Marshall Sahlins

From: Charles Brown Subject: marxism-thaxis] Marshall Sahlins presente Good question, Maure .Sahlins was an expert on the Stone Age . The Stone Age is before written history, so the history of the Stone Age is not a history of class struggle . Engels supports this proposition in the first sentence of the Manifesto of the Communist Party , that is that the Stone Age is excepted from the historical materialist Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians(1) [German Original] The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles. 2. That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)] The Stone Age was longer than Engels thought , like 2.5 million years long . And importantly, language ( symbolic sign communication) and culture ( symbolic behavior ) were the origin of Genus Homo, humans ; and the first labor was not productive labor, but direct appropriation of wild resources , easy does it , not slave, feudal, or wage -toil . Contra Engels in “The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (sic). “ Better titled : “The Transition in Labor due to the invention of tradition-culture -language in the evolution from Australopithecus to Homo Habilis.” Sahlins’ “The Original Affluent Society “ is a major support for my claims about the Stone Age above. He wrote on the US loss of conscience in Viet Nam . Always resisting the military and intelligence in the Third World With regard to capitalism, I’d say Sahlins was a anarchist opponent of colonialist-imperialism. But not a Marxist . He doesn’t write about class struggle . He sprinkled his writing with allusions to Marx . In his main theory book he criticizes Marx as a sort of vulgar Marxist , which years after being in his classroom and having studied and learned Marxism very thoroughly , is silly . it makes me wonder whether the CIA made him do it because he had been in Paris in 1968; he had been. as I say , a thorn in their side for a while : invented the teach -in . On Apr 25, 2021, at 3:13 PM, Maure  This looks interesting... were his theories consistent with Marxism, Charles ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society Sent: Sun, Apr 25, 2021 3:07 pm Subject: [marxism-thaxis] Marshall Sahlins presente I forgot, smiles ; Marshall Sahlins presente ! Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.riseup.net To change your options or unsubscribe go to: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/marxism-thaxis