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Marxist Anthropology: Principles and Contradictions. New Perspectives in the Science of Man Part I: Society, Individual and Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

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The science of anthropology has traditionally studied the relations of the human kind to nature and the relations within society, the original animal condition of the human being, the preservation and overcoming thereof, the establishment of human culture, and its material, mental or artistic expression. Anthropology is founded on the presupposition of the variety of human societies and cultures, the differences between them, and the varieties in the developments and relations of each. It is an academic discipline above all, and has no internal commitment to practical undertakings. At best it has nurtured liberal spirits who embraced the “party of humanity”, and who have defended the concept of the whole against any expression of innate superiority of one group over another. It is an abstract social science which has only now separated itself from a spurious natural-science view of humanity, and this latter has given birth to a monster, the biology of racism, the reduction of cultural differences to natural or innate differences, and the assignment of these to a scale of higher or lower races. This academic anthropology did not strangle its offspring until long after it had done its harm.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1975

References

page 236 note 1 See The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, transcr. and ed., with an introd. by Lawrence Krader (Assen, 1972). Marx was one of the first to denounce the racist cant.

page 237 note 1 The issue of a Marxist anthropology is further complicated by the controversy over the young Marx on the one hand and the mature Marx on the other. The relation of the youthful works of Marx to his mature works is a matter of continuity and discontinuity in his undertakings. By the young Marx is usually meant the author of articles in the Rheinische Zeitung and in Vorwärts, of the Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, of the Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte, all from the period 1842–44. The controversy has been carried to an extreme by L. Althusser, who opposes the non-dialectical to the dialectical Marx; Althusser claims that the brand of the dialectic was stamped on those early writings and was only eradicated by him in later life. E. Fromm has put forth the opposition between Marx the humanist and Marx the revolutionist. The transition made by Marx from a philosophical anthropology to an empirical ethnology has been traced elsewhere. See my Introduction to The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx; “Karl Marx as Ethnologist”, in: Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Second Series, XXXV (1973), pp. 304–13; “The Works of Marx and Engels in Ethnology Compared”, in: International Review of Social History, XVIII (1973), pp. 223–75; Ethnologie und Anthropologic bei Marx (Munich, 1973), chs 1 and 2.

page 238 note 1 Ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte, in Marx-Engels, Historisch-Kri-tische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), I, Vol. 3, pp. 122–23.

page 239 note 1 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1, in Marx-Engels, Werke (MEW), Vol. 23, p. 346. Marx took each of these conceptions of humanity in its particularity and did not advance a universal definition of his own.

page 239 note 2 Marx, op. cit., p. 392, note. That which was regarded in 1844 as the potentiality of the reunion of humanity and nature thus fell away, to be replaced in the later writing by the mentioned parallelism.

page 239 note 3 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) (Modern Library, New York, n.d.), see p. 112 on specialized and generalized functions of organs; pp. 149f. on the sting of the bee as a boring instrument; p. 370 on modifications of rudimentary structures, etc.; id., The Descent of Man (1871), op. cit., on specialization of organs of communication, in nature, p. 465, etc.

page 240 note 1 The theses advanced by Marx in 1844 were set forth by him again in Capital: the thesis of continuity-discontinuity of the relations of the human kind and nature; and the thesis of the parallel development of human and natural science. The thesis of the convergence of these sciences is a separate problem.

page 241 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1. In the first ed. (Hamburg, 1867), Marx wrote, p. 774: “Eben desshalb erscheinen die Arbeitsprodukte als Waren, sinnlich übersinnlich oder gesellschaftliche Dinge.” Nota bene, the commodities are things which are sensory and at once suprasensory; being both, they are social. The social in the commodities is at once of the senses and beyond them (but there are other things in nature which are also at once of and beyond the senses). The social is of the natural order, which includes other relations beside the commodity relations, and all these are at once sensory-suprasensory. Marx took up this formulation regarding commodities in the later editions of Kapital: “Es ist sinnenklar, dass der Mensch […] die Formen der Naturstoffe […] verandert.” He then considered that the table while it is still wood, unchanged, not yet in the form of a commodity, is “an ordinary, sensory thing”. “Aber sobald er [der Tisch] als Ware auftritt, verwandelt er sich in ein sinnlich-ubersinnliches Ding.” The mystery attached to the commodity relation, says Marx, arises out of the mystery attached to the social relation. Because we are unclear about the one, willfully mystifying and obscuring that unclarity, we mystify and obscure the other. On the dialectic of the sensory-suprasensory and the mystical, Marx proceeded to reject the mystical root of the commodity, whether in its use-value or in its value determination. Yet both these economic relations have their physiological base and derivation from the head, nerves, muscles, sense-organs. The social form of labor begins when men begin to work for one another. The mystery of the commodity arises out of the form of the commodity itself, which, we have seen, is a sensory suprasensory thing. By exchange, labor products become commodities: “Durch dies Quidproquo werden die Arbeitsprodukte Waren, sinnlich-übersinnlich oder gesellschaftliche Dinge.” Kapital, Vol. 1, op. cit., pp. 85f., cf. Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, in MEW, Vol. 26.3, p. 474. We call attention first to the poetics of Marx, beginning with that which is clear to the senses, sinnenklar, then proceeding to the consideration of wood, an ordinary, sensory thing, then to the commodity, the form of wood as table, a sensory-suprasensory thing. That commodity as sensory-suprasensory is social; it is not social as sensory-suprasensory. Cf. Le Capital, J. Roy tr. (Paris, 1873–75), pp. 28f.: “sinnlich”, “qui tombe sous les sens”; “sinnlich-ubersinnlich”, “à la fois saisissable et insaisissable”; English translation, Frie-drich Engels ed., S. Moore and E. Aveling tr. (New York, 1937), p. 81: “It is as clear as noon-day”, “sinnenklar”; p. 83: “commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”, “Waren, sinnlich-übersinnlich oder gesellschaftliche Dinge”. The relation of the social world to the sensory-suprasensory is a problem of the ontology of social being. See my“Critique dialectique de la nature de la nature humaine”, in: L'Homme et la Société, No 10 (1968), pp. 21–39; Georg Lukàcs, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins. Die Arbeit (Neuwied, 1973). The mystification of the commodity relation is a problem of the fetishism of commodities, and at the same time of the social relation. The problem of fetishism is in turn connected with the relation of religion in society and in thought; it is at once an ontological and epistemological problem. The mystery of the commodity does not arise out of the content or substance of the commodity, nor out of its social relation, but out of its form, as social, sensory-suprasensory. L. v. Stein had attached much mystery to the concept of society; the certainty of the senses, wrote Stein, is not a sufficient ground for truth, since all phenomena have a basis which cannot be grasped with the senses; the concept of society is more difficult to grasp than that of the state or the economy. L. v. Stein, Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs (1848), Pt I, ch. 2. On Stein, see Karl Marx, Die Heilige Familie, in MEGA, I, Vol. 3, p. 311.

page 242 note 1 Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 2nd ed. (1843). See also his Grundsätze der Philosophic der Zukunft (1843).

page 242 note 2 Marx, Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach (1845), MEW, Vol. 3, pp. 6, 534.

page 243 note 1 Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859), in MEW, Vol. 13, p. 46. See also Kapital, Vol. 1, op. cit., pp. 90f.

page 243 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, ch. 12, esp. § 4: “Die Teilung der Arbeit innerhalb der Manufaktur und Teilung der Arbeit innerhalb der Gesellschaft”. This distinction holds for production in primitive as well as civilized societies. The division of labor in the family and in the factory does not presuppose the exchange of commodities; the division of labor in manufacture presupposes society, that of the family does not.

page 243 note 3 David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 3rd ed. (1821). In ch. 1, section 1, Ricardo wrote of exchangeable value of commodities in the early stages of society in this way. He quoted Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, ch. V, to the same effect. Neither divorced the individual from society; both presupposed society in the economic undertakings of the individual.

page 244 note 1 Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of his System; Rudolf Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx, P. M. Sweezy ed. (New York, 1966). See p. 133 and Sweezy, Introduction, p. xx.

page 245 note 1 Karl Kautsky, Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (Stuttgart, 1906); Otto Bauer, “Marxismus und Ethik”, in: Die Neue Zeit, XXIV, 2 (1906), pp. 485–99; G. V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (New York, 1940). See the collections by H. J. Sandkuhler and R. de la Vega, Marxismus und Ethik, and Austromarxismus (Frankfurt, 1970); V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (1917).

page 245 note 2 Friedrich Engels repeatedly brought out the interrelations between the economic and the other factors. See his correspondence with Conrad Schmidt, Josef Bloch, Franz Mehring and W. Borgius (Heinz Starkenburg), MEW, Vol. 37, pp. 435ff., 462ff., 488ff.; Vol. 39, pp. 96ff., 205ff. See Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (1938), pp. 220–29. Marx made the economic factor in history the most important one. H. S. Maine had put the moral factor first, to which Marx replied: “This ‘moral’ shows how little Maine understands the matter; the influences are economic before everything else, the ‘moral’ modus of existence is ever a derived, secondary modus, never the primary one.” Ethnological Notebooks, p. 329. The words “before everything else” can only mean that there is something else which the economic comes before. That which the economic precedes is given in the Ethnological Notebooks on p. 112: the political, religious, juristic and philosophical systems of the society.

page 249 note 1 Ethnological Notebooks, p. 329.

page 249 note 2 L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society (1877). See Ethnological Notebooks, pp. 97–241. See also Marx, drafts of letter to Vera Zasulich, MEW, Vol. 19, pp. 384–406. Engels, Anti-Diihring, Pt II, ch. 1 (MEW, Vol. 20, pp. 137f.), had written that primitive communities had already developed the state (“der Staat, zu dem sich die naturwüchsigen Gruppen gleichstämmiger Gemeinden […] fortent-wickelt hatten”). See “The Works of Marx and Engels in Ethnology Compared”, loc. cit.

page 251 note 1 On the opposition between individual and common interest see Marx, Die Heilige Familie, op. cit., pp. 306–10. In his critique of Helvetius, Marx equates the individual with the private interest on the one side, the human with the common interest on the other. Thereby, the particular interest in the given society is overcome, but the critique of this interest is still to be made: the common interest is potentially the interest of all of humanity, but it is not actually so; this lies in some future time. The individual and the private interest are equated precisely in political society, class-divided society, capitalist society.

page 251 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 353f.

page 251 note 3 The passage in Kapital, Vol. 1, dates from 1867, that on Maine from 1880–81. See Ethnological Notebooks, pp. 86–89.

page 252 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 73.

page 252 note 2 See Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, op. cit., pp. 485f.

page 254 note 1 Marcus Aurelius was citing Epictetus. See Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Spirit”, in: The Psychoanalytic Review, LV (1968), p. 475.

page 254 note 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Die Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), ch. IV, A: “Herr-schaft und Knechtschaft”.

page 255 note 1 Id., Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), § 187, Zusatz; Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 385; see also D. Urquhart, Familiar Words (London, 1855). In Hegel's philosophy of education this parsing of the individual in social life is deplored; Marx, loc. cit., quotes Hegel with approval.

page 255 note 2 “Beide Seiten stehen sich als Personen gegenuber. Formell ist ihr Verhältnis das gleiche und freie von Austauschenden iiberhaupt. Dass diese Form Schein ist und täuschender Schein, erscheint, soweit das juristische Verhältnis be-trachtet wird, als ausserhalb desselben fallend.” Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (1857–1858) (Berlin, 1953), p. 368.

page 256 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 182.

page 256 note 2 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 381.

page 256 note 3 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 3, in MEW, Vol. 25, p. 838.

page 257 note 1 In the French translation of Capital, Marx eliminated the phrase “material relations between persons”, and wrote only “social relations between things” (Le Capital, op. cit., p. 29). In his ultimate formulation on the subject, Marx shows the fetishism commodities to be the opposite of mediate or material relations between human beings. The fetishism is the substitution of the social by the material relation, or the direct by the indirect relation. It is the determination of the human by the material relation.

page 257 note 2 Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 579.

page 258 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, ch. 1, § 4. The fetishism of the commodity relation rests first on the transformation of the commodity into a fetish by the persons engaged in its exchange; but the persons themselves undergo a fantastic transformation at the same time, standing to each other as things exchanged. This is a second dialectic movement, a form of reification of human beings by their dehumanization, and the personification of things, which is a fantastic process. But more than this, commodity fetishism in this second dialectical movement is in turn twofold: the human being is first dehumanized and reified, second personified, made into an artificial person. See the next section, in which this movement is further developed.

page 258 note 2 In ancient Rome, mercantile ventures were undertaken by a societas composed of socii, associates or partners. Modern social science is the child of commercial practice.

page 260 note 1 On the mythology of nature see Marx, Grundrisse pp. 30f.

page 261 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 425. See also Grundrisse, p. 356; Kapital, Vol. 1, pp. 99f.; Vol. 3, op. cit., pp. 832f.

page 262 note 1 The capitalist himself is only the master of capital as its personification. See Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, I, in MEW, Vol. 26.1, p. 365; III, p. 419. See Richard Jones, Textbook of Lectures on the Political Economy of Nations (Hartford, 1852).

page 262 note 2 Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, p. 420; Jones, op. cit., Lecture III.

page 264 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 100: the economic character masks of persons are but the personifications of the economic relations, who stand to each other as the bearers of these relations.

page 265 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 74.

page 267 note 1 Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 177; Vol. 3, p. 838 and ch. 48 passim; Theorien fiber den Mehrwert, III, p. 475.

page 268 note 1 Theorien über den Mehrwert, III, p. 474. This is not the criticism by Marx of the mirror theory of consciousness, but it is its initial positing.

page 268 note 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I; Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialec-tique (Paris, 1960), pp. 504f.; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book V.

page 268 note 3 Adam Smith, op. cit., p. 796.

page 269 note 1 David Ricardo, op. cit., pp. 42ff. and 275.

page 269 note 2 Giambattista Vico, Dell'antichissima sapienza italica, in Opere, Fausto Nicolini ed. (Bari, 1953), pp. 248ff., 305f.; Karl Löwith, Vicos Grundsatz: verum et factum convertuntur (Heidelberg, 1968). On Vico, see Marx, Kapital, Vol. 1, p. 393, note: to Vico is attributed the distinction between human history, which we make, and natural history, which we do not.

page 270 note 1 Marx, ibid.: “Die Technologie enthüllt das aktive Verhalten des Menschen zur Natur, den unmittelbaren Produktionsprozess seines Lebens, damit auch seiner gesellschaftlichen Lebensverhältnisse und der ihnen entquellenden geistigen Vorstellungen.” Technology does not constitute the activity of human society in relation to nature, but is the record, as fossil evidence or current form, that discloses what that relation was or is. The direct process of the sustenance of human life is appositive to the activity of the society in its natural relations which the technology has laid bare. The activity of the society is not caused by the natural relations, nor does the activity of the society act as a causal or determining factor directly; the direct process of production of the material life and the social relations are in a reciprocal relation, standing to each other as mutual determinants. Yet the order of the introduction of the members of the sequence is first, the material relations of production, and second, the relations in society. This order is underlined in the French translation of Capital, which Marx controlled, where in place of the construction “damit auch” he caused to be inserted “par consequent”, which is more causal, making the relation in society rather more determinate, the relation to nature rather more determinant (Le Capital, p. 162, col. 1, note). The intellectual ideas and conceptions flow from the social relations; here the relations are clearly expressed as determinant and determinate, in contrast to the relations of the relations between human society and nature and those within the society. – The problem of Marx on technology has occasioned a great debate: N. I. Bucharin, Theorie des histori-schen Materialismus (Hamburg, 1922), had proceeded directly from technology to society without taking the intervening step of introducing the economic production process, and without reference to the relations in society. Georg Lukács, in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, XI (1925) (repr. Lukács, Schriften zur Ideologie und Politik, P. Ludz ed. (Neuwied, 1967), pp. 188ff.), had objected to this. The same accusation against Bukharin was made by Sidney Hook, Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York, 1933), p. 142. Bukharin had in fact given a better account of his position; see his contribution “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism”, in: Science at the Crossroads. Papers Presented to the International Congress of Science and Technology (1931), p. 22 (repr. with new front matter by Joseph Needham and P. G. Worskey (London, 1971)). None of those participating in this discussion had made the distinction, which is clear in Marx's conception, that technology is not the relation between human society and nature, but is the record of that relation. From this it follows that we can comprehend more of the content of the relation between the human kind and nature than that which is evidenced by its formal and external side, or the technology alone.