https://home.csulb.edu/~eruyle/published/anth%20marx88.htm his is the version I sent to the editor of Nature, Society, and Thought in June of 1988. There are minor editorial changes in the version published as: "Anthropology for Marxists: Prehistoric Revolutions." Nature, Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical Materialism 1(4):469-499 (1988). This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the West Coast Marxist Scholars Conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, April 26-29, 1984. *********************** ANTHROPOLOGY FOR MARXISTS[1] There is, of course, plenty of darkness around us now, just as there was between the two wars. Those who wish to despair can find cause enough and more in our everyday life. Marxism does not console anyone by playing down difficulties, or minimizing the material and moral darkness which surrounds us human beings today. The difference is only - but in this "only" lies a whole world - that Marxism has a grasp of the main lines of human development and recognizes its laws. Those who have arrived at such knowledge know, in spite of all temporary darkness, both whence we have come and where we are going. And those who know this find the world changed in their eyes: they see purposeful development where formerly only a blind, senseless confusion surrounded them. Where the philosophy of despair weeps for the collapse of a world and the destruction of culture, there Marxists watch the birth-pangs of a new world and assist in mitigating the pains of labor (Lukacs [1948] 1964, 2). These profoundly true words of Georg Lukacs have particular relevance in the Age of Reagan. It is only through the application of scientific socialism that humanity can emerge from our present darkness. And it is only through an understanding of scientific socialism that we, as individuals, can impart to our personal lives a real sense of meaning to guide our action. But this understanding can only be achieved and maintained through struggle. Bourgeois forces of darkness are continually seeking to undermine our science, just as they are continually attempting to destroy emerging socialist societies in Central America and throughout the world. Just as we must defend our revolutionary comrades, so we must defend our revolutionary science. To do this, we must adopt a critical perspective and continually re-examine our knowledge in the light of the latest scientific achievements. Anthropology provides crucial insights for such a re-examination. Although other disciplines provide important analytical tools and data, they focus primarily on Euro-American bourgeois society and are thus both historically and culturally limited. Anthropology alone provides the time depth and cross cultural perspective necessary to locate bourgeois civilization within the full sweep of the human experience on earth. Marx and Engels used anthropological materials to enrich materialist conception of history in two ways (Bloch 1983, 10). They used anthropology, first, to demonstrate that the materialist conception of history was universally valid, that all societies were constructed along the same general principles. Second, they used anthropology to show that the particular institutions of bourgeois society, such as the state, private property, and the family, were not universal, but instead were historically limited responses to the particular material circumstances of the modern epoch. This latter point is absolutely fundamental and underlies the entire Marxian enterprise. Since the institutions of class and gender oppression in bourgeois society are products of human activity within a particular set of material conditions, they can be changed by human activity. The struggle for socialism would be doomed to failure if class and gender oppression were inevitable concomitants of human nature, as, indeed, is often argued by bourgeois ideologues. Thus, the cross-cultural data professionally controlled by anthropologists plays a crucial role in the ideological class struggle (and, it may be added, gender struggle). In waging this class struggle, Marxists must utilize the latest developments in anthropological fact and theory. This essay explores some of these developments and their relevance for historical materialism. ANTHROPOLOGICAL RELATIVISM A century of further anthropological research has caused a re-evaluation of the work of Morgan and the other nineteenth century anthropologists regarded so highly by Marx and Engels. The past century has seen spectacular discoveries in archaeology and human paleontology, more intensive collection and analysis of ethnographic data, and several interrelated areas of advance in anthropological theory which must be incorporated into a materialist understanding of the development of our species.[2] The establishment of a professional anthropology in the twentieth century was accompanied by the rejection of the earlier evolutionary perspective in favor or a relativist one. No longer were "primitive" cultures seen as stages through which Europeans had already passed, but rather, each culture was seen as a separate and unique experiment in human possibility - as if each were a differently colored, separate piece in a mosaic of human diversity, to be studied, and valued, in its own right (Keesing 1981, 111-112). There are three aspects to modern anthropological relativism: 1. the separation of race and culture and the non-importance of race; 2. linguistic relativism; and 3. cultural relativism.[3] The separation of race and culture is fundamental to the relativist position, as it is to all modern social science. In the modern view, the behavioral repertoire of any society is determined by what they learn, not any innate "racial" features. This does not deny, of course, that humans have biological needs and drives, nor that, within any human population, there are individual differences in physical and mental abilities. The modern formulation does deny that there are any significant differences between human groups (or "races") in terms of their physical, mental, or moral needs, abilities and capabilities. The belief in racial equality was widespread among Enlightenment philosophers, and is also a key feature of the Marxian tradition. But prior to modern anthropology, this was merely a philosophical belief, not a scientifically established principle. This permitted the rise of racist ideology in the 19th century when most social thought assumed the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of colored races (Harris 1968; Drake 1980). Under the leadership of Franz Boas, modern anthropology discredited this assumption and provided firm scientific evidence for the modern view that all human populations are equivalent in key human abilities to acquire, utilize, and develop cultural information. There are thus neither "primitive races" nor superior or inferior "races." In fact, many modern anthropologists have abandoned the race concept itself as not useful for understanding human physical variation (see Livingston 1962; Brace and Metress 1973; Littlefield et al 1982). Another important principle of modern anthropology is linguistic relativism. The intensive analysis of the languages of American Indians and other "primitive" peoples led to the recognition that all living languages are comparable in their phonetic and grammatical structure and in their ability to express whatever ideas are important to the people using the language (Lounsbury 1968). In the words of Sapir, Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite number of varieties may be spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunting savage of Assam (Sapir 1921, 219). There are, in other words, no "primitive" languages. Languages without writing are not inferior to written languages, they merely lack this essentially derivative linguistic form. The third element of the relativist position is cultural relativism itself. Cultures must be understood and valued in their own terms and not as steps on some evolutionary "ladder." The family system and religion of a foraging people, for example, must be understood in terms of the values and life-style of that people, and not simply as stages in the development of the family system and religion of the West. The religious ideology of Australian aborigines, for example, is just as subtle and complex as that of Christianity or Zen Buddhism: Australian Aborigines have incredibly subtle, philosophically challenging mystical cosmologies that posit a spiritual plane of existence that was prior to the world of sensory experience (in the "dreamtime") but now lies behind or parallel to it. Mervyn Meggitt (personal communication) describes how the old Walbiri man who was his spiritual guide eventually told him that he, Meggitt, had reached his philosophical depth and could follow no further into the mysteries of the cosmos. Perhaps no Westerner has ever fully penetrated these Aboriginal philosophical realms (Keesing 1981, 333). The essence of anthropological relativism is a rejection of the naive evolutionism which sees non-Western peoples as inferior to, and simply representing stages in the development of, modern Western civilization. Each culture has its own methods of dealing with the environment, with social relationships, and with the supernatural, has its own thought patterns and its own belief and values systems which are different than, but not inferior to, those of the West. The West clearly has a more elaborate technological system than India or the Arunta of the Australian outback, but this was simply because the West valued technology. The religious systems of India are far more elaborate than the pale monotheism of Christianity, and the Arunta have elaborated a marriage and kinship system which is truly mind-boggling in its complexity. To say that the West is more advanced than India or the Arunta is simply to impose our Western values on these other cultures. For the cultural relativist, all cultures are equally advanced and equally human. It is unfortunate that the positive insights of cultural relativism were accompanied by anti-evolutionism, anti-materialism, and anti-socialism. Cultural relativists tended to reject and even ridicule the idea that cultures had evolved. They did not attempt to understand why particular cultures were patterned in different ways, why kinship was valued by the Arunta, religion by the Hindu, and technology by the West. The humanistic concern with cultural differences was never applied to the Soviet Union.[4] In spite of these shortcomings, anthropological relativism is an important perspective, the essence of which is not only fully compatible with the thought of Marx but also can best be understood in the framework of historical materialism.[5] A MATERIALIST SOCIAL TAXONOMY The past few decades have seen a resurgence of evolutionism and materialism in Anthropology led by people like V. Gordon Childe ([1936] 1951), Leslie White (1949, 1959), Julian Steward (1955), and Marvin Harris (1968, 1979, 1985).[6] A materialist view of social evolution is diagramed in Figure 1. The major elements of this view may be summarized as follows. First, the transition from ape to human, what may be called the Human Revolution, began about 5,000,000 years ago. By about 40,000 B.P. (Before Present), humanity reached its present level of physical and mental capabilities. All living humans are thus equally human and equally far removed from our ape-like ancestor. There are no living peoples representative of the lower or middle paleolithic stages of human evolution. Thus, there are no primitive races or primitive peoples. Second, although there has been no measurable change in our human genetic capabilities during the past 40,000 years, there have been dramatic changes in our culture, leading to dramatic changes in human life-styles and in the nature of human societies. These changes may be conceptualized as a series of "revolutions:" the Neolithic Revolution (about 10,000 B.P.) which involved the development of plant and animal domestication and the emergence of a settled village-farming way of life; the Urban Revolution (about 5,000 B.P.) which involved the development of plow agriculture, systems of class rule, and cities; and the Industrial Revolution (about 1800 A.D.), which involved the development of machine production using the energy of fossil fuels and the emergence of a world capitalist system. Third, living foraging peoples can be used to reconstruct the probable life-style of the upper paleolithic and mesolithic (from about 40,000 to about 10,000 years ago), but only with some reservations. It must always be borne in mind that the foragers of the upper paleolithic occupied the choicest environments and had no contact with horticultural or industrial peoples, while living foragers and horticulturalists are usually linked into regional systems which include agriculturalists and state-level societies. Consequently, their economic and social life frequently cannot be understood except in relation to these regional systems (for further discussion of this point, see Keesing 1981, 109-120). Further, all peoples studied by ethnographers have been subject to decades or centuries of Western contact which has dramatically altered the material conditions of their lives. In many cases this has led to the emergence of novel cultural complexes which must be understood as products of acculturation (or culture contact) rather than as survivals of our primitive past (see Leacock 1978; Ruyle 1973b, Keesing 1981; Wolf 1982). The upper levels of Figure 1 deals with the kinds of societies that have emerged since the Industrial Revolution. Although these are outside the scope of the present discussion, a brief explanation is in order. As Marx demonstrated in his chapters on the primitive accumulation of capital, the Industrial Revolution was financed by the plunder of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Although it occured in Europe, the Industrial Revolution was thus a world-historical event which transformed the social structures not only of European nations but of the rest of the world as well. The result was the emergence of not one but two kinds of modern society: Overdeveloping Capitalist Nations in Europe and North America, which, on the basis of their centuries-long exploitation of the Third World, have developed the kinds of bourgeois affluence and irrationality criticized by Marxists and non-Marxists alike; and Underdeveloping Capitalist Nations, characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness, resulting from their continuing exploitation by the Euro-American nations.[7] The Overdeveloping Capitalist Nations and Underdeveloping Capitalist Nations are thus interdependent rather than independent and are locked into a single World Imperialist System. Since 1917, as portions of the formerly colonial or semi-colonial world have broken free from imperialism, they have embarked on independent socioeconomic development under the leadership of Communist Parties associated with the Third International. The result has been the emergence of Protosocialist Nations, a third type of modern society and harbingers of a new world system. Irrespective of how one feels about the particular policies pursued by the leaderships of the Protosocialist Nations, from the standpoint of social taxonomy they are different from either the Overdeveloping or Underdeveloping forms of capitalism, and must therefore be seen as a third form of modern society.[8] With this background, we may turn to the analysis of the revolutions of prehistory.