Marxist and Structural Marxist Perspectives of Hunter-Gatherers

Abstract

Neo-Marxism is an alternative general theory available to hunter-gatherer researchers that views classes, class interest, and class conflict as providing the context for discussing social theory. In Marxist thought, objectivity is a myth, and hunter-gatherers were the original egalitarian communist society: groups where classes do not exist, capital accumulation is absent, egalitarianism dominates, and where the means of production is owned or held in common by all. The evolution of later societal forms brought classes, private ownership, economic specialization and production beyond the household, slavery, and the development of gender and class inequality. The attempt to introduce structural Marxist theory into ethnographic and archaeological research, however, is problematic. In Marxism, the history of culture is a history of class struggle, and, although forms of inequality exist among foraging communities, there seem to lack anything that approximates classes in the usual sense of the term as set forth by Marx and others, so the proposal of a pre-class state of humanity left no mechanism for conflict or social change.