New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Vol.1, No. 1 (May 2007) Pp. 14-39

Towards a Class-Struggle Anthropology

A. Allen Marcus
New Proposals Editorial Collective
Charles R. Menzies
New Proposals Editorial Collective
ABSTRACT. Dancing between review and argument this paper lays out a foundation for a class-struggle anthropologythat is, an anthropological practice that can be linked to the ultimate goal of achieving a classless society. To this
end we will review those anthropologists who have gone before us, pulling out those works of theirs that we see as critical in (re)building a class-struggle anthropology. As part of this process we discuss the relationship between what has
stood as Marxist anthropology in North America, the idea of socialism, the political development of the world working
class during the nine decades since the October Revolution, and the challenges of intellectual continuity in the face
of diering generational experiences of Marxist anthropologists. Ultimately we argue that a progressive anthropology
necessarily involves political activism in our work, communities, and schools.
Keywords: Marxism, class struggle, political economy, social justice
RSUM. Alternant entre le synopsis et largumentation, cet essai met en place une fondation pour une anthropologie
de la lutte des classes, savoir une pratique anthropologique pouvant tre relie au but ultime quest la ralisation dune
socit sans classes. cette fin, nous faisons un survol des anthropologues qui nous ont prcd, et de ceux dentre leurs
travaux que nous considrons cruciaux pour la (re)construction dune anthropologie de la lutte des classes. Ce faisant,
nous examinons les relations entre lanthropologie marxiste en Amrique du Nord, lide du socialisme, le dveloppement politique de la classe ouvrire mondiale au cours des dix dcennies qui ont suivi la Rvolution doctobre, et les
dfis de la continuit intellectuelle face aux direntes expriences gnrationnelles des anthropologues marxistes.
Finalement, nous soutenons quune anthropologie progressiste implique ncessairement lactivisme politique dans
notre milieu de travail, nos communauts et nos coles.
Mots-cls: Marxisme, lutte des classes, conomie politique, justice sociale

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the

history of class struggles.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist
Manifesto
The philosophers have only interpreted the world
in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerrbach

or Marx social class is at the centre of understanding and organizing social change. As interpreted by Lenin the working class, organized by
its politically advanced vanguard, constituted the

path toward emancipation and the realization of

human potential. Rosa Luxemburg emphasized
among other thingsthe critical power of the
combined force of the working class, engaged in a
general strike, in overthrowing capitalism. Trotsky,
through his analysis of combined and uneven development and the thesis of permanent revolution,
pointed the way forward toward a global socialist
society (even if the revolution began in the most
backward of countries).
Anthropology, by contrast, has tended to draw
upon the more conservative theoretical frameworks
of mainstream scholars such as Emile Durkheim

Originally published in Anthropologica Vol 47, No 1, 2005:13-34. Published with the permission of
Anthropologica (www.anthropologica.ca).

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 15

or Max Weber to construct models of society
that highlight ways of building and or maintaining community connections and social functions
(Patterson 2001). This is not, of course, to say that
there are no important anthropological contributions which draw upon Marxthere are some.1 In
this essay we detail in broad stroke the history of
Marxist anthropology in North America (which for
us includes Mexico, the United States, and Canada)
and, in so doing, point the way forward towards a
class-struggle anthropology, with the ultimate aim
of achieving social justice and the elimination of a
class-based society.
To carry out the task that we have set for ourselves we balance between review and argument.
For our review we have selected pieces that are critical for engaging in our project of a class-struggle
anthropology. Because we are social activists engaged in the social justice movement and practising professional anthropologists engaged in the
arcane world of publish or perish we have focussed
on those anthropological writers and works that we
have found contribute toward our project in terms
of their intellectual and practical contributions.
For our argument we draw upon the classical
call for a class-struggle social science that is intent
on reinvigorating hope for a better, more just world.2
This is a social science that places its analytical eye
and its political hopes upon the working class as the
pivotal social agent of change and upon the ruling
class as the agent of reaction and deception. In so

1 For three key review articles see OLaughlin 1975,

Roseberry 1988, 1997. One may also wish to consult Wessmans Anthropology and Marxism (1981) or
Blochs more European focussed Marxism and Anthropology (1983). All of these reviews outline aspects of the
relationship between Marxism and anthropology and,
with the possible exception of OLaughlin, tend to focus
on the intellectual as opposed to the activist elements of
the relationship.

2 We are critical of the fashion now popular in the Uni-

versity of Excellence that seeks novelty and innovation

for its own sake. Excellence has come to be synonymous
with innovation and novelty. Reworking or pulling forward old ideas to a new generation is not as appreciated
as is riding the euphonious cutting edge of innovation
(see: Readings 1996).

doing we draw directly from the corpus of theory

inspired and informed by the writings and political
engagements of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. In
this essay we have attempted to avoid the endless
internal debates within Marxism and focus instead
upon the ways in which Marxism as theory and
practice has informed anthropology. Nonetheless, it
would be remiss if we did not at the very least lay
out the core concepts of Marxist theory so as not
to be waylaid later on in the paper over potentially
unfamiliar phrases or concepts new to the 21st-century ear.
First and foremost Marxism is a theory and
a practice united in the objective of achieving a
classless society. As a theory, Marxism is a body of
conceptual tools that allows an informed analyst
an eective mechanism by which to make sense
of the myriad ways and means the ruling class of
a particular society deploy to hold onto their privileged position in society (see, for example: Ollman
1971; Mandel 1969). Chief among Marxisms central concepts is that of social classdefined at its
most basic as ones place relative to the means of
production, the tools, machines, and knowledge
used to transform the world around us into things
usable by humans. While primarily focussed upon
the workings of capitalism, Marxist theory has also
been used to understand the workings of kin-ordered and tributary societies (Wolf 1982, 1999).
As practice, Marxism, through the identification
of the key problem of class-divided societies, which
is the exploitation of the majority by a minority that
controls the ability of society to produce goods and
services, suggests ways and means of overthrowing
the rule of the minority by the majority. Here the
primary focus is upon the social conflict between
and among classes. Marxism holds that conflict to
be an inevitable part of the economic laws of motion of an expansionary system built on economic
competition between capitalists for the social surplus and between workers and capitalists for the
social wage.
However, this inevitable economic competition
is ultimately underwritten by what Marxists often
refer to as leadership or the political means and

16 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

will to fight. There can be various aspects to this
leadership. It can be over competing blocs of capitalists fighting each other by leading one working class
to slaughter another in war. It can be a race to the
bottom that reduces the percentage of the surplus
that goes to use values (what Marxists refer to as the
rate of exploitation). Alternatively, as Marxists advocate and fervently desire, it can be class struggle
emerging from a conscious working class that has
the political means and will to increase its power
over production, eventually fighting for the eradication of classes and thereby the privileges associated
with private property: what Marx called class for
itself.
To this end we will review those anthropologists who have gone before us, pulling out those
works of theirs that we see as critical in rebuilding
a class-struggle anthropologythat is, an anthropological practice that can be linked to the ultimate goal of achieving a classless society. As part
of this process we discuss the relationship between
what has stood as Marxist anthropology in North
America, the idea of socialism, the political development of the world working class during the
nine decades since the October Revolution, and the
challenges of intellectual continuity in the face of
diering generational experiences of Marxist anthropologists. In so doing we recognize that much
of what we say below is not new, not innovative, and
not original in anyway exceptperhapsin its attempt to confront the present (Smith 1999), with
a new synthesis that addresses the perpetual crisis,
and growing economic disparities that characterize
the current period.3
There are no road maps for what we are trying
to do because there is so little in the way of contemporary attempts to synthesize Marxist anthropology
into a coherent body of work. Ultimately we argue
that a truly progressive, class-struggle anthropology
necessarily involves political activism in our work,

As Michael Blim has so clearly and passionately

demonstrated, even in the face of expanding economic
and social capacity, the gap between rich and poor is
wider than at nearly any previous point in human history (2005: 1-11). And, that group of rich are themselves
becoming fewer and fewer relative to the growing masses
(Blim 2005).

communities and schools. We are not attempting

to provide the definitive synthesis of Marxism and
Anthropology, nor finally resolve the contradictions
between professional scholarship and political commitment, but rather to provide a provisional history
of a present that needs, badly, to be confronted by
class struggle. As anthropologists we would like to
contribute to this project and hope that we can at
least provide a prolegomenon for further research
and a more complete synthesis of that which is both
Marxist and anthropological.

The Short Twentieth Century and

Marxist Anthropology

In 1995, Eric Hobsbawm coined the now wellworn phrase the short twentieth century to describe the period from 1914 to 1989, which, he argued, marks the boundaries of the major challenges,
conflicts and ideological themes of 20th-century
history. While we share Canadian writer Ellen
Meiksins Woods (1998) concern with the excessive
periodizing of contemporary social theory and the
connected problem of multiple generations of new
pessimists declaring an end to history and a crisis
of modernity every couple of decades (Wood and
Foster 1997), we also recognize the scholarly wisdom of Hobsbawms connection between a 75-year
global class war4 that was the end result of the first
inter-imperialist world war and the political, social,
and intellectual alignments that emerged from the
October Revolution.
It is, of course, easy to find harbingers of the
October Revolution in the pre-World War I period
and continuities between the challenges of the Cold
War and the contemporary period (Wood 1998).

We use this term as a provisional replacement

for the term Cold War which makes a number of assumptions that we explicitly reject: (1) that there was
no military engagement and no shooting between the
USSR and the imperialist countries; (2) that the nuclear
Mexican stando that characterised the post Korean War
period can stand for the entire conflict over politicaleconomic systems during the twentieth century; (3) that
prior to the Korean War, when the imperialist countries
were not united around a politics of global anti-communism the ideological and political challenges to the world
working class were significantly dierent.

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 17

However, even if, as Ellen Meiksins Wood asserts,
1989 does not mark the end of an epoch of capitalism and its attendant class struggles, it does mark
the collapse of huge states that covered most of the
old world. It also marks the disappearance, degeneration, splintering, and ideological disorientation of
political parties that wielded tremendous influence
in the world working class and a crisis of legitimacy
for viable alternatives to capitalism. The terrain of
political struggle has changed in dramatic ways and
we claim the right to join Eric Hobsbawm in using
1989-91 as a heuristic boundary.
As scholars for the Marxist generation of 2000,
most of our intellectual development derives from
the social science of this short 20th century that is
now a decade and a half in the past. The scholars
who mentored us through the process of doctoral
studies were beneficiaries of the remarkable, nearly millenarian, optimism about progressive social
change that characterized the period of early adulthood for what has come to be called the generation
of 1968 (Kurlansky 2004). Having done their doctoral research during the heady days of the 1960s
and 70s, their research was able to explicitly engage
broad struggles for social change and even revolutionary transformation as it happened in the traditional field sites of anthropologyAfrica, Asia,
Latin America, or the so-called fourth-world of
Aboriginal or Indigenous peoples.
Beginning first with India, China, and Korea
the grand movements of decolonization and antiimperialist nationalism forced anthropologists to
reconsider anthropological practice. The existence
of two global superpowers defined largely by their
diering economic systems provided a geo-political
space in which newly independent nations in Asia,
Africa, and Oceania, and older, former colonial nations in Latin America and the Caribbean were
able to negotiate political and economic advantages by pitting the USSR and the U.S. against each
other. Crumbling Euro-American empires made it
more dicult for anthropologists to gain access to
the so-called Third World on their own terms, as
the human subjects of anthropological inquiry were
becoming agents in their own right and were claiming control over both the right to speak for their

peoples and the right to determine who had access

to them (see Menzies 2001:26-29).
In particular, the unprecedented global expansion of access to education and the opening of universities to the working classes both of imperialist
countries and of the former colonial world provided
intellectual platforms and scholarly careers to those
who might, in a previous generation, have simply
been the subjects of anthropological, sociological
and ethno-historical studies. Anthropologists could
no longer take for granted the fact that their field
informants would never read or publicly comment
on their work; they often had to share a stage with
them and fight for a place in the field site. This was
as true for studies here in North America, as it was
for exotic places where servants of empire had
once studied men in grass skirts.
The expansive optimism of the day gave much
room for progressive anthropologists to define
themselves by and to participate in the political
conflicts and struggles of the short 20th century,
but the era of nave fieldworkif such a beast ever
existedwas over. If one did gain access, the ethical content of ones work was open to question. In
North America, for example, the participation of
U.S. anthropologists in intelligence activities during the Vietnam war threatened to break apart the
American Anthropological Association (see Vincent
1990:310; Wolf and Jorgensen 1970), domestic disputes over anthropology at home touched o political firestorms over the culture of poverty in the
United States (see Marcus 2005; Leacock 1971)
and in Mexico, the 1968 generation challenged anthropologys longstanding ties to the Mexican state
(see Lomnitz 2001; Warman et al. 1970).
Perhaps most important among the many
global political events that were coming together to
democratize the academy, undermine old certainties and raise new questions about the relationship
between ideas and action was the defeat of the U.S.
army in Vietnam. By the late 1960s it was becoming clear to most of the world that the United States
could not win its war in Vietnam. Several U.S. governments had done everything short of using nuclear weapons, yet the North Vietnamese government
and the insurgency in the South were only getting

18 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

stronger. The emergence of a defeatist wing of the
Democratic Party and the ocers corps in the U.S.
army during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Burner
& Marcus 1999), shook the intellectual foundations
of world capitalist hegemony.5
In the anthropological profession the cracks
in imperial hegemony yielded radical reappraisals of the discipline. Most notably, Dell Hymes
(1972) Reinventing Anthropology, Talal Asad (1973)
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Arturo
Warman et al. (1970) De eso que llaman antropologa
mexicana and Kathleen Goughs (1968) important
Current Anthropology article New Proposals for
Anthropologists (Gough 2002) sought to redefine
the field in such a way as to make anthropology relevant as an agent of social change. These critiques
relied on the personal commitment of the anthropologist to radical change, exhorted the anthropologist to act as an agent of social change and warned
of the dangers of doing anthropology too close to
the influences of the state. It was these calls for a
new and partisan anthropology that could contribute to broad and rapidly emerging progressive social
change that drove the work of many of our mentors,
and drew us and our colleagues of the generation
of 2000 into the orbit of older scholars whom we
regarded as part of the solution, not the problem.

See Burner and Marcus (1999). See also, the it

is dicult to ask a man to be the last to die speech by
recent Democratic Presidential candidate, John Kerry,
before the U.S. Congress in 1971. Kerry was among a
large contingent of mainstream Democrats in the U.S.
who were advancing a defeatist position. Kerry was also
involved with the Detroit war crimes inquest organized
by anti-war veterans. He was not alone in his defeat at
any cost position. There was a petition from the West
Point ocers corps that stated a quick defeat in Vietnam would stop the U.S. army from a crisis of morale
that could have serious implications for Western Europe.
Navy ships were reporting near mutinies from crews who
voted not to proceed into battle, and the fragging, or
killing of ocers in the battlefield by enlisted soldiers,
was increasing the diculty of actually prosecuting the
war on the ground in Vietnam. By the early 1970s more
than 60% of Americans were opposed to continued U.S.
presence in Vietnam (see, Kurlansky 2004; Kerry et al.
1971; Joseph 1981; www.moderntribute.com or www.
fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1972VVAW.html).

While there was nothing as spectacular as the

U.S. defeat on the battlefields of Southeast Asia
during our coming of age, we did witness and participate in such events as the mass popular uprisings
against U.S. cruise missiles in Europe during the
early 1980s, the British coal miners strike of 1984,
Operation Solidarity in British Columbia in 1983,6
the revolutions, popular uprisings and guerrilla
struggles of Central America and Southern Africa,
and the worldwide battle against privatization and
the withdrawal of the welfare state that occurred in
the wake of the global economic contraction, following the collapse of the Mexican peso in 1982. Many
of us came from student politics and sought careers
that could accommodate and help sustain our political commitments. For those of us who had drawn
Marxist lessons from the many defeats of the 1980s,
the scholars who were most exciting to us were those
who were explicitly working within the Marxist tradition and were concerned with key questions about
the political development of the working class.
In particular two figures stand out as the intellectual progenitors of Marxist anthropology in
North America: Eric Wolf and Eleanor Leacock.
Wolf and Leacock shared an intellectual commitment to putting sound scholarship in the service
of emancipatory politics. Taken together we would
argue that they represent the two most significant
Marxist anthropologists of their generation. Wolf
has, in concert with his students, placed the critical role played by social labour in the production of
culture on the anthropological agenda (1982, 1999).
Leacock, a committed activist who paid for her politics, has been central to linking issues of gender and
race to the power play of social class in contemporary
society. Any serious attempt to build a class-struggle
anthropology must necessarily come to terms with
the work of these two Marxist anthropologists.

Operation Solidarity was a popular coalition

of labour and community groups organized in opposition to one of the early neo-liberal attacks on the welfare
state in North America (see Palmer, 1987). Though the
agenda had been developed and refined in the 1970s, the
new language of fiscal restraint, corporate downsizing,
and deficit reduction caught like wildfire in the 1980s
(for its impact on the managerial classes, see Newman,
1988).

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 19

Wolf stands as a founding figure of American
Marxist anthropology for having forced the discipline to honestly engage the historical profession
and for having published foundational Marxist,
Marxian and crypto-Marxist anthropological analyses over six decades from 1952 until 2001 (Marcus
2003). However, it was his 1982 magnum opus,
Europe and the People without History (1997), and
the series of articles and speeches that preceded
it on peasant revolution and the rise of capitalism
(drawn together posthumously by his widow, Sydel
Silverman, Wolf 2001), that drew aspiring Marxist
anthropologists from around the world to study with
him. Though Wolf was engaged in a variety of forms
of political activism, including helping to start the
anti-Vietnam war teach-in movement (Schneider
1999), risking his career over revelations that his
colleagues had used field data to aid the U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia (Wolf and Jorgensen 1970),
and supporting a variety of attempts to democratize the profession (Schneider 1999), his principle
contribution was in making Marxist anthropology
theoretically viable. Unashamedly Marxist in methodology, Eric Wolf s work in the last two decades
of the short 20th century provided an intellectual
guide book for scholars seeking their own Marxist
explorations and explanations.
Wolf s emergence from the Marxist closet that
the 1950s McCarthyite United States had imposed
was a slow and painful process, the final results of
which are just beginning to be debated (Barrett et
al. 2001; Marcus 2003). However for Marxists of
the generation of 2000, Eleanor Leacock provides
an unambiguously activist influence, inspiration and
intellectual genealogy. It was she who best defined
the place of the Marxist scholar, engaged in political
movements that informed her scholarly work and
scholarly work that informed her political commitments. In an autobiographical reflection in the preface to her 1981 volume, Myths of Male Dominance:
Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally, she reflects that political activity was enormously important in helping me keep my feet on the ground
both theoretically and personally. She went on to
say in the same comment that it had not let me
forget, as academics tend to do (if they ever learned

it in the first place), that oppression and exploitation by sex, race, and class are fundamental in the
contemporary world, and that theories which ignore this reality are meaningless if not downright
destructive (Leacock 1981:5).
Her groundbreaking work in the late 1940s and
early 1950s on the ability of humans to exist in cooperative economic arrangements directly confronted the McCarthyite academy (Leacock 1954) at
great personal expense to her career (Button 1993).
In the 1960s Leacock contributed to the debate over
poverty in the United States, taking up questions of
education, training a generation of radical teachers
in anthropology (Leacock 1969), and confronting
what she believed was an attack on the black section
of the American working class (Leacock 1971; also
see Marcus 2005). Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s
Leacock published extensively on the relationship
between imperialism and gender inequality (Etienne
and Leacock 1980; Leacock 1986) and ultimately
raised questions that remain fundamental starting
points for contemporary discussions of the relationship between capitalism, patriarchy, gender inequality and womens liberation (Leacock 1963, 1972).
There have, no doubt, been many North
American anthropologists who have been members of Marxist political parties, most prominently
Oscar Lewis, who is reputed to have been a member
of the Communist Party USA (see Marcus 2005)
and there were several important founding figures
of North American Marxist anthropology from
the generation that came of age during World War
II, in particular, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Diamond,
Elman Service, Paul Kircho, as well as Leslie
White and Alexander Lesser (who were somewhat
maverick figures from the first decades of the short
20th century). However, it is our belief that to a certain degree virtually all the Marxist anthropologists
of the generation of 1968, upon whose shoulders
our eorts stand, are somewhere between Wolf the
theoretician, fighting for Marxist methodologies in
uncovering the strengths, weakness, and rhythms
of the capitalist mode of production, and Leacock
the activist, fighting for an explicitly proletarian political project that took up powerful counter-hegemonic names and strategies outside the academy.

20 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

If the generation that trained us had the best of
parents in these two, we can probably thank what
Eric Wolf might have described as the interstitial
place that Marxism holds in the North American
academy. Unlike European Marxists for whom the
question of aliation (or rejection of aliation) to
a powerful Moscow aligned communist party or
a vast and bureaucratic socialist/social democratic
party created remarkable opportunities to influence
mass struggles, as well as powerful pressures towards intellectual adaptation to immediate political
concerns, our professors grew up in something of a
barren wasteland where there was little orthodoxy
and much room for exploration. They benefited
from the privileges of backwardness and explored a
variety of issues in heterodox, counterintuitive and
often highly original ways.
Amongst this group are several scholars whose
work is of particular relevance for our project of a
class-struggle anthropology. While the individuals
that we have highlighted below are a few among
many, they are representative of those aspects of
what has passed as Marxist anthropology that have
the most to oer our contemporary project of a
class-struggle anthropology. While any such grouping isto a certain extentan act of arbitrariness,
we would point to three key themes at the core of
the contribution of this group of anthropologists:
gender; nation building and national liberation; and
class struggle.
Karen Brodkins theoretical work, like that of
Leacock, helps us rethink the relationship between
class, race, and gender in anthropological inquiry
(Brodkin Sacks 1974,1989). Her empirical work
demonstrated the centrality of gendered and
raced sectors of the working class that have typically been ignored by the trade union movement.
Stephanie Coontzs contributions to post-Leacock
discussions of the relationship between family, private property and the state have set the theoretical standard by which all work on Marxism and
gender should be measured (Coontz 1992; Coontz
and Henderson 1986). Nash, in addition to helping invent the notion of an anthropology of work
and having put the class struggle of indigenous,
Trotskyist tin miners on our collective radar (1979),

has also made a contribution to a Marxist anthropology with her insightful study of impediments to
class consciousness in the United States (1989).
Mexicans like Roger Bartra (1973, 1978, 1979,
1982), Luisa Par (1977), Angel Palerm (1980),
Hector Diaz Polanco (1977) and the Marxist preHispanic archaeological school (Olivera 1978,
Carrasco 1978; Nash 1980) contributed empirically
and theoretically to our understanding of the rise
of capitalism and the attendant problems of building nation states and working classes in the Third
World, both through their scholarly work that has
been translated into English and through their
influence on Canadian and U.S. Marxists such as
Wolf, Roseberry and Nash. However, this important influence is too often missed due to the lack
of bilingualism among many North American academics. We still await an English translation of
Arturo Warman and his colleagues 1970 classic De
Eso Que Llaman Antropologia Mexicana (On What
They Call Mexican Anthropologyour translation), which helped start the critical anthropology
movement.
Richard Lee, Joseph Jorgensen and James
A. McDonald, the first working with indigenous
peoples in Africa, the latter two with indigenous
peoples in North America, have each contributed
to a Marxist anthropology that is relevant for indigenous struggles of national liberation. Lee, most
noted for his work in the Kalahari with the Dobe
Ju/hoansi (Leacock and Lee 1982) has played a
critical role in advancing a Marxist anthropology
of and for indigenous peoples. Jorgensens pioneering work linking dependency theory to Native
American Studies, challenged conservative conceptualizations of indigenous peoples as existing outside of history ( Jorgensen 1972; Jorgensen and Lee,
1974). McDonald, working with members of the
Kitsumkalum First Nation (a northern BC Tsimshian
community), has demonstrated through nearly three
decades of collaboration that a Marxist influenced
anthropology has clear relevance for todays First
Nations struggles (McDonald 1994, 2004).
Kathleen Gough, Gavin Smith, and Gerald
Sider have made significant contributions to our
understanding of class struggle and the ways in

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 21

which these struggles manifest themselves in the
messiness of real life. Coughs work draws attention to the role that we, as practitioners, must play
in the wider world within which our research and
writing occurs. Long before it was popular to call
attention to the reflexive role of the anthropologist,
Gough called upon the professional guild to align
self-consciously with the oppressed and exploited
against the power of the imperialist state. Smith
and Sider, both working with rural peoples, have
elaborated the ways and means through which issues of struggle link to the material conditions of
the everyday and either deflect or lead to explicit
class conflict.
In Canada, Gavin Smith and Richard Lee have
almost single-handedly created a vibrant pool of
Marxist influenced Canadian PhDs.7 Smiths work,
first with peasant struggles (1989) and, more recently, on the possibility of a politically engaged anthropology (1999) has provided us with the theoretical
and empirical basis upon which a class-struggle anthropology can be built. While others have focussed
on the defeats of the 1960s and 1970s, Smith constantly reminds us that words must be backed up
through action (1991).
Kathleen Gough is perhaps most noted for her
political involvement in the 1960s/1970s anti-war
movement and her Trotskyist political activism,
though we should not overlook her more traditional anthropological work on kinship and the family
(see, Gough 1981; Price 2004:307-326; Schneider
and Gough 1961). At Simon Fraser University8
Goughs name came to be identified with criticism
of the McCarthyite tendencies of universities, displeased by what their more radical faculty might say

The edited collection by Lem and Leach (2002)

draws extensively upon the circle of Canadian anthropologists from the Political Economy and Production of
Culture working group. See Marcus (1996) for an equivalent collection of papers produced by CUNY trained
anthropologists.

Menzies was an undergraduate student at SFU

in the early/mid 1980s where the memory of Gough was
still strong. The bitter fights of the late 1960s and 1970s,
which had pitted administrators and conservative academics against radical faculty and students, reverberated
long after the details of the fights had been forgotten.

or do. One of a group of seven faculty members who

were fired, or denied tenure, or refused contract renewal in the early 1970s, Goughs experience should
remind us that the gossamer web of academic freedom can be easily torn when the powerful take issue
with what we may dare to say.
Siders work has explored the messiness of the
social world and the play of human actors within
and against the movement of history.9 Drawing on
fieldwork sites as disparate as outport Newfoundland
(2003) and rural sharecroppers in North Carolina
(2003), Sider points to the ways in which historical
processes intersect with the particularities of local
contexts (see also, Sider and Smith 1997). Sider has
done much to raise foundational questions about
the self-consciousness of the working class, through
broadening and deepening the relationship between
anthropological and historical knowledge.
If the early scholarly life of the generation of
1968 can be defined by the almost millenarian optimism of that year which filled the space between
Fidel Castros jeep rolling into Havana amidst cheering crowds in 1959 and supporters of the United
States dropping o helicopters trying to escape
Saigon in 1975, their later life seemed to be measured by defeats and disappointments. It is beyond
the scope of this essay to describe the long retreat
from the heady 1960s, or weigh in once again with
a laundry list of the many communist parties of the
world that went down in bloody defeat through
attempts to co-exist with their capitalist enemies,
or socialist parties that helped manage capitalism
through a crisis. Suce to say that on a global scale
the political leadership that did exist and the mass
consciousness that created it, was not prepared for

As students of Gerald Sider, we have been influenced not only by him, but also by many of his other
students. In particular Dombrowski (2001), Bornstein
(2002), Carbonella (1996), and Strier (2002) are all
pieces which have helped us to define our own writing and
political vision. Sharryn Kasmir and Kathryn McCarey,
though not students of Sider, have produced works on
nationalism, co-operative production and working-class
consciousness (Kasmir 1996) and anti-militaristic social
movements (McCarey 2002) that have been at least as
important to our discussions as has been the coterie of
students who completed their PhDs with Sider.

22 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

the extent to which the capitalist class and its states
retained the ability and desire to use every resource
up to and including atomic bombs to prevent anybody from getting in the way of the accumulation
of capital.
A permanent employers oensive began to
shred the welfare state and ratchet up the rate of exploitation internationally in the late 1970s (Munck
2002).10 Such names as Thatcher, Reagan, and
Pinochet were the stars of this new class struggle
from above, but much of the world followed suit,
with neo-liberal austerity often imposed by lesser
figures, sometimes from the left or the communist
milieu, such as Mitterand in France, Hawke/ Keating
in Australia, and most spectacularly Gorbachev and
Deng in Russia and China respectively. Despite dramatic rises in overall social productivity and societal
wealth, the job opportunities and funding possibilities for academics became much more restricted.
Academe was, for the first time in human history,
largely a working-class profession filled with wage
earners primarily dependent on their salaries.11

10

The unilateral abrogation of the Bretton Woods

agreement by the U.S. can be said to mark the beginning of a concerted employers attack against the meagre
gains made by workers during the post-World War II
upturn. The political turns that followed and, in more
conventional accounts, are said to mark the dismantling
of the welfare state can be dated to the election of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1978), Ronald Reagan in the U.S. (1980), and a host of likeminded
politicians across the Western Democracies. The underlying economic factors were, however, present far earlier
than the electoral victories of explicitly neo-conservative/neo-liberal politicians. As Tony Cli methodically
documented in his 1970s book. The Employers Oensive, European and North America employersallied
with their respective state governmentswere pushing
hard to limit the gains the working class had managed
to make in the workplace. To do this required combining new attempts to undermine what power workers may
have in their workplace through new productivity contracts (in which workers were rewarded for increases in
productivity) with increasing controls applied to labour
by the state. Even in regimes with nominally left of centre governments, such as the UK, the state was engaged
in realigning labour laws to the benefit of employers (Elliott and Atkinson 1999[1998]).

11

Thomas Patterson (2001) documented how the

As was the case with the rest of the working class,

expectations declined and struggles often became
mute or simply defensive.12
Despite the defensive quality of this period
there were many important attempts to pull together
and generalize the lessons of Marxist anthropology
(Bloch 1983; Fluehr-Lobban 1989; Godelier 1978;
Hakken and Lessinger 1987; Medina 1982; Mintz,
Godelier and Trigger 1981; Nelson and Grossberg
1988; Palerm 1980). While many of us studied
these texts closely, the revolutionary optimism had
gone almost before it started, and we found ourselves
growth of a contingent workforceprimarily female
across North American universities beginning in the
1970s played a significant role in undermining the economic security of the majority of practicing anthropologists. The development of a two-tiered workforce became
commonplace in North American, unionized worksites.
The core ingredient of the two-tiered contract was a first
tier of original workers who maintained their wages and
benefits and a second tier typically of part-time workers
for whom the union negotiated a concessionary agreement usually at significantly lower wages and benefits.
Union leaders saw such arrangements as ways to protect
the economic conditions of those already working on the
shop floor. By the 1980s this pattern of concessionary
contracts was firmly entrenched.

12

Alex Callinicos reminds us, however, that the

impact of the long downturn upon academic workers
was delayed relative to its devastating impact upon the
industrial working class. Since the mid 1970s workers
struggles have been defensive and the provisions of the
welfare state have come under attack. Yet, the experience of intellectuals who had been radicalized during the
1960s and early 1970s was dierent from much of the
workforce. As the economy contracted the 1960s radicals
began to enter middle age. Usually they did so with all
hope of socialist revolution goneindeed, often having
ceased to believe in the desirability of any such revolution. Most of them had...come to occupy some sort of
professional, managerial or administrative position, to
have become members of the new middle class, at a time
when the over-consumptionist dynamic of Western capitalism oered this class rising living standards (a benefit
often denied the rest of the workforce: hourly wages in
the U.S. fell by 8.7% between 1973 and 1986) (Callinicos 1989:168). This is not to suggest that contemporary
anthropology is simply the product of radical intellectual
disillusionment and co-optation. It is, however, to suggest that the social context within which people live does
indeed shape how they come to see the world around
them.

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 23

looking more towards discussions by the best of the
generation of 1968 for the reasons for defeat. Many
of them went back to Marxists such as Mariategui,
Gramsci, Lukacs, and Williams who had theorized
the problems of transforming civil society (Crehan
2002; Lowy 1992). Others who had probably been
less serious about their radicalism or perhaps more
disappointed, took a turn towards Wittgenstein,
retreating into a postmodern world in which the
word trumped the act, thought preceded existence,
and discourse defined the core of theorizing. One
should note, for example, the work of Laclau and
Moufee (1985) and the bitingly eective critique
by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986).13 Declaring the
past as positivist and the present as contingent, they
came to define social science as an almost purely
Weberian struggle over meaning, often separated
from history and the material limitations of human
life. For some, who followed the path of Foucault,
this took the form of a dark but socially progres-

13

It is, perhaps, misleading to suggest that the

post-modernist turn to text and away from materiality is
simply the by-product of revolutionary disillusionment.
Certainly, if one were to follow the argument of A. Ahmad (1992), B. Palmer (1990), or A. Callinicos (1989),
the reasons are more likely to be found in these scholars
lack of revolutionary commitment and understanding in
the first place. As Ahmad points out the most radical of
the generation of 68 didnt necessarily make it through
the hoops and trials of graduate school or tenure review.
While the more radical activists organized, wrote pamphlets, and sold revolutionary newspapers on the street
corner, their more reserved peers wrote the academic
pieces that granted them entry into the halls of the academy. Furthermore, as Callinicos carefully details, the material conditions did in fact change over the course of the
1970s and 1980s (1989). Following upon the heels of the
collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement real wages fell
for the traditional working class and workers struggles
became defensive. This change in the tone of workingclass struggle released the pressure from erstwhile radical academics so that they could focus on more reflective
work (see, for example Rabinow 1977). Despite a growing contingent labour force within the academy those
ensconced in positions of power and privilege did not
feel the bite of cutbacks or the collapse of their real wages
until the 1980s (Callinicos 1989). Disappointment, lack
of willpower, and changing material conditions all combined to give us a generation of dilettantes more interested in playing with text than in resolving or intervening in
the crises experienced by the rest of the working class.

sive Weberian struggle to deconstruct dominant

discourses, building endless walls of sand to hold
back the rough ocean of meaning (Butler, Laclau
and Zizek 2000; Hardt and Negri 2000; Lyotard
1984).14 For others who were less tied to the soul of
the generation of 1968 but more tied to the structuralist methodology, the end of modernism with
its progressivist narratives, mass production, and giant fordist factories belching smoke and exploiting thick-necked industrial workers, released them
from the bonds of working-class ideologies (Gorz
19832; Murray 1990; Touraine 1988) and allowed
them to ascend like Kafkas bucket rider into the
regions of the ice mountains...lost for ever (Kafka
1988) to any tie to materiality and the project of the
working class.
A particularly interesting example of this postmodern tendency to cut anthropological writing
loose from the moorings of material life emerges in
Rapport and Dawsons Migrants of Identity (1998).
In his essay in this volume, Dawson discusses identity and community in a devastated post-Thatcherite
coal-mining town in England, through contrasting
images of the parochial and the cosmopolitan, the
local and the international, homogeneity and diversity, and movement and sedentarism. Wandering in
the social wreckage of the great 1984-85 coal-mining strike that brought all of Britain to the brink of
civil war and sealed the fate of such towns, Dawson
de- and reimagines the British working class in its
former central heartland.
In his discussion of the poetics of death and
belonging, Dawson reduces social class to a performative and symbolic set of identity markers that
are almost entirely mental. At the end of the essay, Dawson leaves us with a picture of an aging
people whose approaching death neatly mirrors
and acts as a stand-in for the death of a coal-min-

14

Some may well question our groupings, in particular that of Negri with Lyotard and other post-modernists. While we respect the progressivist intentions
of Negri, neither of us see anything Marxist in Hardt
and Negris attempt to rewrite capital through the lens
of Foucauldian relocations. From our reading Hardt and
Negri have explicitly rejected social class as the central
dynamic of analyzing capitalism and as the motor force
of progressive change.

24 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

ing town: natural, inevitable and bittersweet; thus
largely assuming the political, economic and ideological environment in which this poetics of death
and belonging has emerged. For Dawson the most
important characteristic in this town is its residents
agential abilities to imagine their own moving identities in the future and beyond the material confines
of the coal town: home bodies and migrant minds
(Dawson 1998: 220).
Where progressive British academics such as
Rapport and Dawson were liberated from the constraints of objectively defined social class by floating o an empty bucket full of symbols, dreams and
other working class chimera collected in the wreckage of defeat, scholars on the North American side
of the Atlantic did not even have to return to the
scene of defeats of the twentieth century in search
of new and more motile identities. With little of
the long-standing and deeply embedded political
organization, social consciousness or working class
culture of the British working class, the U.S. and
Canadian working classes often simply vanished
in anthropological writing into a seamless web of
individual and particular meanings, resistant and
not so resistant identities, and the ever shifting
deterritorialization (Appadurai 1991) and transience (Cliord 1992) generated from anonymous
locales and de-historicized circumstances where the
silence of the working class is less remarkable then
at the site of battles between Thatchers army and
Scargills miners. In an ironic twist, a whole generation of anthropologists answered Kathleen Goughs
call for new proposals by a radical engagement
with text, simultaneously subverting and adopting
Goughs critique of anthropology as the child of
Western Imperialism (1968: 403-407).

After the Fall

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 most

historians agreed that it was the end of one period
and the beginning of another. Some commentators
called it globalization, others post-modernity, and
U.S. president, George Bush Sr., described it as a
new world order. U.S. political scientist Francis
Fukuyama (1989) attempted a more precise defini-

tion in his article The End of History? where he

argued that mankinds evolution through monarchy,
fascism, communism, and other political ideologies
was finally over, and Western liberal democracy
would be the final form of human government.
He went on to argue; economic calculation, the
endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated
consumer demands would replace the conflicts
over big ideas of the past.
For a time it seemed that Fukuyama was right.
The Soviet Union peacefully dissolved, Palestinians
and Israeli Jews signed a peace accord at Oslo, Irish
Catholics and Protestants agreed to settle some
of their dierences, and South Africa achieved
black majority rule under the procapitalist, African
National Congress. There was still, as Fukuyama had
predicted, ethnic conflict, civil war, and a few isolated dictatorships, but the ideological battles that had
characterized the mid-20th century seemed to have
faded from memory. Though violent these conflicts
appeared to be Fukuyamas technical problems to
be solved. In 1991, an international coalition of
more than 20 countries, many of whom had been
enemies only a few years earlier, joined forces to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, as multinational peacekeeping forces fanned out across the globe.
The economic calculation described by Fukuyama
set the tone for the 1990s. Economists sharing his
triumphalism claimed that cyclical economic downturns were a thing of the past. Trillions of dollars
flowed into the U.S. stock market and into emerging economies like Indonesia, Malaysia, South
Korea, and for a time Argentina, where free trade
policies ended protectionist taris and forced the
sale of state sector industries, drawing new capital
to modernize aging inecient productive facilities
and forcing the layo of redundant workers. As new
wealth was created, skyscrapers and modern metropolises grew in places like Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta
while many inner cities gentrified in the advanced
industrial world (Smith 1996). The information
superhighway created a new economy, producing
dotcom millionaires, software billionaires, and millions of CEOs, MBAs and workplace day-traders.

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 25

But most of the worlds population missed the
boom, experiencing it instead as displacement, poverty and blocked ambition. Despite the triumphalist optimism over the death of communism and
a peace dividend driven economic boom in the
1990s, tens of millions of people continued to die
each year of preventable or treatable diseases. Neoliberalism and structural adjustment further institutionalized the war of everyone against all by raising
rates of exploitation and pitting neighbour against
neighbour for tightening resources. Many took the
traditional path out of misery, leaving home and
family to migrate to a wealthier region. Mexico lost
millions of people to the United States, as the 1994
devaluation of the peso brought landless peasants,
laid o workers and suddenly impoverished professionals to the United States (Camarota 2001;
United States Congress 2004). In other parts of the
world, millions of people joined ethno-nationally
defined movements and militias that fought over
whatever resources remained in the many desperately undercapitalized countries across the planet
(Suny 1993).
As the battle between communism and capitalismthe two great universalist futures oered
by modernity in the short twentieth centurybegan to recede people across the globe increasingly
looked to what Eric Wolf has identified as the defensive alternate path to modernity: counter-enlightenment localism (Wolf 1999). For some, like
Bulgarians, who elected their British born former
king as prime minister in 2001, neo-monarchism
promised the return of an imagined national past
(Vassilev 2001). Others, like anti-globalization
protesters at the 1999 Battle of Seattle, wanted
to return to a time when products and communities were more locally or nationally based. Ethnic
and nationalist revivals like the Mayan movement
in Guatemala seemed immanently understandable
after a three decade war of extermination by the
army against Marxist oriented indigenous guerrilla
fronts (Friedlander 2000; Hale 1997, 1999; Smith
1991). Many yearned for a world ordered by ancient
religious principles that could be imagined locally,
rather than in corporate headquarters in the United
States, France, Germany, Japan or the U.K.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks by 19 fundamentalist Muslims in hijacked jetliners killed almost three thousand people and destroyed one of
the great symbols of universalist modernity and the
future, the twin towers of the World Trade Center
in New York City. Suddenly Fukuyamas (1989)
centuries of boredom at the end of history were
being replaced by Samuel Huntingtons clash of
civilizations (Huntington 1993). Though the people who had destroyed the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon emerged from movements previously supported by the United States government
that had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan,15 such
terrifying symmetries were no longer important.
Throughout the world Left and Right cast o much
of the remaining language of Marxist internationalism, enlightenment humanism, and the rhetoric of
compassion that often surrounded the welfare state
and terms like the West and Islamic civilization
became hegemonic in the absence of a broader belief that there might be a unification of humanity
around failed meta-narratives. Instead of endless centuries of boredom, dystopian predictions
emerged for war without end.

Now More than Ever

In face of this onslaught, many radical scholars

have retreated from their ideals of a society based
on justice not power and co-operation not competition, seeing little promise in the current period.
Despite huge defeats of those who have claimed
to represent these ideals, there is reason for hope.
Now more than ever, it is possible and necessary
for radical anthropologists to return to the source of
Utopian energies since the 19th century: the world

15

These movements and individuals appear to

have transformed themselves following the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 1991 and the very public establishment of
U.S. army bases in Saudi Arabia. However, the very fact
that the U.S. started these groups on their way points to
the Machiavellian nature of Imperialist politics; as long
as they were useful in fighting the Soviet Union people
like Osama Bin Laden were granted carte blanche to
prosecute a proxy war on behalf of the U.S. After that
one supposes the U.S. thought they would simply fade
away....

26 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

working class. In the cleared field of post-Cold War
political consciousness there are new opportunities
to draw balance sheets on past mistakes, strengthen
the explanatory power of our work and write and
make history.
If there is anything that is to be learned from the
postmodern turn it is that all anthropological practice
is aligned. Alignment is, in this sense, merely an admission that the participants of a particular social formation cannot separate their production (i.e., ethnographies) from the social relations of which they are a
part. As Raymond Williams pointed out, several years
in advance of postmodernism, alignment variously
expresses, explicitly or implicitly, specifically selected
experience from a point of view (Williams 1977:
199). He went on to argue that to deny alignment is
to grant implicit commitment to the dominant social
order, which is also an alignment. Commitment, if it
is to mean anything is surely conscious, active, and
open: a choice of position...commitment is a conscious alignment, or conscious change of alignment
(Williams 1977: 200, 204).
For Marxists the relationship between consciously aligned theory and action is the principle
purpose of social science. What Wilson (1972) referred to as acting and writing history is similar to
Marxs insistence, in thesis 11 of his 1845 Theses
on Feuerbach that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it (Marx 1969: 15). It is the goal of Marxist
anthropologists to influence the development of
society by contributing to the consciousness of the
world proletariat, and contribute in some small way
to its transformation from a class in itself to a
class for itself. This task has become both easier and
more dicult.
It is obviously more dicult because of the crisis of legitimacy of Marxism and Marxian visions
of how to order society. The world proletariat has
probably not been so unable to constitute itself as a
class for itself since the middle of the 19th century.
However, it is easier because, as a class in itself, the
world proletariat continues to grow in its size and
importance. The existence of an objective working
class in itself, defined by relationship to the means
of production and bourgeois property relations, has

never been more clearly manifest or more internationally ubiquitous. If there is any validity to the
Kautskyian idea of globalization that has become
popular with contemporary leftists, it is its recognition of the internationalization of the world working class and the greater penetration of capital and
direct market relations to the most distant capillaries of the world system, some of which are experiencing such phenomena for the first time, but many
of which are ending long hiatuses from the market.
Along with the late 20th-century expansion of
marketisation, there has been a concurrent increase in
interdependence for the world working class. With
the threat of communism removed, and in the presence of the most massive devalorization of capital
since World War II, the technological downsizing
of key industries and commercial concerns throughout the world, has come the impoverishment of the
most educated and skilled working classes in the
world (particularly those of the former communist
camp). With each year the fears and weaknesses of
one national working class directly brings down the
wages of another. Whether the method of reducing
the social wage as a percentage of the social product
is accomplished through national currency devaluations, wage reductions, decapitalization of infrastructure in the form of factory closings or NATO
bombing sorties, job sharing, starving of poor or
ethnically defined populations, lengthening of the
work day/week, reduction in funding for education healthcare and other collective use values, or
other economic shell games, there seem to be few
of the mid-20th-century complexities that previously bedevilled our analysis of the capitalist mode
of production. In the new world order, the uneasy
stalemate between capital and labour that was so
often mediated by strong welfare or security states
and the threat of communism is gone and everywhere there is directional, class-based action from
the capitalists, where an injury to one is an injury to
all, everyday and on a global scale.
But it is not just immiseration and vulnerability
that makes the world working class look so much
like an objectively definable social class. Despite the
orgy of bourgeois pundits crowing about Marxism
proven false and ex-Marxists declaring that strikes

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 27

do not work in the information age, the post-Cold
War era has been a time of greatly increased class
conflict and working-class rebellion. There are daily protests against neo-liberalism throughout the
globe and relatively frequent general strikes since
the end of the short 20th century. In the last few
years there have been remarkable working-class
fight-backs. There have been general strikes and
national industrial actions in not so surprising
places like Argentina, France, Nicaragua, Bolivia,
South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia and Ecuador.
There have been surprising actions like the successful International Brotherhood of Teamsters 1997
strike in the United States, the Puerto Rican general strike of 1998, and the many waves of maquila
shutdowns in Northern Mexico.
Throughout the Americas there has been a level of labour disturbance and violent confrontation
with the state over the social wage that in a previous
era might have led to a currency crisis, capital flight
and the use of napalm. This high level of social conflict has barely been noticed in world financial markets and has been treated with malignant neglect
by capitalists and their governments throughout
the hemisphere. An example of this is Argentine
president Carlos Menems response to the August
1997 general strike attempt and national march
on Buenos Aires. Instead of revamping the death
squads, he flippantly suggested that Buenos Aires
could use the tourist dollars. Again, in 2001, when
the Argentine economy collapsed and the country
spiralled into anarchy, with burning, looting, and
alternate currency systems springing up in barrios and regional towns, the United States refused
to produce a genuine bailout and the Argentine
army remained unfazed and largely uninterested in
a process that removed presidents and destroyed all
faith in the government. Even the recent election of
left/populist presidents across Americas backyard
in Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina seems
to only raise a few eyebrows in Washington.
The burgeoning anti-free trade protest movements, united in their opposition to liberalized
trade and the international organizations that negotiate, finance, and govern such trade as Asia
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the World

Trade Organization (WTO), and the International

Monetary fund have been able to grab media attention. Multinational media corporations seem
to revel in displaying images of youthful, energetic
protestors gathered in carnivalesque displays of opposition to the economic agenda of the ruling classes. Yet, there has been a negligible response in world
financial markets. As with the massive strikes and
protests by working people, corporate and political
leaders seem unconcerned and dismissive.
This is where the strange disjuncture between
objective conditions and subjective consciousness
comes in. There was a time when a few hundred
peasants marching on a Latin American capital or a
hundred thousand workers marching through Paris
would cause a crisis of the state. However, in the
post-Marxist world, the capitalist class is generally
sure that no matter how disruptive a strike, social
struggle, or act against the government, they can
outlast the working class. After workers and students interrupted the meetings in Seattle the ruling
class responded with a taller fence and a larger zone
of exclusion in Quebec City.
This renewed confidence in bourgeois rule is
probably not misplaced either. As one Paris member of a strike committee during the French working-class uprising of December 1995 was quoted as
saying in a New York, Village Voice article, we have
got Paris, but where do we go from here? With no
viable alternative vision for social distribution besides the market and no other way of organizing
production besides wage labour and capital, working-class struggles are defensive, even when they are
victorious.

Materialism Unashamed and Unbound

As the world working class continues its uneven but inexorable growth, even such states as
Israel and Pakistan, so deeply infused as they are
with religious ideology and fratricidal nationalism,
oer some cause for hope. They both have large and
highly dissatisfied working classes with what we
believe are objective material interests in turning
on their leaders and recognizing commonality with
their Palestinian and Indian class brothers and sisters. It certainly will not happen next Tuesday, but it

28 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

could happen. This is where we not only accept the
label of economic determinism thrown at and often
denied by Marxists, but actually embrace it.
For two writers who have spent the preceding
pages and the last two decades waging an ideological struggle for a Marxist academy, we clearly are
not suggesting that everything can be reduced to
money and immediate economic interest. We reject the reactionary behaviourist fantasy that as the
misery of the working class rises, so too will class
consciousness and class struggle, or similarly, that
rising standards of living necessarily yield declining
class politics. Clearly ideas count and the present
level of misery in this world is quite high enough,
even in our own relatively privileged sections of it.
In our experience the weaker and poorer our class
is, the less ability there is to project class power and
the consciousness that necessarily underwrites it
(Menzies 1997). No political force has ever won a
battle or a war by increasing its weakness and misery.
Instead we are attempting to ground the future
society in the Marxian idea that to be human is
to engage in conscious social labour that produces
wealth. This is the social undercarriage of human
life and we identify the crucial politico-ideological
battles in which humans engage across the planet
as, in some way, related to this underlying definition
of being human. We remain convinced that if there
are indeed clashes of civilizations on the horizon,
it will only be because our social class is so deeply
weakened by the 40 years of imperial unity in face
of the post-World War II Soviet threat and the subsequent triumphalism of their defeat of USSR, that
we are unable to create and disseminate our own
counter-hegemonic ideological class projects in face
of myriad large and small elites reorganizing us into
rival armies and re-dividing the bounty of production.
The anti-fascist and anti-colonial masses that
were often celebrated as the subject of history (as
in Maos statement that the masses make history,
the party leads) during the short 20th century have
been replaced by the fanatic, nationalist logic of great
protectors of our balkanized selves such as George
Bush Jr., Jacques Chirac, Osama bin Laden, Ariel

Sharon and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We have been left

with little choice but to look for better, rather than
worse protective masters. In such an era the mass of
humanity is trapped in terrifying, tessellated political
categories such as the Muslim street, Schindlers
Jews, Old Europe, and, of course, the pre-New
World Order standards nation, race ethnicity,
civilization and the West.16
In rejecting such ideological divisions in the
world working class and looking to the deeper levels
where we are united, we recognize the importance
of the enlightenment and French revolutionary
dream of a secular universal humanity, but stand
at a critical distance from this ideology of expanding capitalism. As with the feudal/tributary mode
of production (Amin 1980) which spread for thousands of years, eventually bringing most of the old
world into its orbit, the capitalist mode of production has found its way to every spot on the planet.
While productive forces continue to improve and
fixed capital continues to grow, there is little geodemographic room left for expansion. In two inter-imperialist wars and numerous anti-colonial
revolutions the world has seen that the only way for
newcomers to get into the imperial club is murder,
and usually on a grand and ghoulish scale. Perhaps
the last geo-demographic frontier for imperial capitalism is the limitless markets of mainland China,
where it is easy to imagine a third inter-imperialist
war starting over the spoils of capitalist restoration.
In such a world of uneven development, where the
Anglo-American capital bloc resolves its governance
problems top down from airplanes, European and

16

There is clearly a similar dynamic at work in

the current retreat from political womens liberation.
The contemporary logic of gender politics seems to be
heavily personalized, contained within the family, family
based social policy, and family based political discourse.
Privatized childrearing has returned to being a given and
the abolition, or radical rearranging of the two principle
gender roles of the epoch of class society, men and women, seems to be, at best, a subterranean footnote (in this
case an endnote). The gender divisions within the world
working class are, of course, hugely significant though
generally pitched in terms of a far more intimate and
personal form of paternalism than the aforementioned
ones, which currently threaten the very basis of human
existence with their projects.

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 29

Japanese national capital blocs quietly rearm and
continue with their political economic war of position, and all manner of blocked elites and their political constituencies across the Third World froth
with murderous rage, we believe that there are no
Oskar Schindlers in the White House, in Downing
Street, or anywhere else, who will genuinely protect
an abstract humanity through what Hitler called
the night and fog of war. We see this as an age
of war, consolidation, and crisis for the world capitalist system. Following Wolf who looked at three
modes of production in crisis and observed that at
this millennial transition, the human capacity to
envision imaginary worlds seems to be shifting into
high gear (Wolf 1999:291), we expect the coming
period to be one that is continually unsettled by
purveyors of myriad imaginary worlds in both the
heartlands of imperialism and the resistant provinces of the former colonial world.
Though we recognize the best of intentions in
many, if not most, humans, such voluntary appeals
to moral suasion as compassion, humanity, liberty,
brotherhood and equality only go so far in face of
a mode of organizing social labour and a logic of
production and ownership that is built on the war
of everyone against all in a race to accumulate capital. If we are ever able to fulfill the purpose of social
science and consciously build a better imaginary
world, it should be built upon the solid foundation of social class. We claim material interest and
the struggle against economic, political, and species being alienation, based on the human being as
conscious social labourer and political animal, as the
only realistic future.
It may not seem likely in the present, but we are
sure that it is necessary in the future, otherwise, we
have the world to lose. Though many of the ideological concerns and conflicts have changed since
the short 20th began, we stand on the same economic determinism that led Rosa Luxemburg, Karl
Liebknecht, Vladimir Lenin, James Connolly, John
Maclean, and Kate Richards OHare to reject the
first inter-imperialist war as an elite attempt to resolve who would own the social labour of the world
capitalist system. People, who are so intimately, and
more importantly, inherently interconnected in

their interests as the world working class, must find

ideologies that enable them to fight for themselves,
rather than against themselves.17
When a pharmaceutical factory in Iraq or the
Sudan or an automobile factory in Serbia is destroyed
from above, it instantly lowers the price of labour,
as well as the productive capacity and the overall
class power of a national working class, diminishing
the power of the entire world working class by just
a little. If this logic suggests economic determinism, then so be it. Many of us of the generation of
2000 watched in horror throughout the 1970s and
1980s as the national trade unions of the United
States and Canada aided the U.S. government in
purging so called communist sympathizers from
the Latin American union movement. With each
dead, disappeared or marginalized radical unionist
the power of labour dropped just a little. When the
tipping point finally came and quantity moved to
quality, we found ourselves in a new world order,
where workers of the South had lost so many of
the gains they made in the short 20th century that
the workers of the North came under threat. When
the North American Free Trade Agreement finally
appeared in 1994 the battle was already lost North
American workers had no space in which to negotiate, little sense of solidarity and stood against the
agreement with the ideologies of their misleaders
and masters. Canadians protested losing their jobs
and social system to low-wage U.S. workers who
were portrayed as lacking civil culture or a healthy
sense of entitlement. In the United States, the fight
against NAFTA involved a similar rhetoric directed
at Mexicans and compounded by traditional forms
of Anglo-racism. Finally, in Mexico, which did have
the lowest average labour costs in North America,
Mexican trade unionists demonstrated against jobs

17

Here we would point to the renewal movement

within U.S. trade unions as one path. The renewal movement seeks to expand internal democratic practice while
simultaneously breaking down the walls of economic, bureaucratic business unionism. This is being accomplished
through grassroots, social justice unionism. We would
also point to the left tradition of shop-floor unionism
that challenges the hold on unions by bureaucrats, many
of whom have long been separated from the real material
conditions of the shop floor (McNally 1980).

30 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

heading north to be stolen by what were portrayed
as ignorant peasants rushing to U.S. owned maquiladoras in northern Mexico and compliant U.S. workers in the Southern United States, who lacked the
class-conscious traditions of the Mexican industrial
union sector that had won some of the highest industrial wages in the Third World during the short
20th century. In the days before agency became an
issue of discourse, this was sometimes referred to
as false consciousness. In face of such a tessellated
working class, we pose the basic Marxist idea that,
regardless of the small or large size of a salary, an
injury to one wage earner is an injury to all.

Making Our Own Future

If there is one crucial fact of the post-Marxist

academy it is the lack of predetermined historical
outcomes. The evolutionist notion that history is an
inexorable metanarrative, unfolding from here to
there, has been laid to rest in a climate of global millennial pessimism and scaled back political expectations. This is one of the insights that post-modernists recognized even before the fall of the Berlin
Wall: those all-encompassing structuralist theories
that explained everything do not really work and
tell us very little that would be useful for writing
and acting history. It is time to bring back history,
the soul of Marxism for theory and praxis.
We would argue that the USSR was not defeated by the inevitable superiority of a market
economy, the lack of incentives under communism,
or the Hegelian unfolding of the spirit, but rather
by a group of historical actors who were more adept at creating and managing social consciousness,
exerting political will and leading vast social forces.
There was no inevitable capitalist victory, nor a teleological workers Utopia waiting over the horizon.
There was history made by real humans in groups,
exerting their wills under inherited historical circumstances, in the name of their interests or perceived interests.
For Marxists this lesson in the role of consciousness in history should force us to abandon
the evolutionism, functionalism, positivism and unconscious behaviourist economic determinism that
came to call itself Marxism for most of the short

20th century. For many years, Marxist method has

been diminished by the positivist evolutionism deriving from the influence of the two main Marxist
leadership tendencies in 20th-century history.
The first of these Marxisms was tied to one of
any number of Workers States (Albania, Yugoslavia,
Russia, China, etc.) or progressive experiments in
national liberation. In its classic form this Marxism
substitutes a chosen socialist or anti-imperialist
Jerusalem for the interests of the world proletariat
and posits an evolutionary track to communism
based on that states outstripping capitalism in some
combination of industrial production and progressive development as proven by life expectancy,
womens participation in the labour force, athletic
prowess, or the number of doctors and teachers per
person. This might be described as the build a better tractor road to socialism. In this road the forces
of production reduce the working class to technoenvironmental spectators, waiting for the eciency
of socialism to usher in the workers utopia. Any betrayal of the world working class is justified as long
as it can be described as providing space for the
chosen state and its people to evolve.
In anthropology this tendency has given us the
muscular materialism of Leslie White and the scientific positivism of Marvin Harris, and in broader
academic writing, structuralist theories such as dependency (Frank 1966; Rodney 1981; Wallerstein
1974), communist party stage theory typologies
(Toledano 1944; see Lowy 1992 or Vitale 1972 for
a critical discussion), Kondratie cycles and the
long wave (Kleinknecht, Mandel, and Wallerstein
1992; Kondratie 1984; Shaikh 1992; Webber
and Rigby 2001) and philosophical structuralism
(Althusser 1977; Pbulantzas 1974) that suggest
the possibility of an autochthonous road to Third
World tractor heaven. The substitution of structure
for politics and the extreme dependency on objectivist political economy that are connected to these
grand portraits of structures of accumulation often
missed exactly the question that Marxist academics
should have been asking; who is organizing whom
for what and how can scholarship be connected to
the political life that writes and acts history? It is
this underlying evolutionary approach that has en-

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 31

abled post-structuralists, who no longer see tractors
and factories, to believe that socialism has arrived
through the back door in the form of post-Fordist,
post-working-class flexible specialization, and postclass mercantile driven consumerist Utopias (Gorz
1982; LaClau and Moue 1985; Murray 1990;
Touraine 1988) or pose darker Durkheimian dystopias that present us with network societies and
information feudalism (Castells 1996; Drahos and
Braithwaite 2003).18
The second main tendency has generally been
connected to social democracy and workers parties. This tendency posed evolution as what E.P.
Thompson called process. In this process there is
a gradual evolution from capitalism to socialism
based on increasing rationality and self-awareness
of the working class. Thompson, in his introduction
to The Making of The English Working Class actually
went as far as to define the existence of the working
class in terms of consciousness. Instead of building
more tractors these Marxists tried to smooth the
conflicts between capitalists and workers, with the
goal of avoiding a direct confrontation. They feared
that such a clash would result in a dramatic defeat,
giving working-class rule a bad name and causing a
devolution in socialist consciousness.
This tendency did not bleach out the political agency of the working class quite as much as
the tractors to communism variety. However, the
gradualist/culturist road to socialist consciousness
implied that the world would one day wake up realizing that when it went to bed it was already socialist. In this case consciousness makes socialism grow
in the fields as the tractors were expected to have
in Stalins USSR or Great Leap Forward China.
It was the job of such social democrats to nurture
this delicate consciousness, even when it has meant
prioritizing the electoral fortunes of the World
War I era German SPD over the lives of millions
of French and English workers by voting war cred-

18

This is not to suggest that structural Marxists

have disappeared entirely. Writers such as Giovanni Arrighi, Anwar Sheikh, and Michael Webber continue to
look at grand cycles, Kondratie waves and other large
movements in the development of the mode of production.

its or prioritizing support for the Unidad Popular

electoral coalition in Chile over sharpening political
contradictions and arming the workers who would
eventually die in the cordones industrials while fighting General Augusto Pinochets national army. In
the current period, the absence of a working-class
socialist consciousness releases those who follow
this approach from their now thankless task and allows for the rise of new labour and the postmodern of the particular. In a phenomenological world,
where theory can only emerge from the grounded
aspects of everyday life, consciousness is what you
make of it and how you use it.
What these two tendencies shared was a faith
in evolution and an inability to envision creating
fractures and historical disjunctures. As with the
less patient and more subjectivist brand of Marxism
that found its expression in Guevarist adventures in
the jungles of the Third World, these two tendencies were fundamentally uninterested in the conscious political organization of the vanguard of the
working class behind a proletarian political project
that could imagine a break with the bourgeois present. This may be one of the reasons that capitalism
is now triumphant: the conscious vanguard of the
capitalist class has not believed in political evolutionism since World War I, which began the short
20th century. They were not counting on the spirit
of history to save them from communism. They and
their intellectual advocates acted and wrote history,
by organizing to win, as if their lives depended on
it. It is only now, after the collapse of the East Bloc
that some of their more liberal intellectual spokesmen like Francis Fukuyama could timidly return to
the evolutionist paradigm and hesitantly suggest a
Hegelian I told you so.
As Marx said in Das Kapital, what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this,
that the architect raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality(Marx 1954:174). This
was his way of identifying the importance of consciousness in all projects involving human labour.
This also points to the relationship between scholarship and action. In this cleared field, where social
democrats are embracing neo-liberalism and a global
war on terror, guerrillas are coming down from the

32 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

mountains to join their old enemies in managing
the bourgeois state and ex-communist party bosses
in the former East Bloc are creating red/brown alliances and helping to impose IMF austerity we
can discard the notion that humans are technoenvironmental bees building their atomic reactors
while waiting for communism and the mind-overmatter textual fantasies of Thompsonian gradualists,
Weberian Gramscian Marxists (Crehan 2002),
and what Ellen Meiksins Wood disparagingly calls
the new true socialists of postmodernism (Wood
1986). As Marxists, scholars, and sentient humans
we are bad architects with free will, taking various
historical projects from conception to reality. The
future is only what we make of it.

Marxism: If It Doesnt Say It, It Isnt

What then can we do to sharpen our analysis

and write and act history as Marxist architects in a
post-Marxist academy? We can start by keeping our
eyes on the new international working class and its
new workers vanguard that is inevitably emerging
in regions with young and militant working classes.
The current climate of race to the bottom global
production seems to allow less and less room by the
year for the creation and financial support of a large
layer of trade union social democratic bureaucrats
that have traditionally managed industrial working
classes for their bosses. Where they do exist, they
often ignore the most militant and strategically important areas of struggle that may not even be directly tied to production sites. This presents exciting
opportunities for the development of new forms of
struggle, new organs of political mobilization, and
new anti-capitalist alliances.
We can also look to older sections of the working class, where hatred of the capitalist class and
the dream of a co-operative, socialist society remain strong. It is easy to forget, in New World
Order North America, that much of the world still
remains loyal to the dream of a co-operative and
equal society. In South Africa, for instance, the
Communist Party, the African National Congress,
COSATU and other pro-capitalist working-class
leaderships are steadily losing legitimacy and rely-

ing on brute force to guarantee the accumulation of

capital. In Korea, which remains a Cold War battlefield, it is often said that the South Korean government would not last an hour without U.S. soldiers,
despite 15 years of economic catastrophe and a
profoundly anti-democratic government in North
Korea. Regardless of the veracity of this rhetorical
claim, it reflects a widely held hatred for the U.S.
imperial project and a counter-position of a variety
of socialist, proletarian, and nationalist visions that
are strong in the communities, worksites and political organizations on the Korean peninsula.
In Brazil, the recent election of Workers Party
leader and former industrial worker Luis Ignacio
da Silva Lula, suggests a conscious workingclass militancy that is threatening enough to have
forced the Brazilian capitalist class to use a working-class party to manage austerity. Despite some
recent successes by Lula in imposing austerity on
the Brazilian working class, his election indicates
important class tensions in Brazil that seem to have
spread to Uruguay in the national electoral victory
of the Frente Amplia in 2004. In China where a
pro-capitalist Communist Party apparatus attempts
to foist capitalism and neo-liberalism on a population schooled in various forms of ocial, statesanctioned Marxism, the tensions are particularly
acute. Massive industrial strikes break out everyday, while many call for the return of the iron rice
bowl and everywhere pictures of Mao ZeDong, the
founder of the communist state, have become good
luck symbols and rallying banners.19
In Old Europe, the first homeland of the
labour lieutenants of capital, in the form of early
twentieth century social democratic parties that
have managed capitalism during its most dicult
moments and communist parties that slavishly followed Moscows on-again, o-again attempts to

19

The continuing power of an Asian populist/

communist vision connected to Mao ZeDong in Asia
is particularly apparent in Nepal and what is currently
referred to as the Naxalite region of India, where the
intersection of caste, class and geo-politics has yielded
a longstanding civil war. In addition to this, there are a
wide variety of legal and semi-legal communist parties
spread across India and Nepal that have recently seen
increasing popularity.

TOWARDS A CLASS-STRUGGLE ANTHROPOLOGY 33

make friends with the capitalist class, the working
class is probably still better organized and more socially conscious than anywhere else in the world.
From French industrial workers who retain a strong
understanding of the value of blocking highways,
shutting down airports, and burning overturned
cars in the streets of Paris to Italian white collar
civil servants, who go into the streets in defence
of the social rights of the entire working class, to
Scandinavia where the gender divisions of class society are probably most attenuated, the wealthy and
well-organized European working class has many
potentially positive features.
It is here in the realm of connecting subjective
ideas to objective conditions that Marxist anthropologists can help to write and act history. With
bourgeois ideology triumphant, it is necessary for
those of us who continue to imagine working-class
power to organize ourselves both as workers and as
anthropologists. If we refuse to submit to the false
god of passivity and look at the way that human
history is made, we will see that there is still an important role for those of us who are willing to swim
against the current Both the physical power and the
consciousness of the world working class are more
important than ever.
As anthropologists, whom Gramsci might
have called traditional intellectuals, we have only
the tiniest connection to the physical power of the
working class. We cannot shut down a city the way
transit workers can. We cannot stop a war the way
soldiers, dockworkers, and weapons factory workers
can, but even the most marginal, sessional instructors amongst our cohort has a public platform for
exerting some small influence on the consciousness
of the world working class. In our goal of a classstruggle anthropology we must heed Jean Paul
Sartres challenge that: commitment is an act, not
a word.2020

20

Quoted in Gerassi, 1971.

Acknowledgments

We would like to dedicate this paper to our

mentor and teacher, Gerald M. Sider. Our lives
have been immeasurably enriched through knowing and working with Gerry, first as students, and
then as colleagues finding our own ways in the
academy. As with all such work there are more
people to acknowledge than space to adequately
do so. Nonetheless, we would mention the critical and important role that our former peers from
CUNY have played in shaping our understanding
of anthropology and the importance of taking an
active role in our communities. We would especially
thank Sharryn Kasmir and Avi Bornstein for being
ready and willing to step forward on all of the various projects that we have suggested over the past
many years. Kate McCafery, Jo Sanson and Andy
Dawson have oered comments, advice, criticism
and support at various points thatif not reflected
in our written wordshas definitely shaped the way
in which we have thought through these issues.

34 A. MARCUS AND C. MENZIES

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