast food. Marx (1863–7/1977: 276–7, 655) rather systematically
distinguished between physiological and necessary needs. The former were
indispensable for the production and reproduction of the individual; the latter were
“habitually required” in a given society. The needs of human beings developed, in
his view, with the development of the productive forces—i.e., purposive activity
(work), the instruments of work, and the objects upon which work is performed
(Marx 1857–8/1973: 494, 612; 1863–7/1977: 284).
Marx also alluded to social needs—“the level of needs of the worker as a
socially developed human being at a given point” (Lebowitz 2003: 40). Social
needs are the genuine needs of every individual in a given society, like adequate
health care or rest; these are typically available only to the privileged layers of that
society, who, like congressmen in the United States today, portray themselves as
representatives of the masses. While Marx never systematically elaborated a theory
of social needs, he and Engels made passing references to the needs of human
beings in general (McMurtry 1978: 33–4). These included adequate food, drink,
clothing, and habitation; fresh air and sunlight; adequate living and working space;
cleanliness of person and surroundings; rest from exertion; variation of activity;
time for intellectual development, social intercourse, fulfillment of social functions,
free play of the vital forces of the body and mind; growth; development; healthy
maintenance of the body; aesthetic stimulation; play; and meaningful interpersonal
and sexual relationships (Marx 1844/1975a: 295–6; 1863–7/1977: 341, 362, 375–6,
611, 762–802; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 38, 417).
“Ensembles of Social Relations” and Human Beings as

Social Individuals
Human beings are distinguished as much by their sociocultural and historical

characteristics as they are by their need to work, their corporeal organization, or
their biological features. Marx recognized the sociality of human beings and that
being human was, in fact, actualized in their relations with other individuals, in their
participation in historically specific communities. He wrote
. . . that the development of the individual is determined by the development of all the
others with whom he is directly or indirectly associated, and that the different generations
of individuals entering into relation with one another are connected with one another, that
the physical existence of the later generations is determined by that of their predecessors,
and that these later generations inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse
accumulated by their predecessors, their own mutual relations being determined thereby.
In short, it is clear that development takes place and that the history of a single individual
cannot possibly be separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individuals,
but is determined by this history (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 438).
Another way of saying this is that these webs of social relations are the foundation
on which intersubjectivity is possible. As a result, human individuals—their
consciousnesses, their personalities, their ambivalences, their subjectivities, their
individualities, their identities, and their cultures—have a profoundly social character
(e.g. Henry 1976/1983; 54–118; Márkus 1978: 15–35; Negt 1988: 228–33: Schaff
1965/1970: 49–102). Human beings are shaped by the sets of relations into which
they are born and which they help to actualize, reproduce, and occasionally even
transform during their lives. The kinds of work they do—the ways in which they
satisfy their needs, express their identities, and form new wants and desires—are all
cast in this forge. In a phrase, sociality permeates all aspects of the individual’s life,
even when he or she is seemingly alone. The spheres of activity founded on these
relations are internalized, accepted, or rejected by the individuals involved. Thus,
these ensembles are not natural relations that exist among generalized or universal
human individuals but rather are the particular relations that exist among specific,
concrete individuals who live at particular times and in particular places or, as Marx
would say, in given historical epochs. As a result, “the specific character of human
beings in a given era cannot be determined a priori but only in reference to the
[particular] ensembles of social relations” (Fracchia 1991: 160).
Human beings are clearly social individuals, but how did human social indiv-
iduals come into being? For Marx, work in the broad, not exclusively utilitarian,
sense was one distinctive feature. Consciousness was another. “Conscious life
activity distinguishes man immediately from the life activity of the animal,” wrote
Marx (1844/1975a: 294). By consciousness, he meant the mental outlook (1) that
is formed under particular social conditions, and (2) that is, at the same time, an
expression of those circumstances. His view of consciousness was broader than the
one we typically employ today. It involves intentionality. It also includes “cognizance
of the surrounding world” as well as the “mental production” of the whole sphere of
presuppositions, dispositions, feelings, and so forth that are handed down by tradition
and accepted in an unreflective manner (Márkus 1978: 26, 70n31a; Marx and Engels
1845–6/1976: 36). While consciousness is ultimately based on the possibilities for
development in the corporeal organization of the species, consciousness itself is a
social phenomenon. Adam Schaff describes this in the following way:
at a certain level of biological evolution, which changes very slowly, man—in the sense
of his attitudes, opinions, value-judgments, etc.—is a product of ontogenesis, a wholly
determined social product. For what he becomes in ontogenesis is fully determined
socially; and this in a way that is quite beyond his control—through language, which
embodies a certain type of thinking, and education, which imparts certain customs,
modes of behavior and of ethics, etc. (1965/1970: 66)
For Marx, consciousness is not the passive reception of stimuli from the natural
and sociohistorical world in which the human individual lives. This socially and
historically determined activity is, instead, a “creative and formative factor in all
social activity” (Márkus 1978: 28). It entails increasing awareness of the objects of
the natural world, other human beings, and their relations with them. It is a repeated
moment in the life activity of the individual. It exists between the appearance,
recognition, and subjectification of those objects, persons, and relations and the
potentials they have for satisfying or creating new needs; the appropriation of these
“objects of social practice;” and “the activation of human actuality” (Márkus 1978:
29). Thus, consciousness is also related to Marx’s concepts of objectification and
labor—the transformation of exterior objects to satisfy needs. Consciousness “is a
particular type of activity directed toward the ‘appropriation’ of reality in a specific
way” (Márkus 1978: 29). Social consciousness never exists in a general or abstract
sense but rather always is a manifestation of particular ensembles of social relations
and sociohistorical conditions; hence, it also includes “false consciousness”—
mistaken ideas that conceal, distort, or invert reality and of whose existence the
subjects are unaware.
Marx portrayed the linkages of consciousness in his famous base–superstructure
architectural metaphor:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,
which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. (Marx 1859/1970: 20)
This passage is often read not as a shorthand or summary statement of complex

relations but rather as claims for (1) the separation of the economic from the cultural
and other realms of society and, ultimately, (2) the economic determination of
society and history. It does not say that the culture is not economic or that the
economic lacks significant cultural, legal, or political dimensions. Such claims
also overlook passages Marx wrote earlier that are hard to square with models of
economic determination. For example,
In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are all out of
proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation,
the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 110)
The mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of
the physical existence of the individual. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these
individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with
their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. (Marx and Engels
1845–6/1976: 31–2)
In this view, “culture [consciousness] constitutes a mode of expression of life

conditioned by the form of production or form of life activity” (D’Amico 1981:
11). Thus, cultures, which are the expression of particular ensembles of social
relations, are scaffoldings for human activity in historically particular circumstances.

Consciousness renders those relations intelligible and reproducible; it is also a
condition for transforming them (McMurtry 1978: 145–56; Outhwaite 1991: 128).
As social beings, human individuals acquired their consciousness in historically
specific communities and could develop as individuals only in those societies. Marx
was aware that “the development of the individual is conditioned by the development
of all other individuals with whom he stands in a direct or indirect intercourse,
and that the various generations of the individuals, which enter into relations with
each other have an interconnection” (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 438). Their
consciousness, passed from one generation to the next, is re-created daily, reworked,
and transformed by particular historical individuals. Marx (1844/1975a: 299) was
acutely aware of the dialectical relation between the individual and species-life (the
community). Richard Lichtman writes that
Like other dialectically related notions, individual life and species (communal) life
can neither be separated from each other nor identified. Though joined, their mode of
experience does not coincide. Individual life is the mode of “experience” of the social
whole, and the social whole has itself no existence separate from the fact of its being
experienced in the lives of individuals. Each individual is an experiencing nodule or
terminus of the ensemble of relations that constitutes the social system. This is not to
reduce society to the sum of individual experiences. For what the individual experiences
is primarily the structure of social relations in dialectical polarity with the world of nature.
But even more significant is the fact that how this experience is itself structured is also a
dialectical consequence and cause of the particular form of individualism in a historical
epoch. In short, the specific conscious experience of individuals occurs in the context
of the totality of structural relationships among individuals, structural relationships
among the aspects of nature, and the structure of relationships between these distinct but
reciprocal realms. And, of course, there is that part of the human psyche, which plays
no part in Marx’s system—the structure of the repressed unconscious. (Lichtman 1982:
220)
This does not mean, however, that all of the individuals of particular communities
share some monolithic form of consciousness that is imposed externally or by
tradition and that homogenized their views of the world, and Marx realized this.
Gyorgy Márkus describes individuality and the constituents of personality in the
following way:
The material and ideal “elements” of his objective world become transformed into
constituents of his own personality . . . only through a process of appropriation . . .
[that is] due to his own selective activity. And it is first of all this activity and its social
consequences that directly form the specific, irreducible individuality of every human
being. Each concrete individual finds a more or less strictly circumscribed scope of
historically possible forms of behavior and activity as something set by, and with, his
historical situation, class position, etc. . . . A concrete walk of life, the personal history
of an individual is determined in the incessant interplay, give-and-take if his own
actions and the “reactions” of his social environment. Human personality evolves . . . in
a constant dialogue between man and world, between subjective activity and objective
social reality. (Márkus 1978: 23)
Marx referred to this as “the difference between the individual as a person and what
is extraneous [accidental] to him” (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 81).
Accidents are not the only way in which individualization and the emergence of
individuality occur. As the production and reproduction of everyday life acquire an
increasingly social character and individuals begin to produce for each other through
cooperation, they have greater possibilities of learning from the experiences of those
with whom they have ties. This is a consequence of the ongoing dialogue between
human beings. This does not prevent them, as Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 47)
phrased it, from hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, herding in the
evening, and criticizing after dinner without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman,
shepherd, or critic. However, when and if a social division of labor develops and
the interests of the individual conflict with those of the community, social rela-
tions are transformed. Some individuals begin to pursue their own interests and
to exploit others—i.e., appropriate their objects and labor. Social differentiation
and specialization follow in their wake. In the example cited above, individuals
are no longer persons but rather have become hunters, fisherman, shepherds, or
philosophers through the exchange relations and rules of distribution that have been
forged. They are simultaneously universalized and depersonalized, which are two
sides of the same coin. On the one hand, their dependence on others means that they
can potentially draw on the knowledge and experience of an ever-widening circle of
human beings. On the other hand, their autonomy and independence are diminished.
In these historicized processes, they are increasingly estranged from nature, from
others, from the products they produce, and from themselves. This estrangement,
or alienation, resulting from forces that occur behind the backs of individuals, leads
to the reformation of personality characteristics and individuality; they too are
manifestations of historically particular ensembles of social relations.
Marx’s focus on “ensembles of social relations” emphasizes the connection
between the human individual who is growing self-conscious of other persons and
of things that are external to him. His aim is to understand the human social being
as a worker and thinker, a producer and consumer situated in historically specific
social worlds that vary in time and space. The historical development of these
variable social worlds provides the real conditions for individualization and human
individuality. It underscores the sociohistorical character of work and consciousness,
both of which, in turn, are linked dialectically to the corporeal organization of human
beings. As Marx put it, real individuals are “individualized through the process of
history” (1857–8/1973: 496).
History
Marx’s view of the world is profoundly historicist in the sense that he believed it
impossible to understand something fully unless one knew how it came to be the
way it is. The historicity of things was important for understanding both process and
succession. For Marx, history involved the inextricably intertwined development of
human beings, of ensembles of social relations (societies), and of nature itself. Early
on, he and Engels wrote that “we know only a single science, the science of history.
One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and
the history of men. The two are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the
history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist” (Marx and Engels,
1845–6/1976: 28). Marx’s materialist science of history has a number of distinctive
features. Let us look at these in more detail.
First, perhaps the most significant features of his historical science are the rejec-
tion of nineteenth-century atomist (Cartesian) reductionism, on the one hand, and
the adoption of a dialectical holism, on the other. Reductionism, which is still a
prominent mode of analysis of the natural and social worlds today, attempts to
explain complex organisms, like human beings, and their behavior in terms of their
constituent parts—e.g. neurons, genes, or the molecular sequences on chromosomes.
The proponents of atomist reductionism are committed to five ontological principles:
(1) each system has a set of natural building blocks which they seek to identify; (2)
these units are homogeneous at least with regard to the whole of which they are
parts; (3) the building blocks exist prior to the whole and hence have properties
that are distinct and independent from those of the whole; (4) the whole may be
nothing more than the sum of its parts, or the interactions of the building blocks
may produce additional or emergent properties; and (5) causes are active subjects
(agents) whereas effects are the properties of objects that have been acted upon.
Marx (1840–1/1975) laid the foundations for his rejection of atomist reductionism
in his doctoral dissertation and developed the argument throughout his career.
Basically, he challenged the validity of each of its ontological premises and resisted
reductionist epistemologies, which reduced the source of knowledge to appearances
(cf. Levins and Lewontin 1985: 269; Meikle 1985: 10–15; Wilson 1991: 120–30).
As Marx (1864–94/1981: 956) put it: “All science would be superfluous if the form
of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence.”
Second, Marx’s theory of history builds on the notion of a totality that includes
both natural history and human history. In his view, a totality is a multileveled,
historically contingent, and dialectically structured unity that exists in and through
the diverse interpenetrations, connections, and contradictions that shape the
interactions of the parts with one another, with the unity itself, and with the greater
whole of which they are a part (Kosík 1963/1976: 18–9; Levins and Lewontin 1985:
133–42, 278–85; Mészáros 1991). Thus, (1) reality is structured by processes and
relations that are not always apparent on the surface; (2) the constituents of the
totality are not identical with each other or in their relations to the whole; (3) the
parts do not exist prior to the whole but rather acquire their characteristic properties
in the interactions that constitute the whole; (4) the whole is always greater than the
sum of its parts, and it is impossible to understand the whole merely by studying its
constituent elements; (5) the whole is in continual flux though the parts and levels
of the totality may be changing at different rates; (6) this flux means that they may
destroy the conditions that brought the totality into being in the first place; and (7)
these transformations create possibilities for new historically contingent structures
that have not existed previously. Consequently, Marx’s ontology and epistemology
have different foundations from those of atomist reductionism. As he put it: “The
method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought
appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in mind. But all of this is
by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being” (Marx
1857–8/1973: 101).
Third, Marx’s theory is firmly rooted in an appreciation of variation. He wrote
approvingly that the historical geologists had shown that the formation of the earth
was a process, a “self-generation” (Marx 1844/1975a: 304–5). 2 This historical,
material world was a precondition for the existence of human beings, of human
production, and of human society in its myriad forms. He appreciated the significance
of variation in both time and space. It was impossible in his view to speak of either
nature or society in general or in some abstract sense; it was necessary instead to think
of the spatial and temporal particularities of both. He referred repeatedly over the
years to the diverse “natural conditions in which man finds himself”—a multiplicity
of worlds shaped subtly or not by their geology, hydrology, climate, and soil fertility
exhaustion to name only a few of the factors he mentioned (e.g. Marx 1863–7/1977:
637–8; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31, 42). For human communities with similar
modes of production, the consequence of such environmental variation is that even
slight differences of emphasis in what is taken from nature or in how tools and labor
power are employed, can yield significant variations in the details of how labor is
organized. Marx was acutely aware of the fact that particular physical conditions,
or material worlds, could impose limitations on human communities with particular
means of production—for instance, the unpredictability or impossibility altogether
of agricultural production in high-elevation or high-latitude environments, like
the alpine grasslands of the Andes mountains or the tundra of northern Canada.
Moreover, he was aware that environments changed with the passage of time. Some
changes were due to the impact of new forms of human activity, like agriculture or
the domestication of animals (Marx 1863–7/1977: 287–8). Other changes—such as
those produced by earthquakes or floods—were less obviously or less directly the
result of human activity. He also knew that the tempo and mode of such changes
varied from region to region and from epoch to another. Frederick Engels, I believe,
eloquently captured Marx’s sentiments in this regard when he wrote:
There is damned little left of “nature” as it was in Germany at the time when the
Germanic peoples immigrated into it. The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna,
and the human beings themselves have continually changed, and all this owing to human
activity, while the changes of nature in Germany which have occurred in the process
without human interference are incalculably small. (Engels 1873–82/1987: 511)
Fourth, although he often employed the language of essentialism and reductive

materialism in his writing, Marx did not view historical change exclusively as either
the unfolding of some potential inherent in the totality that revealed a necessary and
regular succession of development stages or the outcome of forces or events that
accidentally impinged upon the totality from the outside.3 Yet, there are elements of
both developmental necessity (directionality) and chance (accident) in his historical
arguments. For example, Marx (1863–7/1977: 772–80) described the developmental
logic of capital accumulation in terms of concentration (reproduction on an extended
scale) and centralization (regrouping capital into fewer units)—a logic that played
itself out historically in England, albeit with fits and starts, in the nineteenth century.
But, he also noticed that the development of capitalism in Russia in the 1870s was
seemingly following a different pathway from that of England (Marx 1881/1983:
123–4). Moreover, when considering the structure of capitalist production in the
1860s, Marx (1864–94/1981: 567–72) suggested that there were several potential
routes of its development in the immediate future given the then-existing property
relations and balance of force—the formation of monopolies in certain spheres of
production that would provoke both state intervention and the emergence of a new
financial aristocracy. An alternative was the development of factories or companies
run by workers. Both, in fact, have occurred since he wrote.
“Developmental contingency,” a concept elaborated in another context by
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985: 94–6), affords us a useful, shorthand
description of Marx’s views about historical change. The concept captures the
interplay of structure and process, of necessity and accident. To paraphrase their
description of the concept and its implications, development is a historical process
in which the effects of a force cannot be specified in a general or abstract way; they
can only be specified in the singularity of the conditions and relations that exist at a
particular time and place. One consequence of this is that the historical formation of
ensembles of relations and their associated environments appear as “as a temporal
sequence of events in which the exact order is critical” (Levins and Lewontin 1985:
95). Another consequence is that subtle variations among local communities have
the potential to affect what happens or does not happen next; in other words, further
development always involves confronting the existing structures and following,
or not, one of several alternative pathways. Still another consequence is that the
transition from one historical formation to another depends more on the conditions
that prevailed at the time of the transition than on how those conditions and relations
of the totality emerged. Finally, in some instances (labor strikes, for example),
the possible outcomes for particular communities are often quite constrained but
perhaps not completely controlled; as a result, the driving forces involved appear
to play themselves out with almost law-like regularity. At other moments, when the
balance of forces are more nearly equal, people do have a real potential or capacity
to make their own histories; whether they have chosen to do so or succeeded in
doing so are other issues.
Fifth, Marx’s science of history is not a philosophy of world history that attempts
to describe humanity or the flow of history in some general or abstract sense. This is
an impossibility. He is concerned instead with examining what is happening or what
has taken place in communities that have particular locations in time and space. As a
result, the histories of communities are not internally monolithic because the different
subjectivities that emerge are inseparable from the ensembles of relations that make
them possible. Nor is history homogeneous, either within a given historical epoch
or when different communities are compared. While the ensembles of relations that
produce and reproduce history are empirically rich in detail and specificity, they do
not create or constitute an infinite diversity. There are limits. Marx recognized them.
They underpin his concept of a mode of production, which acknowledges the forms
of cooperation, the commonalities, of different types of societies.
In the Grundrisse, Marx (1857–8/1973: 459–514) distinguished two broad
categories: capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. There were two major
differences between them, as Jason Read (2003: 38) notes. Capitalist societies
separated propertyless workers from the means of production and subsistence and
freed up the flow of money within the community. In pre-capitalist communities, the
workers retained control over their means of production, and wealth was integrated
into the community. In addition, Marx made further distinctions within the category
of pre-capitalist modes of production, which he labeled the primitive communal,
ancient, Asiatic, Germanic, Slavonic, and feudal. The names Marx chose designated
different forms of cooperation and social structure rather than either presumed
geographically based identities or presumed inferiority resulting from some “chain
of being” placement on a social evolutionary ladder whose top rung was occupied
by Western capitalism. For example, the Inca and Aztec states of the Americas have
been described in terms of the Asiatic mode of production; the Maasai and other
pastoral peoples of East Africa have been described in terms of the Germanic mode
of production; and the forms of cooperation and social relations of the primitive
communal mode of production figure prominently in the everyday lives of numerous
American Indian peoples, including many of those whose communities now own
casinos. Eric Hobsbawm (1964: 36) is correct, I believe, when he interprets the
various pre-capitalist modes of production identified by Marx not as an evolutionary
succession or progression but rather as different forms of individuation and property
relations, as alternative steps away from or pathways out of historically specific
forms of primitive communal society.
Marx was struck by the observation that communities manifesting pre-capitalist

modes of production tended to reproduce existing social relations. He described this
in various ways:
In all these forms—in which landed property and agriculture form the basis of the
economic order, and where the economic aim is hence the production of use-values,
i.e., the reproduction of the individual within the specific relation of the commune in
which he is its basis—there is to be found: (1) Appropriation not through labour, but
presupposed to labour; appropriation of the natural condition of labour, of the earth as
the original instrument of labour as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials.
The individual relates simply to the objective conditions of labour as being his; [he
relates] to them as the inorganic nature of his subjectivity, in which the latter realizes
itself; the chief objective condition of labour does itself appear as a product of labour,
but is already there as nature; on one side the living individual, on the other the earth,
as the objective condition of his reproduction; (2) but this relation to land and soil, to
the earth, as the property of the labouring individual—who thus appears from the outset
not merely as labouring individual, in this abstraction, but who has an objective mode
of existence in his ownership of land, an existence presupposed to his activity, and not
merely a result of it, a presupposition of his activity just like his skin, his sense organs,
which of courses he also reproduces and develops etc. in the life process, but which are
nevertheless presuppositions of this process of his reproduction—is instantly mediated
by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified
presence of the individual as member of a commune—His naturally arisen presence as a
member of a tribe etc. [i.e., an ensemble of relations]. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 485)
With particular reference to communities manifesting the Asiatic mode of production,

he wrote that
The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which

constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed,
spring up again on the same spot with the same name—this simplicity is the key to
the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast
with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing
changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society
remain untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regime of politics. (Marx
1863–7/1977: 479)
In the back of Marx’s mind as he wrote these passages was the dynamism of
capitalism—the continuous reinvention of the subject and transformation of the
productive forces. As Read (2003: 10) points out, capitalism was no longer fettered
by the need to reproduce “any particular structure of belief, desire, or tradition.” One
issue to be explained was that the different forms of consciousness, subjectivity, and
social practice—as refracted by the modes of production manifested in particular
communities—directly affected and shaped the tempo and form of historical

change.
At the same time, Marx was acutely aware that historical changes had already
happened, that they were taking place at an increasing pace in the present, and that,
given the existing webs of social relations, they would continue to take place in the
future. He portrayed the conditions that laid the foundations for the appearance of
new forms of cooperation and subjectivity with the advent of capitalism:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and en-
tombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of
the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the
era of capitalist production. . . . Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the
European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. . . . These different moments are
systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the
combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the
system of protection. These methods depend on brute force, for instance the colonial
system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force
of society to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode
of production into the capitalist mode and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife
of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
(Marx 1863–7/1977: 915–16)
In this passage, Marx identifies the motors that are driving the expansion of the
capitalist mode of production as well as the complexities of the transition from
the dominance of one mode of production to the dominance of another. Read
(2003: 5) described the historicity of transition as the tension between reproduction
(determination) of traditional forms of cooperation and subjectivity, on the one hand,
and their dissolution (underdetermination), on the other. The new conditions forged
during moments of transition were apparent not only to the peoples of the traditional
societies in the colonies but also to those of the metropole and its satellites or
internal colonies. Importantly, transitions are processes rather than single events;
they are spread over both time and space. For example, the cotton fabrics produced
by English wage-workers in the textile mills of Manchester in the late eighteenth
century were made from cotton that was grown by African slaves in South Carolina;
much of the cotton cloth produced in northern England was ultimately sold in India
where the British had destroyed the local textile industry earlier in the century.
In sum, Marx’s theory of history contains notions of structure, transformation,
and directionality (Callinicos 1995: 95–110, 141–65). The structure is forged by
particular ensembles of social relations and the connections of those communities
with the environments that they continually use and re-create anew. Marx used the
concept of a mode of production to distinguish one kind or type of society from
another. These types were different from actually existing communities. Historically
specific communities, like the one in Atlantic Canada around 1750, manifested
either a particular mode of production or some combination of modes of production,
one of which was dominant over the others. Marx’s notion of history was based on
the contradictions, tensions, and conflicts that develop within the realm of social
production in its myriad manifestations; these were the motors of historical change.
It recognizes changes in tempo—moments of acceleration, moments of stasis—as
well as alternative pathways of development. It also acknowledges that sometimes
changes, which were possible, did not happen; they were blocked for one reason
or another. Finally, Marx’s theory of history contains a notion of non-teleological
directionality, what we referred to above as contingent determinism.
Truth and Praxis
Praxis extends Marx’s answers to the questions: What are human beings? What is
their reality? How was that reality formed? Praxis is the most basic characteristic
of human beings and their most distinctive feature.4 It is not an attribute of either
animals or machines. As you will recall from earlier in the chapter, something
essential happens when the sphere of human being becomes established in opposition
to the “givenness” of nature, when human being becomes distinct from what is not
human. Praxis is the active process by which human beings establish a relation with
objects of the external world and with one another. It is the way they renew those
relations, create new relations, and gain a more profound understanding of what
they have made. Most importantly, praxis is not something that exists outside of
human beings; instead, it permeates the very core of their existence. As Karel Kosík
(1963/1976: 139) noted: “Praxis is both the objectification of man and the mastering
of nature, and the realization of human freedom.” Let us look in more detail at how
Marx conceptualized and employed the idea of praxis.
The first dimension of Marx’s notion of praxis is that it involves human activity
and production; it also involves consciousness of self and other. As Marx put it:
Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would
have in two different ways affirmed himself and the other person. (1) In my production
I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed
not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking
at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be
objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. (2) In you enjoyment
or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of
having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential
nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s
essential nature. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species,
and therefore would become recognized as felt by you yourself as a completion of your
own essential nature and as a necessary part of your yourself, and consequently would
know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. (4) In the individual
expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly
confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. (Marx
1844/1975b: 227–8; emphasis in the original)
Marx makes several points in this passage. The objects produced by the individ-
uals entail the transformation of raw materials provided by the natural world through
the mental and physical activity of those persons. The objects are a manifestation of
their activity in a congealed or crystallized form; as a result, the person and object
are viewed as belonging to the same ontological category rather than to separate,
distinct categories of person and thing (Bernstein 1971: 44). The object produced
by one individual satisfies a need perceived by the other; thus, in Marx’s terms, the
objects are use values. During the process of producing the object, the individual
imagines the object in its finished form and subordinates his will to the task at hand.
As Marx (1863–7/1977: 284) would put it later: “Besides the exertion of bodily
organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will
be steadily in consonance with his purpose.” The way human beings apprehend
the world with their bodies, how they interact with the natural and social worlds in
which they live, and how they relate to each other in these processes are all aspects
of objectification. In the process of objectification, human beings have not only made
themselves; they also portray themselves as having dissolved the unity of nature and
as having a separate existence from the material world. This is Marx’s theory of
alienation, which is ultimately concerned with the separation of human beings from
their practical activity, from the products they create, from one another, and from
the realization of their own potential. Thus, the questions of how and what human
beings produce are especially important, because Marx tied them to the question of
freedom, which ultimately involves removing impediments to the development of
the human capacity.
Marx (e.g. 1844/1975a: 270–82; 1857–8/1973: 831–3) is clear that objectification
takes different forms in different sociohistorical settings. In modern capitalist society,
for instance, it involves alienation or estrangement of the worker from the product
of his labor because of social relations that based on wage labor, private property
in the means of production, and market exchange. Marx describes the process by
which alienation emerges historically in capitalist society from a certain point of
departure:
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production
increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more
commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to
the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities: it
produces itself and the worker as a commodity. . . . This fact expresses merely that the
object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as
a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been
embodied in an object: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its
objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labour appears as
loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage
[subservience] to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [and as externaliza-
tion] . . . (1844/1975a: 271–3; emphasis in the original)
Marx proceeds to point out that “Political economy conceals the estrangement
inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between
the worker (labour) and production” (1844/1975a: 274; emphasis in the original).
In other words, because they posit the categories and conditions that are historically
specific to capitalist production as transhistorical and hence universally applicable,
the political economists have only a partial understanding of this historically
contingent reality. They have created instead an ideology and continue to portray
their representation of the world as real.
Consciousness, the second dimension of Marx’s theory of praxis, is intimately
related to objectification. For Marx, consciousness of nature is always a social
product conditioned by the level of development of the forces of production and the
ensembles of social relations and cultural forms associated with them. Conscious-
ness originates in a new relation between the subject and self; it is a reflective
moment in which the unity of humanity (subject) and nature (object) is negated,
and a new understanding of what the relationship could be is initiated through
human activity. Consciousness is an integral part of activity—consciousness not
only of the properties of the raw materials given by nature, what potentially can
be done with them, and the processes for transforming them, but also, and more
importantly, awareness of the needs, feelings, and sentiments of other persons.
For Marx, consciousness is simultaneously an element of human experience, a
moment in its historical development, and the understandings that result from the
sociohistorical development under historically specific ensembles of social relations.
Thus, consciousness combines both real (true) understandings of the world and other
human beings with misperceptions and misunderstandings of both.
This leads us to a third dimension of Marx’s idea of praxis: the “relentless
criticism of all existing conditions.” This aspect of Marx’s work was already crystal-
lizing when, as a student, he was first beginning to grapple with Hegel’s thought and
writings. The criticism of the writings of Hegel, Feuerbach, the political economists,
and others as well as of his own thoughts would continue for the rest of his life.
The kinds of questions he posed in his critiques were: What is the argument? What
is implicit and explicit in the argument? What are the presuppositions? Where is
the argument persuasive and why? What are the weaknesses and fallacies of the
argument? Where is it ambiguous or vague? What empirical evidence supports or
refutes the claim? How might we move from misleading or inadequate arguments
to ones that provide new insights and fuller explanations or representations of
human reality? What are the implications for action? What kinds of action have the
arguments supported or sustained? In some instances, his critiques involved sentence-
by-sentence analyses of the arguments he was examining (e.g. Marx 1843/1975a,
1875/1989, 1880–2/1974). In other instances, they were the bases for working out
new hypotheses (e.g. Marx 1857–8/1973). In still others, they were detailed analyses
and assessments of the balance of forces at particular historical moments, like the
Paris Commune, and why the particular courses of action that unfolded ultimately
failed with regard to the realization of human freedom (e.g. Marx 1871/1986).
Thus, for Marx, praxis as the determination of reality begins with an accurate,
theoretical understanding of existing institutions and the contradictions inherent
in them. He realized the importance and significance of empirical evidence in the
process of developing such an understanding of the world—that is, how it came to
be the way it is and, given the conditions at any particular time, the real possibilities
that exist for the future. Marx was not particularly concerned with speculating about
what the future might be like. His “relentless criticism” did mean, however, that he
devoted considerable time and energy to examining the ideas that people had about
the world. These, he observed repeatedly, did not always conform to ways things
really were, although, as Richard Bernstein (1971: 52) notes, they do tell us something
about the reality at that moment in time. They are representations or reflections of
reality rather than reality itself. Marx’s relentless criticism of institutions and beliefs,
then, is ultimately concerned with understanding them rather than condemning them
outright. For example, in a famous passage, Marx (1843–4/1975: 175–6) wrote that
Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest
against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as a people’s illusory happiness is a demand for their real
happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to
abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is thus in embryo
a criticism of the vale of tears whose halo is religion. (as translated by Easton and
Guddat 1967: 250; emphasis in the original)
The goal of this dimension of praxis, in Marx’s (1843/1975b: 144) view, should
be the “reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the myst-
ical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a
religious or a political form.” A correct theoretical analysis of politics, political
economy, religion, or philosophy and the contradictions inherent in them would
yield understanding of the institutions, beliefs, and practices involved (Bernstein
1971: 53). It was essential, in Marx’s view, to speak to truth and to let the chips fall
where they might. Consequently, he did not accept arguments based on authority
or divine inspiration or rely on the eloquence of arguments themselves. He argued
instead that there is empirical evidence and that an argument should mirror the facts.
In other words, Marx was committed to a correspondence theory of truth whose

criterion involves praxis—i.e., an unmediated representation of reality of both the
immediate forms and the underlying structures that are reflected in them; with
regards to the criterion of praxis, this means that truth must be explanatory rather
than predictive (Bhaskar 1991b). Thus, Marx rejected claims based on authority,
divine inspiration, consensus, or whether an argument was consistent with, entailed
by, or contingent upon another statement—i.e., what philosophers call subjective,
voluntarist, or coherence theories of truth, all of which were resurrected by one or
another subsequent writers in the Marxist tradition.
From early onward in his writings about capitalist society, Marx privileged
the standpoint of politically engaged and socially conscious working classes that
are capable of exposing and potentially transcending the inhumanity of their real
existing relations (e.g. Marx 1843–4/1975: 184–7; 1844/1975a: 281–2; 1844/1975c:
202–6; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 493–6). One reason for this stance harkens
back to the master–slave relationship that Hegel described in his Phenomenology
of Spirit (1807/1977: 111–19, §178–96). As you will recall in this vignette, the
master, in order to be a lord, must possess a slave, who produces things for the
master to consume and is dependent upon him. The slave initially takes the master
to be his reality and lives in fear of him; his essential nature is his labor, and his
consciousness is expressed in the things he produces, which are externalized from
himself. However, the more the master succeeds in his lordship, the more he fails, as
he slowly realizes his dependent consciousness; he has in fact achieved his position
by virtue of the slave who is his essential reality. As the slave begins to realize that
he is more than the things he produces, he realizes that he has a consciousness in his
own right as well as a self-existence and freedom outside of the things he produces.
Increasingly, as his consciousness grows more independent, he realizes that he can
no longer be reduced to the things he makes. Both master and slave are aware of
their divided nature and contradictory being (Bernstein 1971: 24–8, 91). Clearly,
the master and the slave have different perceptions and understandings of reality.
For Marx, the standpoint of the slave provides a fuller, more accurate image of
reality than does that of the lord. While there is no impetus for the master to alter his
relation with the slave, the slave has every reason to emancipate himself, to become
a free human being. The incompleteness of the master’s understanding as well as the
perversity of his actions is another reason why Marx privileged the perspective of
an engaged, conscious working class. In his view, “the non-worker does everything
against the worker which the worker does himself; but he does not do against himself
what he does to the worker” (Marx 1844/1975a: 282).
In 1845, a third dimension of Marx’s notion of praxis crystallized. This was
revolutionary practice, or as he put it, “philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is, to change it” (Marx 1845/1976: 5; emphasis
in the original). This coincided roughly with his growing involvement in working-
class political movements (e.g. the Communist League), the deteriorating political
situation in Europe, his steadily more difficult economic circumstances, and the
appearance of Frederick Engels’s (1845/1975) The Condition of the Working-Class
in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources. The appearance
of Marx’s “revolutionary practice” involved a shift in perspective from that of the
sympathetic philosopher looking at society from the outside to that of an empathetic
participant in working-class everyday life and struggles—a participant scrambling
to provide for his family and their survival, who simultaneously was critically
assessing the balance of forces in European society, and trying to devise tactics and
strategies for altering the balance of force and the circumstances of workers (e.g.
Draper 1978; McLellan 1973: 137–225). Perhaps the most famous manifestation of
this dimension of praxis is Marx and Engels’s (1848/1976: 519) call: “working men
of all countries, unite!”
Marx did not elaborate a theory of revolutionary practice. In his view, the possib-
ility for revolution was a dialectical one that built on the contingency of relations, the
balance of forces, and contradictions that existed at a particular moment. He did not
have an elaborate theory about the form an ensemble of social relations would take
as a people’s genuine needs were recognized and satisfied and as their freedom was
actualized. He did not argue for a set trajectory of historical change; for example,
as you will recall from the preceding section, he thought of pre-capitalist modes of
production as alternative pathways out of a primitive communal condition. Instead,
he pointed out the potential for revolutionary practice that might exist, given the
balance of forces at particular moments. For instance, he suggested that there were
at least two alternative possibilities for capitalist development in the 1860s (Marx
1864–94/1981: 567–73), and, together with Engels in 1882, he contemplated the
potential impact of the ongoing class struggles in Russia and cautiously suggested:
“If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for proletarian revolution in the West,
so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant-communal land-
ownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (Marx
and Engels 1882/1989: 426). As a backdrop for the contingency of revolutionary
practice were conditions of capitalist development that unfolded with almost law-
like predictability: the constant formation of new markets for commodities; the
concentration and centralization of production into steadily fewer and, at the same
time, larger enterprises; increased rates of technological innovation; the increased
importance of technology relative to human labor power in developing economic
sectors; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; and periodic economic and financial
crises that result from the impossibility of a smooth, continuous process of capital
accumulation.
In this chapter, we have sketched the outlines of Marx’s anthropology. As we
have seen, Marx read widely and thoughtfully. At the same time, his interpersonal
relationships and experiences while growing up in the Rhineland and, later, his
steadily increasing involvement in political activism made him aware of what was
happening in the world. His declining economic circumstances from the early
1840s onward thrust him into the working classes and helped to forge an awareness
and consciousness of the fact that he could learn much from the experiences and
understanding that the masses of workers had of the world in which they lived.
The workers were not the objects of inquiry to be described and reported to the
world; they were instead thoughtful, perceptive individuals with vast funds of
knowledge from whom the world could learn. In this sketch of Marx’s anthropology,
we have focused on the corporeal organization of human beings, the significance
of ensembles of social relations, the historicity and diversity of human societies
and their propensities to change, and the importance of praxis in the production,
reproduction, and transformation of those communities. We have seen how Marx
interwove the corporeal organization of human beings and their sociality with the
diversity of their social relations as they engaged in practical activity to transform
the raw materials of the environments to satisfy needs and to create new ones.
–3–
Human Natural Beings
Marx was a materialist. In 1837, during his second year at the University of Berlin,
he wrote to his father mentioning his struggle to understand Hegel’s system of
philosophy and, more importantly, describing his efforts to bring together art and
science, which were divorced from one another in the university (Marx 1837/1975:
18). While many writers have focused on Marx’s intellectual debt to Hegel, fewer
have examined his connections with traditions of materialist thought. His attempt
to bring the arts and sciences together in a single system involved studies in natural
science, history, and the romantic philosophy of Friedrich Schelling (1755–1854)
who sought the common basis of nature and self. Two years later, Marx (1839/1975)
took extensive notes on the non-deterministic materialism of Epicurus (341–271
BC) and the school he established. Briefly, the Epicureans believed that life rose
up from the earth rather than descending from the heavens; claimed that there
were more worlds than this one and that the present one will change; noted the
emergence and finite duration of living forms; denied the influence of distant, divine
powers; stressed the importance of contingency or chance as opposed to necessity
or teleology; argued that mind and body were united; and emphasized that men and
women were active agents in the acquisition of knowledge and that they were capable
of forging their own happiness (Foster 2000: 21–65). Marx’s doctoral dissertation,
which he completed in 1841, dealt with the differences between ancient Greek
philosophies of nature (Marx 1840–1/1975). In his view, the Epicureans who had
influenced early Enlightenment writers—like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and
Isaac Newton—were also the key that would unlock understanding of the present.
Marx thought of Epicurus as “the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment”
(Marx 1840–1/1975: 73).
As we saw in the last chapter, Marx was concerned with questions about the
emergence and development of human natural beings, their creation of human and
natural history, and their metabolism with nature. These were important issues in his
materialist account of history. He framed his argument in terms of changes in human
corporeal organization, ensembles of social relations, and activities and practices
that varied because of the different metabolisms that existed between human social
individuals and the particular natural and social worlds (environments) in which
they lived. He saw these changes in non-teleological, historical terms. Parts of his
theoretical perspective were already supported by empirical evidence while other
parts were suppositions based on the limited evidence available. This combination
65
included (1) the anatomical similarities of human beings and chimpanzees

recognized by Edward Tyson in 1699; (2) the close taxonomic and presumably
historical relationship of human beings and non-human primates postulated by
Carolus Linnaeus in the 1735 and subsequent editions of his Systema Naturae; (3)
the diverse arguments proposed from 1750 onward by the Comte de Buffon, James
Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Abraham Gottlob Werner that the earth was significantly
older than commonly believed; and (4) the view expounded by Georges Cuvier in
1812 that there was, in fact, a succession of past worlds on earth. Thus, as Valentino
Gerratana (1973: 64) put it, “Marx was already not only taking for granted the
principle of the historical evolution of animal species and of nature in general, which
found little favour in the sciences of the time, but [he was] also tending to exclude
from that evolution any finalist [teleological] assumption.”
From the late 1830s onward, when Marx was formulating his materialist concep-
tion of history, his slightly older contemporary—a young Englishman named
Charles Darwin (1809–82)—was also working out his own materialist views about
the historical evolution of plants and animals (Ospovat 1981). Perhaps Marx’s
(1857–8/1973: 105) most directly germane comment about human evolution
before the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 was that “human
anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher
development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood
only after the higher development is already known.” His later remark—“since
Darwin demonstrated that we are all descended from apes, there is scarcely any
shock whatever that could shake ‘our ancestral pride’”—suggests that, while Marx
(1864/1985) was amused at the public outcry over the implications of Darwin’s ideas
(i.e., human beings and apes shared a common ancestor, and there was a transition
from ape to human), he was definitely not bothered by them. As we shall see, while
Marx, in fact, had the highest regard for Darwin’s insights, he was also critical of the
way in which Darwin and others naturalized explanations of social inequality and
other culturally constructed categories.
Thus, this chapter has four goals. The first is to review the bases for Marx’s agree-
ment and positive valuation of Darwin’s arguments in The Origin of Species and to
survey subsequent developments of evolutionary theory. The second is to use the
lens provided by Engels’s (1876/1972) “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition
from Ape to Man” and by Marx’s own theoretical framework to examine relevant
data derived from paleoanthropology and the natural sciences in order to discern the
interplay of the changing dispositions and anatomical structures of human beings
and their primate relatives as well as the emergence of practices such as tool-making
and language. The third is to consider the implications of this biocultural nature for
population structures. The fourth is to examine briefly Marx’s and Engels’s critique
of the naturalization of explanations of the social relations of capitalist society and
how this critique played out in the historical development of anthropology both here
and abroad.
Human Natural Beings • 67
Charles Darwin and the Development of Modern Evolutionary

Theory
Marx (1860/1985) first read The Origin of Species in 1860. He immediately recognized
its significance, and, except for a minor complaint about the style of the argument,
he had nothing but praise for the volume. Marx commented explicitly about certain
points of agreement or conclusions he drew from Darwin’s arguments. Moreover,
there must have been other points of agreement between Marx and Darwin because
of the materialist perspective they shared; these can be inferred either from Marx’s
other writings or from the implications of his materialist theoretical perspective.
The former include: (1) a short quote from Darwin’s chapter on variation describing
how natural selection acts on variations of form under different conditions (Marx
1861–3/1991: 387–8; 1863–7/1977: 461); (2) the notion that evolution is a gradual,
ongoing process (Marx 1867/1987: 494, 1868/1987a: 558–9); (3) evolution involves
both the continued preservation of what has been inherited and the assimilation of
new traits (Marx 1861–3/1989: 427–8); (4) acknowledgement of Darwin’s “history
of natural technology, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve
as the instruments of production for sustaining their life” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 493);
(5) a refutation of Malthus in Darwin’s discussion of the extinction of animal species
(Marx 1861–3/1989: 350–1); (6) human natural beings are descended from apes
and, hence, are also a unity with nature (Marx 1864/1985: 581; Marx and Engels
1845–6/1976: 39–41); (7) Darwin’s “struggle for existence” in natural history is
analogous to class struggle in human history (Marx 1860/1985: 232); and (8) a
rejection of teleological arguments in natural science and, by extension, the adoption
of a notion of historically contingent change (Marx 1861/1985: 246–7). In the latter
category of inferences that may be drawn from Marx’s other writings or from his
materialist perspective, we should include at least: (9) a notion of internal motors of
formation and change as opposed to external engines of development, and (10) non-
reductive forms of argumentation. In my view, one thing that emerges from Marx’s
comments is that he saw Darwin, like himself, as more concerned with explaining
processes of change rather than origins or events.
Darwin’s Metaphors and Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
The idea of evolution was “in the air” by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The
universe had evolved according to Kant, the earth had evolved gradually according
to Hutton, life on earth had evolved according to Lamarck and Geoffrey St. Hilaire,
and even human beings had evolved according to Buffon and Rousseau—from apes
no less. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of resistance to the idea of evolution.
Part of it arose from the fact that none of Darwin’s predecessors had satisfactorily
explained how one species actually evolved into another. The other source of
discontent among the public and a few natural historians was that it threatened their
beliefs, religious and otherwise, about the world and man’s place in it (Desmond
1989). The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 fuelled
the discontent. At the same time, it marked a radical departure from the teleological
worldviews of his predecessors, who saw “the real objects of the world as imperfect
reflections of underlying ideals or essences” and “that the real variations between
real objects only confuse us in our attempts to see the essential nature of the uni-
verse” (Lewontin 1974: 168). Instead of sweeping away the real variations among
individuals of the same species in order to focus on the type, Darwin focused his
attention on that variation and made it the object of his study. His singularly stunning
insight, as Richard Lewontin put it, was that
individual variation and the differences between species were causally related. Darwin’s
revolutionary theory was that the differences between organisms within a species are
converted to the differences between species in space and time. Thus, the differences
between species are already latent within them, and all that is required is a motive force
for the conversion of variation. That force is natural selection. (1974: 170; emphasis in
the original)
Darwin, like Marx, initially framed his ideas in terms of already existing
metaphors, analogies, and analytical categories. He built on the language and
imagery of German romanticism, political economy, animal breeding, and natural
science as he struggled to explain his new understandings of the natural world and
the evolution of species (e.g. Kohn 1996; Richards 1992; Schweber 1980, 1985).
Anyone who has ever written even a term paper will understand and hopefully be
sympathetic with the notion that the language and imagery in which arguments
are initially conceived are often quite different from those that clearly explain
ideas and their implications. In a more self-reflexive moment, perhaps, this might
account for Marx’s two comments in letters about Darwin’s “clumsy English style of
argumentation” as well as his own, at times, fumbling and often opaque attempts to
say what he actually meant.
Darwin used four powerful metaphors in The Origin of Species to frame and
express his new ideas about nature, variation, and the motor force driving evolution.
They are “an entangled bank,” “the struggle for existence,” “natural selection,” and
“wedging.” His metaphors were used singularly or more frequently in combination
to produce powerful, evocative images rich in meaning. He employed the phrase
“an entangled bank” to express the complexity of organization of nature. The dual
sources of inspiration were the engravings, paintings, and poems he was familiar
with before his journey on the Beagle, on the one hand, and the luxuriant, Amazonian
rainforests of Brazil, on the other (Kohn 1996). In The Origin, Darwin described the
interrelatedness of all nature in the following way:
It is interesting to contemplate the entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many
kinds with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with
worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed
forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us. (1859/1964: 489; emphasis added)
Darwin’s second metaphor was “the struggle for existence.” It too was not a
new idea. Herder, for example, had remarked on crowding as well as the struggle
between individuals and between species for survival; however, there was no sense
of the potential for transformation in his view (Lovejoy 1959b: 211–2). Darwin, in
contrast, used the metaphor to mean interdependence, chance, as well as contest,
endurance, or persistence. He wrote that:
I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical
sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more
important) not only the life of the individual but success in leaving progeny. Two canine
animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other over which
shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of the desert is said to struggle for life
against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on moisture.
A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which on average only one comes
to maturity, may be said be more or less truly said to struggle with plants of the same
and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe is dependent on the apple
and a few other trees, but can only in a far-fetched way be said to struggle with these
trees, for if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it will languish and die.
But several seedling mistletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more
truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its
existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other
fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds
rather than those of other plants. In these several senses which pass into each other, I use
for convenience the general term of struggle for existence. (Darwin (1859/1964: 62–3;
emphasis added)
Darwin’s third metaphor, “natural selection,” was used to describe both how
variation is maintained and how descent with modification occurs. He relates it to his
second metaphor, the struggle for existence:
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause
proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its in-
finitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to
the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The
offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of
any species which are born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle,
by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved by the term Natural Selection, in
order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection. (Darwin 1859/1964: 61; emphasis
added)
Darwin used his fourth metaphor, “wedging,” to represent in mechanical terms

how natural selection actually operates on the hereditary variation that exists between
individuals and between species. The imagery refers specifically to the activities of
quarrymen and the implement they used at the Salisbury Craigs in Scotland to cut
stone from the cliff faces, and, in the process, how they transformed a beautiful
natural landscape into an ugly monument (Kohn 1996: 36).
The fact of nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp
wedges packed close together and driven by incessant blow, sometimes one wedge being
struck, and then another with greater force. (Darwin 1859/1964: 67)
Let us describe Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in slightly

different terms. It is based on a series of observations he made about differences
between individuals and on breeding experiments that he and other breeders
conducted. First, hereditary variation exists between individuals of the same species
and between different species. Second, the number of eggs, sperm, or seeds produced
by an individual vastly exceeds the number of individuals born. This, in turn,
exceeds the number that survive to the reproductive stage and that can potentially
contribute hereditary material to the next generation; in one of Darwin’s plant
breeding experiments only about one seed of a thousand actually germinated. Third,
some individuals have a greater likelihood of becoming adults and reproducing than
others, because the hereditary material they possess is advantageous for some reason
in the environments in which they live. Fourth, as a result of differential survival,
this advantageous material has a greater likelihood of being passed on to succeeding
generations. Thus, Darwin could explain how both descent with modification and
the formation of new species (speciation) occurred. He could account for the way
these happened. He could assert with certainty that the kinds of plants and animals
that exist today are the modified descendents of different kinds of organisms that
lived in the past. He could declare with equal certainty that whatever happened in the
future would be based on the organisms and conditions of the present.
Darwin’s great insights were the principles of variation, heredity, and selection.
What he could not explain, however, was the connection between individual
variation, on the one hand, and the inheritance (heritability) of characteristics from
one generation to the next, on the other. An Augustinian monk—Gregor Mendel
(1822–84), a contemporary of both Marx and Darwin—would provide answers to
these questions. While Mendel published the results of his experiments with plant
hybrids in 1866, Marx was completely unaware of his work and Darwin, if he were
aware of it, did not understand its importance. Although Mendel’s work was finally
recognized in the early 1900s, its significance was still being hotly debated into the
1930s (Allen 1978).
The Problems of Variation and Inheritance
If Darwin made variation the proper study of biology, then Mendel was responsible
for clarifying the mechanisms by which hereditary variation is created and trans-
mitted. As Richard Lewontin (1974: 173–8) notes, Darwin and the other plant and
animal breeders of his day were aware that offspring tend to resemble their parents
(like produces like) but yet are different from them and that these differences are
also inherited to some extent. They attempted to cross organisms from different
varieties, and even species, and saw that, if any of the hybrids produced were fertile,
they tended to revert to one or the other of the original parental type over a number
of generations. Because the breeders focused on the differences rather than on
the similarities, they viewed variation and inheritance as ontologically distinct
categories. The effects of this were: (1) they saw the variation existing between
individuals within the same species as different from the variation that exists between
species; and (2) they focused their attention on the group or variety rather than on
the individual. What Mendel did that was different from his contemporaries was
that he focused on individuals, their ancestors, and their progeny. In other words,
he distinguished between the individual and the group. Let us consider briefly what
Mendel did in his experiments and what he actually showed.
Mendel bred varieties of garden peas that differed from one another in a few
traits—that is, when tall plants were bred with tall plants, their offspring were also
tall. Mendel then bred a tall plant with a short one and noted that each of the hybrid
offspring was tall and, in this trait, they resembled one of their parents. However,
when he bred the hybrids of the first generation with one another, he noted that
their offspring resembled one or the other of the original parental types—roughly
three-quarters were tall and one quarter was short. On the basis of this experiment,
he concluded, with regard to the characteristic being studied (1) that the hybrid
individuals inherited a discrete particle (gene) from each of the parents; (2) that the
expression of the gene for tallness was dominant over the other; and (3) that these
particles re-assorted themselves in the offspring of the first-generation hybrids in
such a way that there were both tall and short individuals in the second generation.
When he bred individuals that were hybrids for two traits—such as tall vs. short
plants and smooth vs. wrinkled pods—he observed that the gene pairs associated
with different physical characteristics—let us say height and seed color—were
inherited independently from one another. In other words, the significance of
Mendel’s work was, to paraphrase Lewontin (1974: 177–8), that it showed that
variation and inheritance were manifestations of the same underlying phenomena
but that they required two different kinds of causal explanation.
Mendel’s studies buttressed a later flurry of activity from the 1920s onward that
was concerned with the genetic variation of populations and with how genetics
related to the process of selection. This involved conceptualizing a local population
of individuals, all of whose genes constitute the gene pool of the population, its
reservoir of hereditary material that is passed from one generation to the next. Many
individuals or only a few may contribute to and share in the gene pool. The pool may
be stable through time or change from one generation to the next depending on the
particular conditions that prevail or appear. These investigations had three important
consequences. First, they made it clear that no two individuals in a population have
exactly the same combination of genes—including identical siblings who were born
with the identical genetic systems but were subjected to different environmental
and historical circumstances so that different genes mutated. Second, they clarified
the nature of the genetic variation that exists within a population, identifying
recombination, gene flow, and mutation as important sources. Recombination is what
occurs when two individuals mate and their offspring receive half of their genetic
complement from each parent. If the organism has about 30,000 gene pairs, as each
human being seems to have, then the continual reshuffling from one generation to
the next becomes a major source of the genetic variation that occurs in a population.
Gene flow occurs when an individual from outside the population breeds with an
individual from the population, and new genetic material is potentially introduced
into the gene pool. The other source of variation is mutation. While many but not
all of the mutations that appear in the gene pool of a population are variants that are
already known and that already exist in the population, some are not. As a result,
mutation is the ultimate source of new genetic material in a population. Third, these
researchers began to examine how selection, as well as mutation and migration,
alter frequencies of particular genes in a population They also suggested that genes
acted in ways that controlled the metabolism of cells which in turn controlled the
expression of particular characteristics; unfortunately, given the technology of the
time, they had no way to prove it (Allen 1978: 126–40, 198).
The first generation of population geneticists—Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962),
John B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), and Sewall Wright (1889–1988)—recognized
that Mendel’s principles operated in all organisms; that small-scale, continuous
variability in characteristics, like height, also had a genetic basis; and that even small
selection pressures acting on minor genetic differences can result in evolutionary
change (Gould 2002: 504). In a phrase, they integrated and synthesized the views
of Mendel and Darwin. They established the foundations for linking the traditional
subfields of biology—genetics, paleontology, ecology, systematics, or developmental
physiology, to name only a few—into a more holistic biology, that would come to
be called the Modern Synthesis or the New Synthesis in the 1940s. This fusion was
launched with the publication of Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1900–75) Genetics and
the Origin of Species in 1937.
The Modern Synthesis and Beyond
The heyday of the Modern Synthesis may have been in 1959 at the time of various
centennial celebrations of the publication of The Origin of Species. Gould (2002:
503–84) described the Modern Synthesis as “a limited consensus,” that had

“hardened” in the 1940s and 1950s in time for those celebrations. By the early
1960s, however, the three central tenets of the synthesis—adaptation, the individual
organism as the unit of selection, and the sufficiency of microevolutionary theory to
explain change as it is refracted in the fossil record—began to be challenged.
One manifestation of the hardening, as Gould describes it, was an increased
emphasis on adaptation: Every gene or gene complex was somehow adaptive.
Adaptations, as you recall, are the products of natural selection modifying the
gene pool of population in such a way that it increases the harmony between the
population and its environment. Any hereditary characteristic that increases this
congruity and promotes survival is an adaptation; adaptations take many different
forms and may involve morphological, physiological, or behavioral features that
enable individuals to survive and produce offspring. However, evidence was
beginning to accumulate which indicated that some genes may be neutral—that
is, they have no selective significance with regard to increasing or decreasing the
fitness of individuals living in a particular environment, and, hence, they are neither
advantageous nor deleterious. The second manifestation of the hardening and the
challenge revolved around the question: At what level or levels does selection
operate—the gene, the individual, the population, or the species? Advocates of the
new synthesis argued that, while selection operates at the level of the individual,
the adaptations that result might be beneficial to the group as well. The challengers
disagreed. The arguments they raised in the 1960s and 1970s continue to the present.
The third tenet is that the explanation used to account for small changes in the gene
pool of a contemporary population is merely writ large, but identical, to the one
that is refracted in the paleontological record. That is, change is steady and slow.
Gould (2002: 558) called this the “principle of extrapolation.” One challenge to
the uniformitarianism embodied in this tenet has been over the issue of whether
the evolutionary process is always gradual, or whether it proceeds by fits and starts
with moments of rapid change preceded or followed by periods of relative stasis
(punctuated equilibrium). Gould concludes his discussion of the Modern Synthesis
by noting how well it has endured, in spite of the challenges.
Molecular biology has been a major growth field in the United States, England,
and France since 1945 (Allen 1978: 187–228; Appel 2000). This development
was accompanied by number of new technologies and techniques—computers,
X-ray crystallography, DNA sequencers, powerful mathematical and statistical
methods, and so forth—that afforded opportunities to examine for the first time the
molecular structure of cell nuclei, the three-dimensional arrays of DNA molecules
on chromosomes, the structure of genes, the regulation and development of genes,
the sequence of DNA molecules on chromosomes, and the entire genomes of a
number of species, including even that of human beings. We now know, for instance,
that the genomes of human beings and chimpanzees are virtually identical (99
percent); that the rates of change in the proteins produced by the DNA code vary
little from species to species; that human beings and chimpanzees had a common
ancestor 5 to 7 million years ago; that the 6 billion or so human beings in the world
today fundamentally have, with few exceptions, the same genotype; or that there is
more variation within human populations—let us say from Africa, Scandinavia, or
Japan—than there is between them (Lewontin 1995; Marks 2002).
There seem to be two counter-tendencies in biology today. The research of many
biologists is reductionist in the sense that they are concerned with breaking down
their objects of inquiry—the cell, the gene, the organism, or the environment—into
their constituent parts. Another group—notably Richard Lewontin (1929–), Richard
Levins (1935–), and their associates—views nature as a totality, a historically
contingent and ever-changing structure. Nature is, in their perspective, a multi-leveled
whole, a unity of contradictions, characterized by spontaneous activity, positive and
negative feedback, the interpenetration and interaction of categories from different
levels of the whole, and the coexistence of opposing principles that shape interaction.
The various elements of the whole—the parts and the levels—as well as the whole
itself are continually changing, though at different rates; consequently, at any given
moment, one element might appear to be fixed in relation to another (Levins and
Lewontin 1985: 133–42, 272–85). The importance of this dialectical world is that it
helps us think of genes, organisms, and environments as interacting parts of a whole
rather than distinct entities with their own roles to play. Lewontin (2000: jacket), for
example, rejects the idea that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to its
environment. He argues instead that the individual organism is a unique consequence
of the interaction of genes and the environment, and that individual organisms,
“influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and
choose the environments in which they live.” Marx would have appreciated how
Lewontin and Levins have conceptualized and framed issues concerned with human
natural beings and how we came to be the way we are, because of the non-reductive
and dialectically interactive aspects of their argument.
Human Natural Beings: Bodies That Walk, Talk, Make Tools, and
Have Culture
The title of this section derives from David McNally’s (2001) insightful essay, “Bodies
that Talk: Sex, Tools, Language, and Human Culture,” in his Bodies of Meaning. We
saw in the preceding chapters the three distinctive markers Enlightenment writers
used to characterize human beings: they reasoned, they made tools, and they talked.
The anatomists and physicians of that era had a fourth characteristic: they walked
upright. These are legacies from the Enlightenment. They were part of Marx’s
intellectual inheritance as well. However, as we saw in the last chapter, he did
not frame his answer to the question of what human beings are precisely in these
terms. He emphasized instead that human beings were sensuous, active creatures;
that there was a dialectical interplay between their corporeal organization and the
ensembles of social relations that shaped their activities; that their bodily organs
were transformed into instruments of labor and production; that they objectified
the world and the resources it provides to satisfy established needs and to create
new ones; and that their conscious life activity in contrast to that of animals was
increasingly determined by social relations and culture.
As Raymond Corbey (2005: 93) correctly observes, scientific definitions of the
genus Homo (that is, modern human beings and their ancestors) established in the
late 1940s and early 1950s—e.g. erect bipedalism, a well-developed thumb, or rapid
expansion of cranial capacity associated with craniofacial remodeling and reduction
in jaw size—often incorporate or imply philosophical understandings of humanness,
such as upright gait, tool-making, large brains, language, and culture. In the 1950s,
it was possible to believe that these traits appeared roughly at the same time. We
now know that they did not appear simultaneously, but rather sequentially over a
period of time that spanned 5–7 million years for some scholars or 2–3 million years
for others. The result of this is that the biological definition of Homo clashes with
popular and philosophical views of what it means to be human. Consequently, some
paleoanthropologists have argued that the genus contains both “animal” hominids
and “human” hominids, and that the transition from ape to human occurred some
time since the late Tertiary. This refracts in some complex way the criterion or criteria
that particular individuals select to define “human.” Another potential complicating
factor results from the fact that geneticists have found that chimpanzees and, to
a lesser extent, gorillas are the closest living animal relatives of human beings.
The primatologists who study these apes often stress their similarities with human
beings rather than their differences. Thus, they portray the apes as conscious,
active, and social creatures who vocalize, communicate, occasionally use tools, and
have distinctive personalities; when they talk about ape language and culture, the
discussion becomes murkier and the audience more skeptical.
For our purposes here, the question is not whether the answers provided by
present-day scientists are fundamentally different from and thus incommensurate
with those of Marx, but rather how do or might Marx’s views articulate with
contemporary perspectives and practices. A relatively unknown essay by Frederick
Engels, Marx’s friend and collaborator for more than forty years, provides additional
clues for contemplating the linkages.
Engels’s “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man”
The publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871 was the impetus for Engels
(1876/1972) to set down his own views on the transition from non-human primate
to human natural being. It is useful to keep in mind a few facts about the context
in which Engels wrote his essay, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from
Ape to Man.” While the first remains of “Neanderthal man” had been found in 1856,
their significance was neither recognized nor appreciated until the early years of the
twentieth century (Delisle 2007: 70–124). While writers speculated about whether
human beings had lived at the same time as extinct animals, the first incontrovertible
evidence was only uncovered in 1859; it consisted of stone tools and fossil animal
bones sealed beneath an unbroken stalagmitic deposit in Brixham Cave in southern
England. As a result, Engels’s argument was a deductive one, as were those of his
contemporaries (Trigger 1967/2003).
Engels argued that the ancestors of human beings were social, arboreal apes who
lived in the Old World tropics toward the end of the Tertiary period, which we now
know occurred between about 2 and 23 million years ago. He was clear that both
human and non-human primates were behaviorally highly complex, and structurally
integrated organisms. Even though he had no conception of the microevolutionary
processes described above, he was also clear that a change in one behavior would
ultimately be linked with changes in other organs (sensory and anatomical structures)
and behaviors. Through reading and possibly even trips to the zoo, he argued that the
arboreal primates of the present day used their forelimbs and hindlimbs differently
when they climb. On this basis, he suggested that the decisive first step in the
transition from ape to human involved upright walking, an erect gait. This change
in the locomotor behavior and structures was accompanied by other changes, most
notably in the hand. These changes involved the development of greater dexterity
and of a precision grip involving an opposable thumb long before the first flints
were fashioned into knives and these early humans began to manufacture tools.
The development of the hand and all that this entailed were linked, in turn, with the
development of the brain and other sensory organs, with new relations to the objects
of nature, with increased dependence on others and the formation of new ensembles
of social relations, and importantly with the development of language. The latter was
facilitated by changes in the hand, speech organs, and brain—a combination that
enabled these early humans to undertake more complex activities and to change the
environments in which they lived in planned, conscious ways.
Marx and Engels often forged and refined ideas in their letters. However, in none
of these, to my knowledge, did they discuss Engels’s essay about the transition from
ape to human, even though they may have done so in conversation. Moreover, there
is no evidence that Marx disagreed in any way whatsoever with Engels’s conclusions
in this regard. While parts of Engels’s argument could be stated with more precision
today in light of the vast quantities of information that have been gathered, especially
since the late 1950s, the basic timeline—erect posture, tool-making, and language—
is still correct. In fact, it was adopted by paleoanthropologists, most prominently
Sherwood Washburn (1911–2002) in the late 1950s (e.g. Washburn 1960; Washburn
and Howell 1963; Woolfson 1982). The issues debated today are not whether the
steps outlined by Engels occurred, but rather where and when they took place.
Fossils and Proteins
In Marx’s day, the empirical evidence for the evolution of human beings was
provided by the comparative anatomy of living species. Today, that evidence is
provided by fossilized bones and their associated environments, by the similarities
and differences of DNA or protein sequences that exist among different species, and
by the molecular clock that the various sequences provide (Marks 2002: 7–31). The
issues that paleoanthropologists explore and resolve are still upright walking, tool-
making, language, and culture; however, the terrain of the debates has shifted in the
last fifty or so years because of the vast quantities of new information.
According to molecular anthropologists, the last common ancestor shared by
modern human beings and chimpanzees, our closest relative in the animal kingdom,
lived 10 to 5 million years ago, and gorillas diverged from that group around 11 to
9 million years ago (Patterson, Richter, Gnerre, Lander, and Reich 2006). Together
with earlier discoveries of fossil hominids in South Africa, this finding helped to
focus attention since the 1960s on the tropical regions of Africa, especially those east
of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Here, there were fossil-bearing
deposits that dated to the end of the Tertiary—that is, the Pliocene Era, which
occurred roughly 5 to 2 million years ago. In the mid 1990s, paleoanthropologists
began to look for ancestral chimpanzees and gorillas on the west side of the Rift
Valley, where the extant species live today. In Chad, they found a number of fossil
hominids in late Miocene and early Pliocene deposits that ranged in age from about 7
to 3.5 million years ago. No one questions that the various early hominid species on
both sides of the Rift Valley were bipedal walkers, keeping in mind that anatomical
clues for this form of locomotion are scattered over the body: toes, ankles, knees,
hips, shoulders, neck, and hands, to name only a few. Thus, at the present time, it
seems that human natural beings appeared first in the tropics, perhaps in the triangle
formed by Chad, Ethiopia, and South Africa. The fossil evidence has raised a number
of questions: Did all of them share the same locomotor pattern? Were they bipedal
all of the time or only part of the time? Are some individuals ancestral chimpanzees
instead of precursors to the genus Homo? Did some of the earlier individuals belong
to one of the later ancestral species shared by chimpanzees and early hominids? Did
any of these individuals belong to species that stand in the direct ancestral line of
modern human beings (Delisle 2007: 326–8; Gibbons 2006)?
Besides the fact that ancestral ape and hominid species resided in tropical Africa
5 to 10 million years ago, what were the circumstances in which quadrupedal, tree-
climbing primates became bipedal? Paleoanthropologists have described a number
of potential advantages of upright walking that might have served them well: visual
surveillance against predators, hunting, carrying food and other objects, feeding on
low branches, and reducing the energy costs of traveling long distances because of
scarcity of resources, and even display (Delisle 2007: 327). Marx would have been
fascinated, I suspect, by the changing circumstances in which this fundamental

change occurred.
Let us look briefly at two recent works. First, Pierre Sepulchre and his associates
(2006) argued that the 6000-km-long escarpment created 12 to 10 million years
ago by tectonic uplift associated with the formation of the Rift Valley in East
Africa altered the prevailing patterns of atmospheric circulation, which brought
moisture and precipitation to the interiors of Kenya and Ethiopia. The reorganized
atmospheric circulations brought less moisture to the region, and, by 8 to 6 million
years ago, the environmental conditions were beginning to shift from woodland
to savanna grassland habitats and species; this transition occurred between 5 and
3.7 million years ago. A second argument, made by Geoffrey King and Geoff
Bailey (2006), is that the ancestral apes and hominids of tropical Africa lived in
the broken, hilly country created by the formation of the Rift Valley. Moreover,
these complex, environmental mosaics with their diverse and variable resources
were the primary habitats of the early hominids rather than the emerging savannas
that were inhabited by new kinds of ungulates and a rapidly expanding diversity of
terrestrial monkeys—the ancestors of modern baboons and macaques. This broken,
hill country, they argue, continued to be the preferred habitat for human beings along
their entire dispersal route of dispersal as they then began to move into the Eurasian
landmass about 2 million years ago. The relation of these changes to the evolution of
human beings will become apparent in the next few pages.
Engels’s second inferred step in the gradual appearance of human natural beings
involved changes in the anatomy and manual dexterity of the hand. This was closely
associated with upright posture and gait. While all primates manipulate objects to
varying degrees with their hands (as do raccoons and squirrels), the hands of modern
human beings are quite distinctive in several respects—e.g. they can open a jar lid
or thread a needle. Chimpanzees and other apes cannot do either easily, if at all.
Modern human beings have power and precision grips and a much greater range of
motion and rotation in their fingers, wrists, forearms, and shoulders than do non-
human primates. These capacities are reflected in both anatomical structures and the
ranges of motion they exhibit; they include long, opposable thumbs relative to the
length of the other digits and the ability to rotate the index finger toward the thumb.
These features contrast with those of modern chimpanzees, which have a restricted
range of motion of the thumb; curved digits that are relatively long with respect
to the length of the thumb; and powerful grasping muscles in both their hands and
wrists (Trinkhaus 1992).
The manufacture and use of stone tools has been taken as an indication of manual
dexterity, a sign that “man the tool-maker” has arrived on the scene. The earliest
stone tools now known are chipped cobbles and flakes from 2.5-million-year-old
deposits in Ethiopia. These are probably not the oldest tools in the world; right now,
however, they are the oldest ones we know about. We know that modern chimpanzees
will break off twigs and use them to fish for termites, and we can safely presume, I
believe, that at least some hominids used sticks or rocks, for example, earlier than
2.5 million years ago. What we do not know about the tools from Ethiopia is who
made them. There were two genera of early hominids in Ethiopia between about 2.5
and 1.0 million years ago: Australopithecus and Homo. We suspect that the latter
made the tools, because the configuration of the fingers, hand, wrists, and forearms
more closely resemble those of modern human beings. The australopithecines had
hands with long curved fingers, thumbs and little fingers with a restricted range
of rotation, and heavily muscled fingers and wrists adapted for grasping. Some
paleoanthropologists argue that both genera manufactured and used stone tools;
others suggest that only some australopithecines had the manual dexterity to make
tools; a third group claims that stone tool-making was restricted to the genus Homo.
Tool-making, of course, is a marker for something else. In this instance, as Engels
indicated, it is linked with the development of the brain. All of the early hominids
that lived before 2.5 million years ago had brain volumes that resembled those
of chimpanzees. A significant increase in brain volume began to appear about 2.0
million years ago in the genus Homo and continued until about 100,000 years ago.
The brain volumes of modern human beings are roughly three times larger than
those of their Plio-Pleistocene ancestors. Paleoanthropologists have suggested a
number of reasons for the expansion of brain size: the need for increased brain
power to facilitate complex manipulative tasks like making stone tools; increased
hunting; social cooperation; food sharing; language; and heat stress. Two issues
emerge. First, what is the relationship between increased brain size and the structural
organization of the brain itself? Second, was this increase in brain size gradual and
continuous, or was it punctuated with episodes of growth followed by periods of
relative stasis (Delisle 2007: 328–30)?
The development of the brain was, of course, Engels’s third step in the evolution
of human corporeal organization (Schoenemann 2006). There are three facts about
the brain that it is useful to keep in mind. The convolutions on the brain’s surface
leave their imprint on the interior surface of the skull; consequently, by examining
the endocasts of the imprints left on the skulls, it is possible to learn about the surface
organization of the brain. The second fact is that the endocasts of human and non-
human primates—that is, chimpanzees and modern human beings—are different
from one another. The third is that brains consume enormous amounts of energy;
human adults, for example, use about 20 percent of the metabolic energy they have
to regulate the temperature of their brains. Heat regulation is accomplished by the
circulation of blood through a complex network of arteries and veins that crisscross
their brains. Dean Falk (2004: 161) has suggested that the vascular system of the
hominid brain was reorganized to deal simultaneously with “the changed hydrostatic
pressures associated with erect posture” and with the changes mentioned earlier in
this section that were taking place in the habitats of the African tropics in general
and, more specifically, in the habitats in which the early hominids lived 7 to 2
million years ago.
Examining the endocasts of apes, the large and small species of australopithecines,
and early members of the genus Homo, Falk learned (1) that the surface organization
of the brains of large australopithecines resembled those of modern chimpanzees,
and (2) that they were different from those of the later, small australopithecines and
early species of Homo, both of which had features resembling the brain surfaces of
modern human beings. In her view, the dentition of the large australopithecines, as
well as associated paleoenvironmental evidence, indicated that they continued to
live in wooded habitats. In contrast, the teeth and paleoenvironmental data indicated
that the small australopithecines and early species of Homo moved into more open
country, possibly savannas, but as likely the environmental mosaics described
earlier in which patches of trees, grasslands, and water dotted the landscape. The
heat stress induced by spending more time in open country created another set of
selection pressures along with gravity and the changes in hydrostatic pressures
that accompanied bipedal locomotion. More important, until the vascular system
of the brain was able to regulate temperature more efficiently in those hominids
that had moved into more open habitats, brain volumes remained low—that is,
roughly similar to those of apes. Once the vascular system of the brain became more
efficient, brain volumes increased. This process became apparent in the remains of
H. habilis about 2.5 million years ago. It seems to have been a fairly continuous
process until about 100,000 years ago, when the growth curve flattened out (Lee and
Wolpoff 2003).
The vascular system is not the only organ of the human body involved in heat
regulation; others include sweat glands, the distribution of hair, and skin. Two of the
truly distinctive features of modern human beings are that they have about 2 million
more eccrine sweat glands than non-human primates, and that these glands are
distributed over the entire surface of their bodies. What makes sweating an effective
evaporative, cooling mechanism is that human beings are relatively hairless in
comparison to the living apes, even though they have about the same number of hair
follicles as chimpanzees. The reason for their appearance is that their hair shafts are
much smaller than those of apes; hence they appear hairless except for the tops of
the heads. In this regard, Adrienne Zihlman and B. A. Cohn (1988: 404) note that
“hair retention on the head is probably important in protecting the scalp from the
sun’s ultraviolet rays and may assist in stabilizing the temperature of the brain.” One
inference that might be drawn from this extended argument is that even the earliest
of our big-brained ancestors probably appeared relatively hairless in comparison to
their primate contemporaries.
This inference has some additional implications. As you will recall, hominid
populations began to move out of the African tropics and onto the Eurasian landmass
about 2 million years ago. Their remains have been found at deposits that are about
1.8 million years old at Dmanisi, which is located north of the Caspian Sea, where
winter temperatures occasionally plunge below 0 °F (–17.8 °C). So, what does this
imply for a relatively hairless hominid? Brian Fagan suggests an answer:
For Homo erectus to be able to adapt to the more temperate climates of Europe and Asia,
it was necessary not only to tame fire but to have both effective shelter and clothing to
protect against heat loss. Homo erectus probably survived the winters by maintaining
permanent fires, and by storing dried meat and other foods for use in the lean months.
(Fagan 1990: 76)
Thus, the elaboration of culture, Engels’s fourth step in the transition from ape to
human being, is not unrelated to the development of the brain and other sensory
organs. It also involved extending the body’s instruments of production and
objectifying the world around them in new ways as they appropriated new kinds
of external objects to satisfy new needs that were essential for their survival and
reproduction in their new circumstances.
The final step mentioned by Engels was the development of language. Both
modern human beings and non-human primates, especially chimpanzees, are quite
vocal. Both use vocalizations and gestures to communicate information, which
suggest that our common ancestors 10–5 million years ago probably did the same.
Nevertheless, the vocalizations and gestures of non-human primates are not the same
as language, which is unique to the human species. Language, as you know, has
three central features: (1) basic sound units produced in the oral cavity, which lack
innate or intrinsic meaning; (2) rules for combining and recombining these sounds
into larger units, like words (morphology) and sentences (syntax), have the capacity
to communicate enormous ranges of information and meaning (semantics); and
(3) symbolic reference involves both the arbitrariness of the utterance with regard
to what is being represented and the ability to refer to things that are not immedi-
ately present or exist only in some abstract sense (Deacon 1992a). These features
distinguish human language from other forms or systems of communication—such
as the dances of honeybees, seasonal whale songs, or the calls of monkeys—which,
respectively, are referential but not symbolic, involve mimicry, and express ranges
of immediate feelings like fear, anger, or pleasure.
There are important neuroanatomical differences between the vocalizations of
non-human primates and the speech of modern human beings. Terrence Deacon
describes them in the following manner:
[Non-human] primate calls are controlled by neural circuits in the forebrain and midbrain
that are also responsible for emotion and physiological arousal, but not the motor cortex,
even though this area can control the muscles of the larynx and mouth. Stimulation of the
vocalization areas in a monkey brain often produce other signs of arousal—such as hair
standing on end, display postures, facial gestures and even ejaculation.
Human speech uses a very different set of neural circuits. It depends on the region
of the motor cortex that controls the mouth, tongue and larynx and the areas that are in
front of it. Repeated efforts to train primates to mimic even simple speech sounds have
had little success. The unique skill in learning to speak suggests that this facility may
reflect some critical neurological difference. The ability to combine a larger number of
component sounds to form larger units, words and phrases, makes possible to syntactic
complexity of speech. Common brain areas may be involved in speech production and
grammatical processes because defects in grammar and speech production caused by
brain damage often occur together. (Deacon 1992b: 119)
Two regions of the human brain involved in speech production are Broca’s area
and Wernicke’s area. The former is a motor speech area associated not only with
sensorimotor control of the structures of the oral cavity, the varied positions of
the tongue, and their coordination with movements of the respiratory system, but
also with manipulative and gestural abilities; it is typically located on the left hemi-
sphere of the cortex and also seems to be associated with right-handedness—the
tendency shared by about 90 percent of the human population today (non-human
primates typically do not show a preference for left- or right-handedness). The latter,
Wernicke’s area, which controls understanding and formulating coherent speech, is
located on the cortex amid areas that are associated with seeing, hearing, and feeling
(Gibson and Jessee 1999: 205; Tobias 1998: 72).
All normally developed human brains have Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Since
they are located on the surface of the brain, they leave imprints on the interior
surface of the skull and thus appear on endocasts. While there are no endocasts
currently available for hominids that lived before about 3 million years ago, both
appear on endocasts of H. habilis (c.2.5 million years ago). An endocast from a late,
small australopithecine, A. africanus (c.3.1 to 2.6 million years ago), has an ape-like
pattern but shows evidence of Broca’s area. Thus, the earliest representatives of
the genus Homo seem to have had the neural capacity for spoken language. The
configurations of their brain surfaces resembled those of modern human beings
rather than apes. This development coincided in time with the initial expansion of
brain volume, the appearance of stone tool making (culture in the broadest sense),
and preceded by a half million or so years the initial movements of hominids out of
the African tropics (Tobias 1998).
Between 7 million and 2 million years ago, a set of complex, interrelated changes
occurred in the heads of our human and pre-human ancestors. A few of these were: the
brain was reorganized as both the vascular and neural systems evolved; the surface
topography of the cerebral cortex became more folded and complex; asymmetric
hemispherical specialization of the brain appeared; the anatomy of the craniofacial
region was significantly shortened, and, toward the end of that period, the volume of
the brain itself expanded, particularly in the frontal area. In other words, the brains
of our ancestors who lived 2 million years ago were quite different from the brains
of their ancestors who lived 5 million years earlier. With regard to the evolution
of language, the faculty seems to have been an emergent phenomenon that was a
byproduct of other developments, rather than one that was built on a pre-existing
structure or structures shared with other primates. That is to say, there is not a single
structure that is concerned exclusively with language and speech production; instead
there seem to be several areas—one associated with emotions, another with sensation
and motor control—that have become, in the course of the last 5 million or so years,
interconnected by neural circuitry that was evolving simultaneously in response to
selection pressures that had nothing to do with the development of language and
only a little to do with other systems of communication more broadly defined.
The interconnections between the faculties of language and tool use in human
natural beings were confirmed more than seventy years ago. Lev Vygotsky and
Alexander Luria (1930/1994) assessed studies that compared the development of
speech and practical intelligence in individuals, both apes and human children; these
studies showed (1) that the practical behavior of apes is independent of any speech-
symbolic activity, and (2) that tool-use by apes was analogous to that of human beings
who were either pre-verbal children or deprived of the ability to speak (aphasics).
While the tool-using abilities of apes remained essentially unchanged throughout
their lives, those that children manifested at different stages of psychological develop-
ment changed dramatically, especially after they began to talk, first to themselves
and then increasingly to others when they were confronted with a problem to solve.
While practical intelligence (tool-use) operates independently of speech in young
children, practical activity and speech are increasingly interconnected as the child
matures. The egocentric, inner speech of four-year-olds becomes increasingly
communicative as they turn to peers and adults for information and insight about
the issues they confront. As the human child matures, speech increasingly moves
from solving the problems that are immediately at hand to a planning function that
precedes their actions; that is, speech and interpersonal relations begin to guide and
dominate what they will do in future. In a phrase, practical activity (tool-use in this
case) and language began to be linked increasingly in the development of human
natural beings, not only in their evolution over the past 7 million years but also in
the maturation process of the each individual human being. It is part of the complex
process by which natural beings became human natural beings.
As we have just seen, there are significant differences in the growth and develop-
ment patterns of non-human primates and human beings. For example, ape neonatal
infants have about 50 percent of the brain volume of adults of the same species, and
their brains typically grow to roughly the same size as the adults by the end of their
first year of life. In contrast, human infants are born with brain volumes that are
about 25 percent of the size of those of adults; their brains double in size during the
first six months, are about 75 percent the size of adults by two and a half, 90 percent
by age five, and 95 percent in their tenth year. This protracted process of growth and
development of humans has a number of implications: (1) brain development occurs
much more rapidly in apes and through a seemingly smaller number of developmental
stages; (2) the growth rate in brain volume extends beyond well beyond the first year
of life in human beings; (3) human infants are relatively helpless in comparison
to ape infants during the first years of life; (4) this prolonged period of maturation
coincides with growth and developmental stages that witness not only the formation
of new neural connections but also the related elaboration of practical activity and
speech; and (5) the changes in the neural circuitry of human infants and children are,
in fact, associated with the elaboration of practical activity and speech.
Paleoanthropologists have discerned the ape and human patterns of brain growth
and development in the fossil remains of early hominids, provided that cranial and
pelvic bones are present in their sample. An important limiting factor with regard
to brain volume at the time of birth is the cross-section of the mother’s birth canal.
The size and shape of the neonate’s head cannot be greater than the width and
height of the birth canal. For example, an early hominid—H. rudolfensis that lived
about 2.5 million years ago—had a brain volume of 800–900 cc but a birth canal
that was only able of passing a fetal head with brain size of about 200 cc (Stanley
1998: 160–3). Thus, they infer that the human rather than the ape pattern of growth
and development was already in existence at that time. This implied that the infants
also exhibited the same pattern of prolonged maturation and dependence that exist
in modern human beings. These traits coincided in time with the appearance of
tool-making and language; they also coincided with the expansion of those stages
of brain growth and psychological development when new neural connections are
being formed as tool-use and speech become increasingly social activities embedded
in ensembles of social relations.
With more than 130 years of hindsight, it appears that “Engels got it right!”
The broad outlines of his argument have stood the test of time. Nonetheless, the
accumulation of diverse sorts of empirical evidence during that period has added
unimaginable detail and enriched our understanding of the process. On the one hand,
neither Marx nor Engels ever questioned that human natural beings were also social
beings. As Engels (1876/1972: 251) put it, our primate ancestors “lived in bands.”
On the other hand, they never considered in any extended manner the implications
that the life histories, fertility, and mortality patterns of the early hominids might
have on the demography and population structures of those groups.
Demography and Population Structure
Neither Marx nor Engels ever wrote systematically about the relation between
population and political economy (Seccombe 1983). Marx (1863–7/1977: 784)
suggested that “every particular historical mode of production has its own special
laws of population, which are historically valid only within that particular sphere. An
abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in
the absence of any historical intervention by man.” He refused to abstract population
from historically specific social structures or ensembles of social relations. His
comment is part of a larger discussion about the relation between the capitalist mode
of production and the formation of a reserve army of labor. Marx was certainly aware
of differences in mortality and fertility, the effects of the movement of workers from
the countryside to industrial cities; and the deleterious effects of industries, like
pottery-making, on the health and life expectancies of the individuals engaged in
those activities. Marx (1863–7/1977: 471) certainly recognized that age and sex were
important factors structuring the division of labor in capitalism, and that they were
potentially implicated in structuring discontinuities from one mode of production to
another. He also implied that the determination of population dynamics is situated
in the inner workings of particular modes of production, and that “population forces
will periodically come into contradiction with themselves and with other elements of
any given socio-economic system, and will tend to make their own contribution of
time to the developmental propulsion of particular modes through time and space”
(Seccombe 1983: 33).
As you will recall from earlier discussions in the last chapter and this one, labor
and thus the division of labor were characteristics that, in Marx’s view, distinguished
human natural beings from natural beings. Biodeterminists, drawing on liberal social
theory (notably John Locke), rooted the division of labor and the nuclear family
in biology; in their view, sharing or exchange occurred because of the biological
differences between males and females, which resulted in different dispositions
and activity patterns. Females, whose mobility was periodically constrained by
infant care, remained in close proximity to home bases and foraged for vegetable
foods, while larger, more aggressive males hunted for meat, which was essential for
survival, and shared this prize both with their offspring and with the mothers of those
offspring (e.g. Washburn and Lancaster 1968). However, there are three problems
with this perspective: (1) most non-human primates, including chimpanzees, forage
individually most of the time; (2) the perspective does not explain how individuals
of both sexes transformed themselves from self-feeders to producers; and (3) Engels
(1884/1972) argued that families, as we construe them today, developed out of
“bands.” Marx and Engels never doubted that our primate ancestors were social
beings. Not surprisingly, they did not speculate about the demographic aspects of
the transition from social natural beings to human natural beings, nor did they ever
comment on the potential implications of mortality, fertility, and age structure in that
transition; however, other writers have thought about these issues.
The early hominids were sexually dimorphic—that is, adult males were larger
than adult females—but these differences were not as great as the sexual dimorphism
found in non-human primates, such as chimpanzees or gorillas. The males and
females of sexually dimorphic primates have roughly the same growth rates until
puberty; the males continue to grow for several years after reaching this stage, while
the females stop. Lila Leibowitz (1985, 1986) argued that the larger body size of
adult males was not related to dominance and sex roles, but rather to reproductive
and foraging advantages; it was correlated with either solitary existence (orangutans)
or transient group membership (chimpanzees and gorillas). The larger body size of
adult males gave them a greater chance for survival outside a social group; it also
meant that both males and females engaged in the same foraging activities but in
different places.
There is a great deal of variability not only in male and female roles but also
in the relations between the sexes with groups of non-human primates (Leibowitz
1985, 1986). There is even variation between social groups of the same species—e.g.
baboon troops in which food resources and concentrated vs. those where resources
are dispersed. Chimpanzees probably show the greatest flexibility and diversity of
relations. The core members of chimpanzee social groups are adult females and their
juvenile and infant offspring. Adult males join these core groups temporarily for
greater or lesser periods of time, before wandering off to forage in other localities,
either alone or in all-male groups. Thus, self-feeding is the rule in the core and all-
male groups, except at those rare times when a small animal is killed and the meat is
shared with individuals foraging nearby.
As we have seen, the maturation pattern of our primate ancestors who lived 3
million years ago was essentially the same as that of modern human beings. They
reached reproductive age at about the same rate as we do. Paleodemographic studies
indicate that infant and juvenile mortality was high, that about half of the individuals
died or were killed before they reached reproductive age, and that the average life
span of the survivors was about twenty years. Assuming that females had their first
infants shortly after reaching puberty, when they were twelve or thirteen years old,
and that they did not ovulate for the three or so years when they were lactating and
nursing, their second infant would have been born when they were fifteen or sixteen
years old, and their third when they were eighteen or nineteen.
Such a demographic profile has several implications. First, few, if any, females
were alive when their offspring reached puberty. Second, most of the members of a
social group were prepubescent individuals who had not reached reproductive age.
Third, many of the juveniles were orphans who had to fend for themselves in order to
survive. Fourth, they were exposed to prolonged learning in a social group that was
composed largely of other prepubescent individuals. The conclusion that Leibowitz
drew from this evidence is that age or stage of maturation may have been more
important than sex in structuring the social relations of early human populations.
Her observations and arguments suggest a model of early hominid society. The
social groups were small and composed mainly of individuals who had not yet
reached reproductive age. Within these groups, prepubescent males and females of
the same age were roughly similar in size; they foraged for themselves from a young
age and shared food with other individuals, when there was more than any one of
them could consume. In the process of growing up in a small group, they learned
to use and make simple wooden and stone tools from their peers. They shared
information about the world around them through language. Their understanding of
their world was gained through practical activities and experiences, the successes
and failures of everyday life. Food sharing involves a degree of cooperation that does
not exist in contemporary non-human primates and presumably did not exist among
their ancestors, except on the most limited bases. It is an attribute that involves
cooperation among individuals as well as new levels of understanding, trust, and
confidence in the motivations of others. However, cultural understandings and ways

of doing things changed slowly. There were so few individuals in these early groups
that new ways of seeing and understanding the world or making new tools were
often not validated because of the absence of an appreciative audience.
It appears that H. erectus populations living between 2 million and 500,000 years
ago may have exhibited less sexual dimorphism than their immediate ancestors.
This evidence, coupled with their movement into new landscapes in Eurasia and
the changes that had already been taking place and that were continuing to occur in
Africa, suggest that diminished sexual dimorphism was likely associated with new
forms of social organization. Leibowitz suggests that adult males may have been
integrated into the juvenile, adult female, and infant groups on a full-time basis.
Their integration coincided with two other changes that facilitated both new forms
of cooperation and further development of human natural beings themselves: (1)
systematic hunting and hence the increased consumption of meat (a high energy,
protein-rich food source); and (2) appearance of spatially organized, hunting and
hearth-centered activities that were carried out more or less simultaneously in
different places. If this change refracts new relations based in some complicated
manner on sex differences, then shifts in the ensembles of social relations refracting
changes in the age structure of human populations occurred much more recently.
Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee (2006) have argued that significant changes in the
numbers of individuals surviving to adulthood—i.e., the ratio of older to younger
individuals in a population—did not occur until the last 50,000 years or so. This
change, they argued, was not a biological one but rather one rooted in culture and
social relations. In practical terms, it means that there were then grandmothers and
grandfathers, repositories of practical knowledge, who could share that information
with the younger generations of the social groups.
Marx on the Naturalization of Social Inequality
Compare the following statements made by Marx about Darwin’s The Origin of
Species. The first was made less than a month after its publication. The second was
made two and a half years later.
Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one
aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has been done. Never before
has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature,
and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the
crude English method. (Marx 1859/1983: 551)
I’m amused that Darwin, whom I’ve been taking another look, should say that he also
applies the “Malthusian” theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr. Malthus’s case,
the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but—only with
its geometric progression—to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable

how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its
division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian
“struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes [i.e., war of all
against all] and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which civil society figures
as an “intellectual animal kingdom,” whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as
civil society. (Marx 1862/1985: 381)
What stands out in both quotations is Marx’s critique of the naturalization of social
inequalities, the transposition of capitalist social relations to nature, and their
reappropriation into capitalist society as “natural” relations. One target was Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), the seventeenth-century materialist and political theorist who
had argued that human individuals always act out of self-interest to satisfy their
appetites and avoid their aversions, and that, in order to avoid being thrust back into
a state of nature during the time of the English Civil War, they should submit their
own individual wills to, or at least not resist, that of the sovereign in exchange for
self-preservation and avoiding death (Wood and Wood 1997: 94–111). A second
target was Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) who also assumed that self-interest and
competition were the foundations of modern society, that poverty was a natural
outcome of social relations, and that the tendency to over-reproduce far outstripped
the capacity of society to produce food, which led to a limited food supply and a
“struggle for existence” among its members. It is important to note here that Marx
believed that “human nature” was not fixed but varied from one historical epoch to
another, and that his concept of class struggle was different from those of Darwin
who viewed struggle between different individuals of the same species in terms
of differential reproduction and survival, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), and
Malthus who viewed struggle in terms of limitations imposed on society as a whole
by its environment (Bowler 1976: 639, 647–50).
In 1875, Frederick Engels made a similar point with regard to “bourgeois
Darwinians” who saw only struggle for existence in nature where only a few years
earlier they “laid emphasis on co-operation”:1
All that the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence boils down to is an
extrapolation from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the bellum omnium
contra omnes and of bourgeois-economic theory together with the Malthusian theory of
population. Having accomplished this feat . . . these people proceed to re-extrapolate the
same theories from organic nature to history, and then claim to have proved their validity
as eternal laws of human society. (Engels 1875/1991: 107–8)
The questions are: What happened in the thirteen years that intervened between
Marx’s letter and that of Engels? What were the relationships of the liberals and social-
ists that Engels called bourgeois Darwinians to the development of anthropology?
When Darwin was composing The Origin of Species in the 1840s and 1850s,
many of the concepts (e.g. evolution) and metaphors (e.g. “struggle for existence”
or “survival of the fittest”) that he would eventually use had already been employed
by others. In a real sense, they had entered into the public domain and were being
deployed by naturalists, political economists, and social commentators at a time
when the popularity of reductive materialist arguments was on the rise in some circles
and challenged in others, especially in those with strong religious convictions. The
advocates of this reductionist standpoint were attempting to explain the development
of human society as well as human psychology and social organization in terms
of natural laws that were derived from biology or even physics; their perspective
frequently emphasized the naturalness of hierarchy, gradualism, or equilibrium.
What many but not all of the advocates of this standpoint attempted to do was replace
the notion of divine intervention with the “laws of nature.” Moreover, their efforts
were facilitated by the fact that they also used the same conceptual frameworks
and drew on the same analogies and metaphors to describe the human and natural
realms. As a result, it was not uncommon by the 1850s for writers to slip between
claims that human beings had a nature, and that nature had a moral economy (Jones
1980: 1–9). These tendencies became increasingly common in many countries
after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 (e.g. Glick 1988). Twelve
years later, Darwin (1874/1998) published his views about the human species and
the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of primitive and civilized
peoples in The Descent of Man. Darwinism and evolutionism were concerned with
the individual, with the evolution of the human psyche and intelligence, and with the
evolution of human social and social organization. While they were liberal reactions
against entrenched aristocratic and conservative understandings of the world, they
also became part of emerging discourses about individualism, meritocracy, the
struggle for existence, and scientific racism that came to be called Social Darwinism
after 1879; however, many features and metaphors, like “the struggle for existence”
or “nature red in tooth and claw,” associated with Social Darwinism were in use
before Darwin wrote either The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man. While it is
possible to argue that Darwin was a Social Darwinist, it is also clear that some of his
followers were socialists and others were not.
Anthropology—an emerging discipline concerned with human variation, the
evolution of human societies, and the cultural practices and beliefs of marginal
peoples—also began to coalesce rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s (e.g. Hammond
1980; Harvey 1983; Kelly 1981; Stocking 1987; Weikart 1999; Weindling 1989:
11–59). Its early practitioners often had the same understandings of human beings,
human diversity, and societal evolution and made use of the same analogies and
metaphors as Darwin and his followers. However, anthropology was never a
politically homogeneous discipline even at its inception. Some early figures in
the history of anthropology—like Franz Boas (1858–1942) or Robert H. Lowie
(1883–1957) in the United States—were socialists who rejected the positivism of the
social evolutionary perspectives and replaced them instead with empiricist-inspired

and grounded studies of the cultural practices of particular communities, populations
rather than types of individuals, the weaknesses of scientific racist arguments, or
the politics of science (Pittenger 1993). For example, Lowie was highly critical of
Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who was
one of the leading exponents of Darwin’s thought in Germany; at the same time, he
praised the writings of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), especially
his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Kropotkin 1904/1989) and of the socialist
Alfred Russel Wallace.
For our purposes in this book, it is worth noting that discourses which naturalize
social hierarchy and power relations have been and continue to be pervasive and
influential in anthropological practice and theory and their appropriations by
states including socialist ones (e.g. Patterson and Spencer 1995; Ssorin-Chaikov
2003; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). It is also clear, as the letters quoted above
indicate, that Marx and Engels were early opponents of the naturalization of cultural
categories.
In this chapter, we examined how Marx’s materialism was an outcome of his
efforts as a student to bring together the arts and sciences and then, a few years later,
to address questions concerned with the emergence and development of human
natural beings and their relationship with the worlds in which they lived. For Marx,
the attraction of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was precisely its
materialist foundations. One can only presume that Marx would have applauded
subsequent clarifications of the underlying mechanisms of descent with modification
and speciation as well as of the historically contingent and ever-changing structure
of the world in which these mechanisms operate. We then moved to an examination
of Engels’s essay on the role of labor in the transition from non-human primate to
human natural being and suggested that Marx agreed with the views of his long-
time friend. We also saw that the broad outlines of Engels’s argument have stood
the test of time, although the kinds of detailed information available today are
infinitely richer than when he wrote. Engels linked the emergence of human natural
beings with a series of interconnected changes in the corporeal organization of
our ancestors that involved bipedalism, changes in the anatomy and dexterity of
the hand, expansion and reorganization of the brain, tool-making, language, and
the elaboration of culture. We then examined data clarifying these developments;
some of the data derived from the investigations of neuroanatomists, while others
came from paleoanthropological inquiries in African and Eurasia. Finally, we raised
questions about the kinds of social relations that might have existed in these early
communities, and how issues of mortality, fertility, life expectancy, and life history
might have effected and produced diverse social structures.
There is, however, another set of linkages between Marx, Darwin, and their
successors that we explored: the naturalization of social inequalities through the
use of folk categories that are understood as the biological categories of Western
modernity.
– 4–
History, Culture, and Social Formation
Marx read widely in anthropology and history in the 1870s. He filled fifty notebooks
about Russia and, between 1879 and 1882, took more than 450 pages of notes
interspersed with commentaries on topics as diverse as prehistoric Europe, the
history of India, Dutch colonialism, family and gender in Roman society, and
American Indian societies (Anderson 2002; Smith 2002). Only about a third of
the notes were transcribed and published by Lawrence Krader in The Ethnological
Notebooks (Marx 1880–2/1974). It was the second time in his career that Marx read
extensively about non-Western societies; the earlier one occurred between 1853
and 1859 when he wrote articles about India, China, and the Ottoman Empire for
the New York Tribune (Avineri 1968). Marx’s interest in anthropology and history
raises two interrelated questions: If his overriding concern was capitalist society, as
some have claimed, then why did he read so extensively about non-capitalist and
pre-capitalist societies? Did his theoretical standpoint and understanding of these
societies change in significant way between the 1850s and the 1870s?
The presupposition underlying the first question is that Marx saw the study of
non-capitalist or pre-capitalist societies in the 1870s as distinct from and unrelated
to that of capitalism. For later commentators, it was alternatively a grander project,
a diversion from the really important project, pedantry, a sign of depression over the
defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, and even an indication of encroaching senility.
In contrast, David Smith (2002: 78–9) has argued that it is difficult to sustain either
the presupposition or the conclusions drawn from it, since Marx was still actively
working on the second and third volumes of Capital in the 1870s, and, at the same
time, was preparing a new edition of the first volume as well as a French translation
which combined elements of the first and second German editions of that volume
(Anderson 2002: 87). Smith further suggests that Marx’s turn to anthropology and
history had a lot to do with the subject matter that the latter was planning to discuss
in the second volume. In volume one, as you will recall, Marx (1863–7/1976: 711–
61) discussed the “simple reproduction of capital” and drew most of his examples
from the British Isles. In the second volume, he would discuss the “accumulation
and reproduction of capital on an expanded scale” (Marx 1865–1885/1981: 565–99).
Smith writes that, at this point,
Marx needed to delve further into the multicultural specificity of the world that capital-
ism was seeking to conquer. . . . Now he needed to know concretely, in exact detail, what
91
capital could expect to confront in its global extension. So it should not be surprising that
Marx chose to investigate non-Western societies precisely at this point. Euro-American
capital was speeding into a world dense with cultural difference. To understand this
difference, and the difference it makes for capital, Marx needed to know as much as
possible about noncapitalist social structures. (Smith 2002: 79)
In other words, Marx’s turn to anthropology and history was not distinct from his
concern with capitalism but rather was an integral part of that project.
With regard to the second question, Marx’s theoretical standpoint and under-
standing of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies did change during his career
(e.g. Krader 1975). The changes are perhaps most apparent in his discussions of
transition, especially the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx developed
one explanation in the 1840s, which relied heavily on Adam Smith’s writings; it
suggests that human society had developed through a progression of stages from
primitive communism through feudalism to capitalism (e.g. Marx and Engels
1848/1976: 482–5). In this perspective, the motor driving the evolution of class and
property relations was set in motion by the growth of trade and competition and
involved the structural differentiation of roles within the labor process (Brenner
1989). This has frequently been characterized and criticized as a unilinear and
Eurocentric perspective. However, as Kevin Anderson (2002: 86) notes, Marx’s
“references to [European] colonialism as a source of civilization and progress had
largely disappeared” by 1857, when he began to develop a second explanation
of transition. This explanation was elaborated in works written from that date
onward—notably the Grundrisse, Capital, and The Ethnological Notebooks (Marx
1857–8/1973, 1863–7/1977, 1880–2/1974). In these, he abandoned the earlier model
and viewed social change in historical-dialectical terms. He paid more attention to
the variability of pre-capitalist and non-capitalist communal societies, made the
concept of modes of production the centerpiece of his analysis, suggested that the
various modes of production were differentially or variably resistant to change,
and implied that not all societies formed in the same way or passed through the
same succession of modes of production. Moreover, he continually clarified and
refined his argument about transition. For example, in the 1867 English edition of
Capital, vol. 1, Marx (1863–7/1977: 91) wrote: “The country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” When
the French edition was published eight years later, he had modified the passage and
made the implications of his analysis of capitalist development more transparent:
“The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those which follow
it on the industrial path [échelle], the image of its own future” (Marx 1875/1963:
549 quoted by Anderson 2002: 88 with emphasis added). Thus, Marx was already
explicitly clear about the possibility of alternative pathways of development for
capitalist societies by the 1870s and for non-industrial and non-Western societies
more than a decade earlier.
History, Culture, and Social Formation • 93
The goals of this chapter are to look at Marx’s conceptual framework especially
with regards to the diversity of human societies and of the modes of production that
constitute them (including those that might be residual, dominant, or emergent in any
given society); his notions of historical trajectories and the historically determined
contingency of transitions; and how, given this standpoint, he might have dealt with
the enormous amount of information about pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies
that archaeologists, sociocultural anthropologists (ethnologists), and historians have
gathered in the last 150 years.
Marx’s Historical-Dialectical Conceptual Framework
Marx’s empirical anthropology was underpinned by a historical-dialectical notion

of society. In this regard, his views bore a generic resemblance to those of Hegel.
Both saw human society as a process of becoming. In Hegel’s view, the dialectical
progression of human history and society toward emancipation culminated in
Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the constitutional mon-
archies of the early nineteenth century. In Marx’s view, the realm of individual
freedom, which Hegel claimed had already been fully realized in the Prussian state,
actually “lies . . . in the future as a real possibility of the present” (Fetscher 1991:
228) As Iring Fetscher put it,
The dialectic of the productive forces and productive relations which effects [sic]
historical progress offers in contrast to Hegel’s dialectic of world spirit no guarantee
that the realm of freedom will be realized; it presents only the objective possibility of
such a development. Should the historically possible revolutionizing of society not come
about, then a relapse into barbarism (Luxemburg) or the “common ruin of the contending
classes” (Marx) is also possible. (Fetscher 1991: 228)
This led Marx (e.g. 1852/1979) to consider factors such as contradiction, the balance
of force among opposed groups, cultural beliefs, and historical contingency in his
empirical studies of particular societies.
Marx was also indebted to Hegel’s critique of the distinction that Kant drew
between appearance and reality. Kant, as you will recall, had claimed that human
beings only know things by their appearance, and that the real essence of the thing,
the “thing-in-itself,” was unknowable. Hegel did not think that there were limits to
the application of human knowledge; in contrast, he claimed that appearance and
essence belong together, and that unfolding of consciousness or knowledge of the
thing-in-itself is a dialectical process that self-corrects its own claims (e.g. Hartnack
1992). Marx (1857–8/1973: 100–8; 1861–3/1971: 536–7) addressed the relation
between appearances and reality in the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value,
where he provided a framework—a point of departure—for clarifying problems
in order to gain practical understanding of everyday life in capitalist society. The
method he developed was analogous to peeling an onion layer by layer, revealing

its internal structure with each successive layer until reaching its core, and then
reassembling the whole. The technique involved looking behind and beneath
superficial appearances, moving from the perceived concrete appearances by a
process of abstraction (breaking the whole into mental constructs) and then back
to the newly appreciated concrete whole with a greater understanding both of the
unity of parts and whole and of the inner dynamics, structure, and contradictions of
that totality. Marx’s ongoing historical analyses of particular societies underwrote
a general conception of society which provided both a framework and a set of
questions for further detailed, empirical sociohistorical studies of those and other
historically specific societies. My goal in this section is to consider the conceptual
underpinnings of his dialectical anthropology and some of its implications for
anthropology today.
Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production
Marx recognized the significance of the diversity of human societies. He also rec-
ognized the significance of the similarities and differences among them and attrib-
uted these to underlying structures that constituted an inner core beneath their
surface appearances. He called these underlying structures modes of production.
In a famous, often-cited passage, he described a mode of production in terms of an
architectural metaphor:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,
which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a
definite stage in development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. . . . At a certain stage of their
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing relations of production, or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated
hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into
fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation
lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure (Marx
(1859/1970: 20).
Marx distinguished and contrasted the capitalist mode of production from a series
of pre-capitalist modes of production. In his view, the four most distinctive features
of industrial capitalist societies were commodity production; private ownership
of the means of production; the social division of labor between a class whose
members owned the means of production and the direct producers who sold their
labor power in order to produce and reproduce the conditions of their existence; and
the appropriation by the owners of the surplus value created by the wage-workers.
Due to these features, the emergence of industrial capitalism ushered in a whole new
rhythm of history—an accelerated history—that was a consequence of continual
innovations in the productive forces and the organization of production as well
as continual disruption of social institutions and practices. Marx and Engels had
already described this in the Communist Manifesto:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx
and Engels 1848/1976: 486–7)
Both in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and in

the Grundrisse, Marx (1858–8/1973: 471–514, 1859/1970: 21) mentioned six pre-
capitalist modes of production—communal (original), Asiatic, ancient, Germanic,
feudal, and Slavonic.1 He sketched in varying detail the structural features of each,
portraying the last five as alternative pathways away from the conditions of the orig-
inal primitive community. He phrased these developments in terms of the dissolution
of communal property and the consequent development of new forms of property
relationships and social divisions of labor. He would elaborate this in subsequent
works, most notably The Ethnological Notebooks.
Primitive communism Natural communities of human beings were essential for

the original form of landed property. These communities were “a presupposition for
the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land” (Marx 1857–
8/1973: 472; emphasis in the original). The communality of these groups—their
shared customs, language, and kinship—combined with various external factors—
such as environmental conditions and the circumstances in which they lived—to
shape their character, beliefs, and practices. Thus, culture and nature itself provide
the bases for the appropriation of the objective conditions of life for their members
as well as foundations for their activity. This meant that “each individual has the
status of proprietor or possessor only as a member of the community” (Lefort
1978/1986: 143). Another way of saying this is that all members of the community
participate in the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods, and
that if sharing breaks down, the community ceases to exist (Leacock 1982: 159).
Another feature of these original communities—i.e. primitive communities in a
temporal rather than developmental sense—was that they were diverse (Patterson
1988). As Marx (1857–8/1973: 472) put it, “this form, with the same land-relation
as its foundation, can realize itself in very different ways” (cf. Marx and Engels
1845–6/1976: 22–3).
The common thread of human society, in Krader’s (1976: 223) view, is life in the
community, where the opposition between the private and the public is non-existent
or very poorly developed. This thread is broken, however, with the appearance of
social classes, when men begin to pursue individual or individual-class interests
in the context of the continuing public institutions of the communal society. These
institutions and the community itself are transformed in the process, as the structures
of the old mode of production are displaced by those of the new. This focuses attention
on the dual character of the relations of production and how they are transformed.
It compels us, on the one hand, to consider how the society was organized for the
production, circulation, distribution, and consumption of goods. It forces us, on the
other, to examine how the organization in which the production of goods, knowledge,
and human beings took place was itself reproduced or transformed. It also focuses
attention on the contradictions that emerged within the relations of production and
how these were resolved. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond (1951/1996) referred to
these tensions as kin/civil conflict and pointed to the fact that their resolution was
potentially always a two-way street.
In some instances, the contradictions were resolved through leveling mechanisms
that inhibited social differentiation within the community, through emigration by part
of the community, and even through murder. In other instances, they were resolved
by the simultaneous dissolution of the old social relations and the emergence of
new ones, whose appearance was often obscured or disguised by the fact that they
were dressed up in old, familiar ideological clothes—i.e., socially and culturally
meaningful categories, practices, and beliefs (Marx 1852/1979: 103–4; 1880–2/1974:
164, 329–30). In a phrase, the dissolution of the primitive community involves
either internal differentiation within the group and the formation of the state, or
alternatively encapsulation by and enmeshment in societies that were already class-
stratified and state-based—i.e., civilized. Read has observed that
The presuppositions of any mode of production are the conditions that constitute a
mode of production but are not produced from them. Their original appearances are
unimaginable or unexplainable according to the particular protocols and practices of that
mode of production. Thus, . . . the very question of these presuppositions is concerned
with the question of what could be called “ideology,” or the manner in which a particular
mode of production justifies itself by rewriting, or over-coding, its own emergence.
(Read 2003: 39–40)
The Asiatic mode of production and the Slavonic transition As small communities
pass from one or another variant of primitive communism to societies manifesting
the Asiatic mode of production,2 they retain ownership or control of the land and
do not develop distinctions between food production and manufacture or between
town and countryside. The members of a community have access to its resources by
virtue of their membership in the community and participation in its activities (Marx
1857–8/1973: 472–4, 494; 1863–7/1977: 477–9). Because of its self-sufficiency,

the community is relatively impervious to the effects of exchange, which, when
it occurs, takes place along the borders with other communities and is limited to
surplus goods or labor that ultimately satisfy the collective needs of its members
(Lefort 1978/1986: 152). Marx described the resiliency of communal property in
Asiatic communities when he wrote:
In the oriental form, the loss [of property] is hardly possible, except by means of
altogether external influences, since the individual member of the commune never enters
into the relation of freedom towards it in which he could lose his (objective, economic)
bond with it. He is rooted to the spot, ingrown. This also has to do with the combination
of manufacture and agriculture, of town (village) and countryside. (Marx (1857–8/1973:
494; emphasis in the original)
The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which

constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed,
spring up again on the same spot and with the same name—this simplicity supplies the
key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking
contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-
ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic units of society
remains untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics. (Marx
1863–7/1977: 479)
Marx discerned two variants of the Asiatic mode of production. In the more
democratic form, rural village communities existed independently side by side; they
were based on an amalgamation of food production and handicraft production and
a fixed division of labor. Besides the mass of the members of each community who
were occupied in much the same way, there were perhaps a dozen or so individuals
who were maintained at the expense of the community as a whole—the headman,
the scribe, the teacher, a few artisans, a poet, and a prayer leader were only a few
of the specialists mentioned by Marx (1863–7/1977: 478–9). In the more despotic
form of the Asiatic mode of production, several of the independent villages were
enmeshed in a larger state-based society that claimed ownership of the land and
resources of which the village communities were merely the possessors. The state,
which represented the unity of the wider society, was an excrescence on the village
communities; its officials were supported by tribute in the form of surplus goods
and labor appropriated from those rural communities. Cities, to the extent that they
appeared at all, developed in areas favorable to external trade, where the heads
of state or their representatives could exchange the goods and services they had
appropriated from the communities for goods or services that were not produced
locally (Marx 1857–8/1973: 472–4; 1880–2/1974: 329).
Marx typically characterized societies manifesting the Asiatic mode of production
as relatively impervious to change. There was oscillation between the democratic and
despotic forms because of the relative instability of the state forms, on the one hand,
and resistance by the autonomous communities that had become enmeshed in their
webs of tributary relations, on the other (Gailey 2003). However, he also portrayed
the Slavonic mode of production as a transitional form resulting in serfdom; it
occurred in those circumstances where the headmen of Asiatic societies were able
to modify the communal property of the villages and appropriate it for their own,
potentially creating serfs who, while they had effective possession of the land, were
compelled by extra-economic means to transfer goods, labor, or both to the lords
(Marx 1857–8/1973: 472–4, 497; Hilton 1991; Ste Croix 1981: 135–6, 210–11).
The ancient mode of production A second form of property was that found in many
of the diverse societies that constituted the social mosaic of the classical Greek and
Roman worlds (Marx 1857–8/1973: 474–6; Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 33;
Finley 1973, 1991; Hindess and Hirst 1975: 80–108; Ste Croix 1981). Community
was once again the precondition for their existence; however, in these instances, it
was a community composed of independent, self-sufficient landowners who maint-
ained their equality as citizens by participating in the activities of their city-states,
such as the protection of its public (state) lands, waging war with neighboring groups,
and managing relations with the outside world. Marx put it in the following way:
The commune—the state—is, on one side, the relation of these free and equal private
proprietors to one another, their bond against the outside, and is at the same time their
safeguard. . . . The presupposition of the survival of the community is the preservation of
equality among its free self-sustaining peasants, and their own labour as the condition
for the survival of their property. . . . The survival of the commune is the reproduction of
all its members as self-sustaining peasants whose surplus time belongs precisely to the
commune, the work of war etc. The property in one’s own labour is mediated by property
in the condition of labour—the hide of the land, guaranteed in turn by the existence of
the commune, and that in turn by surplus labor in the form of military service etc by
the commune members. It is not cooperation in wealth-producing labour by means of
which the commune member reproduces himself, but rather cooperation in labour for
communal interests (imaginary and real) for the upholding of the association inwardly
and outwardly. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 475–6)
In other words, the independent peasant-citizens cooperated not as direct producers

but rather as citizens with particular obligations to the state and rights that derived
from their citizenship. For example, citizens were obliged to protect state property or
wage war, but only they had the right to appropriate surplus labor or goods resulting
from plunder or tribute. Social-class distinctions between direct producers and non-
producers in the ancient communities were defined in terms legal statuses, such as
slave or citizen. These statuses were often further complicated, because they could
also intersect with groups that were defined either by kinship, place of residence
within the city-state, or historical circumstances (Marx 1857–8/1973: 478).
Marx was acutely aware of historical contingency and the specificity of the
sociopolitical dynamics that shaped these ancient communities:
The commune, although already a product of history here, not only in fact but also
known as such, and therefore possessing an origin, is the presupposition of property in
land and soil—i.e., of the relation of the working subject to the natural presuppositions
of labour as belonging to him—but this belonging [is] mediated by his being a member
of the state—hence by a presupposition regarded as divine etc. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 475;
emphasis in the original)
The difficulties which the commune encounters can only arise from other communes,
which have either previously occupied the land and soil, or which disturb the commune
in its own occupation. War is therefore the great comprehensive task, the great communal
labor which is require either to occupy the objective conditions of being there alive, or
to protect and perpetuate the occupation. Hence the commune consisting of families
initially organized in a warlike way—as a system of war and army, and this is one of the
conditions of its being there as a proprietor. The concentration of the residences in town
[is the] basis of this bellicose organization. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 474)
The expanded reproduction of these communities involved wars of conquest,

plunder, increased reliance on slave production on state lands, possibilities for
the concentration of property ownership by some citizens at the expense of other
citizens, the fragmentation of estates, the growth of foreign (overseas) trade, the
monetization of the economy, and even the appearance of wage-workers which
created contradictions that resulted, at times, in the restructuring of social relations
even in circumstances where the forces of production were poorly developed (Banaji
2001).
The Germanic mode of production In an effort to understand the Germanic tribes

on the periphery of the Roman State, Marx considered a third route away from
primitive communism. In his view, Germanic society manifested a communal form
of production in which the social and political-economic relationships that joined
its members together had to be continuously renewed (Bonte 1977: 174–6). The
individual was a private proprietor of the land and had access to the commons
through participation in periodic gatherings of the community. Here, the relations
of production are based in the household. Social continuity as well as the use of
common lands and other resources depended on the household’s participation
in larger community structures and activities. Marx conceptualized this mode
production in the following way:
Among the Germanic tribes, where the individual family chiefs settled in the forests,
long distances apart, the commune exists, already from outward observation, only in
periodic gatherings-together (Vereinigung) of the commune members, although their
unity-in-itself is posited in their ancestry, language, and history, etc. The commune
thus appears as the coming-together (Vereinigung) not as a being-together (Verein);
as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a
unit. The commune therefore does not in fact exist as a state or a political body, as in
classical antiquity, because it does not exist as a city. For the commune to come into
real existence, the free landed proprietors have to hold a meeting, whereas e.g. in Rome
it exists even apart from these assemblies in the existence of the city itself and of the
officials presiding over it. True the ager publicus, the communal or people’s land, as
distinct from individual property, also occurs among the Germanic tribes. It takes the
form of hunting land, grazing land, timber land, etc., the part of the land which cannot be
divided if it to serve as means of production in this specific form. But this ager publicus
does not appear, as with the Romans e.g. as the particular economic presence of the state
as against the private proprietors, so that these latter are actually private proprietors as
such, in so far as they are excluded, deprived, like the plebians, from using the ager
publicus. Among the Germanic tribes, the ager publicus appears rather merely as a
complement to individual property, and figures as property only to the extent that it is
defended militarily as the common property of one tribe against a hostile tribe. (Marx
1857–8/1973: 483; emphasis in the original)
Thus, the diverse forms of Germanic society were focused on the land. This contrasted
with the emphasis of ancient societies on the city; of Asiatic societies which exhibited
a unity of town and countryside; of feudal societies which began with land as “seat
of history [and] whose further development then moves forward in the contradiction
between town and countryside; [and of] the modern [age which] is the urbanization
of the countryside, not the ruralization of the city as in classical antiquity” (Marx
1857–8/1973: 479). Marx (1881/1983: 108; emphasis in the original) would later
add that “the agricultural rural commune therefore emerged in Germania from a
more archaic type; it was the product of spontaneous development rather than being
imported ready-made from Asia. It may also be found in Asia—in the East Indies—
always as the final term or last period of the archaic formation.” It is important
to keep in mind, as Pierre Bonte (1977: 176) remarked, that Marx’s comments
on the historic specificity of Germanic societies have been placed in a different
context by societal evolutionists who, when they mention it at all, see this mode of
production as a developmental stage between primitive communism and feudalism.
Antonio Gilman (1996) has also contrasted Marx’s view of Germanic societies
with conceptualizations of hierarchically organized chiefdoms that have tended to
dominate anthropological and archaeological discussions of social stratification
from the 1960s onward. These notions have also been questioned by Carole Crumley
(1987) and Christine Gailey (1987) who respectively emphasized the importance of
heterarchy and ambiguity in kin-stratified, communal societies.
The feudal mode of production Marx’s discussion of feudalism was neither straight-
forward nor systematic, as Perry Anderson (1974a: 411–28), Eric Hobsbawm (1964:
41–9), and others have observed. 3 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels
(1845–6/1976: 33–5) described feudalism as starting during the Middle Ages in
the countryside; its genesis involved the transformation of structures that occurred
with the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire—the deterioration of agricultural
production, the collapse of industry and trade, and the decrease of both urban and
rural populations. In their words,
These conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them,
together with the influence of the Germanic military constitution, led to the development
of feudal property. Like tribal and communal property, it is also based on a community;
but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the
ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism
is developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of
landownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility
power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as just as much as the ancient
communal property, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of
association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different
conditions of production.
This feudal structure of landownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape
of corporative property, the feudal organisation of the trades. Here property consisted
chiefly in the labour of each individual [organized into guilds]. (Marx and Engels 1845–
6/1976: 34; emphasis in the original)
Marx and Engels often linked feudalism with serfdom. Marx (1868/1987a: 557)
portrayed feudal society as a “struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom.”
Engels (1876–8/1987: 164–6; 1884/1972: 213–5) stressed the importance of small-
scale agriculture in feudal society as well as the internal stratification that existed
in rural communities during the European Middle Ages with freeholders at one end
and serfs at the other. In addition, both saw small-scale craft production and trade
in the towns as developments that would eventually erode the feudal class structure
and pave the way for capitalism (e.g. Marx 1864–94/1981: 443–52, 751–4, 917–38;
Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 484–9).
Feudalism, for historian Guy Bois (1976/1984: 398), was a combination of small-
scale individual production and “the seigneurial levy secured by a constraint of
political (or extra-economic) origin.” Agricultural production was predominant in the
total economy. It was small-scale production because of the constraints imposed by
the limited development of agricultural technology; thus, investments in agriculture
rested on the shoulders of the peasant producers. There was social stratification
within the village community between those peasant production units that owned
ploughs and those smallholders who eked out a livelihood with their inadequate
landholdings and labor. The various layers of the village community were joined
together by the shared possession of pastures, woodlands, and other resources;
the artisans and merchants in the towns were also organized into communities
(guilds) that strived to protect the interests and knowledge of their members from
the exactions of the lords. The manorial estates of the nobility were worked with
the same agricultural implements and techniques as those of the peasant landholders
and sat like an excrescence on the whole system of rural production. “The levy
was the principal aspect of the lord’s economic role” (Bois 1976/1984: 396). The
levy imposed on the peasant producers by the lords provided the former with rent
and had a constant but varied indirect impact on the activities of the latter. Since
the agricultural technology and techniques were relatively stable, the growth of
feudal society involved the addition of new production units in the countryside;
its decline entailed a reduction in the number of production units. In Bois’s view,
when the possibilities for expansion were exhausted, the contradictions that had
accumulated during the process of growth were honed, the existing forms of
exploitation disintegrated, and the relations of production were reorganized (Bois
1976/1984: 393–408). In this regard, the decline of the feudal mode of production
in Europe mirrored its crystallization in the tenth century, which involved not only
the disintegration of an earlier mode of production still rooted to some extent in the
productive activity of slaves but also the adoption of more productive agricultural
techniques and technology, the growth of trade, and the appearance of a market
for land. It involved a new dynamic, one that was based on interdependence and
inequality with new forms of surplus extraction (Bois 1989/1992: 88–93).
In the mid 1970s, economist Samir Amin (1973/1976: 13–16) drew a distinction
between the primitive communal mode of production, on the one hand, and the other
pre-capitalist modes of production discussed above, on the other. He grouped the
latter into a single category, which he called the “tribute-paying” mode of production.
Amin then asked whether the feudal mode of production was merely a “borderline”
case that was peripheral to a more “central” tributary mode of production. In posing
the question, he was attempting to deal with the historic specificity of the European
case. His standpoint implies the coexistence or articulation of the feudal and other
modes of production as it is manifested in historically specific societies. In this
regard, for example, Marx had written that
Since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations

derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form,
or even travestied. . . . In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production
which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the
others. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 105–7)
In Western Europe, . . . the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself
the whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed,
it has at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to the
antiquated mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of
decay. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 931)
This has two implications. First, societies are “concrete combinations of different
modes of production organized under the dominance of one of them” (Anderson
1974b: 22n6; emphasis in the original); this perspective was subsequently adopted
by anthropologist Eric Wolf (1982: 79–88) and historian John Haldon (1993: 63–9)
among others. The second implication is that it is possible to speak, as literary critic
Raymond Williams (1977: 121–8) has done, of each historically specific society as
a combination of residual (antiquated), dominant, and emergent cultures or modes
of production.
Societies and Cultures
Modes of production have been described as the “bare bones of a Marxist analysis
of historical process” (Hilton 1985: 6), and as “the base of our understanding of
the variety of human societies and their interaction, as well as of their historical
dynamics” (Hobsbawm 1984: 46). They consist of the unobservable processes and
relations that are simultaneously revealed in the everyday life of a given society
and obscured or concealed by that phenomenal world of appearances. They are the
“bare bones” or the inner layers of historically specific societies that are covered by
muscle, flesh, skin, and even warts. Another way of saying this is that historically
particular societies are totalities that exist at different levels; they are structured and
historically determined complexes, whose parts are not only continually changing
but are also linked to one another by constantly shifting, changing, and dynamic sets
of relationships and contradictions.
Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 36) developed the base–superstructure model of
a mode of production in The German Ideology in the mid 1840s, a model that Marx
made famous in the passage from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy cited earlier in this chapter. Here, as you will recall, Marx wrote
about the “the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a
legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social
consciousness” (1859/1970: 20). This passage has been interpreted in three ways.
One is that the associated forms of social consciousness are mere reflections of the
economic base. A second interpretation is that the forms of social consciousness
constitute a superstructure parallel to the legal and political superstructure. These are
reductive arguments that make it difficult to consider art and philosophy, for example,
as anything but epiphenomena of the economy or the state. A third interpretation is
that the associated form of social consciousness—that is, culture—is intertwined
with praxis and social relations as these are manifested in particular societies. This
view also derives from The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels wrote
The production of ideas, conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven

with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life.
Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct
efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in
the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men [and
women] are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men [and
women], as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces
and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. . . .
Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms
of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer the retain semblance of
independence. They have no history, no development; but men [and women] developing
their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their actual
world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. (Marx and Engels 1845–
6/1976: 36–7; emphasis added)
This third interpretation allows us to make sense of passages that do not employ
a reductive base–superstructure model: for example, those in The Eighteenth
Brumaire, which refer to French social structure in the mid nineteenth century,
or in the Grundrisse, which are concerned with Greek art and myth in classical
antiquity and the fascination of the German bourgeoisie with those forms. Consider
the following:
Upon the different forms of property [i.e., big landed property and capital], upon the
social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly
formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class
[both the aristocratic and capitalist fractions] creates and forms them out of its material
foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to
whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they are
the real motives and starting-point of his activity. (Marx 1852/1979: 128)
Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem
engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never
yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and
costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured
disguise and borrowed language. (Marx 1852/1979: 103–4)
In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are all
out of proportion to the general development of the society, hence also to the material
foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization. . . . But the difficulty
lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of
social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a
certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model. (Marx 1857–8/1973:
110–11)
In these passages there are not only correspondences between culture, on the
one hand, and the forms of production and social relations, on the other, but also
reciprocal interactions between them. Culture is the expression of life as it is shaped by
historically specific forms of production and ensembles of social relations (Williams
1983/1989). It involves both objectification (the process of rendering human needs
into material objects that satisfy needs) and materialization (the embodiment within
those objects of social relations) (Jones 2002: 12). It is “bound up with an existing
state of affairs and . . . is a condition which makes it possible to change that state of
affairs” (Outhwaite 1991: 128). As Marx put it,
In order to examine the connection between spiritual [i.e., intellectual] production and
material production, it is above all necessary to grasp the latter not as a general category
but in definite historical form. Thus for example different kinds of spiritual production
correspond to the capitalist mode of production and to the mode of production of the
Middle Ages. If material production itself is not conceived in its specific historical form,
it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding
to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other. (Marx 1861–3/1963: 285)
Here, the relation between culture, on the one hand, and the economy or the state,
on the other, is complex not simple and multi-directional rather than a one-way
street. In a phrase, culture is the arena in which the ambiguities, antagonisms,
and contradictions of everyday life are expressed, reproduced, and occasionally
resolved.
Pre-Capitalist Societies: Limited, Local, and Vital
Marx was struck by the diversity of human societies, past and present. He suggested
that a relatively small number of modes of production, representing alternative path-
ways out of the archaic or primitive communal forms of society, underpinned this
diversity. In his words,
The archaic or primary formation of our globe itself contains a series of layers from
various ages, the one superimposed on the other. Similarly, the archaic formation of
society exhibits a series of different types. . . . These older types all rest upon natural
kinship relations between members of the commune. (Marx 1881/1983: 103)
The history of the decline of the primitive communities has still to be written (it would be
wrong to put them all on the same plane; in historical as in geological formations, there is
a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary, and other types). (Marx 1881/1983: 107)
Moreover, societies manifesting one or another of the pre-capitalist modes of

production were only “limited” and “local developments of humanity” (Marx 1857–8/
1973: 409–10), but they possessed “an incomparably greater [natural] vitality than
the Semitic, Greek, Roman, and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies” (Marx
1881/1983: 107). He believed that “we should be thoroughly acquainted with all
the historical twists and turns” of the archaic formations (Marx 1881/1983: 106–7).
One reason for his interest was the spread of capitalism from the mid nineteenth
century onward and its articulation with various kinds of pre-capitalist societies
in Asia, Africa, and the Americas; the diversity of these articulations provided
alternative snapshots into what potentially could happen in the future. Let us briefly
consider two points that are relevant to this discussion of pre-capitalist societies and
cultures.
First, Marx characterized the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist
societies in terms of the relentless drive of the former toward universality, its constant
development of the forces of production, its continual creation of new needs, its
exploitation of both workers and nature, its continual destruction of local or national
barriers and traditions, and its reworking of old ways of life. He also pointed to the
contradictions reproduced in capitalist society and to the resistance they provoked.
He wrote that
capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as
of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence
of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones
appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first
time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases
to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous
laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an
object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital
drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as
well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs,
and reproduction of old ways of life. It is destructive toward all of this, and constantly
revolutionizes it, tearing down all barriers which hem in the development of the forces
of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the
exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.
But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally
beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since,
every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which
are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality
towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a
certain stage of development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier
to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension. (Marx 1857–8/1973:
409–10; emphasis in the original)
Thus, the development of capitalist society was fraught with contradictions that
were concrete and historically specific (context-dependent) to the capitalist mode of
production (e.g. wage-laborer vs. capitalist, the use value of commodities vs. their
exchange value, or the clash between capitalist and small peasant property). On
the one hand, they have contributed to the universal development of the forces of
production and the productive power of labor; on the other hand, they have done so
at a tremendous cost to the members of the societies experiencing that development.
Marx (1868/1987b: 552) saw the development of large-scale industry and all that it
implies as “the mother of the antagonism, but also as the producer of the material
and intellectual conditions for resolving these antagonisms.”
Second, dialectical contradictions were the motors of historical movement. For
Marx, these internal antagonisms had the capacity to erode and dissolve old social
forms and to underwrite the crystallization of new ones (Bhaskar 1991a; Godelier
1966/1972: 345–61). They were historical, structural, and context specific. They
appear under historically specific circumstances and obscure the conditions in which
they were formed. While the interactions of these countervailing structures and
relations with one another and with other parts of the social whole in particular
historical contexts can reinforce, hinder, subvert, transform, or resolve the
antagonisms over time, they do not always do so. Whether or not change occurs
depends on the balance of forces that exist at a particular moment in the production
and reproduction of a given society. As historian John Haldon notes,
Different modes of production place different constraints upon the possibilities for
change, on the one hand, and upon the structures of political power, on the other, which
are particularly important for understanding the internal dynamic of a given historical
social formation. (Haldon 1993: 57)
A mode of production cannot of itself give rise to a different mode of production, but
it can generate at times the conditions that may lead to its break up or transformation.
(Haldon 2006: 193; emphasis in the original)
This is why Marx (1863–7/1977: 479; 1881/1983: 107) spoke not only about the
vitality and resilience of primitive communal societies—their apparent unchange-
ability and tendency to reproduce existing social relations—but also about the
relentless drive of capitalism to transform nature, itself, and other societies around
it. It also accounts for Marx’s comments about the “continual retrogressions and
circular movements” of history and the low regard he had for ideas of progress,
especially those that ignored the ordinary peoples of society (Engels and Marx
1844–5/1975: 83–4).
Third, Marx used abstractions that operated at different scales and levels of
generality in his discussions of sociohistorical change. In some instances, he seems
to have been using a telescope to capture the “big picture” in a sentence or two—e.g.
his highly abstract claim that “changes in the economic foundation lead soon or later
to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” (Marx 1859/1970: 21).
In other instances, he seems to have employed binoculars or even a microscope to

examine and depict almost day-to-day changes in the balance of force in France in
1848–51 and again in 1870–1, both of which were particularly volatile moments in
its history (Marx 1852/1979; 1871/1986). Each perspective allowed him to organize
information and to grasp the particularities of society in a different manner. Each
allowed him to open up a distinctive line of inquiry. Shifting from one level of
abstraction to another allowed him to explore the sociohistorical dynamics of various
societies, to compare their similarities and differences to examine the conditions in
which they were produced and reproduced, and to develop more general arguments
about the significance of the insights he gained. Studying these dynamics at local
or regional levels also yields a much more complicated picture of sociohistorical
development than ones that project them either as a unilinear succession of stages
leading from barbarism to civilization or as the unfolding of some natural potential
for internal differentiation and the formation of structure, and that avoid altogether
the issue of contingency.
Human History is Messy
Archaeologists, historians, and historically minded anthropologists study past soc-

ieties. While archaeologists rely on material remains and spatial associations that
have survived to the present to reconstruct the tempo and mode of everyday life in
some past society, historians use written records and historical anthropologists use
interviews of living peoples combined with traditions and documents to accomplish
that goal. Once we move beyond the specificities of the kinds of evidence and
methods they use, all of them are concerned with the kinds of society and the
varieties of social relations, processes, and contexts that produced those particular
patterns of objects—including artifacts, texts, and traditions—recovered from the
archaeological and historical records. The archaeological record provides virtually
all of the evidence of human history until the last 5,000 years, when writing systems
appeared in isolated parts of the world. These areas of limited literacy were like small
islands in a vast sea. It has only been in the last century or so that literacy spread to
many other parts of the world. As a result, archaeologists continue to provide much,
but not all, of the evidence for human history well into the twenty-first century.
During the twentieth century, many archaeologists have focused their efforts
on three questions: (1) the origins of early human societies, which is typically
viewed in relation to the development of tool-making; (2) the origins of pastoral and
agricultural economies, which involves both the transformation and the development
of the productive forces and the appearance of sedentism; and (3) the origins of
states, which is often glossed as the rise of civilization or the appearance of cities.4
At the most general level of abstraction, they have confirmed that kin-communal
societies both preceded and were contemporary with pre-capitalist states, and that
industrial capitalism appeared rather late on the world stage, only during the last 500
or so years. They have demonstrated rather convincingly the diversity of societies
across time and space, the diversity of their relationships with the natural world
they inhabited, and the diversity of the trajectories of sociohistorical development
in different parts of the world. They have found evidence that suggests the existence
of social inequality in some societies and not in others. At a more concrete level,
they have examined the internal dynamics and external relationships of some of
these developmental trajectories, and have identified similar processes, conditions,
or historical moments in some but not all of them. Given the messiness of human
history, these are significant contributions to our understanding of what happened in
the past. Let us highlight a few of the more salient ones.
While there are some broad similarities between humans and modern chimpanzees,
sharing seems to be a distinctly human feature. For example, there are published
examples of modern chimpanzees making tools, cooperating during hunting, and
even sharing prey with other participants and bystanders. What distinguishes these
behaviors from human sharing is that they are independent or separate events,
which are neither integrated into a cultural system nor are they regular, everyday
occurrences (Ichikawa 2005: 151–7). For the most part, contemporary apes do not
share with other members of their bands, and presumably our common ancestors
3–5 million years ago also did not share food regularly with one another either. Thus,
there was conceivably a period in human history when our ancestors made stone
tools, perhaps talked with one another, and even harvested or scavenged food side
by side but did not share the products of their labor with one another. The advent
of sharing dissolved this proto-mode of production; precisely when that occurred,
however, is still hotly debated by archaeologists with estimates ranging from about 2
million to 50,000 years ago (Binford 1985; Isaac 1979).
For most of history, human beings lived in small groups of individuals with whom
they interacted on a regular basis for most of their lives. These bands ranged from a
couple of hundred individuals during those parts of the year when they concentrated
in particular localities to a dozen or so individuals when they dispersed; there were
both ecological and social reasons for this pattern of aggregation and dispersion.
Their mode of production was based on sharing the foods they foraged, trapped,
hunted, or fished. Food was consumed immediately, either on the spot or shortly
thereafter. While movable property—like carrying bags, clothing, or spears—might
have been individually owned, land in a general sense and its resources were held
in common with complex rules of access and equally complex and strict obligations
to share with others written into the ethical fabric of everyday life (Barnard and
Woodburn 1988). Because of the unity of the production process and the direct
participation of all members in the band in the production, distribution, circulation,
and consumption of socially produced goods, each individual was dependent on
the group as a whole, and there was no structural difference between producers and
non-producers. Such a distinction would exist for only a moment in time, and only
from the perspective of an individual who was too young for, too old for, or not a
participant in a particular labor process. The distinction disappeared when the focus
extended beyond the particular moment, the particular individual, or the particular
work activity; it was inverted as a direct producer in one activity became a consumer
in the next. Moreover, membership in these mobile bands was likely to have been
fairly flexible as males, females, or both moved into and away from the core group
during the course of their lives for various reasons, including interpersonal ones.
Leadership, as Richard Lee (2005: 19) noted for a different context, was likely
“subject to the constraints of popular opinion. . . . The leader of a band could persuade
but not command. This important aspect of their way of life allowed for a degree of
freedom unheard of in more hierarchically organized societies.” It is likely that
there were probably also status distinctions in these communities reflecting age,
gender, kin relations, and life experience among other things. It is also possible that
the members of these ideologically egalitarian societies occasionally experienced
individuals or groups among them who attempted to forge hierarchically ordered
social relations; these efforts were likely tolerated briefly in some instances and
resisted in others.
Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, new modes of subsistence—pastoralism
and plant cultivation—were grafted onto existing economies in various parts of both
the old and new worlds (Balter 2007). Following herd animals and cultivating plants
involve new relations between human communities and their natural environments.
One of the most important is the delay between labor investments—e.g. preparing
the land, planting the crop, and tending it—and the time at which they are actually
consumed. During that period, other modes of subsistence must be productive
enough to sustain the incipient herders and farmers. It is likely that agriculture,
herding, and cultivation were only a few of a number of subsistence strategies
during their initial phases of development, and that, as they grew more productive,
their relative importance in terms of the amount of time and energy devoted to them
increased relative to other subsistence practices in their communities (Flannery
1968). In the process, subsistence activities that were once important now became
minor activities or were dropped altogether as steadily more time was devoted to
the preparation of fields, the construction and repair of walls and canals, to tending
the crops, or to moving herds from one seasonal pasture to another. In a phrase,
their members reorganized and rescheduled the time they devoted to particular
subsistence particular practices; in some instances, they may even have begun
to specialize in certain activities at the expense of others creating new spatially
organized, intraregional technical divisions of labor as a result of the new forms of
cooperation which were emerging (e.g. Patterson 1999).
These communities elaborated delayed-return economies that relied increasingly
on the further development of food preservation and storage techniques (Testart
1982). Thus, foods that were acquired at one time of the year were processed and
stored in order to be shared, consumed, or exchanged at a later time. The capacity to
store food and other resources for long periods underwrote formation of permanent
settlements—that is, villages that were occupied on a year-round basis. In many but
not all parts of the world, the appearance of sedentary villages was closely associated
with the development of food production technologies such as plant cultivation in
Mesopotamia or highland Mexico or net-fishing in coastal Peru (Moseley 1975).
More importantly, these communities seem to have elaborated practices that
involved the actualization of extra-domestic forms of social groups, such as clans
or lineages, that were corporate landholding groups whose members placed new
emphases on property rights and shared only with close kin or affines. As Alan
Barnard and James Woodburn (1988: 11) note, these social relations were “usually
but not always linked with delayed yields on labour.” They point out that the kinds
of property rights that might have been elaborated include those over certain bodies
and practices of knowledge, land and water sources, movable property, and the labor
or reproductive capacities of particular categories of individuals (such as unmarried
women). Archaeologists have shown that societies with these concerns regarding
property, status differences, and some degree of centralized decision-making existed
side by side with ones, like those described above, that exhibited little internal
differentiation. Mesopotamia was an area where two forms of egalitarian, food-
storing agricultural societies with different spatial distributions coexisted during the
sixth and fifth millennia BC (Flannery 2002; Frangipane 2007: 153). Their relations
with each other and with contemporary pastoral peoples living around them were
complex and shifting as social conditions changed.
In the fishing-foraging and early farming communities on the central Peruvian
coast of the fourth to the end of the first millennia BC, the relations of production
that developed involved the elaboration of community-level relations and their
articulation with the domestic level, where the real appropriation of raw materials
continued to take place. The emergent community-level relations linked a new,
spatially organized technical division of labor with traditional age- and gender-
based activities. They also underwrote labor processes and activities—such as the
construction of fish-drying terraces, monumental platform mounds, and irrigation
systems—that were well beyond the capacities of a single or even a small number of
cooperating households, and that constituted the conditions for the reproduction of the
society. The reproduction of these societies depended on the continued participation
of households in community-level structures and activities. The results of this were
(1) that each member of the community was dependent on the group as a whole; (2)
that all adults participated directly but differently in the production, distribution,
circulation, and consumption of the social product; and (3) that it is difficult to
discern status or wealth differences from the goods associated with human burials
(Patterson 1991: 14–20). By 1000 BC, the societies on the central Peruvian coast were
also linked with nearby communities that had similar but not necessarily identical
forms of sociopolitical organization and with more distant societies in the Andes that
potentially had quite different forms of surplus appropriation (Burger 1992).
The formation of social-class structures and state-based institutions never appear

in isolation from one another or from other changes in a society. They involve
the simultaneous dissolution of old community-level relations of production and
their reconstitution along lines that facilitate the extraction of the labor or goods
of one group by the members of another group. The appearance of exploitative
social relations is related to other changes in the society and to the creation of new
sociohistorical circumstances and balances of force within the society. Class and
state formation are always contingent processes, one lane of a two-lane street—the
other being the state/non-state transition or the disintegration of class structures as
well as the institutions and practices of the states they support. They are often linked
with violence, conquest, repression, and cooption, especially from the standpoint
of peoples that become enmeshed in their relations. The appearance of social-class
structures is always linked to the institutions, practices, and legal codes of the state,
which simultaneously represent the interests of the dominant class and afford an
arena of struggle for fractions within the ruling class. States ensure that bodies are
counted for taxation and conscription, both of which require records (the origins of
writing systems); that internal dissent is suppressed or deflected outward toward
other communities; that bureaucracies are formed and overseers are selected; that
stationary or moving capitals are established; that production is reorganized to
satisfy new patterns of distribution and exchange; and even occasionally that new
distinctions are created between town dwellers and their rural kinfolk. Customary
authority, exercised in the context of these processes, is often transformed into the
exploitative exercise of power.
Hierarchical social relations, that facilitate the exploitation of one group by the
members of another, have undoubtedly appeared in a variety of ways. All involved
the ability of rulers, their families, close kin, and retainers to extract tribute in
the form of labor or goods from the direct producers in the society. Drawing on
different bodies of evidence, archaeologists have placed this original extortion of
the community in the political realm of Early Dynastic society in Mesopotamia
in the late third millennium BC, where the lands of the temples were sequestered
from the community and became in effect the property of the temples, which used
surplus variously as a source of income, as a fund of goods for exchange with other
communities, and as insurance for the community in times of emergency. In this
view, the original extortion resided in the custodians of the shrines who arrogated
or were granted privileges, powers, and restrictions that distinguished them from
the rest of the population; they were “able to exploit their position crystallizing
differences in rank and privileges between themselves and the rest of the population
and adding political elements to their ritual offices” (Southall 1988: 75; Diakonoff
1972). A second trajectory, outlined for a slightly earlier period in Mesopotamian
history, argues that ad hoc and provisional, political authority that was granted for
a limited period of time was usurped and transformed into power (Jacobsen 1943,
1957; cf. Gearing 1961). A third trajectory has been discerned by Michael Blake and
John Clark (1999), archaeologists working on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico.
They suggest that the appearance of internal social differentiation toward the end
of the third millennium BC was linked with the appearance of big men—individuals
whose social position did not rest on traditional kinship and the customary rights and
obligations that were moored in kin relations—during conditions that were shaped
by the increased exchange of goods, especially exotic ones, with other communities.
These big men manipulated social relations to create personal followings, to gain
control over the production of others, and to appropriate goods that enhanced their
own position as well of those of their followers. They redistributed the exotic goods
they obtained during village feasts, and they supported part-time craft specialists in
their households.
From the perspective of Marx’s base–superstructure metaphor, the social categ-
ories that regulate the relations of production are cultural or superstructural rather
than ones formed in the economic base. As a result, the economic aspect of the
society is concealed or masked by these structures. Since the cultural or super-
structural moments are dominant during the process of class formation, the social
classes that emerge will be defined largely in ideological terms. Thus, the true nature
of the economic is obscured; the emergent class structure consists of a hierarchy of
social categories that cannot be reduced directly to economic class relations. This
hierarchy of non-economic social categories disguises both the real economic class
relations and the real contradictions that emerge from them. In such a situation,
the economic class relations appear different from their real nature, while the
hierarchical social categories of the class structure appear as “natural” relations. The
formation of the class structures is, in the last analysis, based on the economic order
of the society—the unequal accumulation of surplus product by the various social
categories that make up the hierarchy. The formation of the class structure is the
condition for the formation of economic class relations to the extent that this process
determines the place of the different social categories in the production process and
the reorganization of the labor processes to incorporate exploitation and extortion
by one or more of these categories. The reorganization of the labor processes,
which involves the progressive differentiation of the activities of these categories,
provides the conditions for the further development of the contradictions based on
the appearance of exploitation and extortion.
The ruling classes of pre-capitalist states live on the tribute in the form of labor,
goods, rents, or taxes that they are able to extract from the direct producers. As
a result, they have little interest in changing property relations, since these were
the bases from which their incomes are derived. In other words, the kin-organized
communities of class-stratified, state-based societies continue to be the dominant
units of production even though their survival is continually threatened by the claims
and exactions of states that are unwilling or unable to reorganize production on a
non-kin basis (Patterson 2005). While the state can intervene in the production and
reproduction of the local kin communities, its survival depends on their continued
existence. In these societies, production is organized for use rather than exchange,
and the items and goods kept by the direct producers as well as those appropriated by
the state and the dominant classes are also used or consumed although some portion
of the tribute may enter into market exchange networks as it did in Aztec Mexico
(Hicks 1987, 1999).
Building on Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 472–4) notion that exchange occurs on the
borders between societies, archaeologists have pointed to differences among trib-
utary states, most notably those based on extracting tribute from subject farming
communities, like the Inca Empire of Peru, and mercantile states, like the Aztecs,
that were organized to exert military control over trade routes and administrative
control over those groups involved in the production and circulation of goods (Amin
1973/1976: 37–52; Thapar 1981). The ruling classes of mercantile states exploited
the direct producers of other societies rather than their own. Merchants are the
intermediate agents in the process of surplus extraction; they transfer to their own
state and ruling class the surplus goods appropriated by the ruling classes of other
societies or goods that they themselves extracted directly from the producers. By
itself, trade does not cause state formation; however, “monopolies over imported
prestige goods can play an important role in the growth of social stratification and
centralization of political-economic control” (Gledhill 1978: 241). Since subsistence
production is not a major source of state revenues, local peasant, pastoral, and
farming communities retain a great deal of autonomy and are only weakly linked
with the state. Mercantile states are often urban-based. Their cities are inhabited
by the ruling class, various state officials, merchants, and artisans engaged in the
production of goods for exchange. Different consumption patterns occur between the
city and the villages and hamlets of the surrounding countryside (Brumfiel 1991).
Archaeologists have long been concerned with the interconnections of craft
production and specialization, on the one hand, and the processes of social
differentiation associated with class and state formation, on the other (e.g. Costin
1991, 2001; Patterson 2005). One of the earliest was V. Gordon Childe’s (1950/2004)
historically contingent thesis of combined and uneven development. Childe argued
that (1) agriculture facilitated surplus production and underwrote both technical and
social divisions of labor; (2) the ruling classes of lowland Mesopotamia used part
of this surplus to support full-time craft specialists, notably metalsmiths who relied
on ores obtained from the periphery; and (3) since the initial costs were born by the
lowland elites, development occurred on the margins of civilization with significant
local investments. In his view, the development of full-time craft specialization was
linked with increasing social structural differentiation, the emerging interdependency
of food-producers and artisans, and the growth of market exchange. Craft production
was linked with production for exchange and the activities of individuals who
were removed at least spatially from their natal communities. Elizabeth Brumfiel
and Tim Earle (1987) drew a distinction between independent artisans and those
attached to patrons. Joan Gero and Cristina Scattolin (2002: 69) pointed out that the
distinction frequently drawn between domestic and specialized production makes

the two incomparable and relegates household divisions of labor to “background
work.” Edward Harris (2002: 86) raises the issue of whether specialized production
was intended for local consumption or for export. Other archaeologists—Edward
Schortman and Patricia Urban (2004) among others—have examined how craft
production was organized in particular socioeconomic settings in Central America
on the southeastern periphery of the Maya states.
The processes of class and state formation generate contradictions and conflicts
between the demands of the ruling class and the state on the community, on the one
hand, and the rights and obligations that community leaders have to their kin and
neighbors, on the other (Zagarell 1986: 157–60). These local authorities were caught
on the horns of a dilemma, which Stanley Diamond (1951/1996) has called kin/civil
conflict. These local leaders simultaneously had rights and obligations toward the
members of the communities they represented and toward the state. They had to be
generous and concerned with the well-being of their communities at the same time
that they appropriated goods and labor from its members as representatives of the
state. Their positions were fraught with contradictions. They could find themselves
pitted against the state or, alternatively, their own kin and neighbors. They could
pit their kin against other the members of other communities. They could find
themselves opposed by their kin, other groups, and the state. The contradictions and
their resolutions were often violent as in the case of Teotihuacán in central Mexico
during the seventh century AD, when 95 percent of the public buildings and its
civic center were burned and the inhabitants of the palace were slaughtered by the
residents of the city (Millon 1988). These antagonisms and the alliances they could
engender constitute the historical contingency of the formation and collapse of pre-
capitalist states. This resistance accounts for the apparent stability of pre-capitalist
societies, for their tendency to reproduce existing social relations, and for what is
often seen as repeated cycles of growth and collapse, progress and retrogression,
in ancient civilizations. As Marx put it, the history of pre-capitalist societies was
marked by “continual retrogressions and circular movements” (Engels and Marx
1844–5/1975: 83–4).
In this chapter, we saw that Marx drew a sharp distinction between pre-capitalist
and capitalist societies; he viewed the former as limited, local, and vital and the
latter as universalizing and ridden with antagonisms. At the same time, Marx was
emphatic about the importance of understanding the structures underpinning the pre-
capitalist forms, the historical-dialectical dynamics of those structures, the processes
that underwrote change in those societies, and the apparent resiliency of those
societies under historically specific conditions. He also realized the importance of
sociohistorical and cultural differences—that is, different societies were organized
on the basis of different modes of production and forms of property relations. We
also saw that Marx had a more textured appreciation of culture than is commonly
assumed; in his view, culture—the associated forms of social consciousness—were
intimately intertwined with praxis and the social relations manifest in historically
specific, historically contingent societies. Finally, we looked at the messiness of
history—the fragmentary nature of the evidence as well as the complexity and
the diversity of the sociohistorical record itself—to see what archaeologists and
historians have discerned about human historical development. In the next chapter,
we examine in more detail Marx’s views about capitalism and the historicity of the
modern world.
–5–
Capitalism and the Anthropology of the

Modern World
Marx’s lifelong fascination with history and how it merges with the present has its
roots in first-hand observations about and experiences of the places he lived. Over the
years, these snapshots would inform his analyses of various moments or stages in the
development of capitalism. They ranged from the collapse of rural cottage industry
in Trier during his teenage years through the explosive growth of Berlin’s population
and burgeoning construction industry in the early 1840s or the fragmentation of
the French peasantry and the presence of 85,000 German workers in Paris (roughly
an eighth of the city’s 650,000 residents) by the mid 1840s to the enormous pools
of skilled and unskilled workers employed in the gradually changing industries of
London after 1849.
The transition to the factory system . . . was not a clear-cut process. For a long time there
were branches of manufacture virtually untouched by mechanization, while others were
experiencing a revolutionary transformation. More than that, within the same field of
enterprise, old and new methods of production often coexisted, neither strong enough to
overcome the other, though time was clearly on the side of innovation. (Hamerow 1969:
16)
Marx’s understanding of the subtleties of capitalist development in different areas

would deepen in the years to come. This was partly due to his own historical anthro-
pological research and partly to his acquaintance with the work of others, including
Engels’s (1845/1975) The Condition of the Working Class in England and the sources
he used for a series of articles about British colonial rule in India and local reactions
to it that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune between 1852 and 1862 (Habib
2006; Husain 2006; Patnaik 2006). Marx (1880/1989) was not only concerned with
collecting information about actual social conditions—as evidenced, for example,
by the 100 questions in his “Enquête Ouvrière,” which was sent via labor unions and
political groups to 25,000 workers in 1880—but also, and more importantly, with
disseminating this knowledge both to the workers themselves and to the wider public
through venues like the Tribune, which had a weekly circulation of about 200,000,
making it the most widely read paper in the United States at the time (Husain 2006:
xiii; Weiss 1936/1973).1 The research for the Tribune articles provided him with
117
a window on colonial rule, capitalist development, and local resistance to those

processes in South Asia and in other parts of the world.
The term “capitalist” is typically used in two different ways. In the first, it
refers to a set of economic institutions—such as private ownership of the means
of production, the employment of wage labor, production for the market, free
enterprise, the profit motive, and competition between firms—and, by extension, to
those political institutions, cultural beliefs, and practices that accompany or promote
the activities carried out within this institutional framework. This is the capitalist
mode of production with its economic base, superstructure, and associated forms
of social consciousness. In the second usage, it describes “a society, taken as a
whole, in which institutions or a mentality described as capitalist are predominant”
(Rodinson 1966/1978: 4–5). Capital, in Marx’s view, is a social relation that takes
the form of a thing and ensures both “making a profit” as well as reproducing the
property relations that underwrite the process. He wrote that
Capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular

historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing
a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means
of production. . . . It is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of
society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power which are rendered
autonomous vis-à-vis this living labour-power, and are personified in capital through this
antithesis. It is not only the workers’ products which are transformed into independent
powers, the products as masters and buyers of their producers, but the social powers and
interconnecting form of this labour also confront them as properties of their product.
(Marx 1864–94/1981: 953–4)
Marx distinguished three forms of capital—usurers’, merchants’, and industrial

(Marx 1863–7/1973: 914–26; 1864–94/1981: 442, 744–5). Usurers’ capital involves
individuals lending a sum of money to others with the expectation that the latter will
return a greater sum at some predetermined point of time in the future. Merchants’
capital involves the process in which individuals purchase a good for one sum of
money and then sell it for a larger sum of money. In Marx’s view, both usurers’
and merchants’ capital antedated the development of capitalist society and the
capitalist mode of production. While they may have been necessary conditions for
the formation of capitalist society, they were not sufficient conditions by themselves.
The appearance of industrial capital provided these conditions. Industrial capital
involves individuals (or firms) purchasing the raw materials and tools required to
make a commodity, employing the labor-power of wage-workers (also a commodity)
to manufacture the good, and then selling the items produced by the workers for a
price that is greater than the total cost of the inputs. Part of the money received by
the employers after the sale is reinvested to purchase materials and labor-power for
the next cycle of production and circuit of capital; the other part is used by them to
Capitalism and Anthropology of the Modern World • 119
satisfy their own personal needs or those of the firm. In industrial capitalist societies,
production is geared to exchange rather than immediate use by the producers; there
is a social-class structure based on distinction between those who own the means of
production and wage-workers who sell their labor-power; and exploitation occurs at
the point of production where the owners appropriate the surplus value created by
the workers. As you will recall from the last chapter, Marx (1857–8/1973: 409–10)
argued that there were differences among pre-capitalist societies and variations
within the pre-capitalist modes of production; in addition, he argued that there
were significant differences between pre-capitalist and capitalist societies. The
former were local and limited, while the latter continually transformed the forces of
production, created new markets for the commodities they produced, and dissolved
or reworked traditional ways of life as peoples on the margins were incorporated into
capitalist relations of production.
The goals of this chapter are threefold. The first is to outline Marx’s views about
the transition to capitalism and its subsequent development. The second is to explore
in more detail the notions of articulation and combined and uneven development that
are implicit in his later writings. These have important implications, theoretical and
practical, for his anthropology. The third is to consider what he might have thought
about the structures of contemporary capitalism and their relations to the modern
nation-state.
The Transition to Capitalism and Its Development
Industrial capitalist societies and the capitalist mode of production developed out
of earlier social formations and tributary modes of production of which the feudal
mode of production is one variant. This truism is not a trivial statement. The question
it raises is: What processes were involved in the transition? As we saw in the second
chapter as well as the preceding one, Marx was well aware of both broad similarities
and differences within and between the tributary societies of Asia and the Americas
as well as their resemblances to the feudal societies of Northwestern Europe and
the Slavonic societies of Eastern Europe. Another way of saying this is that they
were subject to different internal constraints; what was potentially an opportunity
for development in one society may well have been an impossibility given the
constraints for another. As a consequence, Marx recognized multiple pathways
of historical development in both pre-capitalist and capitalist forms that involved
internal developments, external linkages, and historical contingency.
Therefore, it should not be surprising that Marx presented two different accounts
of the origins of industrial capitalism and hence of capitalist societies.2 One viewed
it as the fruit of merchant capitalists who forged commercial networks, promoted
commodity production, and dissolved the natural economy that dominated the
countryside by restructuring labor processes and organizing rural putting-out
industries as well as altering the division of labor; this removed production from
the control of the town-based guilds (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 31–4, 66–
74; 1848/1976: 485). The other saw the rise of industrial capitalism in terms of
the technical development of small owner-operated establishments that became
merchants themselves and produced directly for the market. In the first account,
expanding commerce, the shift of commodity production from the town to the
countryside, and the development of the division of labor in terms of both special-
ization and cooperation were the motors of change. In the second account, the
engines were class struggle and technical changes in the productive forces. The first
focused on the role of external relationships; the second was concerned with the
internal dynamics of change (Marx 1859/1970: 21; 1864–94/1981: 449–55; Marx
and Engels 1848/1976: 485).
While the two perspectives were not necessarily mutually exclusive, Marx grew
increasingly skeptical by the late 1850s about the capacity of the development of
trade and merchant capital by themselves to effect the breakdown and reorganization
of the old, tributary or feudal modes of production, since the merchants themselves
were typically fractions allied with the ruling classes and the money they accumulated
through trade or usury remained largely in the sphere of circulation. In Capital, he
wrote that
The development of trade and commercial capital always gives production a growing
orientation towards exchange value, expanding its scope, diversifies it and renders it
cosmopolitan, developing money into world money. Trade always has, to a greater or
less degree, a solvent effect on the pre-existing relations of production, which in all
their various forms are principally oriented to use value. But how far it leads to the
dissolution of the old mode of production depends first and foremost on the solidity and
inner articulation of this mode of production itself. And what comes out of this process
of dissolution, i.e., what new mode of production arises in place of the old, does not
depend on trade, but rather on the character of the old mode of production itself. In the
ancient world, the influence of trade and the development of commercial capital always
produced the result of a slave economy; or, given a different point of departure, it also
meant the transformation of a patriarchal slave system oriented towards the production
of the direct means of subsistence into one oriented towards the production of surplus-
value. In the modern world, on the other hand, its outcome is the capitalist mode of
production. It follows that this result is itself conditioned by quite other circumstances
than the development of commercial capital. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 449–50)
Marx came to see that, unlike the paths dominated by merchant capitalists, those
in which the owners of small production units were able to create markets for the
commodities they produced had the capacity to dissolve and transform the social-
class relations of the existing feudal or tributary social orders. As noted earlier, in all
of the pre-capitalist forms of society where production was geared toward use rather
than exchange, communities of direct producers retained control of their means of
production and subsistence, while the politically dominant classes whose members
lived off the goods and services they appropriated from the direct producers pressed
to reproduce those exploitative social relations. Marx put it this way,
The aim of this work is not the creation of [exchange] value—although they may do
surplus labour in order to obtain alien, i.e., surplus products in exchange—rather, its
aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his family, as well as of the total
community. (Marx 1857–8/1973: 471–2; emphasis in the original)
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct
producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly
out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. (Marx 1864–
94/1981: 927)
Under these conditions, there was no particular incentive or compulsion for either
the direct producers or their exploiters to increase productivity beyond subsistence
levels. Moreover, the direct producers—i.e., the owners of small production units—
remained marginal to the dominant fractions of the pre-capitalist, class-stratified
societies, whose very maintenance and reproduction depended on non-economic
means of extracting goods and services from them.
Marx was well aware that tradition played an important role in setting the levels
of surplus that were extracted by the ruling classes from the direct producers of the
community. The demands could not be so high that they threatened the well-being
and survival of the direct producers themselves; as a result, it was “in the interest
of the dominant section of society to sanctify the existing situation in law and to
fix the limits given by custom and tradition as legal ones” (Marx 1864–94/1981:
929). These caps effectively regularized demands from one year to the next at least
in the short run even though the harvests undoubtedly varied considerably. There
were also sanctions in the rural communities of some but probably not all tributary
societies that served as leveling devices which impeded or limited the accumulation
of property and the process of rural social differentiation or at least channeled them
in particular directions.
Nevertheless, Marx believed that, while there may have been marked inequalities
in the distribution of wealth among the rural producers of some tributary societies,
there may have been relatively little internal social differentiation among the
members of those ruling-producing classes. That is, the basic social cleavage in the
societies was that between the direct producers and the classes that extracted surplus
from them. There were a few wealthy rural producers who had the capacity to
produce surplus goods beyond their own subsistence needs and the rents demanded
by their communities or local lords; there were many who could satisfy their own
needs and meet obligations but had little or no capacity to produce regular surpluses.
Although he cited no specific historical evidence, he wrote the following with
particular reference to Europe:
It is still possible for this villein or serf to develop independent means of production of
his own and even become quite wealthy. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 929)
in the feudal period the wealthier peasant serfs already kept serfs of their own. In this
way it gradually becomes possible for them to build up a certain degree of wealth and
transform themselves into future capitalists. (Marx 1864–94/1981: 935–6)
Subsequent historical research in the tributary societies of Europe, especially

England and France, has confirmed that there was some degree of internal social
differentiation among the rural producers, and that, as a class, its members were
engaged in a long-term struggle with the local lords to reduce their annual exactions
(e.g. Bois 1976/1984, 1989/1992; Hilton 1978/1990). This has also been shown in
the tributary Inca state of the central Andes, for example, where (1) the wealthy
were those individuals with many kin and the poor were orphans who lacked kin;
and (2) important shrines seemingly possessed property in both land and herds
as well as service obligations that were distinct from those of the Inca state, local
tribal entities, or other corporate landholding groups in the region (Patterson 1984;
Spalding 1984).
An important distinction that Robert Brenner (1997: 38–9) and Ellen Wood
(2002) have made is the one between market involvement and market dependence.
Terence Byres (2006: 18–20) notes that market involvement means voluntary and
perhaps irregular participation in the market to sell surpluses either for cash or
other goods and to acquire goods that are not produced locally. By contrast, market
dependence means that the direct producers must participate in the market since
they no longer have non-market access to all of the subsistence goods they need.
Market dependence is rooted in the profit motive and requires marketing on a regular
basis. Markets now exist for subsistence goods, raw materials, land, labor, and
money. The logic of the former is pre-capitalist, whereas the latter is a capitalist
logic. That the distinction was not always immediately apparent is evident by the
formation, for example, of the market economy of Mughal India or Aztec Mexico
(Habib 1968/1995; Hicks 1987, 1999). Hence, the distinction is of considerable,
but probably not primary, importance in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
What processes are set in motion?
In one of those instances where the direct producers (that is, wealthy peasants)
were able to create and expand markets for their goods, they became increasingly
dependent on the market for their own livelihoods as well as for the maintenance and
reproduction of their production units. These circumstances brought a new dynamic
into play that was concerned, in the last analysis, with expanding production and
increasing productivity. The elements of this dynamic included, for example,
the prolongation and intensification of the work day; differentiation of the labor
process; the development of new forms of cooperation and production; and, most
importantly, the continual transformation of the instruments of production including
the introduction of machines which both made workers appendages of those
machines and eventually displaced human beings from the production process (Marx
1863–7/1977; Marx and Engels 1848/1976: 487). This continual development of the
productive forces and the concomitant reworking of the social relations both at home
and abroad constituted the universalizing tendency that Marx (1857–8: 409–10) saw
in the rise of industrial capitalism. It was a highly uneven process that occurred on a
world scale over a period of several centuries. Industrial capitalism thrived in some
regions, it was thwarted or distorted in others; and it never occurred in still others
even though the social relations among peoples in those areas were inextricably
altered as they simultaneously resisted and were enmeshed in emergent capitalist
exchange relations. In one of his descriptions of the process, Marx wrote:
The number of men condemned to work in coal and metal mines has been enormously
swollen by the progress of machine production in England. . . . Along with the machine,
a new type of worker springs into life: the machine-maker. We have already learnt that
machinery is seizing control even of this branch of production on an ever-increasing
scale. As to raw materials, there can be no doubt of the rapid advance of cotton spinning
not only promoted as if in a hot house of the growing of cotton in the United States,
and with it the African slave trade, but also made slave-breeding the chief business
of the so-called border slave states. . . . On the other hand, it is no less certain that the
blossoming of English woolen factories, together with the progressive transformation of
arable land into sheep pasture brought about the conversion of the agricultural labourers
into “supernumeraries” and drove them in their masses from the land. Ireland, having
during the last twenty years reduced its population by nearly one-half, is at the moment
undergoing the process of further reducing the number of its inhabitants to a level
corresponding exactly with the requirements of its landlords and the English woolen
manufacturers. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 570–1)
One way of conceptualizing the early stages of the appearance of industrial capital-
ism is to imagine it as the gradual eruption of a few volcanic islands from a vast sea
of societies dominated by kin-communal, tribal, or tributary social relations.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism took place on a world scale begin-
ning in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. It was firmly set in place by the rise
of industrial capitalist in Northwestern Europe toward the end of the eighteenth
century. This historically contingent structure which steadily spread over the entire
planet developed variably or differently from one part of the world to another. Three
intersecting conditions were necessary for the transition to occur: (1) the existence
of a rural social structure in which the peasants no longer constituted one or another
form of unfree labor; (2) the existence of independent artisans who produced non-
agricultural commodities; and (3) an accumulation of monetary wealth derived from
commerce, usury, and plunder (Hobsbawm 1964: 46–7; 1962). It is also necessary
to explain why industrial capitalism emerged first in Northwestern Europe and not
elsewhere, even though peoples in other parts of the world—notably Africa, the
Americas, and South Asia—played important roles in that development.
Marx sketched the rise of industrial capitalism in the famous section in the first
volume of Capital that dealt with “primitive accumulation.” He was clear that it
involved the separation of rural producers from their means of production, and that
it proceeded along developmental pathways that were different from the one that
occurred in England, which served as his example for analytical purposes. He said
that
The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis
of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in
different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession,
and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our
example, has it the classic form. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 876)
This process gave rise to both wage-workers and the capitalists who employed them.
He was aware that serfdom had all but disappeared in England by the end of the
fourteenth century and that the majority of the population in the fifteenth century
were free peasant proprietors, many of whom supplemented their needs by wage-
work on the large estates and by using the resources of the common lands that were
held by the local community. The commons provided pasture, manure, timber, and
firewood to name only a few of its resources. Such communal property was always
distinct from both that of the state and the large estate holder (Marx 1863–7/1977:
877–95).
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the feudal lords drove the free
peasants from the lands and homes and seized the common lands, transforming
both into pastures for sheep which could be tended by a relatively small number of
individuals and whose wool could be sold either to Flemish wool manufactures or to
local merchants or firms that hoped to gain from the rise in prices. The Reformation
provided an additional impetus for the expropriation of the agricultural population.
At the time when the properties of the Catholic Church were seized, it held most of
the land in England. As Marx noted
After the restoration of the Stuarts [1660–88], the landed proprietors carried out, by legal
means, an act of usurpation which was effected everywhere on the Continent without
any legal formality. They abolished feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its
obligations to the state, “indemnified” the state by imposing taxes on the peasantry and
the rest of the people, established for themselves the rights of modern private property
to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally, passed those laws of settlement on the
English agricultural labourer [which meant that they could be pursued for five years and
forcibly returned when caught]. . . .
The “glorious Revolution” [1688] brought into power, along with William of Orange,
the landed and capitalist profit-grubbers. They inaugurated a new era by practising on a
colossal scale the theft of state lands which had hitherto been managed more modestly.
(Marx 1863–7/1977: 883–4)
Marx was clear about the role played by the state as an agent of the new landed
class, both with regard to the expropriation of peasants from their lands as well
as the forcing down of wages and the criminalization of beggars and vagabonds
throughout the sixteenth century—processes that Michel Foucault might have called
disciplining and punishing the proletariat.
Integral to Marx’s account of the transition during the sixteenth century is the
progressive fall in the value of precious metals. He wrote that
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entomb-
ment in the mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of
the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era
of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive
accumulation. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 915)
Enormous quantities of gold and silver poured into the coffers of merchant houses
and the Spanish government. They poured with almost equal rapidity out of the
governmental coffers of Spain to pay for an army and colonial administration, to
purchase weapons, cloth, and other commodities in Northern Europe that were not
produced in the new Iberian state, or to purchase royal and noble titles in Central
Europe—all ultimate acts of conspicuous consumption by the monarchy. Some idea
of the amount of specie that flowed into Europe can be gleaned from the fact that,
in 1535, the Spanish conquistadors of Peru ransomed a claimant to the Inca throne
for 13 tons of silver and more than 6.5 tons of pure gold (estimated value US$83
million in 1990), and this was only an infinitesimally small fraction of 1 percent of
the precious metals that reached Europe from Peru alone in the sixteenth century
(Patterson 1991: 3, 166–7). This order of magnitude contrasts markedly with that of
the investment of a group of Dutch merchants who put up 6.5 million guilders (the
equivalent of about 4 tons of gold) in 1602 to form the United East India Company,
which was one of the world’s largest merchant houses at the time and had more than
12,000 employees (De Vries 1976: 130–2). The decline in the value of precious
metals and money effectively lowered wages, which were already being set by
law, raised prices, and swelled the profits of capitalist farmers (Marx 1863–7/1977:
903–13).
Marx (1863–7/1977: 909–13) pointed out that the events of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, which turned peasants into wage-workers and their means of
subsistence into commodities, also created a home market for both labor power and
raw materials. The capitalist farmers who employed farm workers had incentives to
improve the productivity of their lands by adopting new forms of labor organization,
new regimens of work, and new methods of cultivation. The rural proletarians now
had to purchase the very food, clothing, and other necessities of life that their parents
and grandparents had produced for themselves only a few decades earlier. Rural
industries—such as spinning and weaving—were also destroyed as the peasants

were driven from their lands and homes. Those parts of the rural population that
remained in the countryside were transformed into wage-workers on capitalist
farms; those parts that were forced out of homes and off their lands became a large
reserve army of labor that would be absorbed into the textile factories that were
appearing on rivers in the vicinity of the new market places that were beyond the
control of the old towns and their guilds.
The intermittent expulsion of rural producers from their lands created a home
market for the subsistence and other goods that they could no longer produce for
themselves. Once the feudal constitution and guild organizations of the towns
were dissolved, it is clear that some members of the old craft guilds became small
capitalists who employed wage-workers to produce particular commodities as did
some merchants and some cottage artisans. However, it is also clear that some
individuals began to bring together or concentrate all of the materials and labor
power that was needed to produce a commodity like linen. They acquired the flax,
rented or purchased the machines for spinning and weaving thread, they hired the
workers, brought them together in a crowded factory, and then sold the cloth they
produced, keeping the profits for themselves in order to meet their subsistence
needs, to consume conspicuously, or to reinvest in the maintenance of their factory
and to purchase new inputs of materials, machinery, and human resources. In the
early stages of industrial capitalism, the woolen manufacturers of England not
only competed with one another but also with Irish producers for a share of the
market. The drive for profits, an increasing share of the market, and even expanding
the market itself underwrote the continual transformation of the machinery and
organization of the productive process toward greater productivity.
The formation of overseas colonies facilitated the concentration of capital. As
Marx observed:
The colonies provided a market for budding manufactures, and a vast increase in
accumulation which was guaranteed by the mother country’s monopoly of the market.
The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder
flow back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there. Holland, which
first brought the colonial system to its full development, already stood at the zenith of
its commercial greatness in 1648. It was “in almost exclusive possession of the East
Indies trade and the commerce between the south-east and the north-west of Europe.
Its fisheries, its shipping and its manufactures surpassed those of any other country. The
total capacity of the Republic was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe put
together.” . . . By 1648 the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more
brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.
Today, industrial supremacy brings with it commercial supremacy. In the period of
manufacture it is the reverse: commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance.
Hence the preponderant role played by the colonial system at that time. . . . It proclaimed
the making of profit as the ultimate and sole purpose of mankind. (Marx 1863–7/1977:
918)
Thus, Marx points out that the colonies served not only as sources of raw materials
that were exported to the mother countries but also as the ultimate destination of
exports for goods that were produced or finished in the metropoles; frequently,
colonial production and even inter-colony trade were forbidden, which meant that
raw materials were shipped from the colonies to the home country and were processed
into commodities that were then shipped back to the colony from which the raw
materials originated or to nearby neighboring colonies. He acknowledges what
anthropologists, like Stanley Diamond (1974: 1), have long recognized: “civilization
[capitalist in this case] originates with conquest abroad and repression at home.”
Marx further argues that the maritime trade and commercial wars which were
integral parts of the colonial system promoted a system of national debt and public
credit. He remarks that
The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As
with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of
creation and thus turns it into capital, without the risks inseparable from its employment
in industry or even in usury. The state’s creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum
lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their
hands just as so much hard cash would. But furthermore, and quite apart from the class
of idle rentiers thus created, the improvised wealth of the financiers who play the role
of middlemen between the government and the nation, and the tax-farmers, merchants
and private manufacturers, for whom a good part of every national loan performs the
service of a capital fallen from heaven, apart from all of these people, the national debt
has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and
to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern
bankocracy. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 919; emphasis in the original)
Marx’s discussion of the primitive accumulation of capital is an analysis of the

transformation of one kind of tributary society into a capitalist society rooted in
industrial capitalism. This theory of history also embodies a notion of directionality,
which is reflective of contradictions in the domain of production as they are manifest
in the wider society. Societies underpinned by the capitalist mode of production
exhibit this directionality because of their continual efforts at expanding markets
for the commodities they produce and their continual attempts to improve the
productivity of the machines and labor processes they employ in the manufacture
of those items. What his discussion also shows are the close relationships fueled
by commerce and colonial settlement that existed between those parts of the world
where industrial capitalism developed and those that provided loot, human bodies,
and natural resources which fueled the growth of the manufacturing centers in
northern Europe.
What were the manufacturing centers like? Marx’s short answer was that, in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were composed of a number
of relatively small firms, some of which, for example, produced cotton textiles
while others engaged in more specialized processes or items, like bleaching,

dyeing, printing, or the production of looms, which they sold to one or more of
the textile manufacturers in the region. Those firms that were able to increase their
productivity by adopting more efficient machines, by lengthening the work day of
their employees, or by paying them lower wages had the capacity to gain a greater
share of the market for their goods and hence to increase their profits. This, however,
also threatened the very existence of their competitors who continued to produce in
more traditional or less efficient ways; this forced many of them not only to adopt
the new machines or practices but also to seek ones that were even more productive.
Marx viewed this era as one of competitive capital. By the 1850s, however, many of
the smaller firms found the cost of continually upgrading the machines they used to
be increasingly prohibitive, and they began to close their doors as their shares of the
markets declined. The result of this was simultaneously a decline in the number of
firms producing a particular good combined with a significant increase in the value
of the firms that survived. Marx (1863–7/1977: 774–81) called these processes the
concentration and centralization of capital. He also noted other changes in the mid
nineteenth century. One was a shift in the relative importance of firms from those
that produced goods, like cotton textiles, to those that produced steel, for example,
which was essential for the construction of railroad tracks, locomotives, and other
machines. A second was the increased wealth available to firms like steel factories,
for example, which were incredibly expensive and were often the property of joint
stock companies with large numbers of investors rather than single owners. A third
resulted from the combination of increasingly more sophisticated machinery that
required fewer and perhaps even less-skilled workers to produce particular goods
and the ongoing dispossession of people from their lands, which forced massive
migration—from Ireland, for example; together, they created a large, unemployed or
underemployed reserve army of labor.
The Articulation of Modes of Production
In the preceding section, we examined Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation

and the role it played in the dissolution of feudal (tributary) society in England and
in its transformation into a social formation based on the production relations of
industrial capitalism. Two processes were involved in primitive accumulation. The
first process was proletarianization—that is, the formation of a class of free wage-
workers who were systematically denied access to land and who ultimately had
only their labor-power, their capacity to work, to sell in order to provide for their
subsistence and that of their families. The second process involved the creation of a
system of overseas colonies that yielded plunder, taxes, and surplus goods that were
often produced by various forms of unfree labor—such as indentured servants and
slaves in the British colonies or individuals with labor-tax obligations in the Spanish
colonies.
We also saw that the state underwrote both processes of primitive accumulation.
It used political and legal forms of compulsion, and sometimes force, to drive rural
producers from their homes and lands and then to criminalize their poverty. In
England, this dispossession simultaneously created the conditions for the formation
of (1) a class of wage laborers and a labor market, as well as (2) a class of unfree
workers composed of debtors, criminals, and indentured servants who toiled for
varying lengths of time to repay their obligations. While the former underwrote
the steady expansion of production and hence provided the basis for the continual
transformation of the productive forces, the latter did not participate directly in
either wage labor or the labor market. In other words, the forms of surplus extraction
were different for the two classes. For the wage-workers, exploitation occurred at the
point of production and involved the appropriation of the surplus value they created
by the capitalist. For the unfree workers, exploitation involved extra-economic forms
of compulsion and surplus extraction. Many of the goods from the North American
and Caribbean colonies that were prized by English merchants—tobacco, sugar,
cotton, and rum to name only a few—were produced by unfree labor—indentured
servants and increasingly African slaves after the 1690s; other prized items—such as
furs—were produced by indigenous and other peoples who lived on the margins of
the colonies and were enmeshed in the colonial system by means of their exchange
relations with merchants or their local representatives.
While Marx (1863–7/1977: 873–940) formulated his concept of primitive accum-
ulation largely in relation to the transition to capitalism in England, he was already
well aware from his own observations and research that capitalism did not develop
everywhere in the same manner that it had in England. The reason was that England
was merely one historically specific instance of the transition, albeit the earliest one.
Robert Miles noted that
The historic specificity of the transition to capitalism in England must be emphasized.

The subsequent expansion of the capitalist mode of production cannot be considered
to have proceeded by a series of transitions in precisely the same way as in England
because the particular combination of circumstances that led to this emergence were
transcended by it. Because the historical context has been transformed by the emergence
of the capitalist mode of production, the latter must be expected to have had effects upon
extant, non-capitalist modes of production as a result of the inherently expansionary
nature of the accumulation process. (Miles 1989: 39; emphasis in the original)
Primitive accumulation was the connective tissue that linked the various trajectories
with each other. Miles (1989: 40) and others observed that primitive accumulation
is “a historically continuous process of transformation of relations of production and
not a single, unique event in seventeenth-century England.” This process continues
to the present day, side by side with proletarianization (the spread of wage labor
relations), the privatization of community and state property, plunder, and other
forms of the appropriation of value from peoples living on the peripheries of the
industrial capitalist world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a phrase,
primitive accumulation has been and continues to be a permanent feature of capitalist
development; one only need consider its predations in the United States, Russia, the
People’s Republic of China, or Mexico, for example, during the last twenty years.
As we saw earlier, Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 271–2n3, 446, 480, 570–1, 876n1,
915–17, 932–4, 1039–40, 1076–80) already had a comparative perspective on the
development of capitalism in different countries. He had also commented on the
interconnections between different parts of the world: for example, of the factory
workers in England, slaves in the American South, serfs in Eastern Europe, village
communities in India, and immigrants to areas, like the United States or Germany,
that were experiencing the growth of industrial capitalism. For example, with regard
to the interdependence of Manchester textile factories, slaves in the American South,
and commerce, he wrote
Direct slavery is as much a pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as
are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton no
modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies
which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale
machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few
products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery
is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. (Marx 1846/1982: 101–2).
While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it
gave impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into
a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers
in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. (Marx
1863–7/1977: 925)
While the transition to capitalism in England involved primitive accumulation

through the dispossession of producers from their lands, proletarianization, and
the creation of home markets, those that occurred elsewhere involved variously the
intensification of pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction, new forms of unfree
labor, slave-raiding, new relations between indigenous elites and the colonial
administrators, new forms of taxation and other means of indirect exploitation by
the colonial and metropolitan states as well as the separation of producers from their
means of production and the appearance of new contradictions within the colony and
between its residents and the metropolitan state.
Marx described the dynamic forged by the articulation of capitalist country and
non-capitalist colony in the following way:
In Western Europe . . . the process of primitive accumulation has more or less been
accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly subordinated to itself the
whole of the nation’s production, or, where economic relations are less developed, it has
at least indirect control of those social layers which, although they belong to antiquated
mode of production, still continue to exist side by side with it in a state of decay. . . .
It is otherwise in the colonies. There the capitalist regime constantly comes up against
the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as the owner of his own conditions of labour,
employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist. The contradiction between
these two diametrically opposed economic systems has its practical manifestation here
in the struggle between them. Where the capitalist has behind him the power of the
mother country, he tries to use force to clear out of the way the modes of production
and appropriation which rest on the personal labour of the independent producer. (Marx
1863–7/1977: 931–2)
These comments focus attention on Marx’s belief that historically specific societies
are totalities manifesting diverse articulated combinations of different modes of
production.3 They also indicate that the structures of relations between the capitalist
and pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction as well as the contradictions they
engender may vary and be reproduced and transformed differently in historically
particular societies such as India, the Tongan Islands, or the United States. In other
words, they bring into awareness his view that capitalism and what lies beyond it
were developing and will continue to develop along different historical trajectories.
The possibility of alternative trajectories of development in the future was one
of the reasons why Marx devoted so much of his time and energy to historical
anthropological studies in the 1870s. What was conceivable and possible, given the
balance of forces that existed in a particular society? This was clearly a question he
was pondering as he wrote about the Paris Commune and his famous drafts of the
letter to Vera Zasulich toward the end of his life (Marx 1871/1986, 1881/1983). It
is also the reason why political activists he influenced—V. I. Lenin (1899/1960),
Rosa Luxemburg (1913/2003), Leon Trotsky (1930/1980: 3–15), Antonio Gramsci
(1926/1967, 1933/1971), José Mariátegui (1928/1971), Mao Zedong (1930/1990),
and Amilcar Cabral (1963) among others—were not only students of history but were
also concerned with the lessons it taught. Many anthropologists have shared their
concern with the issues of articulation and alternative pathways of sociohistorical
development during the twentieth century.4
While Marx laid the foundations for a theory of articulation, his formulation of it
was inchoate, and he did not elaborate many of his observations in any great detail.
This task would fall to his successors in the twentieth century. Let us look briefly at
a few of those insights and their implications in order to see directions in which they
were or might have been developed.
First, Marx’s theory of articulation draws on his discussions of colonialism,
nationalism, expanded reproduction, and transformation, the latter two being
important concerns in the second and third volumes, respectively, of Capital. His
writings on colonialism and nationalism, which began in the late 1840s and early
1850s, should be understood as an interconnected project or a “continuum” (e.g. Marx
1848/1976; Ahmad 2001: 9). Marx wrote extensively about two British colonies,
Ireland and India, the latter which he characterized once as the “Ireland of the East,”
because of the similarities he saw in the implementation of English colonial policies
in the two countries (Marx 1853/1979a: 125).5 These can be described briefly as the
destruction of local industry, the creation of local markets for goods manufactured in
England, the dispossession of people from their lands, the development of capitalist
agriculture (which in India at least was accompanied by the development of railroads
in the early 1850s to move raw cotton to ports where it could be shipped to the home
country), and massive emigration within the country as well as to other parts of
the world. In 1813, India, which had exported fabrics manufactured in Dacca and
other traditional handloom centers, was inundated with thread and cotton goods
made from American cotton in English factories. The English merchants in India
undersold the local producers, and the volume of imported English cloth grew
from about 1 million yards in 1824 to 64 million yards in 1837. During the same
period, the population of traditional textile centers, like Dacca, plummeted from
150,000 to 20,000. However, deteriorating diplomatic relations with the United
States combined with a poor harvest in the American South in 1850 led English
manufacturers to seek new sources of raw cotton, most noticeably in the interior
regions of India; the development of capitalist, cotton-producing farms in these
areas during the early 1850s spurred the construction of railroads linking them with
coastal cities like Bombay. The importance of the English exports to India should
not be underestimated. In 1850, cotton goods constituted more than 60 percent of
the total value of English goods traded to India and accounted for one-fourth of all
of its foreign trade, one-twelfth of its national revenue, and one-eighth of its total
employment. In addition, the British government collected taxes from the colony
and possessed monopolies over the manufacture or distribution of certain items,
most notably salt and opium which was sold to the Chinese (Marx 1853/1979a,
1853/1979b: 154, 1853/1979c: 219–21, 1853/1979d: 316–17).6 In sum, it was an
exploitative relationship based partly on unequal exchange and partly on the ability
of the Colonial Office to impose its will.
Second, Marx was impressed with the impact of political fragmentation initi-
ally through first-hand experience in Europe, especially Germany and Austria,
during the late 1840s and a few years later in India as a result of his investigative
journalism for the New York Herald Tribune. In Europe, he and Engels confronted
the classic problems of national consolidation—namely, the political unification
and independence of nations that were highly fragmented and often dominated by
neighboring powers (Ahmad 2001: 4, 10–11). Engels (1849/1977a) distinguished
“historic nations,” like Poland, that were sizable and had already gained some
degree of sovereignty and smaller nationalities, “peoples without history,” like the
southern Slavs, that were incorporated into larger political entities, the Hapsburg
Empire in this case (Rosdolsky 1980). He also pointed out that conflicts along
national lines were relatively unimportant so long as the ruling classes in each
national group continued to share their common goal of “preserving the monarchy,”
in order to maintain their own positions against the emerging bourgeois classes
(Engels 1849/1977b: 229).
Marx was also aware of the consequences of political fragmentation of India.
As Ahmad (2001: 19) points out, that segments of the traditional classes in India—
displaced peasants, ruined artisans, and aristocratic landowners whose properties
had been confiscated—reacted to the exactions of the British in the 1850s did not
escape Marx’s attention (e.g. 1857/1986a, 1857/1986b, 1857/1986c). However, as
Habib notes:
Marx’s sympathy for the rebels shows itself in a number of ways: his scornful skepticism
of the claims of an early British capture of Delhi from the mutineers; his detection
of exaggeration in the horror stories of atrocities committed by the rebels and his
justifications of these as events inescapable in such revolts anywhere; and, finally, his
denunciations of the atrocities committed by British officers and troops.
However sympathetic by natural instinct, Marx was with the 1857 rebels, he was clear
enough in his mind that the rebellion was a response of the old classes to the process of
pauperization of a large mass of the Indian people and the dissolution of a whole old way
of life, it was not the product of the Indian “regeneration” that he himself looked forward
to. He admitted in respect of the Mutiny that “It is a curious quid pro quo to expect an
Indian revolt to assume the features of a European revolution.” (Habib 2006: xlix)
Nonetheless, Marx saw the similarity between the Indian insurrection of 1857–8,
which he called a national revolt, and the nationalist movements that had swept
across Europe a few years earlier. Not only was it geographically widespread, but it
also cut across caste, religious, and social-class divisions. The groups challenged by
the mutineers were the British financiers and mill owners, the colonial government,
and their local agents and representatives (Marx 1853/1979c: 218). What the Indian
rebels lacked, in Engels (1857/1986: 392) view, was “the scientific element”—that
is, centralized political and military leadership or, as Ahmad (2001: 19) put it, the
basic features of twentieth-century national liberation movements. From the late
1850s onward, Marx (e.g. 1881/1992a: 63–4) was aware of tendencies that might
facilitate the development of centralized leadership in Indian society and the threat
that this would potentially pose to British rule. Moreover, any thoughts he might
have harbored in the early 1850s about the progressive character of colonialism
in India were long dispelled by the time he wrote about the plunder of India and
primitive accumulation in Capital. Marx (1853/1979c: 221–2) wrote not only about
“the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” and “the
devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India,”
but also that “the Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society
scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new
ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the
Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
altogether.” As Ahmad (2001: 20) has noted, no Indian reformer of the nineteenth
century took such a clear position on the question of Indian independence, and all
twentieth-century Indian nationalists accepted Marx’s claim that “colonial capitalism
did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India” (emphasis in the original).
Third, Marx knew that the rise of industrial capitalism and the linkages spawned
by it triggered massive emigration, mostly from the colonies and the peripheral
regions of the home countries. For example, he realized that hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of persons were displaced in India in the 1830s and 1840s. In Ireland,
he noted that more than a million of the colony’s roughly 7 million inhabitants—
that is, 15–20 percent of its total population—emigrated elsewhere (to England,
Australia, and the United States) in the five-year period between 1847 and 1852,
and that, by the mid 1860s, its population had fallen by half to about 3.5 million
persons (Marx 1853/1979e: 528–32; 1853/1979f). Marx frequently mocked the
“public-opinion slang of England,” which attributed the plight of dispossessed Irish
workers to “aboriginal faults of the Celtic race” or to the “shortcomings of Irish
nature” instead of to British misrule; he certainly did not see the Irish as the London
Economist did: a “redundant population” whose departure was necessary before
any improvement could occur. Instead, he saw their circumstances as historically
conditioned, partly by the policies of capital and the state, and partly by their own
efforts to ameliorate those circumstances given the prevailing balance of force at the
time (Marx 1853/1979e: 528, 1853/1979f: 159, 1859/1980: 489; cf. Curtis 1997:
148–80). He was well aware that Irish farmers driven from the land went to the
cities—including London, where the vast majority of those who were employed
worked as unskilled day-laborers in the towns or as day-laborers in the surrounding
countryside. He also knew that Irish workers were often paid lower wages than their
English counterparts, and that English linen manufacturers were closing factories in
the Midlands and relocating them to towns in Ireland where they could pay lower
wages (Marx 1857/1986d: 257, 1863–7/1977: 866; Engels 1844/1975; Robinson
1983: 38–59; Thompson 1963: 429–43). In addition, he was sympathetic to the
plight of the Irish emigrants who were separated from their natal communities as
they settled in distant and often hostile places, like the United States, where large
numbers had the most menial and undesirable of unskilled jobs, occupied the lowest
rungs of the social-class structure, and daily confronted increasingly racialized
discrimination and the possibility of violence because of their creative maintenance
and ethnogenesis of a rural heritage and national identity in the new country and
their adherence to Catholicism (e.g. Ashworth 1983: 181–2; Curtis 1997; Foner
1980: 150–200).
Fourth, Marx explored the interconnection of nationalist politics and diasporic
communities with an increasingly textured appreciation of their complexities from
1860 onward as a result of his investigations of Ireland and the Irish question and
the United States and its civil war (Marx 1972; Marx and Engels 1972). In his view,
the English landed aristocracy and the capitalist classes had a shared interest in
maintaining English domination over Ireland and in promoting emigration. Irish

farms seized earlier in the century by English landlords were turned into pastures
that (1) provided English markets with cheap meat and wool, (2) ensured a reserve
army of labor that drove down wages and the morale of the English working class,
(3) pitted English workers against the Irish immigrants, and (4) guaranteed security
to some extent by scattering some of the more disgruntled members of Irish society
around the world and by insulating others from any radical or revolutionary ideas
they might have held (Marx 1869/1988a: 398–9; 1870/1988). The resolution of
the Irish question ultimately depended on the political independence of Ireland;
minimally, Marx (e.g. 1870/1985: 118–21) thought, this would entail breaking the
grip of the landed aristocracy in Ireland, linking the struggle over land with social
issues, and forming coalitions with working classes around the world and most
especially with those in England. The issue was how to achieve it. This was the
question that underwrote his analyses of the goals and class interests expressed
by various Irish nationalist groups and partly by the tactics that each advocated to
accomplish its aims. The purpose of his analyses was not to idealize or romanticize
the various Irish national movements but rather to assess as accurately as possible
their strengths and weaknesses.
Marx (e.g. 1867/1985, 1881/1992b) was sympathetic, publicly at least, to the
various groups or individuals within the Irish national liberation movement, notably
the Fenian (Irish Republican) Brotherhood and later Charles Steward Parnell
(1846–91), and condemned the sentences imposed by the English on Irish (Fenian)
prisoners in 1867. Nevertheless, in correspondence and confidential reports, he and
Engels were critical of them and paid close attention to both the class position and
ideologies of their members and to their actions. Engels (1869/1988) described the
tactics of the groups as ranging from spontaneous democratic and revolutionary
actions of peasants forced from their lands to the liberal-national opposition of the
Irish urban bourgeoisie. They were particularly critical of the views and tactics of
the Fenians, who focused almost exclusively on the issue of political independence,
neglected both land and social issues, were narrowly ethnocentric, and not only
failed to make alliances with democratic working-class groups in other countries,
especially England, but also failed to understand the importance of these contacts.7
As a result, neither Marx nor Engels was especially sympathetic with cultural
nationalism in the narrow sense of the term regardless of what either said publicly.
Fifth, Marx (1863–7/1977: 711–23, 1865–85/1981: 468–599) was aware that
the extent of capitalist markets and the processes of capitalist production, including
those associated with the production of the capitalists and workers themselves,
were not only in a constant state of flux but were also incessantly renewed on
an ever-increasing scale. He referred to this as accumulation and reproduction
on an expanded scale. His commentary about expanded reproduction provoked a
number of subsequent writers to critique or work out its implications. For example,
Luxemburg argued that
The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist

forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism
needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply
for its means of production, and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system.
(Luxemburg 1913/2003: 368)
Thus, in her view, the capitalist mode of production could not exist in isolation
and had to coexist with non-capitalist modes in order for the accumulation and
reproduction of the capitalist system to occur; in other words, capitalism could
never become a universal form of society. While it repressed its own workers and
engulfed non-capitalist societies it also sowed the seeds of economic crises and
its own destruction, since it was consuming the very conditions that ensured its
existence (Luxemburg 1913/2003: 350, 365–6, 467). Another commentator, Rudolf
Hilferding (1910/1981: 228–35, 288–98), had already argued that economic crises
were always latent in capitalism because of the imbalances or disproportionalities
that exist among the various sectors of the capitalist economy, the declining rates
of profit associated with the increased use of machines relative to human labor, and
the inter-capitalist competition in the market (the anarchy of the market)—all of
which contributed to the periodic overproduction and underconsumption of both
commodities and capital. Both Luxemburg and Hilferding realized that Marx’s
views about expanded reproduction and economic crises were also parts of his
theory of social-class relations.
Marx saw that social-class structures were expressions of exploitative social rela-
tions. He was also aware that social-class structures, both in the capitalist countries
and their colonies were continually reworked during the processes of expanded
accumulation and reproduction. This is perhaps most apparent in his discussions of
how young women and children constituted an enormous reserve army of labor in
England that was repeatedly moved into and out of the labor force in order to depress
wages and to extend the length of the working day (Marx 1863–7/1977: 340–416).
For example,
In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means for employ-
ing workers of slight muscular strength, or whose bodily development is incomplete. . . .
The labour of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist applica-
tion of machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and for workers, the machine, was
immediately transformed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by
enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the worker’s family, without
distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only
of children’s play, but also the independent labour at home, with customary limits, for
the family itself. . . .
Machinery, by throwing every member of the family onto the labour market, spreads
the value of the man’s labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates it. To
purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may perhaps cost more than it
formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four
days’ labour takes the place of one day’s, and the price falls in proportion to the excess
of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one. In order that the family
may now live, four people must now provide not only labour for the capitalist, but
also surplus labour. Thus we see that machinery, while augmenting the human material
that forms capital’s most characteristic field of exploitation, at the same time raises the
degree of that exploitation. (Marx 1863–7/1977: 517–18)
In other words, improvement in machinery allowed factory owners to substitute at

lower wages less skilled workers for those with more skills, children for adults, and
women for men.
Marx (e.g. 1863–7/1977: 345, 354–5, 364–5, 521) also knew that the increased
rates of exploitation had deleterious effects on the health of workers both in the
capitalist countries and the colonies. He described in detail the effects that intensified
production for the capitalist market had on human beings. These included but were
not limited to: (1) the high incidence in the 1840s of pulmonary diseases and lower
than average life-expectancies of men employed in the potteries, many of whom
had begun working fifteen-hour days, six days a week when they were eight years
old; (2) the story of a twenty-year-old woman employed as a dressmaker in one
of London’s finest millinery shops who frequently worked twenty to thirty hours
without a break with sixty other young women in an overcrowded room that lacked
ventilation; (3) the high infant mortality rates in factory and agricultural districts
where mothers had to work away from their homes; or (4) slaves in the American
South who were so overworked that their bodies were effectively used up in seven
years. More importantly, he understood how workers were segmented and isolated
from one another by servile status, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and nationalism. As
a result, he perceived similarities in the exploitation of workers in different parts of
the world. After relating an account of the slave trade, the unremitting toil of slaves
on plantations, and their low life expectancies, Marx wrote the following: “Mutato
nomine de te fibula narrator [this could be thy story under a different name]. For
slave trade, read labor market; for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and agricultural
districts of Scotland, and Wales; for Africa, Germany.” (Marx 1863–7/1977: 377–8)
Marx clearly understood the historicity of social-class structures under conditions
of expanded accumulation and reproduction. They were continually being constituted
and reworked—but not always in the same ways or at the same pace—in both
the industrial capitalist societies of the West and non-capitalist societies on their
peripheries (e.g. Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003: 245–82). The differences, he
knew, were due, at least partly, to the opposition and resistance of peoples in the
home countries and of those on the margins who, while they might have had contact
with capitalist merchants (often on their own terms), had not yet been enmeshed
in capitalist social relations. Another way of saying this is that class structures
were made historically by peoples who were striving exist under circumstances
passed down by earlier generations and who occasionally were able to change those
conditions. He also clearly understood that the inhabitants of some regions—like the
poppy fields of Afghanistan, the gold mines of California, or the cotton plantations
of the American South—provided raw materials that could either be exported
for direct sale or for processing in the home country. In these regions, there were
small commodity-producing economic sectors geared to export, large sectors of
the local populations that reproduced workers outside the labor market, and often
wage-workers that often sought to exclude indigenous peoples or immigrants from
entering the labor market; these have sometimes been called dual economies. Other
regions—Ireland, the border states in Antebellum America, West Africa, or eastern
Europe—were labor reserves whose primary export was human labor-power, which
had long-term devastating effects on the local communities in spite of the fact that
they often engaged merchant capital on terms shaped by their own social relations.
He also knew that the societies on the margins had their own internal dynamics that
were shaped but not entirely formed by their relations with the capitalist countries.
This informed his views about the importance of alliances between the industrial
workers in capitalist states and progressive elements of the working masses in
societies on the periphery of the capitalist world system (e.g. Marx and Engels
1882/1989).
Property, Power, and Capitalist States
Marx began his examination of the interconnections of law, economy, and civil
society in the 1840s. His investigations were provoked by ongoing discussions
of land thefts, debates on free trade and protective tariffs, and polemics about the
condition of the peasantry in Moselle as well as by the distinctions Ferguson, Saint-
Simon, Hegel, and others drew between civil society and a political state that stood
outside of society (Showstack Sassoon 1991). Property was a central concern in
these arguments. Marx saw property as rights of access, use, and disposition—that
is, as political relations between classes of persons that were mediated by things;
consequently, property was also a statement about power viewed variously as agency
(the capacity of action), the ability to realize objective interests, or compulsion over
the actions of others (e.g. Macpherson 1971; Bourdieu 1980/1990).8
If the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state of power “maintaining injustice in
property relations,” which is determined by the modern division of labour, it is not
creating it. The “injustice of property relations” which is determined by the modern
division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., by no
means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political
rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production. (Marx
1847/1976a: 319; emphasis in the original)
Society itself—the fact that man lives in society and not as an independent, self-supporting
individual—is the root of property, of the laws based on it and of the inevitable slavery.
(Marx 1861–3/1963: 346)
Marx initially framed his discussions of property in terms of Hegel’s distinction

between civil society and the state—the former as the sphere of individual (private)
economic desires and the latter as public expressions of the common concerns of
society as a whole, a category which stood above those of individuals and of which
political organization was only one aspect (e.g. Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 3,
89–91; Draper 1977: 32–4). Dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the terms and the
distinction implied between natural man and abstract citizen, Marx (1843/1975c:
166–7) virtually stopped using the notion of civil society by the 1850s and narrowed
the meaning of the concept of the state. He increasingly saw the state as an excrescence
of society rather than an expression of the common concerns of its members (Marx
1880–2/1974: 329). For Marx (1843/1975a), the state was not an abstraction or an
ideal; it referred instead to the historically specific, actually existing political entities
that claimed to rise above the differences of particular socioeconomic interests by
relativizing them and portraying them as equivalents.
Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become
a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the
form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and
external purposes, for the state is only found nowadays in those countries where the
estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away
with in more advanced countries, still play a part and there exists a mixture, where
consequently no section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. . . .
Since the state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common
interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised, it follows that
all common institutions are set up with the help of the state and are given a political
form”. (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1976: 90)
Later, he would write that the legal relations and the political forms of a society
“originate in the material conditions of life;” that “the anatomy of civil society . . .
has to be sought in political economy;” and that “the economic structure of society,
[is] the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Marx 1859/1970: 20). Or,
in the kinds of capitalist societies that were crystallizing at the time,
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the
direct producers, determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows
directly out of production itself and reacts back on in turn as a determinant. On this
is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual
relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case
the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate
producers—a relation whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain
level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive
power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice,
and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in
short, the corresponding specific form of the state in each case. This does not prevent
the same economic basis—the same in its major conditions—from displaying infinite
variations and gradations in appearance, as a result of innumerable different empirical
circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from
outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analyzing given conditions. (Marx
1864–94/1981: 927–8)
Marx’s views about politics, power, and the state were already well developed
by the mid 1840s (Marx 1843/1975a; Colletti 1975; Miliband 1977, 1991). They
were typically elaborated in the context of writings whose central concerns were
the state, class struggle, or the reproduction of society through time. If modern civil
society was the realm of competitive individualism mediated by the market, then the
modern (capitalist) state was an expression of the antagonisms and contradictions
resulting from alienation, exploitation, and the historically contingent processes of
domination and subordination of groups inherent in class-stratified societies. The
institutions and practices of the state sought to contain conflict and to preserve the
social-class structures and political relations that prevailed among their citizens and
subjects. These political relations were, of course, also manifestations of property
and power. States and their agents were representatives of the dominant social
classes whose members owned and controlled the means of production; states were
also arenas of struggle within and between classes (Marx 1843/1975a, 1852/1979;
Marx and Engels 1848/1976). For Marx (1847/1976b: 212), “political power was
precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.” What modern civil
society had accomplished was to simplify the expression of these struggles. In this
perspective, while the ethnic, religious, national, and other kinds of rivalries and
conflicts generated within and between modern societies have their roots in social-
class relations, they are not simply reducible to purely economic arrangements. In
other words, politics and culture were important arenas of struggle, even though
their forms of expression and intensity were often diverse.
As we saw earlier in this chapter, the rise of national states—England, Germany,
or the United States, for example—coincided in time and was inseparably linked
with the development of industrial capitalism, the formation of colonies, and the
creation of both domestic and overseas markets (Marx 1863–7/1977: 914–40; Engels
1884/1990).9 As a result, the class struggles that occurred in one national state were
typically both spatially and organizationally distinct from those taking place in
other countries. They still are in some respects. Marx and Engels (1848/1976: 517;
1882/1989) were acutely aware of the complex culture-historical, political, and
economic roots of the ethnic, national, and racial differences that fragmented the
working classes of particular national states (like England or the United States) and
of the chasms that separated the proletarians of one country from those of another
when they wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and called for the “working men
of all countries, [to] unite!”—a sentiment they repeated once again in 1882 when they
pointed to possible linkages between Russian peasants and industrial proletarians in
the capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America (Benner 1995). They
repeatedly insisted that, strategically, democratic movements in one country needed
to be aware of and to seek the support of similar groups in other states. Aware of the
common interests of workers, Marx and Engels belonged to political groups that had
representatives from a number of national states.
Attempts to organize workers politically within national states as well as across
their boundaries were often resisted by both the capitalist classes of those countries
and the state apparatuses, whose institutions, laws, and practices were shaped to
varying degrees by the dominant classes. Marx (1843/1975a: 22–3) knew that the
political unity of a national state was, as Erica Benner (1995: 31) put it, “realized
only in times of external crisis and war, on, in times of peace, through political
repression. In either situation, the appearance of unity had nothing to do with the
conscious commitment of a state’s members. It depended, in fact, on denying them
opportunities to express any political preferences of their own.” Moreover, he
thought that one should evaluate the reasons why particular national identities were
imposed on a people from above and that these should be distinguished from those
that arose in the community and addressed real human needs as opposed to the
abstract concerns of the state and of the monarchs, representatives, and civil servants
who viewed the state as their own private property (Marx 1843/1975a: 38, 49–54;
Benner 1995: 32). In other words, the modern national states emerging in Europe
and North America, for example, were fragile, because
even the limited benefits of “political emancipation” were distributed unevenly in

society, since they derived “from the fact that part of civil society emancipates itself and
attains general domination,” so that a particular class “proceeding from its particular
situation, undertakes the general emancipation of society [Marx 1843–4/1975: 184].
This “partial revolution” left a potentially explosive tension between the inclusive,
egalitarian premises of democratic constitutions and the social inequalities they declined
to address. (Benner 1995: 34)
Thus, expressions of national identity by national states—like the United States

(America), for example—were simultaneously assertions of unity vis-à-vis other
states and manifestations of the failure of a class-stratified society to achieve any
real sense of community or internal unity by other means.
The conflict between the capitalist classes of different national states usually
pitted one country against another—e.g. the United States and England in the 1850s
and 1860s or France and Germany during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. More
recent examples are the First and Second World Wars of the twentieth century.
These conflicts typically involved the creation of cross-class alliances that yoked
the interests of peasants and workers with those of the capitalist classes under the
hegemony of the latter. Patriotism was often the glue that cemented these historically
constituted blocs (e.g. Dower 1986; Gramsci 1926/1967, 1933/1971). These alliances
set the working classes of one country against those of another. The conflicts between
capitalist states also pitted them against non-capitalist societies—such as India or
China, about which Marx wrote extensively in the 1850s as we saw earlier in this
chapter. In the wake of the Second World War, these conflicts were often referred
to in terms of imperialism, decolonization, national liberation movements, as well
as distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries, the capitalist
countries of the First World and the newly independent but poor nations of the Third
World, the North and the South, or the core and the periphery (e.g. Brewer 1990).
Marx wrote extensively about the contradictions of industrial capitalist societies
from the 1840s onward. The two forms of contradiction described above—those
between capitalist states and those between capitalist states and non-capitalist
societies—have persisted to the present day; they exist alongside and articulate with
a fundamental antagonism in capitalist societies—the one that pits capitalist against
worker.
In the last forty years, the capitalist classes of different countries have also joined
together to form regional or international institutions—such as the North American
Free Trade Agreement or the World Trade Organization—designed to facilitate the
flows of commodities and capital between different countries. These are aspects of
what is now globalization—i.e., the rapid development of global financial markets;
the adoption of flexible production strategies; the adoption of new information
technologies; cheap transportation; movement of vast numbers of people as
migrants, refugees, and tourists; and the spread of capitalist culture through global
media and telecommunications. At the same time that national states have hindered
the formation of transnational unions and attempted with varying intensities to
regulate the flow of workers across their borders, broadly constituted movements
have organized to protest and resist their efforts—the demonstrations against the
World Trade Organization in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa since 1999; the 220,000 or
so labor disturbances that occur annually in China; or the massive immigrant rights
protests that took place across the United States in 2006 are only a few instances
(Walker 2006: 26n18). The focus of the highly diverse, anti-globalization movement
is as often a protest against the institutions of global capitalism as it is opposition
to the practices of particular national states. Marx wrote about these contradictions
from the 1840s onward, which suggests that he would have been intrigued by their
manifestations today.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 237), for example, argue that these
attempts to regulate the global market signal an “epochal shift in contemporary
history” and use the term “empire” to refer to the new form of sovereignty that
they suggest has crystallized as a result of efforts to unify the world market. They
see a fundamental contradiction “between the deterritorialising logic of capital and
the territorialising nature of nation-states” (Green 2002: 40; cf. Hardt and Negri
2000: 42–6, 237). This contradiction was mediated through imperialism, which
allowed the capitalist firms of Europe and North America to expand under the
protection of the national state both at home and abroad. However, imperialism
“also created and reinforced rigid boundaries among the various global spaces, strict
notions of inside and outside that effectively blocked the free flow of capital, labor
and goods—thus necessarily precluding the full realization of the world market”
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 332). In their view, the weakening of the old imperialist
powers in the wake of the Second World War, the pre-eminence of the United States
and its rivalry with the USSR, and the success of decolonization movements were
conditions that promoted the re-creation of the world market and the formation of
a new global division of labor in the 1970s. As Paul Green (2002: 43) has noted,
the unification of the world market did not involve homogenization but rather the
uneven development of capitalism, the decentering of industrial production from
the old industrial capitalist countries to former colonies, “the entry of great masses
of workers into the disciplinary régime of modern capitalist production, and the
emergence of new patterns of labour migration . . . even as some parts of the globe,
especially Africa, remain peripheralised in the traditional sense of relying on exports
of one or two primary commodities and the import of manufactures.”
For Hardt and Negri, what persists in the global structure at the beginning of the
twenty-first century is the conflict between transnational corporations and the power
of the state, albeit in a new form:
Although transnational corporations and global networks of production and circulation

have undermined the powers of nation-states, state functions and constitutional elements
have effectively been displaced to other levels and domains. . . . Government and politics
come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational command. Controls
are articulated through a series of international bodies and functions. (Hardt and Negri
2000: 307)
Their claim is a provocative one that challenges state-centered approaches to under-

standing the world today; however, not everyone agrees with it for any number
of reasons. These include but are not limited to: there are alternative historical
explanations of the developments Hardt and Negri describe; the world is not as
seamless or smooth as they suggest, since the income gap between the North and
the South continues and may even be widening; the crisis of the 1970s was not as
different from those of 1873–96 and the 1930s as they imply; there are still ongoing
and emergent rivalries between national states; there is a profound contradiction
between the globalization of markets and states using different currencies; the
deterritorialization they describe is accompanied by reterritorialization—e.g. the

border between the United States and Mexico; their approach to the issue of power in
terms of binary oppositions is problematic; or, far from opening up a political space
for the voice of the multitudes as they suggest, the intensification of competition in
the market has seemingly strengthened patriarchal, racist, and national-chauvinist
sentiments and dispositions (e.g. Balakrishnan 2003; Smith 2005: 51).
In this chapter, we have looked at three issues. The first was Marx’s views
about the development of industrial capitalist social relations and its intersection
with primitive accumulation, the formation of domestic and overseas markets,
and colonization. The second was concerned with the processes of combined and
uneven development along different historical trajectories that resulted from the
encapsulation and articulation of societies manifesting different modes of production
that were differentially resistant to change. The third focused, on the one hand, on
his discussions of the interrelations of property and power, and, on the other, on the
implications of his writings for understanding what is happening at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. It is perhaps fitting to recall Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 409–10)
comments in the Grundrisse about the universality towards which capital strives, on
the one hand, and the obstacles that it erects that hinder this process, on the other.
–6–
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century
Marx was indeed an anthropologist. His anthropology was empirically grounded

in the changing realities of everyday life in his own society broadly conceived and
in accounts of other societies—initially past societies in the West and increasingly
contemporary societies in other parts of the world. The rich detail of his empirical
anthropology is perhaps most evident in his journalistic accounts and his analyses of
capitalist society and the capitalist mode of production. His anthropology was also
rooted in a life-long exploration and elaboration of the ontological categories—i.e.,
the essential or core features—that characterize and structure human existence.
Marx honed his philosophical anthropology in the 1840s after completing his
doctoral dissertation and continued to refine his views in subsequent writings like the
Grundrisse. These inquiries buttressed his critical analyses of both the contradictions
of modern society and the possibilities and contingencies of alternative pathways of
social change in the immediate future. Marx’s anthropology was therefore cautiously
optimistic. He clearly realized that societies were different from one another; that
they change; and that they will keep on doing so.
As we saw in earlier chapters, Marx argued (1) that individual human beings
engaged in creative and self-creative activity and enmeshed in webs of social
relations are the fundamental entities of society, and (2) that both the nature of
the individuals and their social relations with each other change historically (e.g.
Archard 1987; Brenkert 1983: 227; Gould 1978: 6). Another way of saying this is
that human beings create themselves through praxis, and their sociality creates them
as social individuals in a community. These social individuals are shaped by their
history and plot the course of their actions within the constraints imposed by their
bodies and their social relations with others. Nevertheless, they experience both their
everyday life and history as individuals. In Marx’s (1857–8/1973: 84) terms, they
are “dependent belonging to the greater whole” and “can individuate [themselves]
only in the midst of society.” Moreover, since their social relations are neither fixed
nor immutable, the particular form they assume at any given moment “is a historic
product [that] belongs to a specific phase of their [sociohistorical] development”
(Marx 1857–8/1973: 162).
In the same context, Marx (1857–8/1973: 158, 161–3) also argued logically that
“relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first
social forms,” and that in pre-capitalist societies “individuals, . . . although their
145
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 com-
munities, 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.
Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century • 147
Social Relations and the Formation of Social Individuals
The cornerstone of Marx’s (1844/1975a) views about the formation of social ind-
ividuals 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:
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 domina-
tion 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, belong-
ing 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 forma-
tion 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 vari-
ous forms of protest ranging from religion and the ongoing tensions between com-
munities 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
Anthropology: “The Study of People in Crisis by People in Crisis”
Let us now turn to the second goal outlined in the introduction to the book: namely,
given the topics Marx addressed at length or in passing in his writings, what is his
legacy, both actual and potential, to issues of importance in anthropology today?
Here, it is important to keep in mind that he was a political activist whose aim
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 incorp-
oration 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:
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, generaliza-
tion, 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 Petrović (1965/1967: 119–27) has argued,
Marx did not mean either the “absence of external impediments to movement or
activity” or power over nature and self resulting from “knowledge of internal and
external necessity.” Rather, he viewed freedom in terms of self-determination:
Human beings are free only when they determine their own deeds; when their
creativity and actions reflect an integral, many-sided personality that is not tied
to special thoughts or emotions; and when what is creative in them determines
not only their deeds but also contributes to the extension of the humanity itself
(Petrović 1965/1967: 126–7). For Marx, the struggle for a free, more democratic
society was also part of the struggle for emancipating the individual from the
constraints imposed by alienation, domination, and exploitation. This was the appeal
of socialism and communism—first as theorized and then described in detail by
Morgan (1881/2003). Marx was concerned throughout his life with the questions:
How do we actualize a more democratic society? And, how do we transcend the
limitations of our own society, which proclaims inalienable rights and equality at the
same time that it is riven by structural inequities, poverty, intolerance of difference,
and intense nationalist or fundamentalist sentiments? Marx was shrewd enough
to realize that one does not start by creating something de novo, but rather with
relations, conditions, and contradictions as they already exist. This, in his view,
was the importance of emergent tendencies in societies in the context of dominant
structures. Once again, anthropologists have contributed to our understanding of
emerging tendencies in societies throughout the twentieth century—for example, the
Ghost Dance, the cargo cults that appeared in Melanesia from the 1880s onward, the
civil rights struggles, the women’s movement, indigenous activism, or the Zapatista
movement that formed in southern Mexico in the wake of the NAFTA accords in
the early 1990s (e.g. Collier 1994; Marable 1995; Mooney 1896; Mullings 1997;
Stephen 1997; Warren 1998; Worsley 1968/1970).
In sum, Marx’s anthropology is concerned with Kant’s question: “What are human
beings?” It recognizes the importance of totality—the sometimes contradictory
unity—of various approaches to understanding the human condition. It has a finely
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.
Notes
Introduction
1. For example, the contrast between Renaissance and sixteenth-century anthro-

pology can be drawn by the emphasis on language and then archaeology in the
former and the concern with comparative ethnology in the latter (Pagden 1982;
Rowe 1964, 1965).
2. Anthropology was clearly taught in different university faculties—e.g. law,
theology, and medicine—by individuals with diverse backgrounds and
philosophical presuppositions (Kelley 1984: 247; Vermeulen 1995). It also is
doubtful that the empirical and philosophical strands were ever entirely separated
in anthropology courses taught in the German states during the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, judging by the content of Kant’s lectures (Kant
1798/1978; Stark 2003).
Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology
1. Jacques Roger (1963/1997: 181–204) discusses “the God of philosophers and

scientists” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As he points out,
the shift in conception was complex; describing it as solely in terms of “a growing
hostility to Christianity which drove many into deism and some into outright
materialism and atheism,” while accurate at one level, misses the nuances and
subtleties at other levels (Bowler 1974: 161).
2. The imprimatur of the Royal Press was important for two reasons. It made the
volumes official publications of the Crown. It also allowed Buffon to avoid
censorship, which was a continual threat faced by his contemporaries, notably
Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau (Fellows 1963a: 608–9).
3. Rogers (1963/1997: 259–60) describes the doctrines of preformationism and pre-
existence of germs in the following way. Preformationists argued that the actual
generation of a living being occurred in the body because of its ensoulment by
the seed of the male parent. This seed contained an entirely formed or preformed
individual, and embryonic development consisted merely of the enlargement of
the already existing parts. Advocates of the pre-existence of germs argued that
the germ contained in the seed was not produced by the male genitor but rather
by God at the beginning of the world and had merely been preserved in the adult
male until the moment of development.
173
174 • Notes
4. While Buffon conceptualized descent with modification, he did not accept the
idea of transformism—i.e., one species developing into another. He reasoned
that no new species were known to have appeared, that the infertility of hybrids
constituted a barrier, and that, if one species did evolve from another, then the
process was a gradual one (Mayr 1982: 330–6). Buffon’s friend, Denis Diderot
(1713–84), crystallized the idea of transformism in 1753, when he argued that:
“(1) each species has had a history; (2) it has evolved over a long period of time;
(3) new species appear through a process of variation, but maintain a relation to
each other” (Crocker 1959: 131; Fellows 1963b; Lovejoy 1959a).
5. Ronald Meek (1967: 35–7, 48) characterized the Scottish historical school as
Smith (1723–90), Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), William Robertson
(1721–93), Adam Ferguson (1723–1815), and James Millar (1740–1805). David
Hume (1711–76)), who was a close associate of Smith, and James Burnett, Lord
Monboddo (1714–99), whose views were outside the mainstream of the Scottish
Enlightenment, might also be included as well. Marx mentioned Smith, Hume, and
Ferguson by name in his own writings and cited works that mentioned Millar.
6. My understanding and appreciation of Enlightenment social thought have ben-
efited generally from the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Crawford B. Macpherson,
Ronald Meek, Roy Pascal, and Robert Wokler, and especially from Asher
Horowitz’s pathbreaking analysis of Rousseau’s anthropology, Peter H. Reill’s
studies of historicism and the importance of history in the formation of the social
sciences in the late eighteenth century, Robert Louden’s discussion of Immanuel
Kant’s “impure ethics,” and Frederick Barnard’s explorations of Herder’s ideas
about culture and history.
7. Rousseau’s relationship with Buffon and their contemporaries, notably Pierre-
Louis de Maupertuis (1698–1759) and Diderot, is discussed by Bowler (1974),
Fellows (1960), and Mason and Wokler (1992).
8. While Rousseau was not the first to argue that apes occupied an intermediate
position between human beings and animals, the Origins of Inequality sparked
an interesting debate that linked the origins of language with what Robert Wokler
(1978) called “perfectible apes.” Wokler (1978, 1980, 1988) describes the debate
in the following way. Comparative anatomist Edward Tyson (1650–1708) argued
in the 1690s that, while apes were intermediate because of physical characteristics
they shared with human beings, they were nonetheless not human beings because
they lacked the mental powers of humans—i.e., they did not possess language
which, at the time, was taken to be the true mark of rationality. Buffon agreed
and further suggested that only men had souls. In the late 1740s, the gap between
man and animal closed briefly. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) argued
that souls were fictitious, and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1714–80) claimed
that the cries of animals were evidence of thought. In contrast, Rousseau argued
that the development of language was part of the perfectibility of human beings,
which occurred in the context of contingent social relations, and that apes, even
Notes • 175
though they did not speak, were still a variety of human being, because of their
behavior. Lord Monboddo developed Rousseau’s ideas concerning the humanity
of apes and historically contingent nature of language; like Rousseau, he stressed
the importance of the capacity for language rather than its attainment. In the
1770s, social critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and physiologist,
comparative anatomist Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), often claimed as
a founder of physical anthropology, disagreed with Rousseau and Monboddo.
They argued instead that the anatomical differences between apes and humans
were too great to permit considering the former as part of the human species. By
1795, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) wrote his essay on the origins
of language, the whole question had once again become dehistoricized (Stam
1976: 182–9).
9. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), by contrast, argued
that self-interest alone was the sufficient basis of society.
10. Kant did not champion the rights of women in the public sphere. He argued that
women did not think independently and thus should work behind the scenes in
the private sphere (e.g. Louden 2000: 84–5).
11. Kant’s (e.g. 1775/2000, 1788/2001) views on race, developed from 1775 on-
ward, played an important role in distinguishing species and races and in dev-
eloping a historical interpretation of species (Lenoir 1980; Sloan 1979). While
Kant was skeptical about the possibility of physiognomy (i.e., judging the
dispositions or thoughts of individuals from their visible or exterior forms), he
practiced it with some regularity (Bernasconi 2001).
12. Winckelmann is arguably one of the founders of both art history and classical
archaeology as we know them today, and Blumenbach has been portrayed for
more than a century as the first, truly modern physical anthropologist.
Chapter 2 Marx’s Anthropology
1. Marx’s views about human nature have been discussed by a number of authors,
especially during the past thirty years (e.g. Archibald 1989; Geras 1983; Heyer
1982; Lewis 1974; Lichtman 1990; Márkus 1978; McMurtry 1978; Sayers 1998;
Soper 1981, Venable 1945/1966). They do not always agree with one another.
In this section, I generally follow the persuasive arguments set forth by Joseph
Fracchia (1991, 2005) and David McNally (2001).
2. The geologists Marx had in mind were Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817)
and Charles Lyell (1797–1875) (Foster 2000: 116–20; Greene 1982: 19–68). He
had studied with Henrik Steffens, one of Werner’s students. Both Werner and
Lyell were concerned with empirical evidence for geological change and with the
mechanisms that underpinned those changes.
3. Kosík (1963/1976: 24) observed that Marx’s notion of totality differed from both
the atomist-rationalist conception, which asserts that “reality [is] . . . a totality
176 • Notes
of simplest elements and facts,” and the organicist view, “which formalizes
the whole and emphasizes the predominance and priority of the whole over the
parts.” Marx’s view, instead, is a dialectical conception “which grasps reality as a
structured, evolving and self-forming whole.”
4. I am indebted in this section to the insights of Karl Kosík’s (1963/1976) Dialectics
of the Concrete and Richard Bernstein’s (1971) Praxis and Action.
Chapter 3 Human Natural Beings
1. The “bourgeois Darwinians” specifically mentioned by Engels were Ludwig

Büchner (1824–99), Karl Vogt (1817–95) and Jakob Moleschott (1822–93).
The first was a physician and the latter were physiologists. All were scientific
materialists and reductionists who believed the properties or forms of behavior
exhibited by human beings should be sought in the laws of physics. In the political
sphere, their politics were reformist, and they concentrated their attention on
education and popularizing rather than political action (Gregory 1977a, 1977b).
Chapter 4 History, Culture, Social Formation
1. Later anthropologists inspired by Marx and Engels—e.g. Eleanor Leacock (1972),

Richard Lee (1988), or Eric Wolf (1982: 88–100) to name only three—refer to
Marx’s original communal (tribal) form as primitive communism or the kin-
ordered mode of production. Lewis H. Morgan (1881/2003: 63ff.) coined the
phrase “communism in living” in his Houses and House-Life of the American
Aborigines.
2. The concept of Oriental or Asiatic society had a substantial history before Marx
wrote. Marx’s conceptualization of the Asiatic mode of production relied not only
on analyses of societies in India, Persia, and China but also on those of Peru and
Mexico (Bailey and Llobera 1981; Krader 1975).
3. Hobsbawm also remarked that Engels (1850/1978, 1876–8/1987, 1882/1989,
1882/1990, 1884/1972) wrote more systematically about feudalism than Marx,
and that there is no indication that the latter disagreed with what Engels wrote.
4. V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957), arguably the most influential archaeologist of the
twentieth century and a political activist of the Left for his entire life, described the
origins of agriculture and the rise of states in terms of the “Neolithic Revolution”
and the “Urban Revolution.” He was aware that the former involved a changing
metabolism between people and the natural worlds they inhabited, and that the
latter involved new forms of surplus extraction, social-class structures, conquest,
repression, and craft specialization as well as literacy, monumental architecture,
and new forms of settlement (Childe 1936/1983, 1950/2004, 1954).
Notes • 177
Chapter 5 Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World
1. Engels’s (1845/1975) study of the conditions of the workers in Manchester was

arguably the first urban ethnography. While Marx began with the available sources
on India, including Hegel, he was already impressed by 1853 with the shaping
effects of common property in the village community rather than religion in the
organization of Indian society. Marx and Engels discussed the bases of this view
and its implication in letters, and the former mentioned it in one of the early Tribune
articles (Marx 1853/1983a: 332–4, 1853/1983b: 347–8, 1853/1979a; Engels
1853/1983: 339–41). Marx (1857–8/1973: 473, 1863–7/1977: 477–9) elaborated
his views on the communal ownership of land and the village community in the
Grundrisse and Capital (Habib 2006; Patnaik 2006).
2. The two accounts were polarized to some extent by informed commentators on
Marx during the debates on the “transition question” after the Second World War
(e.g. Brenner 1977, 1989; Byres 2006; Dobb 1947; Hilton 1953/1976, 1978/1990;
Sweezy 1950/1976; Wallerstein 1974).
3. Marx’s views about articulation generated a significant debate in the 1970s and
1980s among anthropologists who were coming to grips with the linkages between
capitalist and non-capitalist relations of production and reproduction in former
colonies. This discussion, which was launched by Pierre-Philippe Rey (1971,
1973/1982, 1975, 1979) and Claude Meillassoux (1971/1980, 1975/1981), was
soon joined by Harold Wolpe (1980, 1985), Joel Kahn and Josep Llobera (1981),
and Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (1985) among others.
4. Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945/1954), Eric Wolf (1959, 1969,1982), Peter
Worsley (1961, 1968/1970), June Nash (1979), Joel Kahn (1980, 1993), Michael
Taussig (1980, 1987), Peter Rigby (1985, 1992), Christine Gailey (1987), Marshall
Sahlins (1988/2000), and John Gledhill (1991, 1995) are only a few of those who
come immediately to mind.
5. As Aijaz Ahmad (2001) notes, Marx, and Engels to a greater extent, wrote about
the issues of nation and nationality in the eastern and southeastern parts of the
Hapsburg Empire and the Crimean War. They did so at the same time that the Marx
was also writing about China, India, the independence question in Ireland, cond-
emning slavery in the United States, and denouncing the caste system (e.g. Marx
1846/1982: 101–2, 1853/1983c: 339–42; Engels 1851–3/1979: Benner 1995).
6. Long-term monopolies over the sale of particular items seem to have been a
common practice for the English. In 1884, English bondholders gained control
over a railroad built in southern Peru in the 1870s to facilitate the transport of
wool from the southern highlands to the port city of Mollendo. In exchange for
the cancellation of the debt, the bondholders received a 66-year monopoly on the
railroad as well as monopolies on the sale of coca, matches, and playing cards
(Spalding 1975).
178 • Notes
7. The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in 1858 by members of the Irish-American

petit bourgeoisie who desired political independence for Ireland and whose goal
was fueled by hatred of the English landlords which appealed to many of the
Irish immigrants. In the wake of the American Civil War, some of its leaders,
former officers in the Union army, organized raids into Canada in 1866 and 1870.
Others sailed for Cork, Ireland in 1867 where they planned to organize and lead an
army that would overthrow the British. Many were quickly arrested, imprisoned,
and deprived of habeas corpus, much like the prisoners held unconstitutionally
by the government of the United States at Guantanamo today. Their supporters
attempted to blow up a prison in London but succeeded only in destroying nearby
houses. The British press used this to whip up anti-Irish sentiment. Some of the
prisoners were eventually executed; others served their sentences in Australia.
8. Dick Pels (1998: 18–73) has argued that the concepts of property and power are
enmeshed in disciplinary and intellectual politics. Today, it is commonplace to
treat property and power as distinct—the former concerned with socially acquired
things, their possession, use, and disposition, and the latter with command over
the actions and activities of persons. He also pointed out: (1) the bases for this
dichotomy were already present in the writings of seventeenth-century theorists;
(2) the boundary between the two concepts has often been blurred; (3) one concept
has frequently served as the limiting case of the other; and (4) the prominence of
one category relative to the other not only depends on national traditions (Scottish
and French vs. German and Italian) but also has shifted over time (power being
the more prominent of the two in late twentieth-century intellectual discourse).
9. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1845–6/1976: 73, 89) saw nationality
as an attribute of existing states rather than ethnic communities defined exclusively
in terms of language and culture or language and blood or as peoples aspiring to
self-determination. This form of nation or nationality had pejorative connotations
for them and was not a substitute for the formation of communities from the
bottom up that genuinely dealt with the needs of their members. In their later
writings, they sometimes also used the term “nation” to refer to peoples, like the
Irish or the Russians. As Erica Benner 1995: 45) put it:
They saw pre-political forms of ethnicity, language community, and territorial
attachments as unthreatening to their revolutionary project so long as these were
not pressed into the service of aggrandizing authoritarian states. What worried them,
and what they wanted most urgently to discredit, were the “political claims” of such
states to represent what Hegel had called the “genuine nationality” or patriotism of
“the people.”
Notes • 179
6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century
1. I use the term “intimate” as a synonym for “sharing” in order to indicate the
relationships among those with whom one shares with no particular expectation
of immediate or future return. In this sense, sharing is distinct from reciprocity,
where there is some expectation of return. John Price (1975: 4) notes that sharing
is the glue that holds together the members of intimate societies are which are
typically “small in scale and personally in quality, such that the members have
extensive knowledge of each other, interpersonal sentiments have developed, and
changing the identity of the persons would change their relationships. There is
usually face-to-face interaction of the same people over an extended period of
time. In an intimate economy the particular patterns of personal interdependency
significantly influence the patterns of economic production and distribution.”
Anthropologists—Eleanor Leacock (1982) among several others—have pointed
out that the social units forged by sharing are often larger than households or
families, which of course are not necessarily the same thing. While sharing is
certainly not a predominant form of economic behavior in capitalist societies, the
sense of community embodied in the practice clearly exists; moreover, people
continually struggle to maintain and re-create it in these and other contexts (e.g.
Gailey 1987).
2. What distinguished one kind of pre-capitalist state from another, as Eric Wolf
(1999: 5) noted, were kinds of relational structures that resulted from the capacities
to control that inhered in groups, how these were manifest in interactions with
others, the contexts in which they were activated and realized, and how the
relationships operated in and organized those settings. While
3. August Nimtz (2000, 2003) provides textured discussions of Marx’s views about
slavery, racism, and race in the North America from the early 1850s onward as
well as his active participation in abolitionist and democratic political movements
in the United States.
4. In 1971, Noam Chomsky (1928–) and Michel Foucault (1926–84) engaged in a
debate with one another about human nature and with the proposals made by Marx
and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Chomsky and Foucault 1971/2006:
37–66).
Bibliography
Abélès, Marc (1976), Anthropologie et marxisme. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe.

Ahmad, Aijaz (2001), “Introduction,” in Aijaz Ahmad (ed.), Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels: On the National and Colonial Questions: Selected Writings, New Delhi:
LeftWord Books, pp. 1–20.
Allen, Garland E. (1978), Life Science in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Allert, Beate (1991), “Review of Ernst Platners Anthropologie und Philosophie.
Der philosophische Arzt und seine Wirkung auf Karl Wezel und Jean Paul by
Alexander Košenina,” The German Quarterly 64(2): 260–1.
Allison, Henry E. (2005), “Spinoza, Benedict de (1632–77),” in Edward Craig (ed.),
The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
pp. 985–1000.
Althusser, Louis (1959/1982), “Montesquieu: Politics and History,” in Louis
Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, London: Verso, pp. 17–109.
Althusser, Louis (1963/1970), “On the Materialist Dialectic on the Unevenness of
Origins,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 161–218.
Amin, Samir (1973/1976), Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations
of Peripheral Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Anderson, Kevin B. (2002), “Marx’s Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist
Societies and Gender,” Rethinking Marxism 14(4): 84–96.
Anderson, Perry (1974a), Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: New Left Books.
Anderson, Perry (1974b), Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London: New Left
Books.
Appel, Toby A. (2000), Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and
American Biological Research, 1945–1975, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Archard, David (1987), “The Marxist Ethic of Self-Realization: Individuality and
Community,” in J. D. G. Evans (ed.), Moral Philosophy and Contemporary
Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–34.
Archibald, W. Peter (1989), Marx and the Missing Link: “Human Nature,” Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Aron, Raymond (1965/1998), “Montesquieu,” in Raymond Aron, Main Current
in Sociological Thought, vol. 1, Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, deTocqueville,
Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, pp. 13–72.
181
182 • Bibliography
Ashworth, John (1983), “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in

the United States, 1837–1846, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Avineri, Schlomo (1968), Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York:
Doubleday and Company.
Baer, Hans A., Singer, Merrill, and Susser, Ida (1997), Medical Anthropology and
the World System: A Critical Perspective, Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Bailey, Anne M. and Llobera, Josep R. (eds) (1981), The Asiatic Mode of Production:
Science and Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed.) (2003), Debating Empire, London: Verso.
Balibar, Etienne (1988/1991), “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London:
Verso, pp. 37–67.
Balibar, Etienne (1989/1994), “Racism as Universalism,” in Etienne Balibar,
Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after
Marx, London: Routledge, pp. 191–204.
Balter, Michael (2007), “Seeking Agriculture’s Ancient Roots,” Science 316(5833):
1830–5.
Banaji, Jairus (2001), Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and
Aristocratic Dominance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barnard, Alan and James Woodburn (1988), “Property, Power and Ideology in
Hunter-Gathering Societies: An Introduction,” in Tim Ingold, David Riches,
and James Woodburn (eds) Hunters and Gatherers, vol. 2, Property, Power and
Ideology, Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 4–31.
Barnard, Frederick M. (1965), Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From
Enlightenment to Nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barnard, Frederick M. (1969), “Culture and Political Development: Herder’s
Suggestive Insights,” The American Political Science Review 63(2): 379–97.
Barnard, Frederick M. (2003), Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Baum, John A. (1979), Montesquieu and Social Theory, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Beiser, Frederick C. (1992a), “Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,” in
Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 26–61.
Beiser, Frederick C. (1992b), Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The
Genesis of German Political Thought, 1790–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Benner, Erica (1995), Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View of
Marx and Engels, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Berlin, Isaiah (1955/2001), “Montesquieu,” in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current:
Essays in the History of Ideas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.
130–61.
Bibliography • 183
Bernasconi, Robert (2001), “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the
Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Race, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, pp. 11–36.
Bernstein, Richard J. (1971), Praxis and Action, Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Berry, Christopher J. (1982), Hume, Hegel and Human Nature, International Archives
of the History of Ideas 103, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Bhaskar, Roy (1991a), “Contradiction,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 109–10.
Bhaskar, Roy (1991b), “Truth,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist
Thought, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 500–1.
Binford, Lewis R. (1985), “Human Ancestors: Changing Views of Their Behavior,”
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 4(4): 292–327. Orlando.
Binsbergen, Wim van and Geschiere, Peter (1985), “Emerging Insights and Issues
in French Marxist Anthropology,” in Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere
(eds), Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment: Anthropological
Explorations in Africa, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 1–38.
Blake, Michael and Clark, John (1999), “The Emergence of Hereditary Inequality:
The Case of Pacific Coastal Chiapas, Mexico,” in Michael Blake (ed.), Pacific
Latin America in Prehistory: The Evolution of Archaic and Formative Cultures,
Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, pp. 55–74.
Blanckaert, Claude (1993), “Buffon and the Natural History of Man: Writing History
and the ‘Foundational Myth’ of Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences
6(1): 13–50.
Bodley, John H. (1982), Victims of Progress, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Pub-
lishing Company.
Bohannon, Paul (1957), Justice and Judgement among the Tiv, London: Oxford
University Press.
Bois, Guy (1976/1984), The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern
Normandy c. 1300–1550, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bois, Guy (1989/1992), The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village
of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism, Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Bonte, Pierre (1977), “Non-Stratified Social Formations among Pastoral Nomads,”
in Jonathan Friedman and Michael Rowlands (eds), The Evolution of Social
Systems, London: Gerald Duckworth, pp. 172–200.
Bonte, Pierre (1981), “Kinship and Politics. The Formation of the State among
the Pastoralists of the Sahara and the Sahel,” in Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter
Skalník (eds), The Study of the State, The Hague: Mouton Publishers, pp. 35–58.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1964/1979), The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation
to Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1972/1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979/1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1980/1990), The Logic of Practice, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984/1988), Homo Academicus, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1989/1996), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of
Power, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron (1977/1990), Reproduction in Education,
Society, and Culture, 2nd edition, London: Sage Publications.
Bowler, Peter J. (1974), “Evolutionism in the Enlightenment,” History of Science
12: 159–83.
Bowler, Peter J. (1976), “Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 37(4): 631–50.
Brenkert, George G. (1983), Marx’s Ethics of Freedom, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Brenner, Robert (1977), “The Origins of Capitalism: A Critique of Neo-Smithian
Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104: 25–92.
Brenner, Robert (1989), “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism,” in
A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern
Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–304.
Brenner, Robert (1997), “Property Relations and the Growth of Agricultural Prod-
uctivity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Amit Bhaduri and
Run Skarstein (eds), Economic Development and Agricultural Productivity,
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 9–44.
Brewer, Anthony (1990), Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 2nd
edition, London: Routledge.
Brian, Kevin M. (2006), Marx, Reason, and the Art of Freedom, 2nd edition,
Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Broackes, Justin (1995), “Hume, David,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford
Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 377–81.
Brodkin, Karen (2000), “Global Capitalism: What’s Race Got To Do With It?”
American Ethnologist 27(2): 237–56.
Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. (1991), “Weaving and Cooking: Women’s Production in
Aztec Mexico,” in Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey (eds), Engendering
Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 224–51.
Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. and Earle, Timothy K. (1987), “Specialization, Exchange,

and Complex Societies: An Introduction,” in Elizabeth M. Brumfiel and Timothy
K. Earle (eds), Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies, Cambridge:
Buikstra, Jane E. and Lane A. Beck (eds) (2006), Bioarchaeology: The Contextual
Analysis of Human Remains, Burlington, MA: Academic Press.
Bunzl, Matti (1996), “Franz Boas and Humboldtian Tradition: From Volkgeist
and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture,” in George
W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), History of Anthropology, vol. 8, Volkgeist as Method
and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological
Tradition, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 79–154.
Burger, Richard L. (1992), Chavin and the Origins of Andean Civilizations, London:
Thames and Hudson.
Burkett, Paul (1999), Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Byres, Terence J. (2006), “Differentiation of the Peasantry under Feudalism and the
Transition to Capitalism: In Defence of Rodney Hilton,” Journal of Agrarian
Change 6(1): 17–68.
Cabral, Amilcar (1963), Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Callinicos, Alex (1995), Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of
History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Caspari, Rachel and Sang-Hee Lee (2004), “Older Age Becomes Common Late
in Human Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America 101(30): 10,895–90.
Chakrabarti, Anjan and Stephen Cullenberg (2003), Transition and Development in
India, London: Routledge.
Chatterjee, Partha (1986), Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse, London: Zed Press.
Childe, V. Gordon (1936/1983), Man Makes Himself, New York: The New American
Library.
Childe, V. Gordon (1950/2004), “The Urban Revolution,” in Thomas C. Patterson
and Charles E. Orser, Jr. (eds), Foundations of Social Archaeology: Selected
Writings of V. Gordon Childe, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, pp. 107–16.
Childe, V. Gordon (1954), “Early Forms of Society,” in Charles Singer, E. J.
Holmyard, and A. R. Hall (eds), A History of Technology, vol. I, From Earliest
Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.
38–57.
Chomsky, Noam and Michel Foucault (1971/2006), “Human Nature: Justice
vs. Power: A Debate Between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,” in The
Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, with a foreword by John Rajchman,
New York: The New Press, pp. 1–67.
Clark, John E. (1995), “Craft Specialization as an Archaeological Category,”

Research in Economic Anthropology 16: 267–94.
Cohen, Gerald A. (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Cohen, Gerald A. (1988), History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cohen, Gerald A. (1995), Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cambridge:
Cohen, Gerald A. (2000), If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Colletti, Lucio (1975), “Introduction,” in Karl Marx Early Writings, Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin Books, pp. 7–56.
Collier, George A. (1994), Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas,
Oakland, CA: Food First Book, The Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Corbey, Raymond (2005), The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human
Boundary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Costin, Cathy L. (1991), “Craft Specialization: Issues in Defining, Documenting,
and Explaining the Organization of Production,” in Michael B. Schiffer (ed.),
Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 3, Tucson, AZ: The University of
Arizona Press, pp. 1–56.
Costin, Cathy L. (2001), Craft Production Systems,” in Gary M. Feinman and
T. Douglas Price (eds), Archaeology at the Millennium: A Sourcebook, New
York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, pp. 273–327.
Crehan, Kate (2002), Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Crocker, Lester G. (1959), “Diderot and Eighteenth Century French Transform-
ism,” in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Strauss, Jr. (eds), The
Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press,
pp. 144–72.
Crumley, Carole (1987), “A Dialectical Critique of Hierarchy,” in Thomas C.
Patterson and Christine W. Gailey (eds), Power Relations and State Formation,
Washington, DC: Archeology Division, American Anthropological Association,
pp. 155–69.
Cullenberg, Stephen (1996), “Althusser and the Decentering of the Marxist Totality,”
in Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio (eds), Postmodern Materialism and the
Future of Marxist Theory, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 120–47.
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. (1997), Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature,
revised edition, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
D’Amico, Robert (1981), Marx and the Philosophy of Culture, University of Florida
Humanities Monograph No. 50. Gainesville.
Darwin, Charles R. (1859/1964), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 1st
edition, with an introduction by Ernst Mayr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.
Darwin, Charles R. (1874/1998), The Descent of Man, Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books.
Davidson, Nigel (2005), “How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?
(contd.),” Historical Materialism 13(4): 3–54.
Davis, Mike (1999), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,
New York: Metropolitan Books.
Davis, Mike (2001), Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of
the Third World, London: Verso.
Deacon, Terrence W. (1992a), “Biological Aspects of Language,” in Stephen Jones,
Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human
Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–34.
Deacon, Terrence W. (1992b), “The Human Brain,” in Stephen Jones, Robert Martin,
and David Pilbeam (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–23.
DeGolyer, Michael (1992), “The Greek Accent of the Marxian Matrix,” in George
E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-Century German Social
Theory and Classical Antiquity, Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
pp. 107–54.
Denby, David (2005), “Herder: Cultural Anthropology and the Enlightenment,”
History of the Human Sciences 18(1): 55–76.
Delisle, Richard G. (2007), Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 1860–2000: The
Nature of Paleoanthropology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Desmond, Adrian (1989), The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and
Reform in Radical London, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
De Vries, Jan (1976), The Economy in Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diakonoff, Igor (1972), “Socio-Economic Classes in Babylonia and the Babylonian
Conception of Social Stratification,” in D. O. Edzard (ed.), Gesellschaftsklassen
im Alten Zweistromland und in den angrenzenden Gebieten—XVIII, Recontre
Assyriologique Internationale, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Philosophisch-Historische Klass, Abhandlungen, Heft 75, Munich, pp. 41–9.
Diamond, Stanley (1951/1996), “Dahomey: The Development of a Proto-State,”
Dialectical Anthropology 21(2): 121–216.
Diamond, Stanley (1969/1999), “Anthropology in Question,” in Dell Hymes (ed.),
Reinventing Anthropology, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp.
401–29.
Diamond, Stanley (1970), “Un ethnocide,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 238: 1194–
206.
Diamond, Stanley (1974), In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, New
Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books.
Diamond, Stanley (1980), “Anthropological Traditions: The Participants Observed,”

in Stanley Diamond (ed.), Anthropology: Heirs and Ancestors, The Hague:
Mouton Publishers, pp. 1–16.
Dickey, Laurence and Nisbet, Hugh B. (eds) (1999), Hegel: Political Writings,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dobb, Maurice (1947), Studies in the Development of Capitalism, New York:
International Publishers.
Dower, John W. (1986), War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War,
New York: Pantheon Books.
Draper, Hal (1977), Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. I, State and Bureaucracy,
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Draper, Hal (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. II, The Politics of Social
Classes, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Dupré, Georges and Rey, Pierre Philippe (1968/1980), “Reflections on the Relevance
of a Theory of the History of Exchange,” in David Seddon (ed.), Relations of
Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology, London: Frank
Cass and Company, pp. 171–208.
Easton, Loyd D. and Guddat, Kurt H. (eds) (1967), Writings of the Young Marx
on Philosophy and Society, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday and
Company.
Engels, Frederick (1845/1975), “The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels: Collected Works, vol. 4, New York: International Publishers, pp. 295–
586.
Engels, Frederick (1849/1977a), “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” in Karl Marx,
Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 8, New York: International Publishers,
pp. 362–78.
Engels, Frederick (1849/1977b), “The Magyar Struggle,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels: Collected Works, vol. 8, New York: International Publishers, pp. 227–38.
Engels, Frederick (1850/1978), “The Peasant War in Germany,” in Karl Marx,
pp. 397–482.
Engels, Frederick (1851–3/1979), “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,”
in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 11, New York: Inter-
national Publishers, pp. 8–102.
Engels, Frederick (1853/1983), “Letter from Engels to Karl Marx, 6 June 1853,” in
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 39, New York: International
Engels, Frederick (1857/1986), “The Capture of Delhi,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels, Frederick (1869/1988), “Letter from Engels to Karl Marx, 9 December
1869,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 43, New York:
International Publishers, pp. 394–6.
Engels, Frederick (1873–82/1987), “Dialectics of Nature,” in Karl Marx, Frederick

590.
Engels, Frederick (1875/1991), “Letter from Engels to Pyotr Labvrov, 12[–17]
November 1875,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 45,
New York: International Publishers, pp. 106–9.
Engels, Frederick (1876/1972), “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from
Ape to Man,” in Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State: In Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. Morgan, New York:
International Publishers, pp. 249–64 [= Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected
Works, vol. 25, New York: International Publishers, 1987, pp. 452–64].
Engels, Frederick (1876–8/1987), “Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution
in Science,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 25, New
York: International Publishers, pp. 5–309.
Engels, Frederick (1878/1987), Anti-Dühring, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Collected Works, vol. 25, New York: International Publishers, pp. 5–309.
Engels, Frederick (1882/1989), “The Mark,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Engels, Frederick (1882/1990), “Manuscripts on Early German History,” in Karl
Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 26, New York: International
Engels, Frederick (1884/1972), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State: In Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. Morgan, with an introduction by
Eleanor B. Leacock, New York: International Publishers.
Engels, Frederick (1884/1990), “On the Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of
National States,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 26, New
Engels, Frederick and Karl Marx (1844–5/1975), “The Holy Family, Or Critique of
Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Fagan, Brian M. (1990), The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World,
London: Thames and Hudson.
Falk, Dean (2004), Braindance: New Discoveries about Human Origins and Brain
Evolution, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Fellows, Otis (1960), “Buffon and Rousseau: Aspects of a Relationship,” Publications
of the Modern Language Association 75(1): 184–96.
Fellows, Otis (1963a), “Buffon’s Place in the Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire
and the Eighteenth Century 25: 603–29.
Fellows, Otis (1963b), “Diderot et Buffon en 1749,” Diderot Studies 4: 221–36.
Fetscher, Iring (1991), “Hegel and Marx,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of
Fink, Karl J. (1993), “Storm and Stress Anthropology,” History of the Human
Sciences 6(1): 51–71.
Finkelstein, Gabriel (2001), “Romanticism, Race, and Recapitulation,” Science

294(5549): 2101–2.
Finley, Moses I. (1973), The Ancient Economy, Sather Lectures in Classics, vol. 43,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Finley, Moses I. (1991), “Ancient Society,” in Tom Bottomore, A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought, 2nd edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, pp. 23–6.
Flannery, Kent V. (1968), “Archeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica,”
in Betty J. Meggers (ed.), Archeology in the Americas, Washington, DC: The
Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 67–87.
Flannery, Kent V. (2002), “The Origins of the Village Revisited: From Nuclear to
Extended Households,” American Antiquity 67(3): 417–34.
Flavell, M. Kay (1979), “Winckelmann and the German Enlightenment: On the
Recovery and Uses of the Past,” The Modern Language Review 74(1): 79–96.
Foner, Eric (1980), Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Forbes, Duncan (1982), “Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Roy H.
Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (eds), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish
Enlightenment, Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, pp. 186–203.
Forbes, Robert J. (1968), The Conquest of Nature, New York: The New American
Library.
Foster, John B. (2000), Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Fowler, Bridget (1997), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investiga-
tions, London: Sage Publications.
Fracchia, Joseph (1991), “Marx’s Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundations of a
Materialist Science of History,” History and Theory 30(2): 153–79.
Fracchia, Joseph (1995), “Review: Time, Labor and Social Domination: A
Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. By Moishe Postone,” History and
Theory 34(4): 355–71.
Fracchia, Joseph (2005), “Beyond the Human-Nature Debate: Human Corporeal
Organisation as the ‘First Fact’ of Historical Materialism,” Historical Materialism
13(1): 33–62.
Frangipane, Marcella (2007), “Different Types of Egalitarian Societies and the
Development of Inequality in Early Mesopotamia,” World Archaeology 39(2):
151–76.
Franke, Richard W. and Chasin, Barbara (1980), Seeds of Famine: Ecological
Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the West African Sahel, Montclair,
NJ: Allanheld, Osmun.
Frayling, Christopher and Wokler, Robert (1982), “From the Orang-utan to the
Vampire: Towards an Anthropology of Rousseau,” in R. A. Leigh (ed.), Rousseau
after 200 Years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium,
Fromm, Erich (1961/2004), “Marx’s Concept of Man,” in Erich Fromm, Marx’s

Concept of Man, London: Continuum, pp. 1–70.
Gailey, Christine W. (1987), Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State
Formation in the Tongan Islands, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Gailey, Christine W. (2003), “Community, State and Questions of Social Evolution
in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” Anthropologica 45(1): 43–55.
Gailey, Christine W. (2006), “Community, State, and Questions of Social Evolution
in Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” in Jaqueline Solway (ed.), The Politics
of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice, Methodology and History in Anthro-
pology, vol. 12, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 31–52.
Galston, William A. (1975), Kant and the Problem of History, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Garber, Daniel (2005), “Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716),” in Edward
Craig (ed.), The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, pp. 552–69.
Garrett, Don (1995), “Spinoza, Baruch,” in Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 870–4.
Gearing, Fred (1961), “The Rise of the Cherokee State as an Instance in a Class:
The ‘Mesopotamian’ Career to Statehood,” in William N. Fenton and John L.
Gulick (eds), Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture, Bureau of American
Ethnology Bulletin 180, Washington, pp. 125–34.
Geras, Norman (1983), Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London:
Verso.
Gero, Joan M. and Scattolin, M. Cristina (2002), “Beyond Complementarity and
Hierarchy: New Definitions for Archaeological Gender Relations,” in Sarah
M. Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (eds), In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide
Archaeological Approaches, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, pp. 155–72.
Gerratana, Valentino (1973), “Marx and Darwin,” New Left Review, no. 82: 60–82.
Gibbons, Ann (2006), The First Human: The Race to Discover our Earliest Ancestor,
New York: Doubleday.
Gibson, James J. (1966/1983), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems,
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Gibson, Kathleen R. and Jessee, Stephen (1999), “Language Evolution and
Expansions of Multiple Neurological Processing Areas,” in Barbara J. King (ed.),
The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us, Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press, pp. 189–228.
Giddens, Anthony (1981), A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol.
1, Power, Property, and the State, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gilman, Antonio (1996), “Prehistoric European Chiefdoms: Rethinking ‘Germanic’
Societies,” in T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman (eds), Foundations of
Social Inequality, New York: Plenum Press, pp. 235–51.
Glass, Bentley (1959), “The Germination of the Idea of Biological Species,” in

Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Strauss, Jr. (eds), The Forerunners
of Darwin: 1745–1859, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 30–48.
Gledhill, John (1978), “Formative Development in the North American Southwest,” in
David Green, Colin Haselgrove, and Matthew Spriggs (eds), Social Organization
and Settlement, B.A.R. International Series (Supplementary) 47, pt. ii, Oxford,
pp. 241–90.
Gledhill, John (1991), Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the Homeland
of Cárdenismo, Albany, NY: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, University at
Albany, State University of New York.
Gledhill, John (1995), Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Poverty: A
Case Study of Michoacán, Mexico, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Glick, Thomas E. (ed.) (1988), The Comparative Reception of Darwin, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Basch, Linda and Blanc-Szanton, Cristina (eds) (1992),
Toward a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and
Nationalism Reconsidered, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol.
645, New York.
Godelier, Maurice (1966/1972), “Structure and Contradiction in Capital,” in Robin
Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory,
Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, pp. 334–68.
Godelier, Maurice (1973/1977), Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Cambridge
Studies in Social Anthropology 18, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
González, Roberto J. (2007), “Phoenix Reborn? The Rise of the ‘Human Terrain
System’,” Anthropology Today 23(6): 21–2.
Gould, Carol C. (1978), Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in
Marx’s Theory of Social Reality, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gould, Stephen J. (2002), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio (1926/1967), “The Southern Question,” in Antonio Gramsci,
The Modern Prince and Other Writings, New York: International Publishers,
pp. 24–65.
Gramsci, Antonio (1933/1971), “Notes on Italian History,” in Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey N. Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York:
Gran, Peter (1979), Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840, Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Gregory, Frederick (1977a), Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany,
Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Gregory, Frederick (1977b), “Scientific versus Dialectical Materialism: A Clash of
Ideologies in Nineteenth-Century German Radicalism,” Isis 68(242): 206–23.
Green, Paul (2002), “‘The Passage from Imperialism to Empire’: A Commentary

on Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,” Historical Materialism 10(1):
29–78.
Greene, Mott T. (1982), Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a
Changing World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Grundmann, Reiner (1991), Marxism and Ecology, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Haber, Francis (1959), The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin, Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins Press.
Habib, Irfan (1968/1995), “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the
Economy of Mughal India,” in Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a
Marxist Perception, New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. 180–222.
Habib, Irfan (1990), “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India,” in James D.
Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early
Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 371–
99.
Habib, Irfan (2006), “Introduction: Marx’s Perception of India,” in Iqbal Husain
(ed.), Karl Marx on India: From the New York Daily Tribune (Including Articles
by Frederick Engels) and Extracts from Marx-Engels Correspondence 1853–
1862, New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. xix–liv.
Haldon, John (1993), The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, London:
Verso.
Haldon, John (2006), “On Igor Diakonoff’s The Paths of History,” Historical
Materialism 14(2): 169–201.
Hamerow, Theodore S. (1969), The Social Foundations of German Unification,
1858–1871: Ideas and Institutions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hammond, Michael (1980), “Anthropology as a Weapon in Social Combat in Late-
Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
16(2): 118–32.
Hanks, William F. (2005), “Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 34: 67–83.
Hann, Chris M. (ed.) (1998), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological
Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hardimon, Michael O. (1994), Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of
Reconciliation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Harris, Edward M. (2002), “Workshop, Marketplace, and Household: The Nature of
Technical Specialization in Classical Athens and its Influence on Economy and
Society,” in Paul Cartledge, Edward E. Cohen, and Lin Foxhall (eds), Money,
Labour, and Land: Approaches to the Economies of Ancient Greece, London:
Routledge, pp. 67–99.
Hartnack, Justus (1992), “Categories and Things-in-Themselves,” in Stephen Priest

(ed.), Hegel’s Critique of Kant, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–86.
Harvey, David (2006), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development, London: Verso.
Harvey, Joy (1983), “Evolutionism Transformed: Positivists and Materialists in
the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris from Second Empire to Third Republic,”
in David Oldroyd and Ian Langham (eds), The Wider Domain of Evolutionary
Thought, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 289–310.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1807/1977), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, with analysis
and foreword by John N. Findley, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1817–30/1978) Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, vol.
2, Anthropology, edited by Michael J. Petry, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing
Company.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1821/1967), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by Thomas
M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1822–30/1975), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,
translated by Hugh B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [= Intro-
duction. The Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Publications, 1956].
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1837/1956), The Philosophy of History, edited by Eduard Gans,
New York: Dover Publications.
Heller, Agnes (1979), A Theory of Feeling, Assen: Van Gorcum.
Henry, Michel (1976/1983), Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1765/2002), “How Philosophy Can Become More
Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People,” in Michael N. Forster (ed.),
Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
3–29.
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1766/2002), “On the Change of Taste,” in Michael N.
Forster (ed.), Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 247–56.
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1772/2002), “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in
Michael N. Forster (ed.), Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1774/2002), “This Too a Philosophy of History for the
Formation of Humanity [=Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit],”
in Michael N. Forster (ed.), Herder: Philosophical Writings, Cambridge:
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1784/1968), Reflections on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind [=Ideen zur Philosophie des Geschichte der Menscheit],
edited by Frank E. Manuel, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
Herder, Johann Gottlieb von (1784–91/1969), “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History
of Mankind [=Ideen zur Philosophie des Geschichte der Menscheit],” in Frederick
M. Barnard (ed.), J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, Cambridge: At

the University Press, pp. 253–326.
Heyer, Paul (1982), Nature, Human Nature, and Society: Marx, Darwin, Biology,
and the Human Sciences, Contributions to Philosophy, no. 21, Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
Hicks, Frederic (1987), “First Steps toward a Market-Integrated Economy in Aztec
Mexico,” in Henri J. M. CLaessen and Pieter van de Velde (eds), Early State
Dynamics, Studies in Human Society, vol. 2, Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 91–107.
Hicks, Frederic (1999), “The Middle Class in Ancient Central Mexico,” Journal of
Anthropological Research 55(3): 409–28.
Hilferding, Rudolf (1910/1981), Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of
Capitalist Development, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hillmann, Günther (1966), Marx und Hegel: Von der Spekulation zur Dialektik:
Interpretation der ersten Schriften von Karl Marx im Hinblick auf sein Verhältnis
zu Hegel, 1835–1841, Frankfurt-am-Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Hilton, Rodney (1953/1976), “The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A
Comment,” in Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,
London: New Left Books, pp. 109–17.
Hilton, Rodney (1978/1990), “Reasons for Inequality among Medieval Peasants,” in
Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval
Social History, London: The Hambledon Press, pp. 139–51.
Hilton, Rodney (1985), “Introduction,” in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds),
The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–9.
Hilton, Rodney (1991), “Serfdom,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist
Thought, 2nd edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, pp. 494–6.
Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul Q. (1975), Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production,
London: Routledge and Kegan-Paul.
Hinton, Alexander L. (ed.) (2002a), Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of
Genocide, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hinton, Alexander L. (ed.) (2002b), Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1959), Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social
Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York: W. W. Norton and
Company.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1962), The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, New York: The World
Publishing Company.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1964), “Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic
Formations, with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm, London: Lawrence and
Wishart, pp. 9–65.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1968), Industry and Empire, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Books.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1984), “Marx and History,” New Left Review, no. 143: 39–50.
Holborow, Marnie (2006), “Putting the Social Back into Language: Marx, Vološinov,
and Vygotsky Reexamined,” Studies in Language and Capitalism, issue 1: 1–28.
Electronic online journal.
Horowitz, Asher (1987), Rousseau, Nature and History, Toronto, ON: University of
Toronto Press.
Hughes, Jonathan (2000), Ecology and Historical Materialism, Cambridge:
Husain, Iqbal (2006), “Prefatory Note,” in Iqbal Husain (ed.), Karl Marx on India:
From the New York Daily Tribune (Including Articles by Frederick Engels) and
Extracts from Marx-Engels Correspondence 1853–1862, New Delhi: Tulika
Books, pp. xiii–xviii.
Husami, Ziyad I. (1978/1980), “Marx on Distributive Justice,” in Marshall Cohen,
Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (eds), Marx, Justice, and History: A
Philosophy and Public Affairs Reader, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
pp. 42–79.
Hymes, Dell (1967/1986), “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life,”
in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 35–71.
Ichikawa, Mitsuo (2005), “Food Sharing and Ownership among Central African
Hunter-Gatherers: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Thomas Widlok and Wolde
Gossa Tadesse (eds), Property and Equality, edited by vol. 1, Ritualisation,
Sharing, Egalitarianism, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 151–64.
Isaac, Glynn (1979), “The Food-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids,”
Scientific American 238(4): 90–108.
Isaac, Jeffrey (1987), Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Israel, Jonathan I. (2001), Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacob, Margaret C. (1988), The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution,
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Jacobson, Thorkild (1943), “Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2(3): 159–72.
Jacobson, Thorkild (1957), “Early Political Development in Mesopotamia,”
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und voderasiatische Archaologie 52: 92–140.
Jones, Greta (1980), Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction
between Biological and Social Theory, Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press.
Jones, Paul (2002), “Williams and Markus on Production,” in John Grumley, Paul
Crittenden, and Pauline Johnson (eds), Culture and Enlightenment: Essays for
György Markus, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 111–30.
Jordanova, Ludmilla (1986), “Introduction,” in Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), Languages
of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, pp. 10–47.
Joyce, Rosemary (2005), “Archaeology of the Body,” Annual Review of Anthro-

pology 34: 139–58.
Kahn, Joel S. (1980), Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and
the World-Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kahn, Joel S. (1993), Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and
Modernity in Colonial Indonesia, Oxford: Berg Publishers
Kahn, Joel S. and Josep R. Llobera (eds) (1981), The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist
Societies, London: The Macmillan Press.
Kaiser, Bruno (1967), Ex Libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels: Schicksal und
Verzeichnis einer Bibliothek, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Kant, Immanuel (1765/1992), “Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Programme
of his Lectures for the Winter Semester, 1765–1766,” in David Walford (ed.)
in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote, Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy,
1755–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 287–300.
Kant, Immanuel (1775/2000), “On the Different Races of Human Beings,” in Robert
Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (eds), The Idea of Race, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company, pp. 8–22.
Kant, Immanuel (1784/1991), “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
Purpose,” in Hans S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition, Cambridge:
Kant, Immanuel (1785/1991), “Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of
History of Mankind,” in Hans S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition,
Kant, Immanuel (1786/1991), “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” in
Hans S. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge
Kant, Immanuel (1788/2001), “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,”
in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Race, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 37–56.
Kant, Immanuel (1798/1978), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Kapferer, Bruce (1988), Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance,
and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia, Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press.
Kapferer, Bruce (ed.) (2004), State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging
Global Realities, New York: Berghahn Books.
Kapferer, Bruce (ed.) (2005), Oligarchs and Oligopolies: New Formations of Global
Power, New York: Berghahn Books.
Kelley, Donald R. (1978), “The Metaphysics of Law: An Essay on the Very Young
Marx,” The American Historical Review 83(2): 350–67.
Kelley, Donald R. (1984), “The Science of Anthropology: An Essay on the Very Old
Marx,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45(2): 245–62.
Kelly, Alfred (1981), The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in
Germany, 1860–1914, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
King, Geoffrey and Bailey, Geoff (2006), “Tectonics and Human Evolution,”
Antiquity 80(308): 265–86.
Knox, Thomas M. and Pelczynski, Zbigniew (eds) (1964), Hegel’s Political Writings,
Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.
Kohn, David (1996), “The Aesthetic Construction of Darwin’s Theory,” in Alfred I.
Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 13–49.
Košenina, Alexander (1989), Ernst Platners Anthropologie und Philosophie. Der
philosophische Arzt und seine Wirkung auf Karl Wezel und Jean Paul, Würzburg:
Königshausen and Neumann.
Kosík, Karel (1963/1976), Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man
and World, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. LII, Dordrecht:
D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Krader, Lawrence (1975), The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development
and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, Assen: Van Gorcum and Company.
Krader, Lawrence (1976), Dialectic of Civil Society, Assen: Van Gorcum and Company.
Krader, Lawrence (1978), “The Origin of the State among the Nomads of Asia,”
in Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalník (eds), The Early State, The Hague:
Mouton Publishers, pp. 93–108.
Kropotkin, Peter (1904/1989), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Montréal, QU:
Black Rose Books
Landmann, Michael (1969/1974), Philosophical Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA:
The Westminster Press.
Langdon, John H. (2005), The Human Strategy: An Evolutionary Perspective on
Human Anatomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leacock, Eleanor B. (1972), “Introduction,” in Frederick Engels, The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, New York: International Publishers, pp.
7–67.
Leacock, Eleanor B. (1982), “Relations of Production in Band Society,” in
Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee (eds), Politics and History in Band Societies,
Lebowitz, Michael A. (2003), Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the
Working Class, 2nd edition, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lee, Richard B. (1988), “Reflections on Primitive Communism,” in Tim Ingold,
David Riches, and James Woodburn (eds), Hunters and Gatherers, vol. 1, History,
Evolution and Social Change, Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp. 252–68.
Lee, Richard B. (1992), “Demystifying Primitive Communism,” in Christine W.
Gailey (ed.), Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond,
vol. 1, Civilization in Crisis: Anthropological Perspectives, Gainesville, FL:
University Presses of Florida, pp. 73–94.
Lee, Richard B. (2003), The Dobe Ju/’hoansi, 3rd edition, Belmont, CA: Thomson
Learning.
Lee, Richard B. (2005), “Power and Property in Twenty-First Century Foragers:

A Critical Examination,” in Thomas Widlok and Wolde Gossa Tadesse (eds),
Property and Equality, vol. 2, Encapsulation, Commericalisation, Discrimination,
New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 16–31.
Lee, Sang-Hee and Milford H. Wolpoff (2003), “The Pattern of Human Brain Size
Evolution,” Paleobiology 29(2): 186–96.
Lefort, Claude (1978/1986), “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another,”
in Claude Lefort (ed.), The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy,
Democracy, Totalitarianism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 139–80.
Leibowitz, Lila (1985), “Humans and Other Animals: A Perspective on Perspectives,”
Dialectical Anthropology 9(1–4): 127–46.
Leibowitz, Lila (1986), “In the Beginning . . .: The First Origins of the Sexual
Division of Labor and the Development of the First Human Societies,” in
Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson (eds), Women’s Work, Men’s Property: The
Origins of Gender and Class, London: Verso, pp. 43–75.
Lenin, Vladimir I. (1899/1960), “The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The
Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry,” in Lenin:
Collected Works, vol. 3, Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, pp. 21–607.
Lenin, Vladimir I. (1913/1963), “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts
of Marxism,” in Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 19, Moscow: Progress Publishers,
pp. 23–8.
Lenoir, Timothy (1980), “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German
Biology,” Isis 71(256): 77–108.
Leone, Mark P. and Potter, Parker B., Jr. (eds) (1999), Historical Archaeologies of
Capitalism, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Leroux, Robert (1958), L’Anthropologie Comparée de Guillaume de Humboldt,
Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg, fasc. 135,
Paris: Société d’Éditions.
Leventhal, Robert S. (1986), “The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the
German States, 1770–1810,” Isis 77(287): 243–60.
Levins, Richard and Lewontin, Richard (1985), The Dialectical Biologist, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, John (1974), The Uniqueness of Man, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Lewontin, Richard C. (1974), “Darwin and Mendel—The Materialist Revolution,”
in Jerzy Neyman (ed.), The Heritage of Copernicus: Theories “Pleasing to the
Mind,” Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 166–82.
Lewontin, Richard C. (1995), Human Diversity, New York: Scientific American
Books.
Lewontin, Richard C. (2000), The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment,
Lichtman, Richard (1982), The Production of Desire: The Integration of
Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory, New York: The Free Press.
Lichtman, Richard (1990), “The Production of Human Nature by Human Nature,”

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, no. 4: 13–51.
Louden, Robert B. (2000), Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human
Beings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1959a), “Buffon and the Problem of Species,” in Bentley Glass,
Owsei Temkin, and William L. Strauss, Jr. (eds), The Forerunners of Darwin:
1745–1859, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 84–113.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1959b), “Herder: Progressivism without Transformism,” in
Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Strauss, Jr. (eds), The Forerunners
of Darwin: 1745–1859, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 207–22.
Löwy, Michael (2003/2005), The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx, Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre (2001), Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lukács, Georg (1966/1976), The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between
Dialectics and Economics, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lukes, Steven (1987), Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luxemburg, Rosa (1913/2003), The Accumulation of Capital, London: Routledge.
MacGregor, David (1998), Hegel and Marx after the Fall of Communism, Cardiff:
University of Wales Press.
Macpherson, Crawford B. (1971), “A Political Theory of Property,” in C. B.
Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp.120–40.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1926), Crime and Custom in Savage Society, London:
Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner.
Mao Zedong (1930/1990), Report from Xunwu, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Marable, Manning (1995), Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American
Politics, London: Verso.
Mariátegui, José (1928/1971), Seven Interpretive Essays on the Peruvian Reality,
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
McGuire, Randall H. (1992), A Marxist Archaeology, San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
McLellan, David (1973), Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, New York: Harper
Books.
McMurtry, John (1978), The Structure of Marx’s World-View, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
McNally, David (1988), Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A
Reinterpretation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
McNally, David (2001), Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and
Liberation, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Marks, Jonathan (2002), What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and
Their Genes, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Márkus, Gyorgy (1978), Marx and Anthropology: The Concept of Human Essence
in the Philosophy of Marx, Assen: Van Gorcum.
Marx, Karl (1835/1975), “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession,”
in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1, New York: International
Marx, Karl (1837/1975), “Letter from Marx to His Father in Trier, November 10–11,
Marx, Karl (1839/1975), “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Karl Marx,
pp. 403–509.
Marx, Karl (1840–1/1975), “Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean
Philosophy of Nature,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1,
Marx, Karl (1842/1975), “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School
of Law,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 1, New York:
Marx, Karl (1843/1975a), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Law,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3, New York:
Marx, Karl (1843/1975b), “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” in
Marx, Karl (1843/1975c), “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
74.
Marx, Karl (1843–4/1975), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Law. Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3,
Marx, Karl (1844/1975a), “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,”
Marx, Karl (1844/1975b), “Comments on James Mill, Éléments d’économique
politique,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3, New York:
Marx, Karl (1844/1975c), “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of
Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1845/1976), “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1846/1982), “Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 28
December 1846,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 38, New
Marx, Karl (1847/1976a), “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A

Contribution to German Cultural History contra Karl Heinzen,” in Karl Marx,
pp. 312–40.
Marx, Karl (1847/1976b), “The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of
Poverty by M. Proudhon,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol.
6, New York: International Publishers, pp. 105–212.
Marx, Karl (1848/1976), “On the Polish Question,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1849/1977), “Wage Labour and Capital,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
228.
Marx, Karl (1850/1978), “The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850,” in Karl
Marx, Karl (1852/1979 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl
Marx, Karl (1853/1979a), “The British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Marx, Karl (1853/1979b), “The East India Company—Its History and Results,” in
Marx, Karl (1853/1979c), “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Karl
Marx, Karl (1853/1979d), “The Western Powers and Turkey.—Imminent Economic
Crisis.—Railway Construction in India,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1853/1979e), “Forced Emigration.—Kossuth and Mazzini.—The
Refugee Question.—Election Bribery in England.—Mr. Cobden,” in Karl Marx,
pp. 528–34.
Marx, Karl (1853/1979f), “The Indian Question.—Irish Tenant Right,” in Karl
Marx, Karl (1853/1979g), “Elections.—Financial Clouds.—The Duchess of
Sutherland and Slavery,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol.
11, New York: International Publishers, pp. 486–94.
Marx, Karl (1853/1983a), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 2 June 1853,” in
Marx, Karl (1853/1983b), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 14 December

Marx, Karl (1853/1983c), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 6 June 1853,” in
Marx, Karl (1857/1986a), “The Indian Question,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1857/1986b), “State of the Indian Insurrection,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
21.
Marx, Karl (1857/1986c), “The Indian Insurrection,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1857/1986d), “The English Factory System,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
61.
Marx, Karl (1857/1986e), “The Indian Revolt,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1857–8/1973), Grundrisse: Foundations to the Critique of Political
Economy, New York: Vintage Books.
Marx, Karl (1859/1970), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New
York: International Publishers [=Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works,
vol. 29, New York: International Publishers, 1987, pp. 257–417].
Marx, Karl (1859/1980), “Population, Crime, and Pauperism,” in Karl Marx,
pp. 487–91.
Marx, Karl (1859/1983), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 11 or 12 December
Marx, Karl (1860/1985), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 19 December
Marx, Karl (1861/1985), “Letter from Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 16 January
Marx, Karl (1861–3/1963), Theories of Surplus Value, part I, Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
Marx, Karl (1861–3/1971), Theories of Surplus Value, part III, Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
Marx, Karl (1861–3/1989), “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63 (continuation),” in
Marx, Karl (1861–3/1991), “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63 (continuation),” in

Marx, Karl (1862/1985), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 18 June 1862,” in
Marx, Karl (1863–7/1977), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, New
York: Vintage Books.
Marx, Karl (1864/1985), “Letter from Marx to Lion Philips, 25 June 1864,” in Karl
Publishers, p. 581.
Marx, Karl (1867/1985), “The Fenian Prisoners at Manchester and the International
Working Men’s Association,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works,
vol. 21, New York: International Publishers, pp. 3–4.
Marx, Karl (1867/1987), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 7 December
Marx, Karl (1868/1987a), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 25 March 1868,” in
Marx, Karl (1868/1987b), “Letter from Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 March
Marx, Karl (1869/1988a), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 10 December
Marx, Karl (1869/1988b), “Letter from Marx to Frederick Engels, 4 December
Marx, Karl (1870/1985), “Confidential Communication,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
24.
Marx, Karl (1870/1988), “Letter from Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt,” in
Marx, Karl (1871/1986), “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1875/1963), Ouevres. Economie, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard.
Marx, Karl (1875/1989), “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx,

pp. 75–99.
Marx, Karl (1880/1989), “Workers’ Questionnaire,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels:
Marx, Karl (1880–2/1974), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, 2nd edition,
edited by Lawrence Krader, Assen: Van Gorcum and Company.
Marx, Karl (1881/1983), “Marx-Zasulich Correspondence: Letters and Drafts,” in
Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “The Peripheries
of Capitalism,” New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 97–129 [=Karl Marx,
1989, pp. 346–71].
Marx, Karl (1881/1992a), “Letter from Marx to Nikolai Danielson, 15 February
Marx, Karl (1881/1992b), “Letter from Marx to Jenny Longuet, 11 April 1881,” in
Marx, Karl (1972), Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, edited by Saul K.
Padover, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1845–6/1976), “The German Ideology,” in
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1848/1976), “Manifesto of the Communist Party,”
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1882/1989), “Preface to the Second Russian
Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, Frederick
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1972), Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection
of Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, edited by R. Dixon, New York:
International Publishers.
Mason, John H. and Wokler, Robert (1992), “Introduction,” in John H. Mason
and Robert Wokler (eds), Diderot: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. ix–xli.
Mauer, Bill (2006), “The Anthropology of Money,” Annual Review of Anthropology
35: 15–36.
Mauro, Frédéric (1990), “Merchant Communities, 1350–1750,” in James D. Tracy
(ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern
World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–86.
Mauss, Marcel (1925/1990), The Gift: Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic
Societies, London: Routledge.
Mayr, Ernst (1982), The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and
Inheritance, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Meek, Ronald (1967), “The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology,” in Ronald
L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and Other Essays: Studies in the Development
of Economic Thought, London: Chapman and Hall, pp. 34–50.
Meikle, Scott (1985), Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, La Salle, IL: Open
Court Publishing Company.
Meillassoux, Claude (1971/1980), “From Reproduction to Production: A Marxist
Approach to Economic Anthropology,” in Harold Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation
of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, pp. 189–201.
Meillassoux, Claude (1975/1981), Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the
Domestic Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn (1980), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution, New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.
Mészáros, István (1991), “Totality,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist
Mészáros, István (2005), Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 5th edition, London: Merlin
Press.
Miles, Robert (1987), Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity?
London: Tavistock Publications.
Miliband, Ralph (1977), Marxism and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miliband, Ralph (1991), “State, The,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of
Millon, Rene (1988), “Last Years of Teotihuacan Dominance,” in Norman Yoffee
and George L. Cowgill (eds), The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations,
Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 102–64.
Mintz, Sidney W. (1985), Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern
History, New York: Viking Penguin.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de (1721/1973), Persian Letters,
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de (1734/1965), Considerations on
the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de (1748/1977), The Spirit of Laws,
Mooney, James E. (1896), “The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak
of 1890,” Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1892-’93,
Washington, pp. 653–1136.
Morgan, Lewis H. (1877/1963), Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of
Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, edited by
Eleanor B. Leacock, Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company.
Morgan, Lewis H. (1881/2003), Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines,

Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.
Moseley, Michael E. (1975), The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilizations,
Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publishing Company.
Mullings, Leith (1997), On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of
African American Women, London: Routledge.
Mullings, Leith (2005), “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology,”
Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667–93.
Nagengast, Carole (1994), “Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 23: 109–136.
Nash, June (1979), We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and
Exploitation in the Bolivian Tin Mines, New York: Columbia University Press.
Negt, Oskar (1988), “What Is a Revival of Marxism and Why Do We Need One
Today: Centennial Lecture Commemorating the Death of Karl Marx,” in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
Urbana, IL: University of Indiana Press, pp. 211–34.
Nimtz, August H. (2000), Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic
Breakthrough, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Nimtz, August H. (2003), Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute
Democracy” or “Defiled Republic,” Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Ollman, Bertell (1976), Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society,
2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ollman, Bertell (1993), Dialectical Investigations, London: Routledge.
O’Neill, John (1982), For Marx Against Althusser and Other Essays, Washington,
DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of
America.
Orser, Charles E., Jr. (1999), A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World, New
York: Plenum Publishers.
Orser, Charles E., Jr. (ed.) (2001), Race and the Archaeology of Identity, Salt Lake
City, UT: University of Utah Press.
Orser, Charles E., Jr. (2004), Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation,
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ospovat, Dov (1981), The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History,
Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838–1859, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Outhwaite, William (1991), “Culture,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of
Pagden, Anthony (1982), Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins
of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palerm, Ángel (1980), Antropología y Marxismo, Mexico, DF: Editorial Nuevo
Imagen.
Paley, Julia (2002), “Toward an Anthropology of Democracy,” Annual Review of

Anthropology 31: 469–96.
Panitch, Leo and Leys, Colin (eds) (2006), Coming to Terms with Nature, Socialist
Register 2007, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Patnaik, Prabhat (2006), “Appreciation: The Other Marx,” in Iqbal Husain (ed.),
Karl Marx on India: From the New York Daily Tribune (Including Articles by
Frederick Engels) and Extracts from Marx-Engels Correspondence 1853–1862,
New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. xl–lxviii.
Patterson, Nick, Richter, Daniel J., Gnerre, Sante, Lander, Eric S., and Reich, David
(2006), “Genetic Evidence for Complex Speciation of Humans and Chimpanzees,”
Nature 441(7097): 1103–8.
Patterson, Thomas C. (1984), “Pachacamac—An Andean Oracle under Inca Rule,”
in D. Peter Kvietok and Daniel Sandweiss (eds), Recent Studies in Andean
Prehistory and Protohistory: Papers from the Second Annual Conference on
Andean Archaeology and Ethnohistory, Ithaca, NY: Latin American Studies
Program, Cornell University, pp. 159–76.
Patterson, Thomas C. (1988), “La creación de cultura en las formaciones sociales
pre-estatales y no estatales,” Boletín de Antropología Americana, no. 14: 53–61.
Patterson, Thomas C. (1991), The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration
of a Pre-Capitalist State, Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Patterson, Thomas C. (1999), “The Development of Agriculture and the Emergence
of Formative Civilizations in the Central Andes,” in Michael Blake (ed.), Pacific
Latin America in Prehistory: The Evolution of Archaic and Formative Cultures,
Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, pp. 181–8.
Patterson, Thomas C. (2005), “Craft Specialization, the Reorganization of Production
Relations and State Formation,” Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3): 307–37.
Patterson, Thomas C. and Frank Spencer (1995), “Racial Hierarchies and Buffer
Races,” Transforming Anthropology 5(1): 20–7.
Pels, Dick (1998), Property and Power in Social Theory: A Study in Intellectual
Rivalry, London: Routledge.
Petrović, Gajo (1965/1967), Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Yugoslav
Philosopher Reconsiders Karl Marx’s Writings, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and
Company.
Petrović, Gajo (1991), “Praxis,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist
Pittenger, Mark (1993), American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920,
Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Plamentz, John (1975), Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Plant, Raymond (1983), Hegel: An Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Publisher.
Popkin, Richard H. (1979), The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza,
Porter, Roy (1972), “The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the Science of
Geology,” in Mikulás Teich and Robert Young (eds), Changing Perspectives
in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, Dordrecht: D.
Reidel Publishing Co., pp. 320–43.
Postone, Moishe (1993), Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of
Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prawer, Siegbert S. (1978), Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Price, David (2007), “Anthropology as Lamppost? A Comment on the Counter-
insurgency Field Manual,” Anthropology Today 23(6): 20–1.
Price, John A. (1975), “Sharing: The Integration of Intimate Economies,” Anthro-
pologica (n.s.) 17(1): 3–27.
Rader, Melvin (1979), Marx’s Interpretation of History, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Raines, John (2002), “Introduction,” in John Raines (ed.), Marx on Religion,
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 1–14.
Read, Jason (2003), The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the
Present, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Reill, Peter H. (1998), “The Construction of the Social Sciences in Late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Century Germany,” in Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson,
and Björn Wittrock (eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation
of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850, Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, pp. 107–40.
Reill, Peter H. (2005), Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Rey, Pierre-Philippe (1971), Colonialisme, néo-colonialisme et transition du
capitalisme, Paris: Maspero.
Rey, Pierre-Philippe (1973/1982), “Class Alliances,” International Journal of
Sociology 12(2): 1–120.
Rey, Pierre-Philippe (1975), “The Lineage Mode of Production,” Critique of
Anthropology, no. 3: 27–79.
Rey, Pierre-Philippe (1979), “Class Contradiction in the Lineage Mode of
Production,” Critique of Anthropology, no. 13–14: 41–61.
Reyna, Stephen P. and Downs, R. E. (eds) (1999), Deadly Developments:
Capitalism, States and War, War and Society, vol. 5, Singapore: Gordon and
Breach Publishers.
Richards, Robert J. (1992), The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological
Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Richards, Robert J. (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy
in the Age of Goethe, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rigby, Peter (1985), Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition,

London: Zed Books.
Rigby, Peter (1992), Cattle, Capitalism, and Class: Ilparakuyo Maasai
Transformations, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Robinson, Cedric J. (1983), Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition, London: Zed Books.
Rockmore, Tom (1992/1993), Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to
Hegel’s Thought, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Rodinson, Maxime (1966/1978), Islam and Capitalism, Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press.
Roger, Jacques (1963/1997), The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French
Thought, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Roger, Jacques (1989/1997), Buffon: A Life in Natural History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rosdolsky, Roman (1980), Friedrich Engels y el problema de los pueblos “sin
historia”: la cuestión de las nacionalidades en la revolución a la luz de la “Neue
Rheinische Zeitung,” Mexico, DF: Siglo XXI Editores.
Rose, Gillian (1981), Hegel contra Sociology, London: Athalone Press.
Rossabi, Morris (1990), “The ‘Decline’ of the Central Asian Caravan Trade,” in
James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the
Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
351–70.
Rossi, Paolo (1984), The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth from Hooke
to Vico, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1750/1973), “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in
George D. H. Cole (ed.), The Social Contract and Discourses, London: J. M.
Dent and Sons, pp. 1–26.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1755/1973), “A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,”
in George D. H. Cole (ed.), The Social Contract and Discourses, London: J. M.
Dent and Sons, pp. 27–114.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1755/1992a), “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality among Men,” in Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (eds), The
Collected Writings of Rousseau, edited by vol. 3, Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, pp. 1–95.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1755/1992b), “Discourse on Political Economy,” in Roger
D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (eds), The Collected Writings of Rousseau,
edited by vol. 3, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse),
Polemics, and Political Economy, Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, pp. 140–70.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1764/1962), Lettres écrites de la montagne, Neuchâtel:

Ides et Calendes.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1765/1986), “Constitutional Project for Corsica,” in
Frederick Watkins (ed.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Political Writings, Madison,
WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 277–330.
Rowe, John H. (1964), “Ethnology and Ethnography in the Sixteenth Century,”
Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, no. 30: 1–20.
Rowe, John H. (1965), “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology,” American
Anthropologist 67(1): 1–20.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. (1985), The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of
Palaeontology, 2nd edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ryding, James N. (1975), “Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century German Ethnology:
A Case Study in the Sociology of Science,” Sociologus 25(1): 1–28.
Sahlins, Marshall D. (1988/2000), “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific
Sector of ‘The World System’,” in Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected
Essays, New York: Zone Books, pp. 415–70.
Sahlins, Marshall D. (1993/2000), “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the
Context of Modern World History,” in Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice:
Selected Essays, New York: Zone Books, pp. 471–500.
Sainte Croix, Geoffrey E. M. de (1981), The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World; from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquest, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Sayers, Sean (1981), Marx and Human Nature, London: Routledge.
Schaff, Adam (1965/1970), Marxism and the Human Individual, New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Schell, Lawrence M. and Melinda Denham (2003), “Environmental Pollution in
Urban Environments and Human Biology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32:
111–34.
Schoenemann, P. Thomas (2006), “Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the
Human Brain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 379–406.
Schortman, Edward M. and Urban, Patricia A. (2004), “Modeling the Roles of Craft
Production in Ancient Political Economies,” Journal of Archaeological Research
12(2): 185–226.
Schulz, Amy J. and Mullings, Leith (eds) (2006), Gender, Race, Class, and Health:
Intersectional Approaches, San Francisco, CA: Jossy-Bass.
Schwartz, David (1995), Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Schweber, Silvan S. (1980), “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of
Character,” Journal of the History of Biology 13(2): 195–299.
Schweber, Silvan S. (1985), “The Wider Context in Darwin’s Theorizing,” in David
Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
pp. 35–70.
Scott, James (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Seccombe, Wally (1983), “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review, no. 137:
22–47.
Seigel, Jerrold E. (1978), Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Sepulchre, Pierre, Ramstein, Gilles, Fluteau, Frédéric, Schuster, Mathieu, Tiercelin,
Jean-Jacques, and Brunet, Michel (2006), “Tectonic Uplift and Eastern Africa
Aridification,” Science 313(5792, 8 September): 1419–23.
Showstack Sassoon, Anne (1991), “Civil Society,” in Tom Bottomore (ed.), A
Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp.
82–4.
Silverstein, Paul A. (2005), “Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot:
Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 34: 363–84.
Singer, Merrill and Baer, Hans A. (1995), Critical Medical Anthropology, Amityville,
NY: Baywood Publishing.
Sleigh, Robert C., Jr. (1995), “Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm,” in Robert Audi (ed.),
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge
Sloan, Phillip R. (1976), “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy,” Isis 67(3): 356–75.
Sloan, Phillip R. (1979), “Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation
of Biological Species,” The British Journal for the History of Science 12(41):
109–53.
Sloan, Phillip R. (1995), “The Gaze of Natural History,” in Christopher Fox, Roy
Porter, and Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century
Domains, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 112–51.
Smith, Adam (1759/1976), The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty
Press.
Smith, Adam (1762–3/1982), Lectures on Jurisprudence, Indianapolis: Liberty
Press.
Smith, Adam (1776/1976), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Smith, David N. (2002), “Accumulation and the Clash of Cultures,” Rethinking
Marxism 14(4): 73–84.
Smith, Neil (2005), The Endgame of Globalization, London: Routledge.
Soper, Kate (1981) On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist
Perspective, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.
Soper, Kate (1996), “Greening Prometheus: Marxism and Ecology,” in Ted Benton
(ed.), The Greening of Marxism, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 81–99.
Southall, Aidan (1988), “The Segmentary State in Africa and Asia,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 30(1): 52–82.
Spalding, Karen (1975), “Class Structures in the Southern Peruvian Highlands,

1750–1920,” in Benjamin Orlove and Glynn Custred (eds), Land and Power in
Latin America, New York: Holmes and Meier, pp. 79–97.
Spalding, Karen (1984), Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish
Rule, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai V. (2003), The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Stagl, Justin (1995), “August Ludwig Schlözer and the Study of Mankind According
to Peoples,” in Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–
1800, Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 233–68.
Stam, James H. (1976), Inquiries into the Origin of Language: The Fate of a
Question, New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.
Stanley, Steven M. (1998), Children of the Ice Age, New York: W. H. Freeman.
Stark, Werner (2003), “Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions about Kant’s
Lectures on Anthropology,” in Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain (eds), Essays on
Kant’s Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–37.
Steinberg, Ted (2000), Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in
America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stephen, Lynn (1997), “The Zapatista Opening: The Movement for Indigenous
Autonomy and State Discourses on Indigenous Rights in Mexico, 1970–1996,”
Journal of Latin American Anthropology 3(1): 72–101.
Stocking George W., Jr. (1987), Victorian Anthropology, New York: The Free Press.
Sweezy, Paul (1950/1976), “A Critique,” in Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition
from Feudalism to Capitalism, London, UK New Left Books, pp. 33–56.
Taussig, Michael T. (1980), The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America,
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Taussig, Michael T. (1987), Shamans, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and Healing, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.),
Testart, Alain (1982), “The Significance of Food-Storage among Hunter-Gatherers:
Residence Patterns, Population Densities, and Social Inequalities,” Current
Anthropology 23(5): 523–37.
Thapar, Romila (1981), “The State as Empire,” in Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter
Skalník (eds), The Study of the State, The Hague: Mouton Publishers, pp. 309–26.
Thompson, Edward P. (1963), The Making of the English Working Class, New York:
Vintage Books.
Thompson, Edward P. (1978), The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Tobias, Philip V. (1998), “Evidence for the Early Beginnings of Spoken Language,”
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8(1): 72–81.
Tracy, James D. (ed.) (1990), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade
in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Trigger, Bruce G. (1967/2003), “Engels on the Part Played by Labor in the Transition
from Ape to Man: An Anticipation of Contemporary Archaeological Theory,” in
Bruce G. Trigger, Artifacts and Ideas: Essays in Archaeology, New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Books, pp. 31–44.
Trinkhaus, Erik (1992), “Evolution of Human Manipulation,” in Stephen Jones,
Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human
Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 346–9.
Trotsky, Leon (1930/1980), The History of the Russian Revolution, New York:
Monad Press.
Venable, Vernon (1945/1966), Human Nature: The Marxian View. Cleveland, OH:
The World Publishing Company.
Verdery, Katherine and Humphrey, Caroline (eds) (2004), Property in Question:
Value Transformation in the Global Economy, Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Vermeulen, Han F. (1992), “The Emergence of ‘Ethnography’ ca. 1770 in Göttingen,”
History of Anthropology Newsletter 19(2): 6–9.
Vermeulen, Han F. (1995), “Origins and Institutionalization of Ethnography and
Ethnology in Europe and the USA, 1771–1845,” in Han F. Vermeulen and
Arturo Alvarez Roldán (eds), Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of
European Anthropology, London: Routledge, pp. 39–59.
Vološinov, Valentin N. (1927/1976), Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Vološinov, Valentin N. (1929/1986), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,
Vygotsky, Lev S. (1934/1962), Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Vygotsky, Lev S. and Alexander Luria. (1930/1994), “Tool and Symbol in Child
Development,” in René Van Der Veer and Jaan Valsiner (eds), The Vygotsky
Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 99–174.
Wade, Peter (2002), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective,
London: Pluto Press.
Waitzkin, Howard (1979), “Medicine Superstructure and Micropolitics,” Social
Science and Medicine 13a(4): 601–9.
Wakin, Eric (1992), Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and
Counterinsurgency in Thailand, University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast
Asian Studies, no. 7, Madison.
Walker, Kathy L. (2006), “‘Gangster Capitalism’ and Peasant Protest in China: The
Last Twenty Years,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 33(1): 1–33.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974), The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy of the Sixteenth
Century, New York: Academic Press.
Wang, Gungwu (1990), “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourn-
ing Communities,” in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires:
Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, Cambridge:

Warren, Kay B. (1998), Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Mata
Activism in Guatemala, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Washburn, Sherwood L. (1960), “Tools and Human Evolution,” Scientific American
203(3): 63–75.
Washburn, Sherwood L. and Howell, F. Clark (1963), “Human Evolution and
Culture,” in Sol Tax (ed.), Evolution after Darwin, vol. II, The Evolution of Man,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–56.
Washburn, Sherwood L. and Lancaster, C. S. (1968), “The Evolution of Hunting,”
in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (eds), Man the Hunter, Chicago: Aldine
Waszek, Norbert (1988), The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil
Society,” International Archives of the History of Ideas 120, Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Weikart, Richard (1999), Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist
Thought from Marx to Bernstein, San Francisco, CA: International Scholars
Publications.
Weindling, Paul (1989), Health, Race and German Politics between National
Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weis, Linda (1998), The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Weiss, Hilde (1936/1973), “Karl Marx’s ‘Enquête Ouvrière’,” in Tom Bottomore
(ed.), Karl Marx, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 172–84.
Williams, Brett (2001), “A River Runs Through Us (Anacostia River, Washington,
D.C.),” American Anthropologist 103(2): 409–32.
Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Williams, Raymond (1983/1989), “Marx on Culture,” in Raymond Williams, What I
Came to Say, London: Hutchinson Radius, pp. 195–225.
Wilson, Godfrey B. and Wilson, Monica H. (1945/1954), The Analysis of Social
Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, H. T. (1991), Marx’s Critical/Dialectical Procedure, London: Routledge.
Wilson, Richard A. (ed.) (1997), Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological
Perspectives, London: Pluto Press.
Winant, Howard (2004), The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Wokler, Robert (1978), “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s
Anthropology Revisited,” Daedalus 107(3): 107–34.
Wokler, Robert (1980), “The Ape Debates in Enlightenment Anthropology,” Studies
on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 192: 1164–75.
Wokler, Robert (1988), “Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo
and Kames on the Nature of Man,” in Peter Jones (ed.), Philosophy and Science
in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, pp. 145–68.
Wokler, Robert (1993), “From l’homme physique to l’homme moral and Back:
Toward a History of Enlightenment Anthropology,” History of the Human
Sciences 6(1): 121–38.
Wokler, Robert (1997a), “Tyson, Edward (1650–1708),” in Frank Spencer (ed.),
History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, vol. 2, New York: Garland
Publishing Company, pp. 1048–50.
Wokler, Robert (1997b), “Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778),” in Frank Spencer
(ed.), History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, vol. 2, New York:
Garland Publishing Company, pp. 887–90.
Wolf, Eric R. (1959), Sons of the Shaking Earth, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Wolf, Eric R. (1969), Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper and
Row.
Wolf, Eric R. (1972), “Ownership and Political Ecology,” Anthropological Quarterly
45(2): 201–5.
Wolf, Eric R. (1982), Europe and the People without History, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Wolf, Eric R. (1999), Engendering Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis,
Wolpe, Harold (1980), “Introduction,” in Harold Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of
Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, pp. 1–43.
Wolpe, Harold (1985), “The Articulation of Modes and Forms of Production,” in
Dipentra Banerjee (ed.), Marxian Theory and the Third World, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, pp. 89–103.
Wood, Ellen M. (2002), “The Question of Market Dependence,” Journal of Agrarian
Change 2(1): 50–87.
Wood, Ellen M. and Wood, Neal (1997), A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and
the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688, New York: New York University Press.
Woolfson, Charles (1982), The Labour Theory of Culture: A Re-examination of
Engels’s Theory of Human Origins, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Worsley, Peter (1961), “The Analysis of Rebellion and Revolution in Modern British
Social Anthropology,” Science and Society 21(1): 26–37.
Worsley, Peter (1968/1970), The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in
Melanesia, New York. Schocken Books.
Yanagisako, Sylvia and Delaney, Carol (1995), “Naturalizing Power,” in Sylvia
Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist
Cultural Analysis, London: Routledge, pp. 1–22.
Young, Gary (1981), “Doing Marx Justice,” in Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten
(eds), Marx and Morality, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary
Volume VII, Guelph, pp. 251–68.
Zagarell, Alan (1986), “Structural Discontinuity—A Critical Factor in the Emergence
of Primary and Secondary States,” Dialectical Anthropology 10(3–4): 155–77.
Zammito, John H. (2001), “Rousseau, Kant, and Herder and the Problem of
Aufklärung in the 1760s,” in Tom Rockmore (ed.), New Essays on the Precritical
Kant, Amherst, NY: Humanities Books, pp. 201–23.
Zammito, John H. (2002), Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Zihlman, Adrienne L. and Cohn, B. A. (1988), “The Adaptive Response of Human
Skin to the Savanna,” Human Evolution 3(5): 397–409. Florence.
Zilsel, Edgar (2003), Social Origins of Modern Science, Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 200, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Index
alienation, 59, 147–51 emigration, 134

anthropology, 89–90, 158–71, 173 formation of domestic and overseas
and the Enlightenment, 5–6 markets, 122–3, 126–8
as social critique, 2–3 overseas colonies, 127–8, 131–2
corporeal organization of human beings, social reproduction of, 135–8
16–17, 24–5, 41–6, 65–87, 176 transition, 119–28
critical-dialectical perspective, 5 chance, 53
dialectical interplay of human natural class and state formation, 114–15, 136–7
and social beings, 16–20, 24–7 class defined, 154–5
diversity and historicity of societies, health, 136–8
17–21, 27–8 colonialism, 131–2
empirical, 1–2, 5 community, 16–20, 22–3, 26, 28–30, 33–6,
ensembles of social relations, 46–50 41–50, 152–3
institutionalization at Göttingen, 23–4, consciousness, 47–50, 57, 147–58, 164–8
31–2 contingency, 53–4, 137–8
philosophical, 2, 4–5, culture, 15–21, 22, 27–9, 48–9, 103–5, 160,
praxis, 40–6, 57–62, 158–71 166–8
articulation of modes of production,
128–38 Darwin, Charles, 6, 66–70, 89–90
and Marx, 89–90
Buffon, Comte de, 5, 13–15, 174 theory of evolution, 66–70
combined empiricism and rationalism use of metaphors, 66–70
13–14 development of human society
development of human society, 15 and natural world, 15–17, 31
historicism, 13–14 Montesquieu, 12–13, 31
on human reproduction 14–15 Rousseau, 17–21
on diversity of human species, 15 Scottish historical philosophers, 21–3
distinctive features of human beings, 7
capitalism, 7, 117–44, 175–8 diversity (see also variation), 12–15, 105,
and health, 136–8, 165–6 158
commodity production, 58 domination, 151–6
defined, 118–19
development of capitalism, 56, 117–44, economic determination
162–4 Marx on 48–9
difference from precapitalist societies, Engels, Frederick, 6, 62, 88, 117–18
105–8, 119, 152–4 chronology, xi–xiii
dynamism of, 55, 137–8 transition from ape to human, 6, 75–84
219
220 • Index
Enlightenment, 5–6, 9, 36–7 as moral beings, 25

anthropology, 15–37 as natural beings, 16–17, 24–5, 41–6,
Early Enlightenment thought, 10–15 65–87, 176
historicization of nature, 11–15 as social beings, 18, 34, 44, 46–50,
historicization of society, 12–13, 74–86
15–23 Marx on, 41–50, 158
evolution, 67–74 human evolution, 77–84
Darwin, 67–71 brain, 82–4
modern synthesis, 72–4 demography and population structure,
transition from ape to human, 75–84 84–7
exchange 114, 120 language, 82–4
exploitation, 151–6 tool-making, 17, 78–80
human history, 8
Fraachia, Joseph, 6, 41–6 alternative pathways, 108–15
as dialectical unfolding, 17–21, 28–9,
genetics, 70–2 33–5, 54
Göttingen, 23–4, 31–2 as progress, 21–3
chance, 51
health, 136–8, 156, 165–6 contingency, 51
Hegel, Georg F. W., 5, 33–6, 93 directionality, 53
and individualism, 33–4 Kant 26–7
history, 33–6 Marx’s premises, 8, 51–7
on civil society, 35–6 relation to nature, 31
on labor, 34–5 Rousseau, 17–18
teleology, 7, 33 human nature
Herder, Johann, 5, 27–30 Buffon, 14–15
concept of culture, 28–9 Rousseau on human nature, 16–17
distinction between culture and Scottish historical philosophers and
civilization, 29 immutability of human nature,
diversity and cultural relativism, 27–8 21–3
on language, 29 human society
philosophical anthropology, 28 Montesquieu on development, 12–13
hierarchy Rousseau on successive forms, 17–18
forms of social hierarchy, 151–6 Scottish historical philosophers and
historicization natural laws of development, 21–3
nature and development of society, 31 human species
of human society, 12–13, 15–23 Buffon, 14–15
of nature, 10–15 language and tool-making as markers,
historicism, 5, 9–36 16–17
defined, 11 Rousseau, 16–17
holism (see totality)
Horowitz, Asher, 16–21 India, 117, 132–8, 177–8
human beings individual, 36–7, 41–50
and praxis, 57–62 formation of social individuals, 147–51,
as individuals, 17–19, 31–2, 41–50 158
Index • 221
individualization, 50 historicity of individual, 7, 41–50

inequality, 87–9, 121–2 mode of production, 7, 51–7
and health, 136–8, 156 on historical development, 7, 53–4, 56–7
Marx on naturalization of social philosophical anthropology, 40
inequality, 87–9 McNally, David, 6, 74–5
Ireland, 132–8, 178 Mendel, Gregor, 70
mode of production, 7, 103
justice, 169–71 ancient, 98–9
as forms of cooperation and social
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 24–7, 175 structure, 54–6
concept of race, 26 Asiatic, 55, 96–8, 176
distinction between human beings as capitalist, 117–44
natural and moral beings, 24–7 distinction between capitalist and
theory of history, 26–7 precapitalist, 54
kin/civil conflict, 157–8 Germanic, 54, 99–100
feudal, 100–2
labor, 6, 34–5, 43–6 dissolution, 119–28
language, 17, 28–9, 43, 81–3, 168–9 precapitalist, 54–5, 92–105
and toolmaking, 17, 81–3 primitive communism, 95–6, 102–3
Leibniz, Gottfried, 10 transition, 56, 92, 105–15
Lewontin, Richard, 6, 53, 67, 71–4 Montesquieu, Baron de, 5, 11–13
development of society, 12
markets, 122–3
Marx, Karl nationalism, 132–5, 175, 178
alienation, 59 national-states, 140–4, 164
and Darwin, 89–90 naturalization of social inequality, 87–9
anthropology, 1–5, 6, 40, 145–6, 158–71 nature
corporeal organization of human and historical development of society, 31
beings, 41–6 Marx and Engels, 52–3
dialectical interplay of human natural needs, 42–6
and social beings, 65–6
diversity and historicity of societies, objectification, 43–6, 58, 148
50 defined, 44
ensembles of social relations, 46–50
praxis, 40 philosophical anthropology, 11–13, 15–22,
premises of human history, 8 25–6, 28, 33–6, 40
biographical information, 1, 5, 39–40, Platner, Ernst, 31
62–3, 65–7, 91–3, 117–18, 145–6, power, 138–44, 178
158–9 praxis, 40–6, 57–62, 158–71
chronology, xi–xiii defined, 57
consciousness, 59, 147–68 precapitalist modes of production, 7–8,
critical-dialectical perspective, 5 93–105
debates over interpretation of work, 3–5 precapitalist societies, 105–15, 179
historical-dialectical perspective, 40, difference from capitalist societies,
93–104 105–8, 119, 152–3
222 • Index
primitive accumulation, 119–30 Smith, Adam, 5, 21–3

progress, 158 social relations, 147–58
property, 138–44, 178 society, 16–20, 22–3, 26, 28–30, 33–6,
41–50, 103–5
race and racism, 15, 26, 179 Spinoza, Baruch, 10
reductionism, 51 states
resistance, 133, 156–8 capitalist, 138–44
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 174–5 precapitalist, 112–16, 122–4, 128–31,
and individualism, 17–19 133
critique of modern civil society, 16 subjectification, 43
development of human nature, 17–19 subjectivity, 46–7
development of human society and its
rise in nature, 20 teleology, 33
historical-dialectical anthropology, 16–21 tool-making 79–80
stages in development of society, 17–21 totality, 28, 31–2, 51–2, 131, 175–6
truth
Saint-Simon, Henri, 35–6 as determination of reality, 60–1
Scottish historical philosophers, 21–3, 174 theories of, 61
concern with natural laws of social
development 21 variation, 52, 105
immutability of human nature, 21–3, genetic, 71–2
36–7 and inheritance, 70–2

【马克思】人类学笔记 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

【马克思】人类学笔记 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Karl Marx, Anthropologist

This page intentionally left blank

Oxford • New York

© Thomas C. Patterson 2009

All rights reserved.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Patterson, Thomas Carl.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978 184520 509 6 (Cloth)

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

1 The Enlightenment and Anthropology 9

3 Human Natural Beings 65

4 History, Culture, and Social Formation 91

5 Capitalism and the Anthropology of the Modern World 117

6 Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century 145

1849 The Neue Rheinische Zeitung suppressed by Prussian government; Marx

1880 Engels writes Socialism: Utopian and Scientiﬁc.

Italy, sixteenth-century Spain, or the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment (e.g.

Polemics, Caveats, and Standpoints

Organization of the Book

Buffon, and Rousseau. An anthropological perspective, combining both its empirical

Chapter 4, “History, Culture, and Social Formation,” explores the alternative

of unfree labor and wage-workers. He recognized that property was a relation

The Enlightenment and Anthropology

The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” was a tumultuous period. It persisted,

Early Enlightenment Thought

The standpoints of Enlightenment thinkers never constituted a uniﬁed, ﬁxed body

The World Historicized

description of mere facts, since it also involved the use of reason—comparison,

The New Anthropology of the Enlightenment

Montesquieu and Buffon provided a “green light” to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam

Rousseau’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology

Rousseau’s conceptualization of the “dynamic of civil society,” as Horowitz

While the presuppositions of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology were fund-

The Scottish Historical Philosophers

The materialist, conjectural histories of society constructed by Smith and his

The Institutionalization of Anthropology

mathematics; when a philosopher (Kant) lectured on anthropology, astronomy,

Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology

on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784/1968). Kant understood history

Herder’s Historical-Dialectical Anthropology

a composite or complex conﬁguration which, by virtue of its inherent relational char-

Herder viewed the culture of a community as a complex of interacting organisms.

Herder’s historical-dialectical and critical anthropology built on Rousseau’s

Göttingen: Beyond “Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers”

Hegel’s Critical-Historical Anthropology

Georg F. W. Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophical anthropology sought to account for

actualize themselves as social members of a community. In this particular form of

self-production [in which] Spirit (Geist) manifests itself . . . in objectiﬁcations, extern-

inequalities and individualism that were characteristic of the commercial-industrial

8–9). Second, revolutions elsewhere formed an almost continuous backdrop to his

What Are Human Beings?

The Corporeal Organization of Human Beings

While Marx made numerous references to the corporeal organization of human

system—e.g. eye, head, or hand movements—constitute modes of attention that

thereby constitute themselves in a world of externalized objects that they have

“Ensembles of Social Relations” and Human Beings as

Human beings are distinguished as much by their sociocultural and historical

This passage is often read not as a shorthand or summary statement of complex

In this view, “culture [consciousness] constitutes a mode of expression of life

relations, are scaffoldings for human activity in historically particular circumstances.

Fourth, although he often employed the language of essentialism and reductive