Pre-capitalist Societies Research Articles

How Moscow did not become a world center of marxist anthropology: historian L.V. Danilova, theoretical discussions of the 1960s, and international contacts of soviet scholars

The article analyzes theoretical and methodological discussions in Russian ethnography and historiography of the 1960s. The focus is on the fate of the historian L.V. Danilova and the collection, edited by her, “Problems of the History of Pre-Capitalist Societies” (1968), one of the brightest achievements of the non-dogmatic Marxism of the thaw era. On the basis of new archival materials, it reconstructs the project of the multi-volume publication “Laws of History and Specific Forms of the World Historical Process”, traces the roots of the “new direction” in ethnography, and offers a new reading of the activity of the history methodology sector of the Institute of History. International team of the would-be authors of this project could have made it a notable phenomenon in world Marxist thought. The author concludes that this did not happen because of the opposition of the conservative academic establishment.

Misperceptions of the Border: Migration, Race, and Class Today

Abstract This paper addresses the role of global migration and the nature of national borders within the co-constitution of class and race. We begin with Marx’s critique of the value-form – a critique that rests upon a distinction between the ‘essence’ of social reality and its immediate appearances. The paper elaborates how Marx’s understanding of the emergence of a society based upon generalised commodity production leads to a certain conception of the ‘political state’ and citizenship – and thus borders and national belonging. This reveals the distinctive territorial forms of capitalism vis-à-vis those found in pre-capitalist societies, and moves us away from transhistorical conceptions of borders and the nation-state. In the second half, the paper turns to look at what this conception of borders and migration might mean concretely for how we think about the co-constitution of race and class today. Here the focus is on three crucial aspects of the contemporary world market: (1) the relationship between the cross-border movements of labour and processes of class formation, (2) migration and the determination of the value of labour-power, and (3) coercive and unfree labour.

The economic rationality in the culture of Gamo wealth redistribution, Southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Many of the studies on the moral economy of pre-capitalist African societies have singularly asserted that wealth redistribution in these societies was made only for the moral satisfaction of the redistributors. However, since the late 1960s this notion has been increasingly criticised with the claim that pre-capitalist societies were also economically rational. This paper presents the political economy of the pre-capitalist society of Gamo in Southern Ethiopia, where wealth redistribution can be interpreted as having been made not only for moral satisfaction but also for economic and political gains. The Gamo have a redistribution culture embedded in an institution known as haleqa in which economically better-off individuals redistribute wealth to the ordinary community members to get elected as clan leaders, a position that will give them opportunities to accrue economic benefits. The paper argues that cultures of wealth redistribution which are often daubed entirely ‘moral’ in fact significantly mix rational political and economic behaviours.

The Political Economy of Pre-Capitalist Societies by Yu.Semenov (1929–2023): a New Stage in the Development of Historical Materialism

The Political Economy of Pre-Capitalist Societies by Yu.Semenov (1929–2023): a New Stage in the Development of Historical Materialism

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

The Joint Effect of Marketing and Extended Self-psychology on Consumer BehaviorThe Example of the "Soft" Addiction Market

The history of addictive consumer goods (tobacco, alcohol, sugar) has witnessed global developments in the modern era. As Siminji puts it: "Commodities like tea, sugar, liqueurs, and tobacco, whose consumption by laborers fit into the rhythm of laborers' lives. The centuries were centuries of rapid change in consumption when England was transforming a rural, agrarian, and pre-capitalist society in a way that was neither methodical nor smooth. People enjoyed sugar while work schedules were sped up, the pace of rural urbanization accelerated, and the factory system took shape and became widespread. These changes increasingly influenced patterns of eating habits." And in China, with the advent of the new century and the catalyst of the Internet, more new addictive consumer products are either moving from a regional product to a national one, as in the case of betel nut or completing the transition from cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Therefore some perceptions of traditional addictive substances or the traditional use of addictive substances have changed, and while the dangers of traditional addictive substances such as cigarettes, high alcohol, and sugar have been well known, addictive consumer products such as e-cigarettes, low alcohol such as beer, and betel nut have been widely promoted and disseminated when people do not yet have sufficient knowledge of them.

Pathways to social development: Rosa Luxemburg’s studies on the anthropology and sociology of imperialism

ABSTRACT While Rosa Luxemburg is widely known for her critique of reformism and political authoritarianism, less attention has been paid to her anthropological and ethnographic studies of non-Western and precapitalist societies. This chapter examines Luxemburg’s work on this in her Introduction to Political Economy and writings composed between 1907 and 1914 at the school of the German Social-Democratic Party in Berlin. In doing so, it compares and contrasts Luxemburg’s studies on the non-Western world with the late writing of Marx (1872–1883), especially concerning “the so-called primitive accumulation of capital.”

DOMINATION, SERVITUDE AND COMMODITY FETISHISM IN HAROLD PINTER’S THE HOMECOMING

The struggle for domination clearly persists in The Homecoming as it does in almost all of Pinter’s works. Because of the vague atmosphere, enigmatic characters, and dark, tragicomic dialogue and action, a single decisive meaning for the play cannot be identified. Many character analyses have been carried out on the play, frequently focusing on Ruth and her decision at the end. Moreover, critics have sought to read the play in the light of psychoanalysis, centering on the characters’ past and complexes. By adding a sociopolitical dimension to purely realistic or symbolic readings, this article attempts to analyze the relationships of domination and servitude between characters at the micro-level of the family structure through Marx’s notions of fetishism in relations between individuals, and commodity fetishism as expounded by Slavoj Žižek. With the help of Žižek’s ideas on ideology, a new layer of sociopolitical signification to the relationships held between characters is added, particularly that between Ruth and the men, which is seen as a parallel to the macro-level fetishized relationships in pre-capitalist societies and commodity fetishism in a capitalist one.

The rule of law vs the archaization of law (on the specificity of legal form of the dependent peripheral capitalism)

The subject of this research is the phenomenon of archaization of legal form, which is reflected multiple modern legal systems, including the legal system of modern Russia. The author believes that the state of current Russian legal order testifies to the downfall of one of the declared goals of Russia’s policy of the last three decades – establishment of the so-called rule of law; while the general academic theory of law has not yet formulated a precise understanding of the corresponding processes, as fearing to go beyond the scope of certain ideological boundaries, it first and foremost deals with the formally due than with actually essential. Archaization in the legal systems of modern countries is the revival of the forms of law, legal practice and legal consciousness that are inherent to the pre-capitalist societies. The thesis is substantiated that the process of archaization of law and legal form as a whole, should be considered as one of the objectively determined development patterns and functionality of the societies of dependent peripheral capitalism. The article reviews the objective prerequisites for this phenomenon: its conditionality by socioeconomic relations (preservation of the elements of other production methods in terms of peripheral capitalism), inequality in distribution of the key social resources, and specific social-class structure of the corresponding societies. The general definition of archaization of legal form acquires more precise contours when the author turns to the realities of modern Russian legal order.

Esencia y apariencia de las relaciones sociales: colonos y propietarios en el imperio romano

La historiografía ha analizado tradicionalmente el problema del arrendamiento de tierras en la Antigua Roma desde una perspectiva formalista, caracterizando el lazo social entre el colono y el propietario únicamente desde el punto de vista contractual, como dos sujetos autónomos que establecen una relación de manera voluntaria y libre. Pero la estrechez de tal enfoque, derivado principalmente de la gran importancia que tuvo el desarrollo del derecho en Roma, no resulta suficiente a la hora de explicar diferentes fenómenos que se pueden apreciar en las fuentes, donde también se observan rasgos de dependencia “personal” en la relación entre arrendatarios y propietarios. Al analizar estos aspectos, veremos que no suponen la inexistencia del interés económico en este tipo de relaciones, sino que su razón de ser es precisamente la de ocultar este interés para su efectiva realización. Se trata de formas aparenciales, aunque necesarias, que el interés económico adquiere en las sociedades precapitalistas, y que éstas se ufanan por ocultar.

Equal Distribution of Inequality: Totality and the Limits of Identity Politics

This essay tracks the limits of identity-based politics, arguing that such political programs fail to adequately theorize their embeddedness within capital and the liberal state. Following Marx, Moishe Postone distinguishes between precapitalist societies, in which overt social relations mediate labor, and capitalist societies, in which labor is abstracted and comes to mediate social relations, creating a social totality. Following Postone, it can be argued that noncapitalist forms of domination, such as racism and patriarchy, are overt forms of domination in which social relations directly mediate labor and its distribution. This claim seemingly strengthens identity politics, but not when considering political programs based on identity lines, which ultimately must adopt and perfect a liberal logic that, rather than eradicating inequality, ensures its more even distribution. This essay shows, for example, how state-driven identity politics based on ethnic difference in Israel/Palestine fails to account for neoliberal reforms that remake the encounter between Jews and Arabs.

The cultural transformation of the proprioceptive senses

Abstract The research question of the present paper is what relation exists between biology and cultural semiosis and I examine as a token of this question the relation between the physiological senses of proprioception and the cultural concepts corresponding to them. While the origins of semiosis are biological, the origin of proprioceptive concepts is debated. Against the biological view that the proprioceptive senses define directly the concepts corresponding to them, there is an opposite view supporting that these concepts are culture-specific. The concept of “classification system” is counter-proposed as the structural framework for the study of proprioceptive concepts. The paper discusses the senses and concepts of proprioception on the basis of a large corpus of anthropological and archaeological material concerning the semiotic systems of precapitalist societies and with the help of a set of metalinguistic spatial concepts. These metalinguistic concepts are up vs. down, front vs. rear, and right vs. left. The senses corresponding to them lead to the senses and concepts of spatial orientation and presuppose a point of reference, closely related to the sense of equilibrium. My conclusion is that the cultural concepts corresponding to these senses are not directly extrapolated from the senses themselves, but are culture-specific and each time integrated within a different cultural and social environment.

Capital and Social Difference in Gramsci and Luxemburg

Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks are widely celebrated for their theorization of the political and of hegemony in capitalist society. We may also read the notebooks as works analyzing conditions where capitalist social relations are prevalent, but where pre- and noncapitalist social relations have only partially decomposed. This opens the way for situating them alongside Rosa Luxemburg’s less well-known writings, including her unpublished prison manuscript “Introduction to Political Economy.” Her analysis of the political and imperial dynamics of capitalist societies centers upon the question of the origins and formation of capitalist social relations. Although his prison notebooks suggest a capacious interest in global dynamics, Gramsci's focus is generally Italy, and the complexities of transition are thereby narrowed. By contrast Luxemburg’s writings on political economy—like Gramsci’s, left incomplete by her imprisonment and subsequent murder by fascists—consistently emphasize the historical evolution of distinct social formations, their geographical diversity, and the importance of the specific emergence of capitalist social relations from precapitalist societies.

Marx on Peasants And Small-Scale Industry: The Changes of Marxʼs Insight into the Pre-Capitalist Societies

Marx on Peasants And Small-Scale Industry: The Changes of Marxʼs Insight into the Pre-Capitalist Societies

Organización campesina y dominios políticos en la cuenca del Duero altomedieval

El texto recoge la conferencia presentada en las IV Jornadas de Jóvenes Investigadores sobre Sociedades Precapitalistas. El objetivo es ofrecer una imagen panorámica de cómo las diferentes estructuras políticas que se implantaron entre los siglos V al X en la cuenca del Duero influyeron en la organización de las comunidades campesinas. Aunque estas disfrutaron de una considerable agencia social, política y económica, el tributo y el control de los espacios de uso comunal facilitaron la intervención de elites relacionadas con el poder estatal, con la excepción del periodo de colapso que se abrió en los siglos VIII y IX.

Non-Linear Pathways to Social Transformation: Rosa Luxemburg and The Post-Colonial Condition

Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital, which spurred intense discussion and debate from the moment of its publication in 1913, has taken on new resonance in light of the global expansion of capitalism, the destruction of indigenous cultures and habitats, and capital's reconfiguration of public and private space. No less important is a series of additional works by Luxemburg that address these themes, but which have received far less attention. These include her notes and lectures on pre-capitalist society that were composed as part of her work as a teacher at the German Social Democratic Party's school in Berlin from 1907-14 and her Introduction to Political Economy, which first led her to confront the problem delineated in The Accumulation of Capital. These writings shed new light on the contributions as well as the limitations of her understanding of the internal and external limits to capital accumulation, especially insofar as the ability of non-capitalist formations and practices to survive the domination of capital is concerned. Luxemburg's understanding of the impact of capitalism in undermining noncapitalist strata has crucial ramifications for working out a viable alternative to capitalism today.

Allegories and Counter-Allegories of the World-System in Chinua Achebe's <em>Arrow of God</em>

If, as Pheng Cheah has suggested, orature in non-European vernacular languages contains the potential to contest predominant conceptions of the world as a resource for capitalist modernity, the literary staging of orature in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God tells another story about the world that questions and interrupts the temporality of capitalist modernity. It is the worldly implications of Achebe's act of storytelling with which this article is primarily concerned. Beginning with a critical assessment of different allegorical readings of Achebe's novel, this essay traces the articulation of a different conception of the world in Arrow of God that runs counter to such allegorical readings. Achebe's symbolic framing of orature and proverb as verbal art forms embedded in a specific social and cultural conception of the world that is organized around the time frame of an agricultural subsistence economy interrupts the temporality of capitalist modernity and the primitivist tropes of precapitalist societies on which it depends. If Achebe's novelistic framing of orature as part of a literary system of symbolic codes gestures toward a mode of agency that counters capital's mode of production narrative, such a mode is enabled by a way of knowing the world that disfigures the ethnographic logic of colonial allegory. This mode of understanding is further articulated in Achebe's temporal framing of the yam as a sacred object that also parodies the ethnographic framing of the commodity fetish. What links the ostensibly disparate rituals of the proverb and the festival of the yam, I suggest, is a counter-allegorical register that interrupts the temporal order of capitalist modernity. To elucidate the broader significance of this register for research in literary studies, the article also draws comparisons with the trope of the ticker tape in Frank Norris's novel The Octopus and the framing of oil fetishism in Helon Habila's Oil on Water. In so doing, the article also suggests that the symbolic codes of Achebe's novel de-fetishize the totalizing idea of capitalist modernity as a world-system in such a way that has profound and far-reaching implications for a wider understanding of the relationship between literature, empire, and the historical development of capitalism on a global scale.

On the Misappropriation of Marx's Late Writings on Russia: A Critique of Marx at the Margins

In his late writings, Marx speculated that Russia could bypass the “necessary” stages that had defined the economic history of Western Europe. By appropriating the positive results of capitalism without traversing through the phase of negativity which produced them, the Russian commune, he claimed, could transition directly into communism. Kevin Anderson's Marx at the Margins (Anderson, 2010) defends the mistaken interpretation that Marx extended this possibility to all precapitalist societies that he studied at the time. This sort of “multilinearity” universalizes the path of development open to Russia, understating the historical context and specific social relations which, Marx argued, enabled such a transformation. Aside from its European context, the distinguishing mark of this commune was its “dualism” — a feature that endowed it with greater “historical initiative.”

Observing Developmental Intervention in Mineral-rich Adivasi Subsistence Economy: An Ethnographic Account from West Singhbhum (Jharkhand)

The shift of the political economy of development from the Nehruvian model to the Neoliberal market model has relocated the discourses and practices of development. A state becomes a facilitator, protector and advocator of the capitalist market economy and the praxis of development become a kind of governmentality that often privileges the specific class interest. In this neoliberalized era, cultural politics of the developmental intervention (DI) needs immediate attention because the state DI has a huge impact on the pre-capitalist mode of social formation. This article covers Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum to study the DI on local indigenous population who have sacral and subsistence kind of societal formation. This article tries to show why there is need to understand development and its nature in mineral-rich Adivasi regions. The main focus of this article is on exploring the pattern of state development intervention in the region of pre-capitalist social formation and what outcomes it has carried for commons. Through case studies collected from field areas, we try to show that the contemporary development process and practices are based on the premises of modernization and neoliberalization and it has been widely criticized for being exclusionary and biased in the mineral-rich pre-capitalist society. At the same time, we also try to demarcate these state developmental issues at epistemological level which helps to understand the nature of development intervention in Adivasi resource-rich regions.

KARL POLANYI AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON REGIONAL / LOCAL?

Por muito tempo a ideia do desenvolvimento esteve sempre associada à expansão das formas capitalistas de produção e às suas consequências em termos do progresso técnico e de acumulação de riquezas. Polanyi, para além do economicismo, aqui compreendido com