Some reflections on
anthropological structural
Marxism
Stephen Nugent Goldsmiths College, University of London
The primary topic in this discussion is the brief career of anthropological structural Marxism and the
possibility of its continued relevance. That issue is framed by a more general one: on what basis are
explanatory theories adopted and discarded in anthropology? The discussion of structural Marxism
is framed within recent debates about the desirability of socio-cultural anthropology’s traditional
associations with other sub-fields of anthropology, and it is argued that the isolation of sub-fields is
a regressive theoretical move.
Introduction: explanation and holism
Debates about ‘theory’ in anthropology are typically unresolved, often acrimonious,
and frequently conducted through the wielding of symbolic power rather than prosaic
evidence. In part, the function of and attitudes towards ‘theory’ flow from the problematic
status of ‘ethnography’, at one and the same time a narrative rendering of
empirical material and also a package of material bound by often implicit assumptions
about causality, logical fit, and intrinsic coherence. Another source of the disputatious
character of ‘theory’1 may not be as mysterious as a fetishized ‘ethnography’: the
attempt to maintain alliances with both of what C.P. Snow (1993 [1959]) famously
depicted as the ‘two cultures’ – those of the sciences and of the humanities – such that
anthropology self-consciously balances universalizing and relativizing tendencies.
Recent efforts to resolve this tension/ambiguity by declaring the ‘interpretative’
versus ‘scientific’ détente finished (see contributions to Segal & Yanagisako 2005)
depend primarily on a re-definition of the anthropological division of labour with one
camp assembled around the ‘crisis of representation’ and the other around ‘evolutionary
psychology’ (to cite ideal-type demonizations). This re-definition of the field,
however, does not erase or resolve – except by exclusion – the characteristic, historical
dilemma of an anthropology that has tried to produce social theory that is at once
sufficiently clinical (society/culture as an object of analysis) to be able to historicize
culture and, simultaneously, sufficiently acknowledging of the subjectivity of ‘cultural
difference’.2
One of the issues highlighted in anthropology’s ‘two cultures’ conflict – the sustained
uncertainty about the relative weights of the universalizing and relativizing
tendencies of anthropology – has been the variable character of the criteria used to
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decide whether an explanation is strong or weak.3 This disposition is often revealed in
the way ‘theory’ appears so commonly as a label of total affiliation rather than a
working premise, some aspects of which may be retained, others discarded as they lose
explanatory value.A revealing structure-functionalist account of the internal dynamics
of a social system, for example, may offer little insight into processual change, but that
failing indicates the limits of explanatory power, not a generic, ‘theoretical’ inadequacy.
The nominalist character of much ‘theory’ in anthropology underpins the strong
tendency for demonization in the field (see Wolf 1994).
A related issue concerns an eclectic ‘standard’ literature that tends to be cumulative
rather than successional.A new study typically adds to the literature without displacing
antecedent explanations. The history of the development of the field, firmly embedded
in the primary literature itself, may provide a sense of continual re-evaluation,
re-orientation, and re-calibration of the explanatory dimensions of the field,4 but it
may also produce a miasma.5 The ‘theory’ that has maintained a grip over the disparate
elements that comprise anthropological holism is less paradigmatic than episodic.
Areas in which successional explanation rather than interpretation is to the fore may be
only awkwardly accommodated (if at all) within certain holistic views, but are more
often demonized as ‘positivistic’ or simply regarded as belonging largely outside
anthropology.
The decline of anthropological structural Marxism (hereafter ASM)6 may be an
example of an explanatory theory being sidelined not as a weak theory, but as the
wrong kind of theory, ‘wrong’ in the sense that it challenges a prevailing interpretative
holism. Its explanations do not just amount to new additions to the literature, but they
supersede other explanations in a way that stretches some aspects of anthropological
holism intolerably. There is, for example, a holism in functionalist claims about the
interdependence of structures of kinship, politics, and economics that may be descriptively
adequate, but which retains little more than metaphoric power in the face of
accounts of social change requiring specification of causal factors.7 It is one thing to
engage holism for the purpose of accounting for the complex interdependence of many
dimensions of sociality, but another to demand that causal explanation always seek
calibration through holism.8
Although there has been a long historical relationship between anthropology and
Marxism,9 an overt anthropological drawing on the work of Marx and Engels (rather
than ‘official’ Marxism) became a notable feature of anthropological discourse in the
1960s. Vincent (1985: 137) notes that most of the entries in the bibliography of
Wessman’s Anthropology and Marxism (1981), for example, are post-1968, and fully half
date from the narrow period 1973-8. Previous Marxist tendencies in the field, as in the
work of Leslie White and his associates (Price 2004), effectively censored in a McCarthyite
climate, were idiomatically materialist and evolutionist, but the successor
tendency was clearly allied with a New Left/Western Marxist revisionism. A hybrid
anthropological structural Marxism was concerned with multiple forms of determination
and power, not just economic ones. It was as much globally orientated as it was
focused on the extremely local and it accommodated the scale of dependency theory as
well as that of the detailed, village-level study. Additionally, it located modern (i.e.
post-Victorian, Malinowskian/Boasian) anthropological preoccupations (such as the
interrelations of kin-groups and political power) in a long-term historical framework
such that, for example, Sacks’s (1979) analysis of Engels had direct relevance for the
study of domestic labour in late capitalism.
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ASM’s explanatory advance on functionalist orthodoxy occurred in a nested
context: at one level a particular expression of a more general critique of the discipline
occurring in the 1960s;10 at a higher level an expression of a field still comfortable as a
socio-historical discipline rather than in thrall to the humanities.With the general shift
of the field towards the literary-hermeneutic – symbolically benchmarked by the publication
of Writing culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986)11 – and refinement of what was
‘anthropologically holistic’ (vigorously outlined in Segal & Yanagisako 2005), the particular
and subtle qualities of the ASM critique were enveloped.At a further level, while
the literary turn seemed to enlarge the anthropological remit through an emphasis on
multi-disciplinarity, it had as a corollary the tendency for the more scientific (or
scientistic) tendencies to be identified with the cognates of particular sub-fields –
economics, evolutionism, politics, psychology – and in some respects become lost to
the new mainstream in anthropology.
Even if the predominant tendency within the field has been to reconfigure anthropological
holism in a manner openly sceptical of the virtues of scientific affiliations, the
rationale for anthropology’s cultural authority as ‘best-informed interlocutor’ (against
challenges to that status from NGOs, development/area studies, ‘the tourist experience’,
travel writing, and the like) still rests on a science-like and realist disposition (see, e.g.,
Besteman & Gusterman 2005). In key respects, the now largely discarded intervention
of ASM may be seen as a crucial statement of a different kind of holistic anthropology
from that which now asserts itself: that is to say, one more concerned with theoretical
adequacy than theoretical propriety.
Economic anthropology
ASM emerged under the influence of several sources, one of which was an orthodox
anthropological conception of a generic pre-modern, tribal economy in which – in
idealized form – a division of labour was primarily shaped only by factors of gender
and age. Economic anthropology emerged forcefully as a sub-disciplinary specialty in
the context of the geo-political restructuring that followed the conclusion to the
SecondWorldWar, and the dominant theoretical discussions largely turned around the
substantivist-formalist distinction. While ‘economic anthropology’ in one reading
meant ‘economics in a tribal/peasant setting’, it also retained the strong notion of
embeddedness, that is, the expression of economic logic through an array or filter of
social relations (e.g. of kinship and politics), a non-autonomous12 economy along lines
indicated by Polanyi (1944) and particularly well known through Sahlins (1972).
The substantivist-formalist debate, however, was in crucial respects at crosspurposes.
At one extreme, formalists who insisted on a market definition of economic
rationality had little to say about non-market economies, except that they were typically
irrational.At the other, substantivists who insisted that economic logic was always
subordinate to diverse culture-logics undermined the prospect of a generalizable
notion of the economic. Each approach actually concerns a very a different kind of
economic target,with – roughly – substantivism being concerned with the structures of
material provisioning regardless of how they are culturally expressed, formalism being
concerned only with structures of material provisioning expressed in prices.13 The
point about confusion of targets is strongly made by Godelier (1972: xxviii) in his
comments on the contradictory advice provided in Notes and queries on anthropology
(Royal Anthropological Institution of Great Britain and Ireland 1960), wherein fieldresearchers
were instructed both to reject and respect ‘ordinary’ economics.
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Another significant influence on the emergence of ASM was the new global expression
of economic formalism through the perspective of a modernization theory that
projected a crude form of economic evolutionism onto the anthropological landscape.
From an anthropological vantage-point, the diversity of anthropological subject societies
(whether codified as tribes, peoples, nations, or races) as well as the diversity of
links that such societies had with larger systems was hardly comfortably expressed by
modernizationist prescriptions. Within the new context and framework offered
by modernization theory – realized in more explicit form with the hegemony of
neoliberalism in the 1980s – the formalist position became an expression of applied
anthropology, and substantivism represented a kind of truculent romanticization of
pre-capitalism. Despite the fact that ‘economic anthropology’ appeared to provide a
richly textured alternative to a monocausal-tending and reductionist modernization
theory, the incommensurability of formalist and substantivist positions with respect to
synthesizing an adequate alternative theory was marked. In a sense, neither provided a
theory adequate to account for what was happening in an anthropological world beset
by a new modernizationist programme,14 yet each contained elements that might be
conjoined in an appropriate synthesis via ASM which – labelled as such, or as political
economy or Marxist anthropology – tried to fuse functionalist and historical accounts.
A new anthropological landscape
The early task of the modern anthropological project was to document and model
extant socio-cultural systems.15 A derived project was the analysis of the institutions
that regulated these apparently self-reproducing systems.16 That ‘investigation of regulation’
project was conducted under a number of sub-field headings (e.g. symbolic
anthropology, structure functionalism, environmental determinism, culture and personality,
etc.), and although there was acknowledged secular change in privileging
certain factors or elements – and hence kinds of tendencies in explanation – the
suggestion that the practice of anthropology itself was shaped by the mode of its own
insertion in the modern world was treated as highly provocative. Both the collections
by Hymes (1969) and by Asad (1974) contained arguments to the effect that although
the subjects and subject matter of anthropology may, in some senses and cases, seem to
be ‘outside of history’, the relationship between anthropology and its subjects certainly
was not. The arguments contained in these two influential volumes were widely
regarded as transgressive, if not scandalous, but it was impossible for critics to refute
the evident systematicity of certain relationships between, for example, national
schools of anthropology and their preferred subjects.Was Dutch expertise in Southeast
Asia a reflection of a natural affinity?WereNorth, Central, and South American peoples
particularly alluring to North American anthropologists? Did Africa and Asia fall under
the gaze of UK anthropology by chance? These associations, of course, were not those
that were directly challenged; rather, the defensive emphasis was placed on the constructions
attributed to those who modestly pointed out that anthropological practice
tended not to be reciprocal (no Inuits doing fieldwork in Shaker Heights, no Dinka in
Peckham) and that political subjectivity tended to be a precondition of anthropological
subjectivity.
ASM emerged in the context of a strongly revised geo-political landscape as the shift
from what is glossed here as the colonial-to-the-neo-colonial was consolidated. The
expected economic depression following the Second World War had not transpired,
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and the immediate post-war years showed an intensification of unsubtle transformation
of pre-capitalist and marginal capitalist societies, the fields of anthropological
inquiry.
Sources of revision
The theoretical borrowings from Marx in ASM tended to be of a non-dogmatic type,
sometimes labelled ‘neo-Marxist’, not the caricature of formulaic application of ‘theory’
– an all-purpose template of historical materialism – but a projection of a series of
hypothetical explanations. In view of the shortage of empirical anthropological material
at the time when Marx and Engels were preparing their theories, the only way to
‘apply’ their theories to such ethnographic material as subsequently emerged was
speculatively/hypothetically. The issue central to ASM’s credibility was not ‘how good
its Marxism was’, but how good the emergent explanations were.17 ASM directly confronted
the insistence thatMarxism is relevant only to the analysis of capitalist societies
by focusing on the dynamics of articulation between pre-capitalism and capitalism,
and less on strict, timelessly valid definitions of those categories themselves.18
‘Structuralism’ also has a qualified and nuanced relationship to ASM, although for
reasons different from those that apply to theMarxist relationship. Structuralism has so
many affinities with incommensurable claimants that a generic definition is impossible.
The versions of structuralism most pertinent to the anthropology of the time are
those associated with Lévi-Strauss and Althusser, but it is the fact that ASM is seen to
draw generally fromthe milieu of structuralism rather than any particular ‘structuralist
authority’ that proves troublesome.
It is Lévi-Strauss’s (1961: 60-1) rather old-fashioned, elementary sociology depiction
which seems most apposite, that is, his allusion toMarx, Freud, and geology – the three
mistresses – as indicating what is intended by structure: something not directly apprehendable,
that is, assumed/hypothesized (and then modelled) on the basis of tangible
evidence (material or behavioural) available to direct examination, quite a ‘normal
science’ approach. While Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism accommodates the more representational
matters (the projection of the mental from the material), Althusser lends a
political economy framework for comparative analysis.
This is not to suggest that ‘structuralism’ and‘Marxism’weremerely adjectives added
for stylistic enhancement, but to suggest that the theoretical abstraction associated with
the more grandiose projects of the period, such as that of Hindess and Hirst (1975), did
not necessarily form a key part of ASM. The theoretical departures implied in ASM
certainly had purchase elsewhere in a broader neo-Marxist set of debates, but in
relation to the orthodoxy of structure functionalism, ASM’s shift was a modest upping
of the explanatory stakes.19 ASM posed the question: at what level of analysis is it
possible to discern the internal structures of Non-market Society X while at the same
time specifying the relations according to which that (pre-/non-capitalist society) was
functional with respect to capitalist society (i.e. subordinate to it and/or co-existing
with it). The strong hypothesis was that it was at the level of economic structures/
material provisioning that one could express both the internal dynamic of precapitalism
and the compatibility of pre-capitalism and capitalism. For illustrative
purposes Wolf (1981) pursues this same line of argument (without resorting to the
more familiar ‘modes of production’ vocabulary associated with ASM) in his comparison
of the kin-based, tributary, and capitalist modes of labour mobilization.
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Despite the emphasis on ‘theory’ in much commentary on ASM, the ethnographic
case studies explicitly flagged as ASM tend to be quite straightforward. The transparency
of explanatory goal is well illustrated in the work of Meillassoux (1981), where,
despite O’Laughlin’s (1977) charge – amongst many others – of a defective and ‘fundamental
ambiguity’, Meillassoux proposes a very plausible explanation for the conservation
of a pre-capitalist domestic community in the presence of exploitation
through articulation with capitalism, an explanation very similar to that provided in
Wolpe’s (1972) analysis of ‘tribal homelands’ and South African apartheid.20
The theoretical precision found wanting in Meillassoux notwithstanding,
O’Laughlin’s‘Mediation of contradiction:whyMbumwomen do not eat chicken’ (1974)
is a display of theoretically uncluttered analysis that draws on ASM in the same way as it
draws on amechanical structure functionalism. There is no‘theoretical’ incompatibility
(or inconsistency) as theory functions to aid explanation, not shore up one or the other
antagonistic positions. In her example, structure-functionalist analysis defines the limits
of an atomized systemwithin whichseniors’ control of external trade goodspermits their
maintenance of culturally legitimated power. The inequalities in that system, however,
which ensure the accumulation of surplus by senior males, ensure the flow/exchange of
essential materials necessary to maintain Mbum ‘autonomy’. This approach does not
dissolve the distinctiveness of Mbum society (or derogate structure-functionalist analysis),
but raises interestingnewissues (e.g.does senior male controlof external trade goods
– and the prohibition on women’s consumption of them – constitute exploitation?). Of
central interest is the way inwhich relations of production that characterize local society
articulate with dominant relations of production in adjacent societies.A similarly lucid
example is provided in the work of Kahn (1975; 1981), where the dynamics of subsistence
and petty commodity production within a Sumatran peasant society maintain an
articulated/semi-autonomous relationship with a set of regional/national economic
structures that significantly shape the boundedness of local society.
These kinds of detailed studies, relatively few though they are,21 represent an ASM
grounded as much in ethnographic reality as in modelling ambition, but they tend to
be overshadowed by a theoretical diversion resulting from ASM’s being just a minor
corner of a generalized Western Marxism.What was to some a multi-disciplinary and
somewhat militantly postured convergence could also become a vortex. The enormous
attention granted Hindess and Hirst’s Precapitalist modes of production (1975), for
example, was part of a theoretical extravagance22 in which the concerns of a historical
materialism-informed exploration of uneven development seemed paltry compared to
emergent hyper-theory. In retrospect, much of the work once identifiable as significantly
related to ASM – the literature of espousal and critique of Althusser, to name one
obvious source – now seems quite tangential to durable, anthropological concerns.
Key fieldwork-based studies are cited in Terray’s Marxism and primitive societies
(1972), the most influential volume of early essays. They represent the first significant
French ASM work to be translated and taken up directly in US and UK anthropology.
They also reveal a tension between evolutionist preoccupations and attempts to characterize
‘primitive’ economy rigorously. Additionally, though, they significantly downplay
the connection between the colonial question and extant ‘primitive social
formations’. Terray notes, for example, of the final two chapters of Meillassoux’s
L’anthropologie économique des Gouro (1964), ‘however interesting the chapters in
which Meillassoux studies the colonial period may be, I think they are far less new and
original than his analysis of the traditional economy’ (Terray 1972: 96).23
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It is with regard to the third matter – the colonial context – that two quite different
tendencies – both identified as ASM – become clear. One of these pertains to the
characterization of the anthropological object – a bounded cultural unit/society/tribe
versus something more abstract. Terray, despite a theoretical armoury that seems to
indicate a demolition of traditional anthropological approaches, recapitulates the traditional
object. The second tendency – social change with respect to the primacy of
economic transformation – is less caught up in the definitional swordplay associated
with concerning the exactitude of the definitions and conditions of modes of production,
and more associated with the question of articulation: that is, how do precapitalist
and capitalist relations and societies co-exist?24
One consequence of the awkward forcing of definitional and explanatory tendencies
under a single heading was that purely ‘theoretical’ work seemed to be far more
voluminous than empirically based work. Additionally, there was some sense in which
economic anthropology approached from a Marxist perspective was regarded as being
implacably ‘economically deterministic’ at the expense of appreciation of ‘culture’, yet
the empirical studies produced ‘under the influence’ (see, e.g., the contributions to
Bloch 1975; Kahn & Llobera 198125) do not actually exhibit this mechanical dependence.
Additionally, the accusation of economic determinism seems particularly disingenuous
in an era of ascendant neoliberalism in which the market prevails and a highly culturalist
anthropology seems to thrive.
While criticism of the shortcomings of other approaches to analysing ‘primitive
economy’ was often excoriating (e.g. Godelier 1972), harsh criticism was reserved for
internecine battles and much of the most revealing work in and around ASM paid little
heed to Marxist credentialism. The influential contributions contained in Bloch’s
(1975) and Kahn and Llobera’s (1981) volumes represent examples of all three of the
tendencies flagged in Terray’s (1972), as well as strong indications of how the explanatory
horizon could be extended. The work of Kahn (1975) and Friedman (1975) in
particular invoked a globalist perspective that decisively pushed the object of anthropological
analysis outside of a debate confined to ‘the local-level’ system and regulated
by the obedient theoretical vocabulary of the kind of empiricism associated with
British structure functionalism.
An optimistic stocktaking was offered in Kahn and Llobera’s (1981) collection, and
ASM seemed to be a strong candidate for combining the advances in synchronic
analysis (which borrowed from structure functionalism, structuralism, and systems
theory26) and analysis over time (longue durée as well as ‘the history of events’, à la
Braudel). The prospect of a maturing ASM in which theoretical advance – which is to
say, refinement of an explanatory agenda – proceeded with a systematic realignment
with the results of the growing body of ethnographic material was short-lived. Instead,
ASM came to be treated as a complex, hyphenate-reject, seemingly a product of a folk
chemistry specializing in the combination of such elements as ‘French’, ‘structure
functionalist’, ‘neo-Marxist’, and ‘structuralist’, and – depending on combination and
context – a perplexing mix of approbation and derogation.
Far from offering a substantial and authoritative link between the anthropology of
pre-capitalist societies and the anthropology of societies-of-various-relationshipswith-
capitalism, the legacy of ASM reflected in Spencer’s ‘Marxism and anthropology’
(1996) and Eriksen and Nielsen’s A history of anthropology (2001) – to cite two critical,
but not wholly unsympathetic accounts – seems quite faint. Spencer notes of ASM and
the attempt to engage class analysis at the local and global levels that ‘[t]hese were
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important issues for any understanding of the modern world (Wolf [1982] provides a
skilful and judicious synthesis of this work), yet the results were oddly unimpressive’
(1996: 353). He continues:
In short, structuralMarxism was threatened by two opposing possibilities: asMarxism it was relatively
indifferent to issues of ethnography and culture and thus was not particularly anthropological; or, in
the hands of ethnographers like Godelier and Maurice Bloch, it did become more obviously cultural,
but looked less and less convincingly Marxist (1996: 353).
Eriksen and Nielsen, who cite Spencer’s ‘neither-one-nor-the-other’ judgement, add
that ‘[t]he fundamental problem with Marxism in anthropology was, and is, that it is
essentially a theory of capitalist society, and that its message about “pre-capitalist
societies” was couched in the language of unilineal evolutionism’ (2001: 116).
Questions of the acuity of these particular judgements aside, it is hard to dispute
Eriksen and Nielsen’s observation of Kahn and Llobera’s optimistic 1981 overview that
ASM‘had already fizzled out as a cohesive trend when the review article was eventually
published’ (2001: 116).
None of these retrospective criticisms, however, is quite convincing in accounting
for the discrepancy between the intensity of interest in the novel aspects of ASM,
however short-lived, and the diffidence of critical commentary shortly thereafter. The
‘oddly unimpressive’ assessment of the legacy of ASM as well as the suggestion that the
failing of ASM was due to its being couched in the ‘language of unilineal evolutionism’
hint at some lack of fit between promise and realization, but this judgement seems to
be based on the appropriateness of labels rather than explanatory adequacy. In the
course of his discussion of Morgan, Terray certainly invokes a stage-ist Marxism, but it
is difficult to see in the protracted debates about modes of production and articulation
(see Foster-Carter 1979) that evolutionist discussion continues to command much of a
position in the overall ASM profile. Similarly, a doctrinaire isolation of ‘Marxism’ and
‘the cultural’ is not so easily recognizable a failing in a literature that seems preoccupied
precisely with the evaluation of the nature of reciprocal relations between economic
and non-economic structures. In sum, the post mortems offered by Spencer and
Eriksen/Nielsen acknowledge the ideological package of ASM far more than they do the
substantive impulse and potential as an advance on existing anthropological theories of
social change, either at the level of the sub-field of economic anthropology or more
generally at the level of socio-cultural anthropology within a holistic framework.
Demise and partial demise
Whether ASM was a logical successor to functionalism or an unwieldy and unsustainable
union of ‘Marxism’ and ‘culture’, its influence was short-lived. For Mintz the fact
that such a development took place at all is surprising. He writes that: ‘If much of the
so-calledMarxist debate seems remote from contemporary social realities – as much of
it is – then in no discipline may its presence seem less probable than in North American
anthropology’ (Mintz, Godelier, Trigger & Hoijer 1984: 12). His explanation for this
improbability applies as well to the UK, for both US and British anthropology cultivated
ahistorical or non-historical positions, with the US projecting its contemporary
Indian natives into the past in order to avoid dealing with them in the present while the
British carefully analysed their colonial natives’ present and regarded them as being
without history, without a past (Mintz et al. 1984: 15). By this reckoning, the last thing
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either anthropological tradition needed was a theory of social change that disrupted
these versions of the ‘ethnographic present’.
Mintz acknowledges Firth’s (1975) attempt to explain the reasons behind the
seeming improbability of British anthropology’s paying any attention to Marxism,
these being: (1) a broadening of anthropological interest to work through other major
sociological figures; (2) a failure of current theory to explain changes in anthropological
material; and (3) a questioning of established institutions and values (i.e. a secular
not an anthropological factor) (Mintz et al. 1984: 17, citing Firth 1975: 42). He goes on
to add an additional four elements of explanation: (1) recognition that the gulf between
‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ was not perhaps as broad as once thought (and perhaps never
existed at all); (2) realization that to characterize the anthropological subject as ‘savage’
in any sense was misplaced; (3) awareness that the 500 years of the capitalist world
system represented a ‘qualitatively different experience for humankind’; and (4)
acknowledgement of the possibility that anthropological techniques could in fact be
applicable in big, complex societies (Mintz et al. 1984: 17-18).27 The emphasis in this list
is on the degree of fit between explanation and the world as encountered anthropologically
and it was a perception of explanatory shortcoming in anthropology that
made a Marxist approach relevant. The ‘so-called Marxist debates’ are a distraction
(Mintz et al. 1984: 12).28
If the emergence of a Marxist anthropology was improbable, its demise was less
surprising, but its demise was not complete, and this incompleteness hints at a crucial
distinction between theory-by-way-of-explanation and theory-by-way-of-identity.
While ASM, for example, waned in part because of particular, negative readings of its
associations and affinities with structuralism and Marxism, other structuralist29 and
Marxist associations have acquired a degree of respectability and acceptance in various
post-structuralist, semiotic, and literary tendencies well represented in contemporary
anthropological discourse. Even if class- and economically orientated Marxism is
regarded as retrograde, indicative of what some dismiss as folk tales, exhausted master
narratives of social theory (see Tyler 1987), the Marxism of identity/cultural politics is
viable.30
Conclusion
Although ASM is generally perceived as passé, the kinds of things it sought to explain
have neither disappeared magically behind the punditry of ‘globalization’ nor have
earlier ASM analyses of the durability and variety of uneven development been convincingly
superseded by superior explanations.31 Instead, what ASM set out to achieve
may simply have proved too difficult and unwieldy: individualistic, fieldwork-based
analyses of the global encounters among the diverse shadows of pre-capitalism and
capitalism.32 Where it failed was not so much in its theoretical ambitions, but in its
power and relevance to the current cultural landscape, able neither to challenge the
managerial systems of modernization nor to persuade by the power of argument and
fact. This does not negate the ambition of a ‘critical anthropology’ as a social science,
but does render it marginalized.
An associated effect of this marginalization, and one evident in the culturalist swing
in anthropology since the 1980s, is that the effective scope of anthropology is increasingly
seen to lie within a humanities rather than social-scientific tendency. There is a
possibly instructive analogy with the circumstances of sociology as described by
Burawoy, who notes in the case of that discipline that regardless of the potency of
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arguments for and against the pursuit of unified-field andmulti-disciplinary strategies,
the struggle still remains situated ‘in the abiding foundations of the societies that
created them. Thus, to wish them away is to indulge in utopian fantasy’ (2005: 518).
A quite different evaluation bears the weight of opinion in many current overviews
of the state of anthropological theory.Here the tendency is towards modifying, perhaps
to the point of severing, connections with its epistemological roots, ones shared with
sociology. In an indicative piece, Yanagisako, for example, writes:
In sociocultural anthropology, the innovative theoretical and methodological developments of the
past quarter century – including reflexive, feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and transnational
approaches to culture – were not generated by competition between cultural anthropology and other
fields in the discipline; nor were they stimulated by competition with evolutionary approaches to
culture. Rather, they were incited by the growing dissatisfaction of sociocultural anthropologists with
prevailing forms of cultural theory, including structural-functionalist, economic determinist, psychological,
cognitive and androcentric approaches. This dissatisfaction led us to look beyond the boundaries
of the discipline to scholarship in the humanities and other social sciences (2005: 95-6).
Many of the positively evaluated adjectives cited in the passage above, portrayed as
part of an internal conversation in anthropology, were also characteristic of other
tendencies in the field, ASM included, but it remains a matter of debate whether the
critical posture ‘socio-cultural anthropology’ is better served by a narrowed reading
‘cultural theory’. That ASM now commands little attention may in the end – and
ironically – have less to do with the stigma of itsMarxist (and structuralist) associations
than with its fidelity to a conception of the social sciences that continues to acknowledge
the conditions of the societies in which they were created, a contradictory, and not
necessarily conciliatory, space of a ‘disciplinary knowledge’.
NOTES
I would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Earlier versions benefited
from the comments of Stephan Feuchtwang, Jonathan Friedman, Keith Hart, Joel Kahn,Mike Rowlands, and
Mitch Sedgwick, to whom many thanks.
1 Ortner’s (1984) celebrated article expresses a notion of ‘theory’ that captures an agency + structuremodel
that is – broadly – uncontroversial in socio-cultural anthropology. Attempts to disaggregate the terms are
generally resisted, as in Ingold (2000), for example, and Segal & Yanigasako (2005).
2 Wolf observes that it is now difficult to teach anthropology of the former sort in as much as: ‘It used to
be that we taught our students about the people out there. Now the very same people sit in my classroom
[and] explain the virtues of various medicines and the physical power of witchcraft’ (Friedman 1987: 117).
3 The ‘rationality debate’ provides instructive examples (see Wilson 1970).
4 The genre of ‘reflexive anthropology’ has emerged to accommodate this self-consciousness.
5 The ‘ethnographic present’, for example, often has mystifying effects when extended into the ‘actual
present’.
6 ASM is broadly defined. Here it includes both a UK tendency directly shaped by French influences (and
with very Althusserian overtones) and a US tendency with different Marxist sources and much less structuralist
affiliation. Although Marxism has different histories in the two national traditions (see Mintz et al.
1984),ASM is represented in the simultaneous critique of both fields as exemplified in Asad (1974) andHymes
(1969).
7 Ironically, it is precisely Marx and Engel’s acknowledgment of holism/interdependence of institutions –
prior to the emergence of modern anthropology – that provides such a fundamental link between Marxism
and anthropology (see discussion in Bloch 1985: 94).
8 Sperber (1985: 60-3) makes a similar point in his critique of relativism.
9 See Bloch (1985) and Wessman (1981), as well as Vincent’s (1985) review of same.
10 See Firth (1975) for a UK ‘institutional’ view. The papers in Hymes (1969) and Asad (1974) provide a
thorough overview.
428 Stephen Nugent
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 419-431
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2007
11 See Scholte (1987) for a critical overview.
12 Sometimes ‘non-market’ is a synonym.
13 Hence, for example, substantivist approaches continue to provide much insight into hidden forms of
domestic labour – even in late capitalist settings – whereas formalism does not.
14 The emphasis is on the new modernizationist programme, exemplified by the wide influence of neoliberalism.
Another one had been going on for 500 years, globalization theory notwithstanding.
15 A ‘task’ still referred back to the ambitions and influences of the founding figures Boas and Malinowski,
hardly figures immune to criticism – often damning – but also figures whose successors never managed to
supplant them, however frequent the father-killing exercises.
16 Even if early on it was recognized that the boundedness of such systems was frequently itself an artefact
of investigation.
17 This – the ‘testing’ of historical materialism on new empirical material – is made abundantly clear in
Terray’s (1972) early discussions, but he also displays what was to become a typical, and destructive, preoccupation
with ‘correct reading’ of canonical texts. Outside the fog of ‘correct reading’, claims that Marxist
analysis applies only to capitalism imply (1) that a capitalist/non-capitalist interface is beyond analysis and/or
(2) that such an analysis cannot be retrospective, such that, by analogy, the appearance of a new species (or
previously thought extinct species) would not be appropriate material for biological analysis.
18 Wallerstein (1974) proposes a different resolution, namely that what the analysis of articulation hints at is
the unsuitability of the units of analysis (‘societies’),the better unit of analysis being the global capitalist system.
19 In crucial respects the key question raised by ASM with regard to pre-capitalism within capitalism may
be seen as a slightly more emphatic statement of the comparativist goal of structure-functionalist explanation,
but going further in seeking to expose a logic of a kind of social reproduction that is apparent in the
ethnographic and historical record, namely the co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist types of societies.
20 What O’Laughlin seems to object to is not the explanation somuch as the lack of theoretical consistency:
how, she asks, can Meillassoux be correct in his analysis if he inadvertently displays an ‘underlying pattern of
evolutionist thought in his work’? (1977: 22) The evolutionist shortcoming is compounded by his alleged
functionalism and empiricism, demonized on the same page.
21 Although geographically diverse, ASM as represented in an area-based framework is probably most
strongly represented in a French colonial African literature focused around the ‘lineage of mode of
production’.
22 See Taylor (1975; 1976) for detailed critique, and reply by Hindess and Hirst (1977). Also see Rod Aya’s
review (1976).
23 It is this work of Meillassoux that forms the subject of the second half of Terray (1972).
24 In the US tradition represented byWolf and Mintz, the issue of articulation is treated differently and is
not the novelty it is in a European context, perhaps – as Mintz (Mintz et al. 1984) implies – because of the
different character of the US ‘colonials’ (internal: Indians).
25 The same holds for such US collections as Littlefield & Gates (1991).
26 Both Lévi-Strauss and Godelier drew on Saussurean and computational notions of ‘system’.
27 In this, Mintz turns the table on Terray (and certain critics of Marxist anthropology), by asking not if
historical materialism worked on the primitive, but whether anthropology worked on the non-primitive.
28 A distraction which, in Friedman (1987: 133), led to ‘self-destruction’.
29 Maurice Henry’s classic cartoon of founding-figure structuralists depicts a fleeting unity.Wearing grass
skirts, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes converse beneath a palm tree (La Quinzaine Letteraire, 1 July
1967).
30 This has given rise to the odd designation post-Marxism, indicating a rejection whose authority is
derived in great part precisely from its association with Marxism.
31 For comparative purposes see ‘The persistence of underdevelopment: institutions, human capital, or
constituencies?’ (Rajan & Zingales 2006, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research), in which
the underlying cause of underdevelopment is attributed to the ‘initial distribution of factor endowments’,
even though conceding that this distribution may well be ‘a legacy of the colonial past’.
32 Among the other liabilities: preponderance of qualitative rather than quantitative methods; long training
times; extended time in the field; small size and poor funding in relation to other social sciences; advocacy
of interests of others; etc.
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© Royal Anthropological Institute 2007
Besteman, C. & H. Gusterman 2005. Why America’s top pundits are wrong: anthropologists talk back
(California Series in Public Anthropology 13). Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bloch, M. (ed.) 1975. Marxist analyses and social anthropology. London: Malaby Press.
——— 1985. Marxism and anthropology: the history of a relationship. Oxford: University Press.
Burawoy, M. 2005. Provincializing the social sciences. In The politics of method in the human sciences:
positivism and its epistemological others (ed.) G. Steinmetz, 508-25. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Clifford, J. & G. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, Berkeley:
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Eriksen, T.H. & F.S. Nielsen 2001. A history of anthropology. London: Pluto Press.
Firth, R. 1975. The sceptical anthropologist? Social anthropology and Marxist views on society. In Marxist
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Foster-Carter, A. 1979. The mode of production controversy.New Left Review 107, 47-78.
Friedman, J. 1975. Tribes, states and transformations. In Marxist analyses and social anthropology (ed.)
M. Bloch, 161-202. London: Malaby Press.
——— 1987. An interview with Eric Wolf. Current Anthropology 28, 107-18.
Godelier, M. 1972. Rationality and irrationality in economics. London: New Left Books.
Hindess, B. & P. Hirst 1975. Precapitalist modes of production. London: Routledge.
———1977.Mode of production and social formation in Pre-capitalist modes of production: a reply to John
Taylor. Critique of Anthropology 8: 2, 49-58.
Hymes, D. (ed.) 1969. Reinventing anthropology. New York: Pantheon.
Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.
Kahn, J. 1975. Economic scale and the cycle of petty commodity production in W. Sumatra. In Marxist
analyses and social anthropology (ed.) M. Bloch, 137-58. London: Malaby Press.
——— 1981. Minangkabau social formations: Indonesian peasants and the world-economy. Cambridge:
University Press.
——— & J. Llobera 1981. Towards a new Marxism or a new anthropology. In The anthropology of
pre-capitalist societies (eds) J. Kahn & J. Llobera, 263-329. London: Macmillan.
Le´vi-Strauss, C. 1961. Tristes tropiques (trans. J. & D.Weightman). London: Hutchinson.
Littlefield, A. & H. Gates (eds) 1991. Marxist approaches in economic anthropology. Lanham, Md.:
University Press of America.
Meillassoux, C. 1964. L’anthropologie économique des Gourou de Côte d’Ivoire. Paris: Mouton.
——— 1981. Maidens, meal and money (trans. F. Edholm). Cambridge: University Press.
Mintz, S., M. Godelier, B. Trigger & H. Hoijer 1984. On Marxian perspectives in anthropology: essays in
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O’Laughlin, B. 1974.Mediation of contradiction: why Mbum women do not eat chicken. InWomen, culture
and society (eds) M. Rosaldo, L. Lamphere & J. Bamberger, 301-39. Stanford: University Press.
——— 1977. Production and reproduction: Meillassoux’s Femmes, greniers et capitaux (review). Critique of
Anthropology 8: 2, 3-32.
Ortner, S. 1984. Theory of anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26,
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Polanyi, K. 1944. The great transformation. New York: Rinehart & Company.
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Rajan, R. & L. Zingales 2006. The persistence of underdevelopment: in stitutions, human capital, or
constituencies? (NBER Working Paper 12093). New York: National Bureau for Economic Research.
Royal Anthropological Institution of Great Britain and Ireland 1960.Notes and queries on anthropology.
London: Routledge.
Sacks, K. 1979. Sisters and wives: the past and future of sexual equality. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age economics. Chicago: Aldine.
Scholte, R. 1987. The literary turn in contemporary anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 7: 1, 33-47.
Segal, D.A. & S.J. Yanagisako (eds) 2005. Unwrapping the sacred bundle: reflections on the disciplining of
anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Snow, C.P. 1993 [1959]. The two cultures. Cambridge: University Press.
Spencer, J. 1996. Marxism and anthropology. In Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology (eds)
A. Barnard & J. Spencer, 352-4. London: Routledge.
Sperber, D. 1985. On anthropological knowledge. Cambridge: University Press.
Taylor, J. 1975. Pre-capitalist modes of production, Pt. I. Critique of Anthropology 4-5, 127-55.
430 Stephen Nugent
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© Royal Anthropological Institute 2007
——— 1976. Pre-capitalist modes of production, Pt. II. Critique of Anthropology 6: 2, 56-69.
Terray, E. 1972. Marxism and primitive societies. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Tyler, S. 1987. Stil rayting. Critique of Anthropology 7: 1, 49-51.
Vincent, J. 1985. Anthropology and Marxism: past and present (review). American Ethnologist 12:1, 137-47.
Wallerstein, I. 1974. The modern world system. New York: Academic Press.
Wessman, J. 1981. Anthropology and Marxism. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing.
Wilson, B. (ed.) 1970. Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wolf, E. 1981. The mills of inequality: a Marxian approach. In Social inequality: comparative and developmental
approaches (ed.) G. Berreman, 41-57. New York: Academic Press.
——— 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——— 1994. Demonization of anthropologists in the Amazon. Anthropology Newsletter, Mar., 2.
Wolpe, H. 1972. Capitalism and cheap labour in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid. Economy and
Society 1, 425-56.
Yanagisako, S.J. 2005. Flexible disciplinarity: beyond the Americanist tradition. In Unwrapping the sacred
bundle: reflections on the disciplining of anthropology (eds) D. Segal & S. Yanagisako, 78-98. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Quelques réflexions sur le marxisme structurel en anthropologie
Résumé
Le principal sujet de cette discussion est la brève carrière du marxisme structuraliste en anthropologie et
la possibilité qu’il soit, malgré tout, encore pertinent. Ce problème se situe dans une autre problématique
plus générale : sur quelle base les théories explicatives sont-elles adoptées et rejetées en anthropologie ? La
discussion du marxisme structuraliste s’inscrit dans les débats récents sur l’opportunité des associations
traditionnelles de l’anthropologie socioculturelle avec d’autres sous-domaines de l’anthropologie. L’auteur
avance que l’isolement des sous-domaines est une régression au niveau de la théorie.
Stephen Nugent teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the Institute for the
Study of the Americas.He has published on ethnohistory and peasant economy in the Brazilian Amazon and
is currently director of the Centre for Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths.
Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK.
ana01sln@gold.ac.uk
Stephen Nugent 431
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 419-431
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2007

Psychology and Marxism

Carl Jung and the search for the soul under Nazi oppression ("We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."). Fetishization of the archetype reveals perverse longing for the alienated self.

I changed from an INFP to an ENFP

Sixteen Personality Types
Test

The Reformer Principled, purposeful, self-controlled & perfectionistic

The Helper: Generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing & possessive

The Achiever: Adaptable, excelling, driven & image-conscious

The Individualist: Expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed & temperamental

The Investigator: Perceptive, innovative, secretive & isolated

The Loyalist: Engaging, responsible, anxious & suspicious

The Enthusiast: Spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive & scattered

The Challenger: Self-confident, decisive, willful & confrontational

The Peacemaker: Receptive, reassuring, agreeable & complacent

http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/

Larry Carlson still fun even when sober....

Henry Darger (outsider artist)

America Is Not Broke | Common Dreams

America Is Not Broke | Common Dreams

***(very good)

Free the Middle East! Free Algeria! Free Lybia! Free Tunisia! Free Egypt! Free Iraq! US out of the Middle East! No Justice, No Peace!

The Manifesto of the 121

From International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.1, Winter 1961, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.



A very important movement is developing in France, and it is necessary that French and world opinion should be better informed about it at a time when the new turn in the Algerian war must lead us to see, and not to forget, the depth of the crisis which opened six years ago.

In greater and greater numbers French people are being prosecuted, imprisoned and condemned for refusing to take part in this war or for going to the aid of the Algerian fighters. Distorted by their enemies, but also watered down by those whose duty it is to defend them, the reasons for their action remains generally misunderstood. It is insufficient merely to say that this opposition to the authorities is respectable. As the protest of men who feel their honor and their idea of truth attacked, it has a significance which passes beyond the circumstances in which it takes place and, it is important to stress, whatever the outcome of events may be.


FOR the Algerians there is nothing equivocal about the struggle whether carried on by diplomatic or by military means. It is a war for national independence. But what is its nature for French people? It is not a foreign war. The soil of France has never been threatened. What is more: the war is being carried on against men whom the State pleases to consider as Frenchmen, but who, for their part, are fighting precisely in order not to be. It is not enough to say that it is a war of conquest, an imperialist war, accompanied in addition by racialism. There is this in every war and the confusion continues.

In fact, by a decision which constitutes a basic abuse, the State first of all mobilized entire age groups of young male citizens for the sole purpose of what it described as a "police action" against an oppressed population, which only revolted through concern for its elementary dignity, since it demands to be at last recognized as an independent community.

Neither a war of conquest, nor a war of "national defence," nor a civil war, the Algerian war has little by little become a war specific to the army and to a caste which refuses to give way before a rising which even the civil power, recognizing the general collapse of colonial empires, seems prepared to understand.

Today it is mainly the army's will which keeps this criminal and absurd conflict going. This army, as a result of the political role which a number of its top representatives make it play, acts at times openly and violently outside all legality, betraying the ends with which it is entrusted by the entire nation. It compromises and threatens to pervert the nation itself, by forcing its citizens under orders to make themselves accomplices of a factious and degrading activity. Is it necessary to recall that, fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitler regime, French militarism, as a result of the exigencies which such a war imposes, has been led to resort to torture and to make torture once again an institution in Europe?

It is under these conditions that many Frenchmen are being led to put in the balance the meaning of the traditional values and duties. What is loyalty when, in certain circumstances, it becomes a shameful submission? Are there not cases when refusal to serve becomes a sacred duty, where "treason" means a courageous respect for truth? And when, by the will of those who use the army as an instrument of racial and ideological domination, the army places itself in open or latent revolt against democratic institutions, doesn't revolt against the army take on a new sense?

The question of conscience was posed from the beginning of the conflict. As the latter lengthens out it is normal that the question of conscience should be resolved in more and more cases by acts of insubordination and desertion as well as protection and help to the Algerian fighters. New movements have developed outside all the official parties, without their assistance, and finally, despite their disavowal. Once more outside the established cadres and slogans a resistance movement has been born, by a spontaneous growth of consciousness, seeking and inventing forms of action and means of struggle in relation to the new situation whose true sense and objects the political groupings and journals have agreed, by inertia, doctrinal timidity or national or moral prejudices, not to recognize.

THE undersigned, considering that everyone must take a stand on acts which it is no longer possible to present as individual acts of adventure; considering themselves, in their place and according to their means, as having the right to intervene, not to give advice to those who have to take a personal decision in the face of such grave problems, but to ask those who judge them not to allow themselves to be deceived by the ambiguity of words and values declare:

* We respect and consider justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

* We respect and consider justified the conduct of the French people who consider it their duty to bring aid and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people.

* The cause of the Algerian people, which is contributing in a decisive way to ruin the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.

Signed by:

* Arthur Adamov, writer
* Robert Antelme, writer and former deportee in Buchenwald
* Georges Auclair, journalist
* Jean Baby
* Hélène Balfet
* Marc Barbut
* Robert Barrat
* Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher
* Jean-Louis Bedouin
* Marc Beigbeder, philosopher and journalist (close to the personalists)
* Robert Benayoun, film-maker and film critic
* Michèle Bernstein, situationist
* Maurice Blanchot, writer
* Roger Blin, actor and dramaturgist
* Arsène Bonnefous-Murat
* Geneviève Bonnefoi
* Raymond Borde
* Jean-Louis Bory, writer, journalist and film critic
* Jacques-Laurent Bost, journalist
* Pierre Boulez, music composer
* Vincent Bounoure
* André Breton, surrealist
* Guy Cabanel
* Georges Condominas, anthropologist
* Alain Cuny, actor
* Jean Dalsace
* Jean Czarnecki
* Adrien Dax
* Hubert Damisch, philosopher
* Guy Debord, situationist
* Bernard Dort
* Jean Douassot
* Simone Dreyfus
* Marguerite Duras, writer
* Yves Ellouet
* Dominique Eluard
* Charles Estienne
* Louis-René des Forêts, writer
* Théodore Fraenkel
* André Frénaud, poet
* Jacques Gernet, sinologist
* Louis Gernet, philologist and sociologist
* Edouard Glissant, writer
* Anne Guérin
* Daniel Guérin, historian
* Jacques Howlett
* Édouard Jaguer, poet and art critic
* Pierre Jaouen
* Gérard Jarlot
* Robert Jaulin, ethnologist
* Alain Joubert
* Henri Krea
* Robert Lagarde
* Monique Lange
* Claude Lanzmann, film-maker
* Robert Lapoujade, painter and film maker
* Henri Lefebvre, sociologist
* Gérard Legrand
* Michel Leiris, writer and ethnologist
* Paul Lévy
* Jérôme Lindon, publisher of Les Éditions de Minuit
* Eric Losfeld
* Robert Louzon
* Olivier de Magny, poet
* Florence Malraux

* André Mandouze, academic
* Maud Mannoni, psycho-analyst
* Jean Martin, actor
* Renée Marcel-Martinet
* Jean-Daniel Martinet
* Andrée Marty-Capgras
* Dionys Mascolo, writer
* François Maspero, editor of Maspero Ed.
* André Masson
* Pierre de Massot, writer and journalist
* Jean-Jacques Mayoux
* Jehan Mayoux
* Théodore Monod, naturalist and explorer
* Marie Moscovici
* Georges Mounin
* Maurice Nadeau, publisher
* Georges Navel
* Claude Ollier, writer (Nouveau Roman)
* Hélène Parmelin, writer, journalist and art critic
* José Pierre, writer
* Marcel Péju
* André Pieyre de Mandiargues, writer
* Edouard Pignon, painter
* Bernard Pingaud
* Maurice Pons, writer
* Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, philosopher and psychoanalyst
* Jean Pouillon, ethnologist
* Madeleine Rebérioux, historian
* Denise René, art gallerist
* Alain Resnais, film-maker
* Jean-François Revel, journalist
* Paul Revel
* Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer (Nouveau Roman)
* Christiane Rochefort, writer
* Jacques-Francis Rolland
* Alfred Rosmer, trade-unionist
* Gilbert Rouget
* Claude Roy, writer
* Françoise Sagan, writer
* Marc Saint-Saëns, tapestrist
* Nathalie Sarraute, writer
* Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher
* Renée Saurel
* Claude Sautet, scenarist and film-maker
* Catherine Sauvage, singer and actress
* Laurent Schwartz, mathematician
* Jean Schuster
* Robert Scipion, journalist and writer
* Louis Seguin, engineer and industrialist
* Geneviève Serreau, actress
* Simone Signoret, actress
* Jean-Claude Silbermann, painter and writer
* Claude Simon, writer
* René de Solier
* D. de la Souchère
* Jean Thiercelin
* François Truffaut, film-maker
* René Tzanck
* Vercors, writer
* Jean-Pierre Vernant, historian
* Pierre Vidal-Naquet, historian
* J.-P. Vielfaure
* Claude Viseux, painter and sculptor
* Ylipe
* René Zazzo, psychologist

What is free will?
Does it exist?
Does anything exist?
Cogito ergo sum.
That's what Descartes said right?
What does Marx say about free will?
"Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will, Marx's philosophy in no way can be reduced to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear."
What about Existentialism?
Here's what Sartre had to say.
I haven't read enough Sartre to understand it. To me existentialism and Marxism conflict.

I. Capitalism: A Society Without Culture

1

Culture can be defined as the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society's reproduction. All forms of capitalist society today are in the final analysis based on the generalized and (at the mass level) stable division between directors and executants: those who give orders and those who carry them out. Transposed onto the plane of culture, this means the separation between "understanding" and "doing," the inability to organize (on the basis of permanent exploitation) the continuously accelerating domination of nature toward any goal whatsoever. For the capitalist class, dominating production requires monopolizing the understanding of productive activity, of work. To achieve this, work is on the one hand more and more parcelized, i.e. rendered incomprehensible to those who do it; and on the other hand, it is reconstituted as a unity by specialized agencies. But these agencies are themselves subordinated to the real directorate, which alone possesses the theoretical comprehension of the whole since it dictates the direction of production in accordance with its general directives. However, this comprehension and these objectives are themselves subjected to a certain arbitrariness since they are cut off from practice and even from all realistic knowledge, which it is in no one's interest to transmit. The total social activity is thus split into three levels: the workshop, the office and the directorate. Culture, in the sense of active and practical comprehension of society, is likewise cut apart into these three aspects. These aspects are reunited (partially and clandestinely) only by people's constant transgression of the separate sectors in which they are regimented by the system.

2

The formative mechanism of culture thus amounts to a reification of human activities, a reification which fixates the living, which models the transmission of experience from one generation to another on the transmission of commodities, and which strives to ensure the past's domination over the future. This cultural functioning enters into contradiction with capitalism's constant need to obtain people's adherence and to enlist their creative activity, within the narrow limits within which it imprisons them. In short, the capitalist order can survive only by ceaselessly fabricating a new past for itself. This can be seen particularly clearly in the cultural sector proper, whose publicity is based on the periodic launching of pseudoinnovations.

3

Work thus tends to be reduced to pure execution and thereby made absurd. As technology evolves, its application is trivialized; work is simplified and becomes more and more absurd. But this absurdity also extends to the offices and laboratories: the ultimate determinations of their activity come from outside them, from the political sphere that runs the whole society. On the other hand, as the activity of the offices and laboratories is integrated into the overall functioning of capitalism, the necessity to fully exploit this activity requires the introduction into it of the capitalist division of labor, that is, of parcelization and hierarchization. The logical problem of scientific synthesis then intersects with the social problem of centralization. The result of these changes is, contrary to appearances, a general lack of culture at all levels of knowledge: scientific synthesis is no longer carried out, science no longer comprehends itself. Science is no longer a real and practical clarification of people's relation with the world; it has destroyed the old representations without being able to provide new ones. The world as unified totality becomes undecipherable; certain specialists are the only people who possess a few fragments of rationality -- fragments which they themselves are incapable of communicating, even to each other.

4

This state of things gives rise to a certain number of conflicts. The technical advances that are a natural tendency of the development of material processes (and largely even a natural tendency of the development of the sciences) often conflict with the technologies that selectively apply those advances in strict accordance with the requirements of exploiting the workers and thwarting their resistance. There is also a conflict between capitalist imperatives and people's elementary needs. Thus the contradiction between present nuclear practices and a still generally prevalent taste for living is echoed even in the moralizing protests of certain physicists. The alterations that man can now bring about in his own nature (ranging from plastic surgery to controlled genetic mutations) also demand an alteration of the society: its self-managed transformation through the abolition of all specialized directors. Everywhere the vastness of the new possibilities poses the urgent alternative: revolutionary solution or science-fiction barbarism. The compromise represented by the present society is contingent on the preservation of a status quo which is in fact everywhere constantly out of its control.

5

Present culture as a whole can be characterized as alienated in the sense that every activity, every moment of life, every idea, every type of behavior, has a meaning only outside itself, in an "elsewhere" which, being no longer in heaven, is only the more maddening to try and locate: a utopia, in the literal sense of the word, dominates the life of the modern world.

6

Having from the workshop to the laboratory emptied productive activity of all meaning for itself, capitalism strives to place the meaning of life in leisure activities and to reorient productive activity on that basis. Since production is hell in the prevailing moral schema, real life must be found in consumption, in the use of goods. But for the most part these goods have no use except to satisfy a few private needs that have been pumped up to meet the requirements of the market. Capitalist consumption imposes a general reduction of desires by its regular satisfaction of artificial needs, which remain needs without ever having been desires -- authentic desires being constrained to remain unfulfilled (or compensated in the form of spectacles). The consumer is in reality morally and psychologically consumed by the market. But above all, these goods have no social use because the social horizon does not extend beyond the factory; outside the factory everything is organized as a desert (dormitory towns, freeways, parking lots...) -- the terrain of consumption. However, the society constituted in the factory has the exclusive domination over this desert. The real use of the goods is simply as status symbols which, in accordance with an inevitable tendency of the industrial commodity, have at the same time become obligatory for everyone. The factory is symbolically reflected in leisure activities, though with enough room for individual variation to allow for the compensation of a few frustrations. The world of consumption is in reality the world of the mutual spectacularization of everyone, the world of everyone's separation, estrangement and nonparticipation. The directorial sphere also strictly directs this spectacle, which is composed automatically and miserably in accordance with imperatives external to the society, imperatives to which absurd values are attributed. (The directors themselves, as living persons, can also be considered as victims of this automated directorial machine.)

7

Outside of work, the spectacle is the dominant mode through which people relate to each other. It is only through the spectacle that people acquire a (falsified) knowledge of certain general aspects of social life, from scientific or technological achievements to prevailing types of conduct and orchestrated meetings of international political celebrities. The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. It answers perfectly to the needs of a reified and alienated culture: the spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order. The ambiguity of all "revolutionary art" lies in the fact that the revolutionary aspect of any particular spectacle is always contradicted and offset by the reactionary element present in all spectacles. This is why capitalist society, in order to streamline its own functioning, must above all continually refine its mechanism of spectacularization. This is obviously a complex mechanism, for if its main role is to propagate the capitalist order, it nevertheless must not appear to the public as a mere capitalistic delirium; it must involve the public by incorporating elements of representation that correspond -- in fragments -- to social rationality. It must sidetrack the desires whose satisfaction is forbidden by the ruling order. For example, modern mass tourism presents cities and landscapes not in order to satisfy authentic desires to live in such human or geographical milieus; it presents them as pure, rapid, superficial spectacles (spectacles from which one can gain prestige by reminiscing about them). Similarly, striptease is the most obvious form of the degradation of eroticism into a mere spectacle.

8

The evolution and the conservation of art have been governed by these lines of force. At one pole, art is purely and simply coopted by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity -- an isolated creativity which serves as an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (and which thus also makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere reserved for "free creative activity" is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed fully and practically. In this sense art can reflect the basic antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separation give rise to the general crisis of traditional artistic means -- a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or to the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention, and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt and destroy it.

II. Culture and Revolutionary Politics

1

The revolutionary movement can be nothing less than the struggle of the proletariat for the actual domination and deliberate transformation of all aspects of social life -- beginning with the management of production and work by the workers themselves, directly deciding everything. Such a change would immediately imply a radical transformation of the nature of work and the development of a new technology designed to ensure the workers' domination over the machines. This radical transformation of the meaning of work will lead to a number of consequences, the main one of which is undoubtedly the shifting of the center of interest of life from passive leisure to the new type of productive activity. This does not mean that overnight all productive activities will become in themselves passionately interesting. But to work toward making them so, by a general and ongoing reconversion of the ends as well as the means of industrial work, will in any case be the minimum passion of a free society. In such a society, all activities will tend to blend the life previously separated between leisure and work into a single but infinitely diversified flow. Production and consumption will merge and be superseded in the creative use of the goods of the society.

2

Such a program proposes to people no reason to live other than their own construction of their own lives. This presupposes not only that people be objectively freed from real needs (hunger, etc.), but above all that they begin to develop real desires in place of the present compensations; that they refuse all forms of behavior dictated by others and continually reinvent their own unique fulfillments; and that they no longer consider life to be the mere maintaining of a certain stability, but that they aspire to the unlimited enrichment of their acts.

3

Such demands today are not based on some sort of utopianism. They are based first of all on the struggle of the proletariat at all levels, and on all the forms of explicit refusal or profound indifference that the unstable ruling society constantly has to combat with every means. They are also based on the lesson of the fundamental defeat of all attempts at less radical changes. Finally, they are based on the extremist strivings and actions appearing today among certain sectors of youth (despite all the efforts at disciplining and repressing them) and in a few artistic milieus. But this basis is indeed utopian in another sense of the word, in that it involves inventing and experimenting with solutions to current problems without being preoccupied with whether or not the conditions for their realization are immediately present. (It should be noted that this utopian sort of experimentation now also plays a key role in modern science.) This temporary, historical utopianism is legitimate; and it is necessary because it serves to incubate the projection of desires without which free life would be empty of content. It is inseparable from the necessity to dissolve the present ideology of everyday life, and therefore the bonds of everyday oppression, so that the revolutionary class can disabusedly discover present and future possibilities of freedom. Utopian practice makes sense, however, only if it is closely linked to the practice of revolutionary struggle. The latter, in its turn, cannot do without such utopianism without being condemned to sterility. Those seeking an experimental culture cannot hope to realize it without the triumph of the revolutionary movement, while the latter cannot itself establish authentic revolutionary conditions without resuming the efforts of the cultural avant-garde toward the critique of everyday life and its free reconstruction.

4

Revolutionary politics thus has as its content the totality of the problems of the society. It has as its form the experimental practice of a free life through organized struggle against the capitalist order. The revolutionary movement must thus itself become an experimental movement. Henceforth, wherever it exists, it must develop and resolve as profoundly as possible the problems of a revolutionary microsociety. This comprehensive politics culminates in the moment of revolutionary action, when the masses abruptly intervene to make history and discover their action as direct experience and as festival. At such moments they undertake a conscious and collective construction of everyday life which, one day, will no longer be stopped by anything.

PIERRE CANJUERS, GUY DEBORD 20 July 1960

Pierre Canjuers (pseudonym of Daniel Blanchard) was at this time a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

I'm just a little sick of liberals and others who focus on issues that are biproducts of capitalism (sexism, homophobia, racism etc.) without looking at the root cause. It's not that I'm against opposing these forms of oppression, I'm just against trying to fix them while completely ignoring the fundamental basis for these oppressions. Please comment, because I know there are going to be some who disagree with me. I don't have a problem with working within the system. I just find that there are a lot of people who are single-issue, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action etc. Again, I'm not opposed to working toward changing these ...things, but I feel they can sometimes be divisive distractions from the things that we have in common. 90% of us (whether pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay, racist/anti-racist etc.) are oppressed under capitalism. Maybe even more than that. I think identity politics divide people. Martin Luther King said in his anti-Vietnam speech, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." There's a saying that the only color that matters is green ($) and you either have it or you don't. Of course, classism does interact with other forms of oppression, but the root is class-inequality. I guess that brings up another good point, which has been hotly debated in leftist circles: is class more important than race/gender/sexual-orientation etc.? I don't really want to address that question here, but it's worth thinking about. Maybe I already have addressed that question....I also wanted to mention another question I brought up in my Gender in Islam class the other day. I asked, "Do you think that there is more gender equality as you go up the socio-economic ladder?" A few WGS students in my class said no, t...hat it's either the same or opposite. I held my tongue, but I really feel that that is wrong. I think the more economic privilege you have the more respect you get, whether you're black, female, gay etc. I think about people like women CEOs of large corporations. They have more power than the average blue-collar working man. Maybe that's beside the point. I guess my point is, I do see more divisiveness in the lower-class community based on demographic lines. Racism, sexism and homophobia seem to be largely working-class problems. I suppose this is because of the divide-and-conquer tactics that the bourgeoisie use to keep working-class people down.I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's very blatant albeit maybe a de facto thing. It comes from a history of divide and conquer that goes back to the very beginnings of capitalism. Slavery, of course, was one of these tactics. Others include over-emphasis on identity and individualism, over-emphasis on "moral" political issues and de-emphasis on economic issues, depoliticization of youth through consumerism etc.Capitalism began around the same time colonialism and industrialism began; around the 18th century. Prior to that there were two other modes of production (according to anthropologist/historian Eric Wolf): the tributary mode (what we know o...f as feudalism/mercantilism) and the kinship mode (what has also been called gift economy/hunter-gatherer/egalitarian; what Marx describes as "primitive communism" etc.). The earliest mode - kinship - encompasses 99% of human history. It was based on kin, whether adopted or biological, and meant that all things were to be for the good of the tribe as a whole. Thus, gift-based economy, reciprocity and sharing were the order of the day. This all changed when agriculture entered the picture. According to Jared Diamond this is when social-stratification, gender inequality and disease came into the picture. People also started to live closer together and become more sedentary. This lasted for a couple of thousand years and eventually became the proto-capitalist system we know of as mercantilism. Mercantilism was the system of exchange under the tributary mode of production. The difference between mercantilism and capitalism is that the merchants did not reinvest their wealth in the means of production, whereas capitalists did. This investment in the means of production meant that the bosses were able to siphon off profits from the fruit of other people's labor. This is the main distinction between mercantilism and capitalism and it is why, in general, people had less agency under capitalism.I don't think there's anything "natural" about capitalism. I think it's in fact against human nature. We are a cooperative species, as Kropotkin makes clear. Capitalism makes us compete with one another. If we worked together more then ...we could accomplish much more. A good post-modern example is open-source software or the various Wiki sites. To go back to your point about the Forest People, many of these kinship-based peoples are going extinct because of global capitalism's need to incorporate everything and everyone into the marketplace. Nobody profits from egalitarian, nomadic tribes and if they're subsisting in traditional ways they're not buying anything and they don't need to earn a wage. Most of these peoples live in areas that were until recently considered untouchable for various reasons. Now with newer technology these peoples' land is being dug up for minerals, timber etc. and they are being told to get jobs and become consumers. There is currently an indigenous rights movement that is trying to keep the last vestiges of pristine living in tact. Many of the tribes who today live traditional lifestyles only live that way because they have fought for it, whether legally, violently or otherwise. A good example of violent indigenous resistance to capitalism is the Ogoni and the Ijaw in the Niger Delta fighting against Shell.Ok, so what's the moral of all this that I've just written? Marx described the modes of production along a unilinear evolutionary timeline. Clearly there are problems with this, particularly the unilinear part. There are so-called "primi...tive-communist" societies that still exist today. China evolved from a tributary economy to a communist economy without ever going through industrial capitalism. That said, Marx I think was right in saying that mankind had to go through these stages to get to anything resembling industrial communism. Many scholars describe the current period as "late capitalism." I like that. Maybe it's naive, but the idea that this period is just the warm up to the inevitable revolution makes me warm and tingly inside. We can't go back to the kinship mode (as green anarchists/primitivists would have us believe) because there are too many people on the earth. We need to progress into something new and I think that next step is something resembling socialism or one sort or another.

Wisconsin Strike
Student Walkout
We are entering a period of revolution throughout the world. From Libya to Wisconsin! Long Live Revolution! The youth of the nation have always been the advance guard of freedom and liberation. Things are changing in the Middle East because the youth are through with it. The youth in Wisconsin are also quite aware of the evils of capitalism. Of course, the protests throughout the Middle East are not quite anti-capitalist. In fact, Hugo Chavez said we must not beat the war drums. However, many leftists have been looking at what is going on in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Algiers etc. and being encouraged. Perhaps this is a new era. Of course some idiots in the Tea Party are not taking the situation very seriously and the US government seems to have an ambivalent and cautious attitude toward the turmoil going on in the region. This is because they are not yet sure what kind of regime will replace the current ones. Could it be a socialist regime per chance? Maybe not, but time will tell.

Soviet Montage:
Eisenstein;


Lev Kuleshov;


Vsevolod Pudovkin;


Dziga Vertov;

Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

We can say without exaggeration that never before has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of “peace,” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific, or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world), or of revolutionary knowledge (which, to change the world for the better, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity take place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically “artistic” personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the statues of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions. If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where Thermidorean reaction is now reaching its climax.

It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword: “Neither fascism nor communism!” a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the Philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the “democratic” past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.

The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called “cultural” organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to ever sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession.

The repugnance which this shameful negation of the principles of art inspires in the artistic world--a negation which even slave states have never dared carry so far--should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation. The opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes which are destroying, along with the right of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility and even human dignity.

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary State has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without the constraint from the outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called “pure” art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist organizations, which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to this revolution, among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which may be reunited all revolutionary writers and artists, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical, and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police-patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and by his henchman, Garcia Oliver.

We know very well that thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as “degenerate.” Every free creation is called “fascist” by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud its right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the new direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left-wing which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and methods of action.
When a preliminary international contract has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. the final step will be the assembling of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:
The independence of art--for the revolution;
The revolution--for the complete liberation of art!

Andre Breton tried to form a surrealist wing of the Communist Party.
Socialism and Surrealism

Surrealist poetry (translated):

BENJAMIN PERET

1899-1958

The Staircase with a Hundred Steps

The blue eagle and the demon of the steppes
in the last cab in Berlin
Legitimate defence
of lost souls
the red mill at the beggars' school
awaits the poor student
With the housemaid Know huntsmen how to hunt on pay-day
Know huntsmen how to hunt
as papa speculates
with the smile
By the dagger the dagger the dagger
the tiger of the seas dreams of happiness
Avenged
The vestal virgin of the Ganges cries out Vanity
when the flesh succumbs
Stop look and listen
the famous turkey spends a day of pleasure
turning round in an enchanted circle
with the pluck of a lion
M'sieur the major
My Paris
my uncle from America
my heart and my legs
slaves of beauty
admire the conquests of Nora
while someone asks for a typewriter
for the black pirate
It is not possible
that a woman dressed as the Merry Widow
could become the wind's prey
because the millionairess Madame Sans-Gene
leads a wild existence
in another's skin
Her son was right
Patrol-leader 129 who wears an Italian straw-hat
and is the ace of jockeys
is abandoning a little adventuress
for a woman
It is the April-Moon which chases the buffalo
to Notre-Dame of Paris
Oh what a bore the indomitable man
with clear eyes
wishes to judge him by the law of the desert
but the lovers with children's souls have gone away
Ah what a lovely voyage



Making Feet and Hands

Eye standing up eye lying down eye sitting

Why wander about between two hedges made of stair-rails while the ladders become soft
as new-born babes
as zouaves who lose their homeland with their shoes
Why raise one's arms towards the sky since the sky
has drowned itself without rhyme or reason
to pass the time and make its moustaches grow
Why does my eye sit down before going to bed
because saddles are making donkeys sore
and pencils break in the most unpredictable fashion
the whole time
except on stormy days
when they break into zigzags
and snowy days
when they tear their sweaters to pieces
But the spectacles the old tarnished spectacles
sing songs while gathering grass for cats
The cats follow the procession
carrying flags
flags and ensigns
The fish's tail crossing a beating heart
the throat regularly rising and falling to imitate the sea surrounding it
and the fish revolving about a ventilator
There are also hands
long white hands with nails of fresh greenery
and finger-joints of dew
swaying eyelashes looking at butterflies
saddened because the day made a mistake on the stairs
There are also sexes fresh as running water
which leap up and down in the valley
because they are touched by the sun
They have no beards but they have clear eyes
and they chase dragonflies
without caring what people will say

Ballad of the Moon

translated by Will Kirkland

The moon came into the forge
in her bustle of flowering nard.
The little boy stares at her, stares.
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her amrs,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings."
"Let me dance, my little one.
When the gypsies come,
they'll find you on the anvil
with your lively eyes closed tight.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
I can feelheir horses come."
"Let me be, my little one,
don't step on me, all starched and white!"

Closer comes the the horseman,
drumming on the plain.
The boy is in the forge;
his eyes are closed.
Through the olive grove
come the gypsies, dream and bronze,
their heads held high,
their hooded eyes.

Oh, how the night owl calls,
calling, calling from its tree!
The moon is climbing through the sky
with the child by the hand.

They are crying in the forge,
all the gypsies, shouting, crying.
The air is veiwing all, views all.
The air is at the viewing.

- Federico García Lorca

Early experimental cinema

Why Hugo Chavez is my #1 hero

The Gospel According to Christian Atheism
Catholic Radicalism
Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism. In fact, the Party has its own Religion Commission which seeks to build positive relations with religious people and communities in the struggle to make life better for working people. Most religious people believe in justice, peace, and respectful relations among the peoples of the world, and many are motivated by their faith to work for those goals.

Membership in the Communist Party is open to all who agree with our program, regardless of religious beliefs.
(CPUSA)