Midwestern Marx Panel 1: Marxism and Human Evolution

Panel Prompt:

Towards the end of his life, Karl Marx turned his focus to anthropology and ethnological studies. His health and death made it impossible for him to publish anything substantial in this new field of study. Frederick Engels, however, was able to publish The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, a seminal work in Marxism, grounded on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, a book they both thought confirmed, elucidated, and expanded on some of the central positions they had developed decades earlier. In his Dialectics of Nature, a posthumously published unfinished work of Engels concerning the leading scientific developments of his day, there is also an important essay on human evolution entitled “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” This essay was praised by one of the leading paleontologists and evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, Stephen Jay Gould.

Considering the cursory, aforementioned links between Marxism and the field of anthropology and human evolution, how does the relationship of Marxism to anthropology stand today? Is it any different than what it was in the 1880s? How could one describe the relationship of Marxism to the discoveries made by the field of economic anthropology and figures like Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss, and Marshall Sahlins? What does economic anthropology tell us about the capitalist form of life in relation to the greater part of the history of the species? And how do the critiques which follow from these relate to the Marxist critique of capitalist political economy and culture.

Panelists:

Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

​Mitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Charles Brown is a political activist in Detroit, Michigan. He has degrees in anthropology and is a member of the bar. He teaches anthropology at Community College. His favorite slogan is "What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

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