Rousseau’s emphasis on history as being a self correcting tool to validate or contradict the statements of politicians clearly influences Marx’s understanding of the connection between the structure and the mode of production. Epicurean thought, which focused on the agency of the individual, the absence of a divine power, and the importance of contingency over teleology, was pervasive in Marx’s writing, including his dissertation work. Marx was heavily influenced by extensive reading of Classical and Enlightenment era philosophers. It developed as a critique and alternative to the domination of Euro-American capitalism and Eurocentric perspectives in the social sciences. Marxist anthropology came about through the works of Marx and Engels and their followers. Social evolution can be slowed, but not stopped. A key tool of the ruling classes is the elaboration of mystification in ideology, which results in the false consciousness of the lower class. However the ruling classes have a vested interest in maintaining their power and will seek to resist such change, though futilely in the long run, by whatever means they can. It is inevitable that change will occur and that the classes will realign themselves. Class struggle is the prime mover for such a system to advance stages. This base determines the superstructure (laws, governments, and other legal and political apparati), and both determine the ideology (including philosophies, religions, and the ideals which prevail in a society at any one time). The modes of production form the base or infrastructure of a society. Marx did not see these stages as progressive steps that every culture must progress through, but as being the development of historically contingent communities and their modes of production. The Marxist version of this resulted in transitions of stage from primitive communism, through feudalism and capitalism, to communism stages are judged in terms of the modes of production which dominate each stage. Morgan proposed that societies moved from more primitive to more civilized stages of development. Both of these men were influenced by Louis Henry Morgan and his model of social evolution based on material concerns. Lewis Henry Morgan’s materialist focus had lead Marx to making extensive notes on Ancient Society (1877), which Engels would later expand into The Origin…. Marx, whose orientation was largely materialist and historicist, framed his analysis around four central points: the physical reality of people, the organization of social relations, the value of the historical context of development, and the human nature of continuous praxis.Īs far as anthropology is concerned, the foundational work is Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: In Light of the Investigations of Lewis H. The rationale for the development of capitalism and the need to move towards communism is developed fully in Capital (1867), but introduced in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx was a revolutionary who focused his efforts on understanding capitalism to overthrow it. Marxism is essentially an economic interpretation of history based primarily on the works of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels.
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