Roseberry - Marx and Anthropology
Roseberry - Marx and Anthropology
Roseberry - Marx and Anthropology
26:2546
Copyright 1997 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
William Roseberry
Department of Anthropology, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, New
York, NY 10003; e-mail: roseberr@newschool.edu
KEY WORDS: theory, philosophy, history, political anthropology, materialism, capitalism
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the continuing relevance of Marxs work in anthropological theory by examining three dimensions of his thought, concentrating on a
central text in each: historical materialism (The German Ideology), the analysis of capitalism (Volume 1 of Capital), and political analysis (The Eighteenth
Brumaire). Each of these dimensions is related to present-day discussions in
anthropological and social theory, but the emphasis remains on an interpretation of Marxs work.
INTRODUCTION
In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx (1970a) claimed, The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it (p.
123). Today both ends of this thesis point to problems. Most marxist-inspired
or -organized attempts to change the world have been discredited, and there
are few activists who will now mount a political program in his name. Moreover, many scholars contend that a central reason for the failure of marxistinspired attempts to change the world lies in marxist interpretations of it. That
is, as an attempt to understand the making of the modern world, marxism was
embedded within, and shared basic assumptions of, other modes of thought
that interpreted the rise of capitalism. It was, in short, modernist, and it approached history and politics with a positivistic commitment to interpretive
schemes that subsumed different societies and histories within a common
overarching schemea grand or master narrative.
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A central figure in this line of critique was Foucault (1980), who began with
a rejection of what he called global, totalitarian theories (p. 80) (he mentioned specifically marxism and psychoanalysis) and counterposed what he
called local and subjugated knowledgesknowledge of relations, struggles, and effects that are denied or suppressed by totalitarian theories. Such
knowledge therefore undercuts or subverts the tyranny of globalising discourses (p. 83).
A consideration of the relevance of Marxs thought for anthropology must
begin with a recognition of the political failure of most marxist-inspired movements and the influential intellectual critique that seems to speak to it. A radical disjuncture must also be recognized between the interpretive schemes of
those marxisms that came to power and those of Marx himself. The criticism of
globalizing or totalizing theories can more easily be leveled at these marxisms than at Marx himself. This is not to deny that elements in Marxs thought
can be found to support the more closed, mechanical, and evolutionistic
schemes that came to dominate marxist thought for much of this century. But
Marxs thought was not a closed system, and he did not see the historical and
materialist framework or outlook he devised in the 1840s as a universal
scheme (or master narrative) in terms of which a range of historical, political, and philosophical problems could be resolved. It contained inconsistencies and contradictions, and it was capable of development and modification
through analysis and interpretation of particular events and processes. Indeed,
Marx warned against the mechanical application of his ideas or the construction of grand historical schemes (e.g. Marx 1983, p. 136).
My aim in returning to some of Marxs texts is not to claim that there is
nothing to criticize. Rather, I engage some of Marxs texts to suggest that he
dealt creatively with a number of issues that remain active concerns in anthropological work, and that he proposed resolutions or modes of approach to
some of those issues that continue to influence current thought. My strongest
claim is that these ideas and modes of analysis deserve to be part of the discussion.
I develop this claim across three thematic areas, in each of which I concentrate on a central text: Marxs materialism (in which I consider The German
Ideology), the analysis of capitalism (Volume 1 of Capital), and the historical
and political surveys (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Unlike
other commentaries on anthropology and Marx, I do not concentrate on anthropologists subsequent appropriations of Marx or evaluate Marxs assertions in light of more recent anthropological understandings (see Bloch 1985;
Donham 1990; Kahn & Llobera 1981; Sayer 1987, 1991; Vincent 1985; Wessman 1981). In each thematic area I deal with issues that have received anthropological attention, but the emphasis remains on the texts themselves.
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HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
The Framework
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels began not with nature or with material conditions but with a collectivity of humans acting in and on nature, reproducing and transforming both nature and material conditions through their
actions (Marx & Engels 1970). The starting point of Marxs materialism was
the social, conceived as material. Individuals within the social collectivity
were seen as acting upon nature and entering into definite relations with each
other as they did so, in providing for themselves. The process of provisioning
was not limited to the problem of basic subsistence but to the reproduction of a
whole mode of life (Marx & Engels 1970), taking Marx and Engels back to
the specific collectivity of individuals with which they began. Yet the process
of provisioning, of interacting with nature and individuals through labor, was
seen to transform both nature and the collectivity of individuals.
Marx had emphasized that labor was organized by and in a specific, empirically perceptible (Marx & Engels 1970, p. 47) social collectivity. Thus labor as human process, the nature upon which humans acted, and the social collectivity that organized labor were historically situated and differentiated.
Marx and Engels related all intellectual and philosophical problems to a material/productive history, and they moved quickly from a statement of philosophical principles to a discussion that would otherwise seem to be a diversiona preliminary account of the history of forms of ownership and property
(pp. 4346). One finds, first, an emphasis on materiality in the form of transforming, creative labor, in specific conditions; second, a statement of the historicity of both the conditions and the labor; and, third, a referencing of all
philosophical problems to this material history. As Marx expressed it, The
human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality
it is the ensemble of the social relations (p. 122).
Thus a range of philosophical problems were given both practical and historical resolutions. There was little room in this framework for universal
truths. The human essence Marx had earlier locatedlabor (see Marx 1964)
led in turn to an emphasis on historical difference, as particular modes of organizing and appropriating labor were seen as the differentia specifica of historical epochs. This philosophical stance required investigation of particular
social collectivities and their modes of life, particular ensembles of social relations, or particular forms of property in history. This was what The German
Ideology proceeded to do.
Marx and Engels made a number of moves that were to influence their later
work, as well as subsequent marxisms. First, their treatment of labor had vari-
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ous temporal dimensions. While one involved a long-term, epochal or evolutionary sweep across various forms of property broadly conceived, another involved a concentration on more specific forms and the processes of their reproduction or transformation (Marx & Engels 1970, pp. 6263).
Second, as they considered long-term history, they emphasized two aspects
that were to become central to most definitions of modes of production: the
productive forces (or the material conditions and instruments upon which and
with which labor acts and is organized) and the forms of intercourse (or the
ensemble of social relations through which labor is mobilized and appropriated, understood elsewhere as relations of production; pp. 8687).
Third, their placement of philosophical issues within material and historical
forms and processes led them to a clearly stated determinism (pp. 4647). A
number of deterministic statements were made in The German Ideology, from
the general claim that social being determines social consciousness to strong
claims of the material determination of the form of the state, ideas, and beliefs.
Some of these statements can be read in terms of the polemical context in
which the text was written, and the intellectual and political excitement the
authors must have felt as they criticized and rejected a range of philosophical
texts, experimented with a new form of materialism that seemed to undercut
prior conceptions of materialism and idealism, and considered a range of historical, political, and philosophical projects their approach both required and
made possible. There are, nonetheless, a number of problematic dimensions
that require comment.
Nature
One of the strengths of the text is its historicization of nature. Marx and
Engels criticized the separation of nature and history, as though these were
two separate things and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history (pp. 62, 63). Nonetheless, always had a more limited meaning for them than it should have. Thus, by the end of the passage in
which they made this claim they had begun to retreat, envisioning a natural
time before or outside of historyexcept perhaps on a few Australian coralislands of recent origin (p. 63). Their exception gives pause, because it includes within the nature that preceded human history a social world, made
natural.
Earlier, the implications of this exception were made clear when they presented a thumbnail sketch of forms of property (pp. 43, 44). Here one finds two
kinds of naturalization that subsequent generations of anthropologists have effectively undercut: a first of the tribe and a second of the family. In this
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early text, Marx and Engels were not radically historical enough in their consideration of the family.
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tion, capital purchased not labor but the workers capacity to work, for a limited period. Capital then had use of that capacity, as actual labor, during which
labor generated enough value to reproduce the cost of labor power plus additional (surplus) value, which could be appropriated by the purchaser of the
commodity labor power (that is, by capital). At a formal level, and within the
assumptions of classical political economy, the production and appropriation
of surplus value through the wage relation was a piece of good luck for the
buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller (p. 301).
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they remain central issues for most anthropological extensions of Marxs ideas
toward an analysis of culture and power in capitalist as well as noncapitalist
settings. That Marx chose to ignore these questions has nonetheless been the
starting point for two contrasting, facile commentariesone, written by critics
of marxism suggesting that the fact that Marx neglected these questions invalidates marxism as a whole, and the other, written by the watchdogs of orthodoxy, contending that because Marx did not address these questions they lay
outside the domain of marxian inquiry altogether.
Another question concerns the reduction of qualitatively distinct kinds of
human labor to the common denominator of measurable time, which requires a
number of historical processes with cultural effects. A central transformation
is in the understanding of time itself; a second is in the reduction of qualitatively different thought and work processes to a number of relatively simple
and common operations that can be performed across various branches of human activity [what a later literature has called deskilling (Braverman
1975)]; another concerns the loss of control over the work process, and the
means of production, by people performing the basic work of production. For
most of human history, working people did not live and work under such circumstances. The development of capitalism involves, in part, a transformation
of work and the conditions of work that includes these three dimensions, all of
which are necessary for the imposition of a new kind of work discipline and
control. The imposition of discipline, in turn, is necessary for the rational calculation and comparison of different labors in terms of a common, socially
necessary standard.
Marx recognized this, though he had little to say about time, and he stressed
the historical uniqueness of capitalism and of the concepts useful for the analysis of capitalism. Following this line of reasoning, the labor theory of value
could only be relevant under capitalism, in a situation in which qualitatively
different kinds of labor have been reduced, socially and economically, to a
common standard (Marx 1977, pp. 152, 168).
Historical Analysis
On the basis of the formal analysis of the wage relation, Marx pursued a range
of economic implications. But formal analysis also made possible and required
historical and political commentaries and investigations. That is, having pursued the theory of value in a fictitious world of commodity producers and merchants in which all transactions are fairly conducted among equals, Marx arrived at a social world divided between two classes, in which a uniquely positioned commodity was offered for sale on the market. On the one hand, remaining within the confines of value theory and a fictitious world of equality
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and equity, he said the fact that one of those classes appropriates the value produced by the other class was by no means an injustice. Yet several hundred
pages later, he returned to a more evaluative mode and condemned an economic system that makes, an accumulation of misery a necessary condition,
corresponding to the accumulation of wealth (Marx 1977, p. 799). The movement from the one view to the other can only be understood by recognizing that
Marx placed the historical and political development of capitalist social relations at the center of his analysis, not as a mere appendage to a more rigorous
and logically satisfying formal analysis.
The first move toward history came when Marx postulated a new kind of
commodity, labor power. As Marx noted, however, this commodity does not
exist in nature; it is produced, under specific conditions. For labor power to exist as a commodity, it must be free to be sold, in two senses. First, the person
who possesses the capacity to work (the laborer) must be free to sell it on a limited, contractual basis to the possessor of capital. That means he or she must
not be encumbered by ties of bondage or slavery that restrict his or her independent action on the market. Second, he or she must have been freed from
ownership or control of means of production, and from participation in a community of producers, and must therefore sell his or her capacity to work to survive.
Marx insisted that most working people in human history have not been
free in this dual sense and have therefore not been in a position to sell their
capacity to work, a necessary condition for capitalist social relations. In Capital and elsewhere, he pursued two kinds of retrospective analysis to stress the
uniqueness of capitalism and the commodity form of labor power. One, which
we might call epochal, looked to prior modes of organizing and mobilizing labor. At various points in Capital, he briefly pointed to earlier forms (pp.
16975; see also Marx 1973, 1989). Second, in an analysis we can call historical, Marx examined the proletarianization of peasants in England through the
enclosure movements (Marx 1977, part 8). Here, his aim was to show that
force was required, and we are far removed from the formal analysis with
which Capital began.
Another occasion for historical and political analysis was provided by the
relationship between capital and labor (as classes, rather than as political economic categories) over the level of surplus value. Marx first presented surplus
value as a category, and as an unproblematic sum appropriated by capital. He
soon emphasized that it points to a relationship marked by negotiation and
struggle. Marx made a distinction between absolute and relative surplus value,
suggesting that there are two ways in which capital can increase the amount of
surplus value it captures in the production process. The first, assuming a constant level of productivity and rate of surplus value, increases the amount of
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surplus value by lengthening the working day, or the period of time living labor can be used when the commoditylabor powerhas been purchased. Assuming here that the value of labor power is recovered in the same amount of
time, increasing the amount of work increases the quantity of surplus value.
This method appropriates and increases absolute surplus value. Relative surplus value, alternatively, increases the rate of surplus value appropriation, lowering the portion of the working day required to recover the value invested in
labor power. This can be done by increasing productivity, or by cheapening the
value of labor power itself.
All these issues push Marx toward history. In his consideration of absolute
surplus value, he examined the history of English legislation and agitation over
the length of the working day. In his discussion of relative surplus value, he
moved toward a history of English industrialization and an examination of
work and health conditions in English mills, especially with the employment
of women and children. In this, he focused primarily on increasing productivity and (with one important exception) did not pay much attention to mechanisms by means of which the value of labor power itself could be decreased.
This remains a rich area for analysis, however. Marx had stressed that the
value of labor power did not represent a bare subsistence minimum but a level
that was historically and culturally determined. The level of subsistence, then,
is subject to a different kind of historical process and political struggle than
that associated with the expropriation of peasants from the land. Changing
working-class diets could cheapen the value of labor power (Thompson 1966,
pp. 31949; Mintz 1985).
Population Dynamics
Finally, Marx linked demographic structure and dynamics to the historical and
cultural determination of the value of labor power. He claimed that population
growth was not subject to natural or universal laws but that each mode of production produced its own laws of population (Marx 1977, p. 784). This in itself
is not surprising from an author who explicitly rejected any sort of abstract,
universal laws or dynamics. The historically specific laws he pointed to
here do not develop mechanically but through the action of human agents. That
is, he indicated certain characteristic relationships under capitalism and explored the ways in which people might act within these relationships.
With regard to population dynamics under capitalism, Marx stressed that
capitalist production occurs within social spaces that include what we might
call structural centers and peripheries: active mills and mines that regularly
employ workers but do not regularly employ the same numbers of workers. In
economic cycles of boom and bust, they sometimes employ relatively more,
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Critical Reflections
Reading Capital critically, one notices, first, the narrowing of his approach to
labor. While the early Marx saw labor as human essence and criticized an economic process that channeled workers into specialized, repetitive tasks, thus
only partially developing a fuller human capacity, Capital concentrates on labor primarily in its relationship to capital. Marx was also exclusively concerned with productive labor, in the language and assumption of classical
political economy, leaving aside other kinds of labor that fell outside the do-
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main of political economy (Collins 1990, Marx 1964, Sayer 1991, Young et
al 1981).
There is, further, the question of what kind of sociological work the analysis
in Capital can, and cannot, be made to do. Marx claimed that the manner in
which surplus labor is pumped out of direct producers reveals the innermost
secret of the social structure (Marx 1967, p. 791). While this secret provided the basis of a powerful analysis of fundamental relationships and processes under capitalism, the secret of a social structure cannot stand in for an
adequate description of it. For this we need much more specification and detail.
We might therefore return to Capital and ask what has been left out. All that
was specified was a relationship between capital and labor power. At a structural level alone, much more specification is necessary. Beginning with the
nonproducer, or capital, end of the bipolar model, we find a mechanism for
the production of surplus value, and an indication of its conversion into capital. But surplus value is sectorially subdivided into, say, industrial, merchant,
financial, and landed capitals, which figure both in the distribution and production of value. At the least, these are tied to different social and spatial configurations, material interests and projects, and so on. Similar differences concern small and large capitals, or regional and sectorial hierarchies. At the direct producer, or labor, end, we need a more expansive conception of labor,
one not wedded to the classical economists distinction between productive
and unproductive labor. We should consider as well a variety of differences
among workersskilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed, male and
female, adult and child, old and young. Marx provided a basis for such analysis
in his model of the relative surplus population under capitalist accumulation.
But the divisions among floating, latent, and stagnant sections of the reserve
army of labor need to be fit within regional, spatial and social hierarchies. We
need also to see how ethnic, racial, or gendered labels are assignedsocially
and politicallyto these sections. In short, a thick sociology and history can,
and must, be built up on the innermost secret of the relationship between
capital and labor.
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and movements, posing questions about class formation, structure, and interests, the position of various groups in relation to each other structurally, spatially, and historically, and the structure and role of states. He also attended to
less predictable issues such as individual careers and strategies, parliamentary
debates and party platforms, and the texts of constitutions.
The surveys include Class Struggles in France (1974a), The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1974b), The Civil War in France (1934), and a
number of brief pieces written about the peasant commune in Russia and its
fate in the aftermath of an agrarian reform (Shanin 1983). Some preliminary
observations concerning the surveys are necessary. First, they cover the entire
period of Marxs writing career. The first two were written during and immediately after the mid-century European revolutions, the last two during the last
12 years of his life. The Civil War was a response to the Paris commune of
1871, and the discussions of Russian peasantries, written shortly before his
death, were a response to inquiries from and a debate among Russian activists
about the revolutionary potential of the mir, or peasant commune. The middle
decades of his writing life were dominated by the work on Capital, but even
here he attended to specific historical and political issues in England, Germany, France, India, and the United States.
Second, the surveys directly responded to the imperative of the eleventh
thesis on Feuerbach in that they were commentaries on and attempts to shape
the direction of movements to change [the world]. They, more than the general methodological essays or even Capital, constitute the most important texts
in which to evaluate the philosopher who hoped both to understand and change
the world he encountered.
Here a remarkable aspect of these surveys is how little they respond to or reflect a grand narrative. This is most clearly seen in his discussion of Russian
peasantries. Marx was asked his view on a debate among Russian activists
about the specific history of Russia in relation to the more general history of
world capitalism. Reflecting the evolutionist spirit of the time, one group (hoping to monopolize the claim to marxism) contended that Russia would have
to recapitulate the history of western European capitalism, that the Russian
peasantry would have to suffer a process of primitive accumulation, and
that Russia would have to enter a long stage of capitalism before entering a
socialist future. Their opponents saw in the commune a possible cell form for a
future socialist society. They hoped Russia could avoid capitalism altogether
and that the commune would serve as the social bridge that would make this
possible.
Marxs attempts to respond gave little comfort to either group. With regard
to the first, he rejected any evolutionist understanding of world history or capitalist development, calling such schemes supra-historical attempts to find a
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universal master-key (Marx 1983, Shanin 1983). The populists position, however, was both evolutionist (the question had to do with skipping stages, not rejecting stage schemes altogether) and romantic, in that their vision of the commune removed it from its specific history and structural relations to landlords,
merchants, and the Russian state. Marx turned his attention to these questions,
producing a more detailed and realistic account of late-nineteenth-century
Russian peasants.
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body, which surrounds the body of French society like a caul and stops up all
its pores. In it, [e]very common interest was immediately detached from society, opposed to it as a higher, general interest, torn away from the selfactivity of the individual members of society and made a subject for governmental activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse, the communal property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France (pp. 23738).
Marx, however, also observed that the French state does not hover in midair (p. 238). By 1852 it was grounded in, and enjoyed the support of, the peasantry. We here encounter some of Marxs most often quoted and least understood claims. The French peasantry, in his view, constituted an immense
mass of similarly structured but socially isolated households; they could only
be considered as a group by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes,
much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Moreover, in analyzing
them politically, he considered two questions: whether they shared common
material interests, and whether their common interests promoted the formation
of a political organization or shared feeling of community (p. 239). Finding
common interest but no possibility of community, he concluded that the peasants were incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, and:
They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented (p. 239). Their
representative in 1852 was Bonaparte himself, a strong executive power before whom all classes fall on their knees, equally mute and equally impotent,
before the rifle butt (p. 236).
To these claims, two kinds of question might be posed. One deals with them
as historical analysis: Is this an adequate account and interpretation of the positions and roles of French peasants in the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath?
A second treats them as epochal analysis: Is this Marxs view of the positions
and roles of peasants in revolutionary movements in general? Unfortunately,
generations of marxists subjected the passage (along with his analysis of the
state) to a systematic, epochal misreading. In this misreading, Marx was examining not the French state or the French peasantry, but the state and the
peasantry in general.
Yet in Marxs discussion, the references were specific and historical. Marx
moved from his general observation regarding the French peasants as a sack of
potatoes to a discussion of concrete issues: the creation of small proprietorship
as a result of the Revolution of 1789, and then the experience of two generations of peasants in the face of exactions placed on their parcelsmortgages
imposed by urban merchants and creditors, and taxes imposed by the state. The
immense mass of households, as isomorphous magnitudes, was a relatively recent political product, which had as one consequence the creation of a
class (in one sense) of producers with none of the mediating institutions, either
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Critical Reflections
This, in turn, raises a final question concerning The Eighteenth Brumaire, one
that points toward a critical assessment. Throughout the text, Marx pursued a
class analysis that took him in at least two different directions. First, he interpreted political positions and programs in terms of material interests. In discussing the division between the Orleanist and Bourbon royal houses, he
linked the two factions to two different forms of propertycapital and landed
property. He contended further that the passions these groups brought to politicstheir old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and
illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles (p. 173)were only their imagined starting points of activity. One could
find the real starting points in the division between their interests (p. 174).
This claim needs to be placed next to Marxs discussion of the French peasantry as a class, in which he posed two questionsone concerning the peasantrys positions and material interests in relation to other classes, the other
concerning the peasantrys (lack of a) feeling of community. In his earlier discussion of class and politics, he did not ask the second question and concentrated on the first. Yet it is interesting that in both cases he referred to certain
feelingsmodes of thought and views of life in one case, and feelings of
community in the other. He recognized that these were separate from, and in
many ways counter to, the class interests and identifications he posited. But in
one case he dismissed them as illusions or imagined starting points of activity; in the other he saw the feeling of community as necessary for the very
definition of a class.
Marx was outlining the basis for two distinct forms of class analysis, then,
one that would separate real, material interests from imagined (implicitly
false) ones, and the other that might take the cultural construction of community as a central problem for class analysis. Yet the second remained little more
than a suggestion, picked up by a later marxist tradition (Thompson 1966,
1978). The first undergirded most of Marxs analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire and had a dominant influence on the later development of marxisms.
Despite the move from a two-class model toward one that saw several class
fractions in a particular social and political space, the definition of class was
tied to material interest, and the tradition and upbringing of individuals and
groups were relegated to the secondary realm of illusion.
This ignored the materiality of tradition and upbringing, and even of
memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions,
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along lines suggested above (pp. 710). Here three dimensions require emphasis. The first concerns the social formations and communities through which
individuals and collectivities identify themselves as subjects (e.g. as proletarians, cobblers, tailors; or as Parisians or the people; as peasants
or Burgundians; and so on). It is interesting to note, for example, that French
working people had only begun to see and organize themselves as a working
class with the Revolution of 1848. Earlier, they had grouped themselves by
particular and separate trades (Sewell 1983). Second, just as these modes of association and identity are material, they are also formed in fields of power, including state power. Third, the formation of individuals, as subjects, in relation
to particular communities, modes of identity, and material interest will often
involve multiple sites and modes of distinction (Althusser 1971, Laclau &
Mouffe 1985).
CONCLUSION
Among the many marxisms that have laid claim to Marxs work, two grand traditions can be delineated: one that makes Marxs framework a science of society and history, positing an evolutionary teleology; and another that uses a historical materialist framework to grasp both the innermost secret of social
structures in terms of the appropriation of labor and the specific structured
constellations of power that confront working people in particular times and
places (Roseberry 1993, p. 341; Thompson 1978, pp. 18890). The first can be
unproblematically subsumed within a wider range of evolutionary philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second remains a valuable
and creative tradition despite the political defeat of the first tradition. Indeed,
that political defeat might be considered a condition of possibility for the further development of the second.
Stripped of evolutionist grand narratives, Marxs work stands in critical
relation to much that is now dominant in social theory. It is, first, materialist, in
its broad assumption that social being determines social consciousness and its
more specific assertion that the forms and relations through which humans
produce their livelihoods constitute fundamental, and determining, relations in
society. It is, second, realist, in its confidence that these forms and relations
have a material existence and can be described and understood in thought and
text. It is, third, structural, in that it envisions these forms and relations as consolidated over time in classes, powers, and institutions. Fourth, among the
most important structures Marx analyzed are those of class. Fifth, he saw these
institutions exercising a determining influence over human action. This does
not mean that Marx ignored the transforming capacities of human action: aside
from the opening passage of The Eighteenth Brumaire or the eleventh thesis on
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