Marxism in the horizon: an essay on Maurice Godelier

Abstract

With his systematic review and methodical discussion of other scholars’ works, Godelier constructed a theory of Marxism that “made sense” in the empirical worlds of anthropology, while preserving the main tenets of historical materialism and dialectical materialism. From his writings in the 1970s, his workshops on “transition,” and his seminars at the CNRS in the early 1980s, we learned to think theoretically about our ethnographic material, and to do it within a framework that referred to Marx. For us, on the one hand, Godelier provided a Marxist theory that respected the value of concrete ethnography, and on the other hand, explored the issue of transitions from one system to another, while thinking about the future, a passage to a better system, probably socialist.