Interpretations of Marx

Karl Marx considered the basic questions of social life to formulate a critical theory of Capitalism based on a radical concept of history. For Marx, history created the context for social action, but people created history. The creation of history involves culture, identity and interpretation, and people can attain a critical consciousness of their own social actions. Marxists take a holistic, dialectic approach to the study of human history. Holism prevents scholars from reducing real life to its parts (culture, economy, politics, or society) with different theories to account for these parts. The dialectic directs scholars to study society as an interconnected whole.

For over a century, Western Marxism has developed and diversified through scholarship. Today it is not a single, unified, doctrinaire theory of society that can simply be hitched to our empirical cart or that critics can dismiss in a few terse sentences. It is instead a tradition of thought, a philosophy, and a mode of theoretical production that has and will produce many theories of society. In communist states, Marxism became a totalitarian party communism that used archaeology to legitimate the state (Klejn Reference Klejn1991, 70; Reference Klejn1993; Trigger Reference Trigger1995, 326). Western Marxism rejects party communism. Many Western Marxist archaeologists adopted a traditional or classical Marxism based in Engels’ (Reference Engels1927) dialectics of nature (Woods & Grant Reference Woods and Grant2015). This includes Anglophone scholars (Childe Reference Childe, Daniel and Chippindale1989; Gilman Reference Gilman1998; Patterson Reference Patterson2003; Trigger Reference Trigger1995; Reference Trigger2003) and the Hispanic Arqueología Social (Bate Reference Bate1998; Lull & Micó Reference Lull and Micó2011; Lull et al. Reference Lull, Micó, Montón and Picazo1990; Lumbreras Reference Lumbreras1974; Tantaleán Reference Tantaleán2016; Vargas & Sanoja Reference Vargas Arenas, Sanoja, Politis and Alberti1999). Others developed a critical archaeology drawn from French Structural Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci (Leone Reference Leone2005; Shackel Reference Shackel2000). In North America, many researchers embrace a Hegelian or relational Marxism (McGuire Reference McGuire1992; Reference McGuire2008; Wurst Reference Wurst2002). These Western Marxist archaeologies form an overlapping continuum from the more scientific Classical Marxism to the more humanistic relational Marxism.

Critiques of Marxist archaeology rarely do the hard study to understand the range and depth of positions that different Western approaches embody. Some symmetrical archaeologists reject Marxism out of hand. They cherry-pick from Mark Leone's Marxist studies of representation and present Leone's critical archaeology as the whole of Marxism (Harris & Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017, 24).

Hegelian relational dialectic

Dialectical thinking begins with social relations rather than with the definition of concrete entities (such as classes, the economy, modes of production). These entities are just the surface manifestations of a web of dialectically related social relations. A web of complex interconnections defines any given entity by its relationship to other entities. Masters do not exist without slaves, nor slaves without masters. An underlying social relationship, slavery, defines both master and slave. Each social entity requires the presence of its opposite and the social relationship that creates them both. This is the unity of opposites.

A relational dialectic does not assume that the entities making up the social whole will fit comfortably together. They might fit, but change does not come from these functional relations. Rather, change originates from relational contradictions that are inherent in the unity of opposites. Thus, slavery defines both the master and the slave. For one to exist, so too must the other, yet they are opposites and as such inherently in conflict. Each has contrary interests and a different lived experience in the context of a shared history. Change in relations is never simply quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative changes can lead to qualitative change, and qualitative change necessarily implies quantitative change. Conflicts that result from relational contradictions may result in quantitative changes in those relations that build to a qualitative change. The social relations that spring from such a qualitative change remake the old with the addition of the new.

A relational dialectic is a way of viewing the world and a method of inquiry. It neither predicts nor explains social change (Ollman Reference Ollman2003, 12). The explanations of social change lie in historically specific social relations and contradictions. A successful dialectical view of the world helps archaeologists to choose important problems and steers them to the empirical observations needed to evaluate those problems. It provides a framework for making empirical observations that help scholars to build knowledge, make critique and act in the world.

A relational Marxism builds praxis (McGuire Reference McGuire2008). Praxis originates from the realization that people make the social world in their everyday lives, and that they can also transform that world. Effective praxis requires that people know the world, critique the world and act in the world. Action without factual knowledge of the world will fail, but simple empiricism will not produce useful knowledge. Archaeologists produce knowledge in a complex dialectic between the reality that they observe, the methods that they use and the consciousness that they bring to that observation. They need to be self-reflexive and critical about how those factors affect their questions and knowledge production. If archaeologists fail to question the ethics, politics, epistemology and reality behind their knowledge, then their actions in the world will be unreliable and filled with unanticipated, harmful and/or counterproductive consequences. Critique without knowledge causes self-delusion and critique without action yields nihilism.

Symmetrical archaeology

The principle advocates for symmetrical archaeology—Michael Shanks (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmore and Witmore2012), Bjørnar Olsen (Reference Olsen2010), Christopher Witmore (Reference Witmore2014; this volume) and Þóra Pétursdóttir (Reference Pétursdóttir2017)—begin with a critique of post-modern archaeology. They accuse it of being preoccupied with the individual, meaning and the socio-cultural, and of ignoring the ‘thingly component’ of the past. They argue that post-modernism created an asymmetrical relationship between people and things, favouring the human over the thingly.

Symmetrical archaeologists make the relationship between people and things equal. They want to study things not simply as useful objects, or as empty vessels to be filled with human meaning, but as actants. They reject the ‘foolishness’ of human exceptionalism and dismiss making humans the centre of everything. Symmetrical archaeology, at least initially, creates a flat ontology that places things, animals and humans on the same plane (Olsen & Witmore Reference Olsen and Witmore2015). They leave open the possibility of highlighting the human, but they begin their analyses by deprioritizing people.

Dualism and the dialectic

Symmetrical archaeologists reject any notion of dualism. Dualisms prioritize Western ontologies at the expense of non-Western ontologies. Dualisms are essentialist. They assume that every entity possesses attributes (essences) that define its identity, as opposed to the essences of other entities. Finally, dualisms impose categories that may or may not exist and that may or may not be useful to analysis. The symmetrical archaeologists’ polemic, however, paradoxically depends upon a dualism between Cartesian (dualistic) thought and relational (non-dualistic) thinking.

This disdain for dualism drives symmetrical archaeologists’ denunciation of Marxism (Harris & Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017, 90–94). They dismiss the dialectic as either inadequately relational or as a form of dualism. They scorn Daniel Miller's (Reference Miller2012) dialectical work on materiality for being insufficiently relational. They profoundly misidentify the Marxist unity of opposites as a dualism (Webmoor & Witmore Reference Webmoor and Witmore2008, 56–61). They do not even consider the Hegelian relational dialectic, which is a more powerful tool than the relational empiricism that they advocate.

Calling the Hegelian dialectic a dualism misconstrues the core concept of the unity of opposites. The opposites in a dialectic are not essentialist categories. Rather, an underlying social relationship creates the opposites and changes in that relationship transform the entities. Explanations of the dialectic discuss two opposites to simplify the concept. But in real historical cases, the underlying relationships are complex, multifaceted and entail multiple entities. In the US south, the underlying relationship of antebellum slavery called forth the master and the slave in Alabama, but it also called forth the overseer on the plantation, the cotton merchant in Charleston and the workers standing at their looms in Manchester, England. A slave rebellion that disrupted the production of cotton or a strike that stopped the looms could have transformed the whole complex web of relations that make up the mode of production.

Critics use a tripartite dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis to dismiss the active and relational character of the dialectic (Harris & Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017, 91). This commonly invoked triad is not relational because it is mechanical and because it suggests closure (synthesis). This triadic concept has nothing to do with a relational Hegelian dialectic or with Marx's dialectic (Mueller Reference Mueller1958). Hegel did not use the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad. Emanuel Kant defined thesis and antithesis; later, his student Johann Gottlieb Fichte added synthesis to create the tripartite dialectic (McFarland Reference McFarland and Taylor2002). In a single passage, Hegel references Kant's use of thesis and anti-thesis, but he does not accept Kant's definition of the dialectic, nor does he use the term ‘synthesis’ (Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1966). Marx used a relational Hegelian dialectic, not the triad (Ollman Reference Ollman2003). The frequent attribution of this tripartite dialectic to Hegel or Marx results from inept readings of Hegel and Marx. In archaeology, critics invoke the triad to mischaracterize all concepts of the dialectic as dualisms (Harris & Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017, 91). They also ignore the fact that the relational dialectic resolves symmetrical archaeology's dualism between Cartesian versus relational thinking.

Symmetrical ontology

Romanticized, aestheticized ruins photography captivates the viewer with decaying things and human absence. Human absence realizes symmetrical archaeology's rejection of an anthropocentric archaeology. Symmetry comes from a flat ontology that assumes humans, animals and things have the same nature of being in the world.

In contrast, Marxists archaeologists stress that people, animals and things have distinctive ontologies. Marx (Reference Marx1906, 198) contrasts bees and humans: “a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”. Marxist archaeologists realize that things do not suffer as humans do (Bernbeck Reference Bernbeck, Kaniuth, Lau and Wicke2018). Things do not feel pain, agony, loss, fatigue, distress, or terror. If you prick things, they do not bleed. If you tickle them, they do not laugh.

The cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold2011, 172–88) compares trees and houses in an example of a symmetrical ontology that rejects the oppositions of nature and culture and natural organism versus cultural design. The tree, like a house, is lived in. DNA does not simply prefigure the form of the tree, but rather the tree's form emerges through being in the world. Similarly, a house is not a fixed thing, but rather a material process built by the people and animals that live in it. Both trees and houses emerge from the relational meshwork of people, animals, plants, materials, weather, etc. He concludes that trees and house differ not as natural organism versus cultural design, but rather by their degree of human engagement. He concludes that trees and houses exist in the same ontological realm.

Ingold's analysis enhances a relational understanding of trees or houses, but things do not have to exist on the same ontological plane to be understood relationally. Ingold's similarities do not change the truth of Marx's comparison of bees and architects. He insightfully observes that trees and houses differ in their degrees of human engagement, but he does not demonstrate an absence of ontological difference. Trees may vary in their degree of human involvement—think of topiary versus a pine tree in the forest. But to understand the difference between topiary and a wilderness pine tree we must evoke human consciousness, concepts of aesthetics, and perhaps even class relations. Such relations are essential to being human in the world but are not part of being thingly in the world.

Þóra Pétursdóttir (Reference Pétursdóttir2017) studies ‘drift matter’ (marine debris) that washes up along the beaches of northern Norway and Iceland. This material floats and amasses in intertidal zones. It can be a resource for humans who walk the beach, or a global environmental problem. Pétursdóttir perceptively argues that drift matter exposes both opportunities and impediments for an anthropocene archaeology. She asks how the physical and ideological changes of the anthropocene will affect the craft of archaeology, and how can archaeology significantly address these challenges? She takes drift matter seriously as active agents that exist in a posthuman space.

Tragically, posthuman material agents are not the only things drifting onto the world's shores. Recently, thousands of refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Río Grande in Texas. We cannot forget the heartbreaking photograph of 27-month-old Alan Kurdi's body washed up on a Turkish beach (Kurdi Reference Kurdi2018). If we accept a flat ontology, a symmetrical archaeology that eschews an anthropocentric approach, then must we initially treat drift matter and the body of a child equally? Olsen and Witmore (Reference Olsen and Witmore2015) argue that ontology should be flat only in the first instance. In the second instance, may we recognize the humanity and heartbreak of a dead child on the beach?

Yet at least some symmetrical archaeologists do equate the ontology of things with suffering. These archaeologists claim that exploited things deserve more attention than humans. Olsen (Reference Olsen2003, 100) argues: ‘Archaeologists should unite in the defense of things, a defense of those subaltern members of the collective that have been silenced and “othered” by the imperialist social and humanistic discourses’. This equation of human exploitation and suffering with the being of things concerns many archaeologists. In a well-argued critique of the symmetrical archaeology, Severin Fowles (Reference Fowles2016) notes that in the last decades of the twentieth century, non-Western peoples resisted being subjects of Western research. Their resistance disrupted Western scholarship and led some anthropologists and related scholars to treat non-human objects as quasi-human subjects. It is easier to study things than people, argues Fowles, because things do not talk back (yet another ontological difference).