Marx Karl - Karl Marx, anthropologist

Karl Marx, Anthropologist

Karl Marx, Anthropologist

Thomas C. Patterson

For Friends, Colleagues, and Students

Contents

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 The red-baiting of scholars who saw Marx only through the lens of anti-communism has gradually been replaced by scholars who assert that Marx is really pass, especially after the dismantling of the Soviet Union.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 Marxs 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 Marxs 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 Marxs 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 Godeliers (1973/1977) Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, ngel Palerms (1980) Antropologa y marxismo, Marc Ablss (1976) Anthropologie etMarxisme, and Randall McGuires (1992) A Marxist Archaeology are a few that come immediately to mind, there are others as well.

My first direct acquaintance with Marxs writing occurred in 1959 in an introductory course in Western civilization with a selection from The CommunistManifesto. 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 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 Ashmoremy colleague, friend, and wifewho sets high standards and has provided instantaneous feedback, constructive criticism, happiness, and contentment for more than a decade.

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 Marxs 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 Hegels 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 RheinischeZeitung; 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.

18434 Marx resigns from the Rheinische Zeitung; marries Jenny von Westphalen; emigrates to Paris in search of employment, and writes Economic and Philosophical