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Neo-Marxism

Structural Marxism and Political Economy

A major criticism of the early school of symbolic anthropology was their lack of curiosity in the production and maintenance of symbols as they relate to issues of power and inequality. The social turmoil experienced throughout the world in the 60's and 70's, with decolonization and strong social and political movements, influenced a more explicit Marxist-based anthropology in the West. Marxist work had long provided the foundation for much of Chinese and Russian anthropology, and it had also long inspired early Western anthropology. But the political climate in the West had not been conducive to explicit recognition of Marxist inspired work until the late 1960's. The questioning of the existing order throughout the world at this period, moved anthropologists to consider not only the historical links of their discipline with political projects, but also the nature of their theoretical paradigms as products of Western-captialist-bourgeosie ideology. Two distinct neo-Marxist schools in anthropology arose at this time, structural Marxism and Political Economy.

Structural Marxism was a mix of the French inspired Marxism of Meillasoux and Godelier and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. It was quite popular in 1970's Dutch, Scandanavian, and Indian anthropology. It was characterized by a focus on the social and political organization of production and the asymmetrical relations of production. Unlike ecological materialism and other forms of Marxism, Structural Marxists identified the determining forces at play not as environment, technology or economy, but as the social relations within which people were embedded (kinship systems, for example). Such a perspective argued that British social anthropology had masked the politics of social and cultural life. Structural Marxists believe that cultural phenomena serve the function of legitimating and reproducing processes of inequality and exploitation. Culture was converted into ideology and controlled social reproduction.

While Structural Marxists still maintained their focus on the dynamics of power in relatively discrete societies or cultures, the second school of neo-Marxist anthropology loosely termed "Political Economy" cast the Marxist analyses farther, to the greater geo-political and economic spheres. Inspired by the World Systems Theory and dependency theory in political sociology (Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, and others) these anthropologists focused on the effects of state and capitalist penetration on largely peasant communities. Peasants were now being recognized as situated within states and wider spheres of exchange and influence. A natural corollary to this approach was the importance of history. Research often focused around identity and class struggle as a product of capitalist expansion.

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