Towards a Class-Struggle Anthropology

Abstract

history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist ManifestoThe philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.- Karl Marx, Theses on FeuerrbachFor Marx social class is at the centre of understanding and organizing social change. As interpreted by Lenin the working class, organized by its politically advanced vanguard, constituted the path toward emancipation and the realization of human potential. Rosa Luxemburg emphasized-among other things-the critical power of the combined force of the working class, engaged in a general strike, in overthrowing capitalism. Trotsky, through his analysis of combined and uneven development and the thesis of permanent revolution, pointed the way forward toward a global socialist society (even if the revolution began in the most backward of countries).Anthropology, by contrast, has tended to draw upon the more conservative theoretical frameworks of mainstream scholars such as Emile Durkheim or Max Weber to construct models of society that highlight ways of building and or maintaining community connections and social functions (Patterson 2001). This is not, of course, to say that there are no important anthropological contributions which draw upon Marx-there are some.1 In this essay we detail in broad stroke the history of Marxist anthropology in North America (which for us includes Mexico, the United States, and Canada) and, in so doing, point the way forward towards a class-struggle anthropology, with the ultimate aim of achieving social justice and the elimination of a class-based society.To carry out the task that we have set for ourselves we balance between review and argument. For our review we have selected pieces that are critical for engaging in our project of a class-struggle anthropology. Because we are social activists engaged in the social justice movement and practising professional anthropologists engaged in the arcane world of publish or perish we have focussed on those anthropological writers and works that we have found contribute toward our project in terms of their intellectual and practical contributions.For our argument we draw upon the classical call for a class-struggle social science that is intent on reinvigorating hope for a better, more just world.2 This is a social science that places its analytical eye and its political hopes upon the working class as the pivotal social agent of change and upon the ruling class as the agent of reaction and deception. In so doing we draw directly from the corpus of theory inspired and informed by the writings and political engagements of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. In this essay we have attempted to avoid the endless internal debates within Marxism and focus instead upon the ways in which Marxism as theory and practice has informed anthropology. Nonetheless, it would be remiss if we did not at the very least lay out the core concepts of Marxist theory so as not to be waylaid later on in the paper over potentially unfamiliar phrases or concepts new to the 21st-century ear.First and foremost Marxism is a theory and a practice united in the objective of achieving a classless society. As a theory, Marxism is a body of conceptual tools that allows an informed analyst an effective mechanism by which to make sense of the myriad ways and means the ruling class of a particular society deploy to hold onto their privileged position in society (see, for example: Ollman 1971; Mandel 1969). Chief among Marxism's central concepts is that of social class-defined at its most basic as one's place relative to the means of production, the tools, machines, and knowledge used to transform the world around us into things usable by humans. While primarily focussed upon the workings of capitalism, Marxist theory has also been used to understand the workings of kin-ordered and tributary societies (Wolf 1982, 1999). …