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In the Matter of Marxism 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 13 1 IN THE MATTER OF MARXISM Bill Maurer The real unity of the world consists in its have insisted on an account of actually existing materiality, and this is proved not only by a few ‘men’ in their real, material conditions of exis- juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome tence. Reactions against abstraction in theory development of philosophy and natural science. more recently often explicitly or implicitly (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877) invoke the Marxist heritage as both a theoreti- cal formation and an agenda for oppositional You make me feel mighty real. political practice. As Marx wrote in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have (Sylvester, 1978) only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Or, as a colleague once put it to me, ‘Derrida never helped save a WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH Guatemalan peasant.’ MARXISM? This chapter uses a narrow delineation of the field of Marxist-inspired debate and critique, emphasizing those anthropologists (and, to a It is difficult to think about materiality, or to lesser extent, archaeologists) who explicitly think materially about the social, without invoke Marxism in its various guises and who thinking about Marxism. The Cold War led seek in Marxist theories a method and a theory many scholars in the West to use ‘materialism’ for thinking materially about the social. The as a code word for Marxism for much of the chapter pays particular attention to the instances twentieth century. More recently, in certain when such authors attempt to think critically quarters of social scientific thought, materiality about what difference it makes to stress mate- stands in for the empirical or the real, as against riality and to think ‘materially’. Such an exer- abstract theory or discourse. Materiality is also cise, however, while admittedly also bounded invoked as causal and determinative, as mov- by the partiality imposed by the imperatives of ing things and ideas toward other states of the essay format, cannot escape replicating the being. Invoked in this sense, materiality, with a antinomies of Marxist thought itself. nod or more to Marxism, is sometimes offered Perhaps the greatest of these is the tension as a corrective to the idea that concepts or ideas between the dialectical method and historical are autonomous and causal, or as an attack materialism that inflected subsequent argu- against presumed extravagances of ‘postmod- ments about the nature and analytical standing ernism’ or other forms of ‘idealism’. of materiality. This tension derives from Marx’s This review of Marxism and the problem assertion of the practical and objective basis of materiality is concerned with the supposed of humans’ subjective consciousness, his inver- limits of critical reflection for dealing with sion of Hegel’s dialectic, and the reductionist actually existing materialities embodied in tendencies that Marx shared with many living, human agents as well as the sedimented nineteenth-century social and natural philoso- histories and concrete objects that occupy the phers as diverse as Auguste Comte and Charles world. Historically, Marxist-oriented scholars Darwin. In the nineteenth century various 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 14 14 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES materialisms sprung up in reaction to, or were human mind’ (1978: 27). Here, the architect’s enlisted against, G.W.F. Hegel’s idealist theory imagination is simply a reflection of his material of history. For Hegel, the Absolute, the univer- reality, his material conditions of existence. sal spirit, moved people to perceive the contra- There is no dialectical movement. So, where dictions in the governing ideas of the age; the dialectic between consciousness and prac- through the dialectic between each idea and tice distinguishes the worker from the bee, still its opposite, men achieve new understandings the worker’s ideational or subjective reality and move human history ultimately to culmi- ultimately ‘reflects’ the material world in the nate in a Christian state. For Marx, material last instance. forces and relations of production moved Marx laid the groundwork for both his people to realize the contradictions of their dialectical method and his materialist theory of material existence, culminating in revolution- history in responding to Ludwig Feuerbach’s ary transformation. Inverting Hegel – placing rejection of Hegelian idealism. For Feuerbach, matter over thought in a determinative albeit Hegel’s theory of history as the unfolding of dialectical position – opened the door to a the absolute idea neglected sensuous and solidification, as it were, of materiality itself as empirically perceptible reality in all its multi- irreducibly real regardless of any human effort farious particularity, by positing that that real- to conceptualize it; as autonomous; and as ity was the expression of spirit, much as in determinative, in the last instance, of every- Christianity Jesus is the material incarnation of thing else. Dialectics gave way to reductionist divinity. Thus, according to Feuerbach, ‘[t]he causality even as that causal argument gave Hegelian philosophy is the last magnificent Marx a means of seeing human ideas and attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost human societies unfolding in history without and wrecked, through philosophy’ (Feuerbach relying on the Christian metaphysics implicit 1966: 34). in Hegel’s universal spirit. Marx is often said to have married Although writers on Marx have sometimes Feuerbach’s materialism to Hegel’s dialectic. argued that his writings betray a dialectical Indeed, the Theses on Feuerbach bear out this phase (‘the early Marx’) and a historical mate- claim. ‘Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really rialist phase (‘the late Marx’, or, sometimes, distinct from the thought objects, but he does ‘the works written with Engels’), within Capital not conceive human activity itself as objective itself one finds evidence of the tension between activity’ (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach). For Marx, dialectial and historical materialism. In distin- in contrast, ‘The question whether objective guishing the labor of humans from that of truth can be attributed to human thinking is not animals, Marx emphasized humans’ capacity a question of theory but is a practical question.’ for projective consciousness, humans’ ability Marx here criticized Feuerbach’s materialism for to plan a material world in advance of their its refusal to see human thought as a material own shaping of it: process, a practical, dialectical engagement with the sensuous world. A spider conducts operations that resemble those The dialectic is difficult to sustain, however, of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an given the imperatives of the new ‘science’ of architect in the construction of her cells. But what Marxism in the nineteenth and twentieth distinguishes the worst architect from the best of centuries, and the social and humanistic fields bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in that would try to adopt it. In a review essay imagination before he erects it in reality. on Marx and anthropology, William Roseberry (1978: 174) (1997) spent considerable time worrying over the distinctions and relations among ‘what men This passage nicely demonstrates the dialec- say or imagine, how they are narrated, and men tic between human consciousness and practi- in the flesh’ (p. 29), taking his cue from the cal activity that Marx borrowed from Hegel. It famous passage of The German Ideology: is not simply that people imagine things sepa- rately from the things themselves, but that [W]e do not set out from what men say, imagine, their practical activity in turn shapes their con- conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, sciousness. The worst architect projects his will imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in into material constructions that then not only the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on reflect that will but operate back upon it to shift the basis of their real life-processes we demon- it in another direction. Elsewhere in Capital, strate the development of the ideological reflexes however, one reads that ‘[t]he ideal is nothing and echoes of this life-process. else than the material world reflected by the (Marx and Engels 1970: 47) 03-Tilley-3290-Ch01.qxd 11/17/2005 6:57 PM Page 15 IN THE MATTER OF MARXISM 15 In order to resolve the ultimate epistemological mind and thing. The final opposition is that status of these ‘real men’ vis-à-vis the concep- between realism and empiricism. This may not tual schemes within which they operate (what at first be self-evident, but I use these terms they say, conceive, or what is said or imagined in the particular sense developed by philoso- about them), Roseberry suggested a ‘modest’ phers of science. Realism strives for knowl- reading of the text that would see these ele- edge independent of any theory or any sensory ments as ‘constitut[ing] an indissoluble unity’ act, and discounts the perceptible as the only (Roseberry 1997: 30), echoing the Engels of the or the privileged route to the truth. Empiricism Anti-Dühring as quoted in the first epigraph to discounts anything not perceptible to the senses this chapter. Roseberry also gestured toward or beyond the range of the human sensorum. the critical reflexivity that apprehension of this Realism posits an observer-independent world, unity entails, since the analyst also occupies a and its Platonic presuppositions – that universal position in an analogous unity, which of neces- forms or laws exist autonomously from human sity emphasizes ‘certain “real individuals” and history or consciousness – permit a kind of theo- not others, or certain “purely empirical” rela- retical abstraction disallowed by strict empiri- tionships and not others’ (p. 30). Thinking cism, which depends on the immediately about the indissoluble unity of real ‘men’ and perceptible.
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