Reasons for Wolf's “Marxian” commitment

Wolf's political sympathies and his willingness to take risks in remaining true to them are evident. Before entering anthropology, during World War II, he risked his life by moving back to Europe as part of a US Army Alpine ski brigade to fight fascism. When he came to Columbia, postwar and pre-McCarthy, Wolf became actively involved in socialist politics. As he described in a 1987 interview with Jonathan Friedman: “All of us were some variant of red. Some of us had actively been members of “the Party” at some point . . . a Marxian stew but not necessarily with any commitment to a particular party line. Sid Mintz and I used to march in the May Day parades. . . . Several of us worked for the Wallace campaign. A lot of us lived on the East Side . . . that was boiling with activity, run by local Italian socialists who had been instrumental in the rise of the American labor party” (1987: 109). After the post-WWII collective euphoria about the United States’ role in defeating fascism had ebbed (Ghani and Wolf 1987: 353), Wolf moreover became an ardent anti-imperialist critic and helped initiate the antiwar “teach-in” movement at the University of Michigan. Resisting the Vietnam War was the inspiration behind his research for Peasant wars (1969: xiii). Wolf today is also widely admired for taking a strong position as chair of the Ethics Committee of the AAA against ethnographic research that aided—or could aid—the US military's counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War (Schneider 1995: 6). Anthony Marcus (1999) describes Wolf in his obituary as a “scholar-activist” and “an important comrade” as well as an educator attracting Marxist graduate students who were active or former workers’ militants from around the world. As Gavin Smith (2020: 197) points out, in Eric Wolf's circles in the 1960s and 1970s it was entirely taken for granted that intellectual work was political work and was understood as a practical and effective (not merely theoretical) contribution to social revolutionary projects.

So why then this deliberate statement by Wolf in EPWH to distance himself from Marxism and insist that he prefers to engage in “Marxian” anthropology? The first reason relates to Wolf's overall aim of establishing Marxian analysis as a powerful and legitimate current within anthropology—one that would demonstrate the deeper, more convincing insights to be gained from Marxian anthropology and oppose those anthropological currents invested instead in distinctiveness and mutual separation as hallmarks of humankind. Wolf succeeded well in this academic political endeavor: Marxian anthropology became remarkably viable within the discipline—perhaps as much as is possible considering that any approach taking inspiration from Marx must ultimately aim for a synthesis that is incompatible with disciplinary boundaries.⁴ Wolf's academic ambitions for Marxian anthropology also, however, seem to have occasionally led to excessive distancing from Marxism. For instance, where Wolf talks of his uses of Marx, stating he prefers to put “in abeyance” the Marx who “hoped to end human alienation by overthrowing capitalism” (Wolf 2001: 60). Or, more excessively still, when he suggests Marx's politics is irrelevant to Marx's analytical work by making a parallel to Max Weber's work, which, Wolf argues, academic practitioners also ought not “turn their backs on” just because Weber was an “ardent German nationalist” (1997 preface to EPWH: xxi). This verging on the denial of “the contradictory unity of theory and practice” that defines Marx's thinking shows that academic politics occasionally overtook Wolf's other aims and sometimes led Wolf's students actively involved in revolutionary organizing to criticize his “in the closet” attitude toward Marxism (Marcus and Menzies 2005).

A second reason for Wolf's distancing from Marxism, however, lies in the fact that while Wolf was engaged in trying to make “Marxian” anthropological analysis theoretically viable and academically legitimate, he was operating in an academic context in which a positivist stream of “Marxism” had managed to gain considerable academic prestige. A lot of this “Marxist science,” as Wolf called it dismissively (1982: xxii), was obsessed with analyzing the social world as the product of a logical unfolding of universal laws of history in which the one proletarian actor had to be identified who was strategically positioned and powerful enough to drive a wedge into the motor of capitalist accumulation while all other actors—women houseworkers, non-waged workers, peasants, etc.—as well as questions about the less “objective,” not merely “material,” conditions for revolutionary intervention were of little importance. Such Marxism that was uninterested in the cultural repertoires that had taken shape in a society to characterize particular political junctures but instead preferred to celebrate “the revolutionary will as opening the way to [the] desired future” was, according to Wolf, “merely prone to underwrite elitist insurrections” (ibid.).

The most absurd—but scientifically prestigious—contingent of “Marxist scientists,” those whom Wolf had the greatest aversion to, were the “analytical Marxists” that emerged in the late 1970s—scholars like Jon Elster, Gerald Allan Cohen, Eric Roemer, Adam Przeworski, and Erik Olin Wright, who, convinced they were serving a broader Marxist politics, set out to “reconstruct Marxism” by applying to it the dominant techniques of mainstream social science, particularly methodological individualism and rational choice theory, which in analytical philosophy were seen as universal criteria of judgment (Harvey 1986). Ironically, the analytical Marxists succeeded in thereby momentarily increasing the prestige of Marxism in mainstream social sciences, but only after this Marxism had put aside everything that could make it politically relevant, throwing out relational dialectics as a key Marxist methodology and with it most else that could not be concretely measured and reduced to an “independent variable” (Burawoy 2020). Despite these “Marxists” explicitly identifying as such, they were in fact a whole lot farther from real-world leftist organizing than Wolf was.

Indeed, a second “Marxism” that lay at the basis of Wolf's apparent aversion toward Marxism and preference for “Marxian” analysis was the Marxism that those around Wolf who were involved in the movements of the New Left were up against: the Marxism of “really existing socialism” and the Euro-Communist parties. Until 1989, these institutionalized socialisms had a dominant claim on Marxist heritage and truth in real world politics. And while it could be, as Gavin Smith argues, taken for granted at the time that as a leftist anthropologist one entered anthropological inquiry from the perspective of a politics “geared to building hegemony for the subaltern by contributing to the effectiveness of their praxis” (Smith 2020: 207), it was then all the more important to distinguish such “Marxian” efforts from the existing “Marxist” hegemons. In the post-1968 era, as universities in the United States were made to open more to students from Black and working-class backgrounds, numerous activists involved in the New Left ended up as students of Wolf's, but while working in the tradition of Marx, this post-’68 New Left was born explicitly in opposition to orthodox Marxism.

Arguably, however, this Marxian/Marxist distinction became less relevant after the collapse of the Communist world in 1989. Indeed, by 1997 when EPWH was being published with a new preface, the demise of the Communist world was a fact, and one might have expected less urge to criticize orthodox Marxism. These were moreover the heydays of a victorious neoliberal discourse on “the end of history”—something Wolf strongly criticized—and the peak of an overwhelming anti-Communist consensus that painted the whole of what had existed historically as Marxist politics as dark and failed and “as belonging to the dustbin of history” (Donham 1999: xi). Unfortunately, however, Wolf was not well positioned to criticize this post-1989 anti-Communist consensus as he had hardly dealt with actually existing Marxism in his work. In Peasant wars he had written about political mobilization by peasant actors whom he was in great sympathy with, but he had avoided writing explicitly about the actually existing Communism that sometimes emerged out of these peasant wars. He had focused his writing on subaltern actors and relational structures but not on real-world Marxist movements. As various scholars sympathetic to Wolf's work have noted (e.g., Marcus 2003; Roseberry 1985; Worseley 1984), EPWH's last chapter, “The New Laborers,” describes the migratory flows of laborers as related to the flows of commodities outlined in the preceding chapter but stops short of including these new laborers’ efforts at political mobilization.⁵ Indeed, even Wolf's 2001 book Envisioning power, while analyzing three major cases of ideology intertwining with power around the mobilization of social labor, largely ignores mass political organization, this time to instead focus on elite machinations of power. This hiatus in Wolf's writing arguably infused his work with “an ultimate sense of tragedy,” as Ashraf Ghani (1995) calls it, and certainly did not put him in a strong position to challenge and nuance the damning consensus of the 1990s against really existing Marxism. This—plus the prestige of “analytical Marxism” that continued into the twenty-first century—is probably also why in the late 1990s Wolf still preferred to continue strengthening “Marxian” analysis and leaving aside Marxism as “a particular kind of politics” (1997 preface: xxi).

Contemporary conditions for Wolfian anthropology

But are there good reasons to continue Wolf's “Marxian/Marxist” distinction today? To begin with the need to build and maintain Marxian anthropology institutionally: this need remains, and this journal (Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology) is an expression of the continuing collective efforts in that regard. But whereas Wolf could still muster the enthusiasm for a Marxian overthrow of the conservative core of anthropology by trying to prove that an anthropology drawing on Marx yielded superior insights, in our current postmodern moment such a struggle seems somewhat futile. Since the “ontological turn,” the divide between Wolfian anthropology and those working from the assumption of difference has become so steep that the common ground needed for fruitful debate between opposing viewpoints is largely missing. Furthermore, many of the resources required to sustain a research program today need to be found by applying to external funding agencies where distanced, anonymous reviewers make decisions based on abstract criteria of “excellence,” with no room for negotiation on political-intellectual grounds. Indeed, in liberal democracies today academic freedom is given a purely individualized definition that provides no protection for collective fields of knowledge (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015). In this context there is a lot to lose from further distancing oneself from Marxist scholarship. The effect of de-emphasizing Marx for instance is evident in the 2010 foreword to EPWH by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who summarizes the book's central messages as that “even global processes must be studied in their local contexts” and that “the centrifugal forces of modernity are continuously counteracted by the centripetal forces of community” (idem: ix). Presented in such an utterly non-Marxist vein, the core theoretical interventions of EPWH get lost, and one might think the book does little more than confirm the existing anthropological consensus on the complexities of the culture concept and of global interconnectedness.

Meanwhile, however, efforts to genuinely continue building Wolf's “Marxian” anthropology—refusing the “intellectual deforestation” of postmodern turns (Wolf 1990)—have proceeded under different and shifting guises, such as “anthropological political economy” (Roseberry 1988), “Marxist historical anthropology” (Kalb and Tak 2005; Sider 1996), the “global anthropology of labor” (Carbonella and Kasmir 2018), “the anthropology of class” (Kalb 2015) or “dialectical anthropology” (Lem and Marcus 2016). This Marxian anthropology has also often been distinguished as “relational” (n.b. Tilly 2001). Many have also contributed anthropological analyses that draw on Marx—and further Wolf's project—without defining a particular analytical framework (e.g., Narotzky and Smith 2006), sometimes explicitly so as to move “beyond strict and structured analytical frameworks” while nevertheless adhering to certain ”fundamental precepts of Marxist analysis” (Lem and Leach 2002: 1). During the past decade, this kind of Wolfian anthropology is more frequently again identifying as “Marxian” or “Marxist” anthropology, without regard to the supposed distinction or fear that “Marxist” anthropology would be less compatible with dialectical anthropological inquiry (see Kalb 2013; Lem and Marcus 2016; Neveling and Steur 2018).

Moreover, few today will associate Marxism within social science with the “analytical Marxism” that was once so prestigious and dominant. Marxism in academia at large is now much more likely to be associated again with the work of social historians such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm as well as Gramscian analyses (n.b. Stuart Hall) and world systems theory (n.b. Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi). After 1989, a geographical, urban and spatialized Marxism also became much stronger and academically prestigious, and the geographer David Harvey became a popular intellectual and, not coincidentally, professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, the very department where Wolf spent most of his career. There is also a strong presence of feminist Marxism in academia today, associated with popular intellectuals like Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser and Angela Davis. In their different ways, each of these post-1989 Marxist currents criticizes the narrow, production-based notion of class of analytical Marxism and classical labor history/sociology, and pushes for an expanded notion of class (cf. Kalb 1997) that includes uneven development, urbanism, and kinship/family formations within dynamic comparativist perspectives. All are much more dialectical than the positivist Marxists and more aligned with Wolf's anthropology. Most Marxist social scientists today would then agree with Michael Burawoy's description of the intellectual program of the analytical Marxists as effectively “hacking the living body of Marxism to death” (2020: 82) and with David Harvey's observation that “with friends like this . . . ” (1986: 686).

Where positivist Marxism of a milder version does show up in academia today, it is usually in the form of provocations from the margins rather than as prestigious, mainstream social science. Alf Hornborg (2016), for instance, insists that we need to replace Marx's murky dialectical theory of value with one based on concrete—and indeed measurable—flows of energy rather than value. Seductively simplifying as such an idea can be, however, there are enough anthropologists today who do struggle through the complicated dialectics of Marx's value theory to demonstrate the benefits of doing so in terms of critically capturing power-laden social-ecological processes (see, e.g., Bruckermann 2024; Franquesa 2018) or contemporary processes of labor repositioning and capitalist accumulation more generally (see, e.g., Cowan et al. 2023; Kalb 2024). Likewise, the vanguardism of classic Marxism still appears as provocation but without gathering a large following. Matthew Huber's Climate change as class war (2022) for instance is a provocatively radical argument about the necessity of working-class—rather than professional-class—climate politics to confront the capitalist class that is producing climate change but has been severely criticized by other Marxists for reducing the working-class in question to unionized energy sector workers in the United States (see e.g., Levien 2023). In other words, the problematic tendencies of positivism and vanguardism continue to exist within certain Marxist analyses, but they are nowhere near as powerful in academia as they were in Wolf's time.

The need for a Marxian/Marxist distinction seems even less when we consider the changed real-world historical context. It is clear by now that the demise of the dominant Marxist political projects has cleared the space for Marxism to again become primarily associated with anti-capitalist militancy rather than with the endless factionalism of the democratic Left or the failed large-scale authoritarian efforts of actually existing socialism. Even in many postsocialist countries, a new critical leftist theorizing and politics emerged precisely out of the struggles against the post-1989 hegemony of anti-communism (Poenaru 2013). The 2008 financial crisis moreover dealt a blow to neoliberal hegemony globally, resulting in the “annus mirabilis” of 2011 when an unprecedented number of people “went onto the streets to demonstrate, to occupy and to strike . . . in more locations than perhaps at any earlier moment in human history” (Kalb and Mollona 2018: 1). For the first time since 1968 “capitalism was once again denounced, sometimes literally so without metaphorical digressions” (ibid.). Indeed, these worldwide mobilizations were again strongly anti-capitalist in rhetoric and “pushed the problem of social inequality and the idea of class from the margins to the center of debate around the world,” somewhat destabilizing the broadly accepted truism that “what's good for capital is good for all” (Carbonella and Kasmir 2018: 1f.).

And while many of the post-2011 anti-capitalist mobilizations remained hesitant of Marxism, this too seems to be running its course. Occupy Wall Street's embrace of “practice and practical solution over theory” (Kalb and Mollona 2018: 24), was not terribly successful: resistance was spectacular but short lived (Neveling and Steur 2018: 1). From the summer of 2014, the Black Lives Matter protests meant another shockwave of insurgency and initially included strong anti-capitalist as well as antiracist demands (see Srinivasan 2021: 173). The former, however succumbed to the enormous popularity of the movement, which came with remarkable symbolic achievements but little impact on the prison-industrial complex and the dynamics of racial capitalism (Haider 2022; Kundnani 2023). Meanwhile, the environmental justice protests led by Extinction Rebellion, while starting out in the “anti-politics” or “beyond politics” mode of many of the 2011 insurrections (Kalb and Mollona 2018), are now realizing that effective strategizing can only happen with a clear understanding of the capitalist relations impeding the necessary structural change. In general, the anti-Marxian political populism on the Left, both inspired and celebrated by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, has not shown much hopeful results, especially in the face of the steady rise of the nationalist Right and of fascism, driven by the very same (expanded) class processes that produced this left-wing populism (see Kalb and Halmai 2011; Szombati 2018). Indeed, with each successive wave of leftist protest that all too soon confronts its incapacity to bring about the urgently necessary structural change, it becomes clearer that Marxism has been too prematurely assigned to the dustbin of history.

Marxian theory between utopia and anti-utopia

The need for a “Marxian” distancing from Marxism is thus less urgent and desirable than in Wolf's time. And yet, a key dilemma related to Wolf's “Marxian” positioning remains: the fact that any successful building on Marx's work needs to strive toward the contradictory unity of theory and practice: the two cannot be divorced, but cannot be equated, either. To think further about how to go about positioning oneself today within this necessary dialectic, I turn to scholars related to Wolf who have been more explicit on the issue.

One of them is the prominent sociologist Michael Burawoy, who in the past two decades—in the changed historical context discussed above—has become more explicitly Marxist in his writing and moreover eager to advocate a “public sociology” that offers insights of use to leveraging social change by engaging in a necessary dialectic between utopia and anti-utopia (not to be confused with dystopia). Indeed, according to Burawoy, any research program that seeks to contribute to changing the world needs to wrestle with the utopian conviction that the status quo is not natural or inevitable and that it is possible to find a way to change it while at the same time engaging with the “anti-utopian” question about what is obstructing the realization of such change (2021: 12). He also observes how the connection between these two different tendencies in Marxian thought—the tendency toward utopia and the tendency toward analysis—in the best of times (“revolutionary times”) form a “contradictory unity”—though at other times (n.b. our current moment) tend to go their separate ways (Burawoy 2020: 68). Hence where Wolf criticized both tendencies by dismissing “Systems Marxism” (“a disciplined body of logically enchained postulates”; Wolf 1982: xxi) versus “Promethean Marxism” (driven by “the hope for human liberation” and the celebration of “revolutionary will”—ibid.), Burawoy uses Gouldner's distinction between “Scientific” and “Critical” Marxism to suggest that these are not just extremes to be avoided but more starting points for a dialectic.

Scientific Marxism, according to Goulder (1980), starts from a rational understanding of society that assumes the determinism of objective structures and treats concepts to reflect real mechanisms, politics as epiphenomenal, and ideology as a distortion of the truth. Critical Marxism, on the other hand, starts out from the ubiquity of alienation obstructing the potential for human self-realization, sees concepts as ways to interpret social processes, politics as an arena for the realization of ultimate values, and ideology as a moral force. Gouldner's two Marxisms thus are not ones to a priori dissociate oneself from but equally valid endeavors, even if they lead in opposite directions. “Scientific” and “Critical” Marxism moreover need each other to remain relevant: an all too persistently “scientific” Marxism at the end of its analytical journey will discover that not much of Marxism, or of anything, to learn is left (Burawoy 2020: 82) while “critical” Marxism stuck in its utopian extreme can easily lead to abandoning the study of capitalist tendencies altogether and move toward theorizing capitalist defects and socialist values instead (ibid.: 91). Arguably, this dialectic between utopian and anti-utopian analysis—or between Gouldner's critical and scientific Marxism—is firmly part of the Marxian/Marxist anthropology that Eric Wolf helped to found. Such Wolfian anthropology often finds itself today in the role of offering a materialist-realist antidote to the numerous idealist interpretations of political movements that emerge within anthropology because of the discipline's continuing focus on ethnography at the expense of history (see Kalb and Mollona 2018: 7ff). Underlying such materialist-realist critique, however, is the much more utopian striving of continuing to problematize capitalism and not succumbing to the all-too-realist assumption, encouraged by the professionalization of anthropology, that doing so is merely old-fashioned or conceited.

Beyond thinking, however, there is still the question of how to relate to real-world political movements. Here it is interesting to consider Immanuel Wallerstein, whom Wolf respected for having “replaced the fruitless debates about modernization with a sophisticated and theoretically oriented account of . . . capitalism [as] an evolution and spread of intertwined and yet differentiated relationships” (1982: 23). Wolf also repeatedly, however, criticized Wallerstein for being too totalizing in his analysis and for supposedly treating “the whole world and all its parts” as having become “similarly capitalist” since the very beginning of European expansion in the fifteenth century (1982: 297). But when engaging with Wallerstein in EPWH, Wolf shows himself theoretically the more orthodox Marxist of the two: EPWH is all about demonstrating how the cultural units we tend to reify in anthropological analysis as “cultures” or “societies” are actually in material ways products of the totality of interactions provoked by capitalist expansion from Europe—and yet Wolf emphasizes that the origins of capitalism are to be found not in the global ascendance of capital as the primacy of the drive toward endless accumulation over and beyond political authority but in the local space where the capitalist mode of production first emerged, namely England during the Industrial Revolution. Interestingly, Wallerstein seems more heterodox here than Wolf in his theorizing. And yet, unlike Wolf, he was much more outspoken in articulating a desire to connect his theorizing to the Marxist “political task” of fighting against the capitalist system (Wallerstein 1986). In other words, an explicit commitment to Marxist politics need not imply orthodox Marxist theorizing.

Unlike Wolf, Wallerstein moreover has written extensively about the connection between one's analytical work and political aims, particularly focusing on the concept of “utopia.” Wallerstein argues that the criticism of utopia as a class-bound ideology—Marx and Engels's warnings against bourgeois utopistic criticism in the name of egalitarianism as politically noxious “subjective lucubrations about the moral society” (Wallerstein 1986: 1298)—was particularly relevant in their era. In our era, which Wallerstein calls “the era of a thousand Marxisms,” utopia however is recognized as always being ideological and gains a more Mannheimian role as reconstructing “a strategy of change that in fact will work”—a will to change the world effectively as a precondition to understanding it (ibid.). As Wallerstein argues, “The task before us is precisely to place the activities of the intelligentsia (i.e., social science) and the activities of political organizations in a framework in which, in tension and tandem with each other, they illuminate the historical choices rather than presume to make them” (Wallerstein 1986: 1308). This aligns of course with Marx's idea of praxis, which is frequently taken up by anthropologists in direct collaboration with their informants (e.g., Chris Krupa's effort to “work with them, as intellectual and political actors in their own right, each of us able to bring different contributions to a shared project”; 2022: 20), or is sometimes done “in anticipation of future collaborations” (Nonini 2016: 248) or of different collaborations, as where the popular sentiments of one's informants are being captured by the organized radical Right (see Kalb 2009).

Engaging in Marxian Marxism sometimes also requires a more direct political engagement in our role as professional intellectuals: just as Wolf took a strong and at the time controversial stance within the AAA's Ethics Committee against potential cooperation between anthropologists and the US Army during the Vietnam War, Marxist anthropologists today speak out in favor of breaking institutional ties with Israeli universities because they are an integral part of the settler-colonial state (Wind 2024) that continues to receive Western support even as it commits genocide in Gaza. Doing so moreover brings the limits to academic freedom and democracy at our own universities into sight and forms a strong reminder that without broad political movements challenging capitalist business as usual, the means-oriented logics of neoliberal capitalism—teaching for the sake of university profits, publishing for the sake of university rankings, management for the sake of ensuring business as usual for capital—continuously threatens meaningful intellectual work, making it succumb to all the alienating and individualizing tendencies Marx already warned about (Wessman 1979: 463). Where the existence of a broad political movement of the Left can no longer be taken for granted as in Wolf's time, a willingness to ally with, and at key junctures join in, political action is crucial for maintaining the conditions for meaningful Marxian/Marxist scholarship to exist.

On trying to work within a Marxian/Marxist dialectic

Marxism as political practice is not everywhere as marginalized as it is in the core of the capitalist world system, but in these more “Marxist” contexts it is all the more relevant to engage in a Marxian-Marxist dialectic. Through my ongoing research in Kerala and Cuba (see Steur 2022), I also noticed that a Wolfian approach to this is distinct from that of other Marxist intellectuals such as Helen Yaffe and Vijay Prashad (and the Tricontinental), who see it as their duty to position themselves alongside the Marxist political leadership, identifying the latter as representatives of an ongoing popular movement and analyzing the dilemmas of socialist governance in a hostile environment (the US embargo on Cuba and the anti-Communist Indian Federation surrounding Kerala). These prominent Marxist intellectuals thereby help to counter liberal and conservative critics but are, like the two Marxist governments in question, unable to pinpoint and politicize the emerging social tensions that could indicate new directions of class struggle (see Steur 2019). What they practice is not anti-utopian Marxism as they prioritize interpreting social structures over analyzing them as objective determinants, but it is a peculiar version of utopian Marxism as the ideological status quo they seek to think beyond is the all too abstract ideology of global capitalism. Drawing on Wolf, the ideological status-quo I try to critically analyze in my research is, on the contrary, the hegemonic political culture in which people's lives are concretely situated, even as I analyze how these local ideologies are shaped by the larger political and economic processes involved in the making of the late-capitalist world (Steur 2017).

Yet, though it is situated at a critical distance from institutional Marxist politics, my research did have the Marxist aim of contributing to the struggle of labor more broadly by helping to put the antagonism between the CPI(M) and emerging social movements in perspective. My entry point into Kerala was the CPI(M), but I soon discovered that they were not organizing the struggles that most intensively involved poor people resisting dispossession and precarity or claiming land. At the forefront of the latter was rather an organization then calling itself the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS), whose leadership consisted of people identifying themselves as Adivasi (Indigenous) or Dalit, all of whom had a history in the Communist movement but had become disillusioned with it (see Steur 2017: chap. 3). Their political interpretation of history and their political visions for the future were the result of radically opposing the existing Communist ones, but at the same time they seemed to be continuing the class struggle that the Communist movement had stood for. Both in sympathy with the ideals of the CPI(M) and in sympathy with the AGMS movement—as a kind of disavowed continuation of the Communist movement—I hoped that a Wolfian analysis of what had made the leadership and ordinary supporters of the AGMS turn away from Communism would contribute a sharper understanding of the processes of class formation and struggle involved. I moreover hoped such analysis could contribute to realigning the Left toward the reality of class struggle rather than the formal antagonisms of political discourse.

A Wolfian analysis allowed me to arrive at a different understanding of the rise of identity politics in Kerala than the locally dominant “Marxist” one. With Wolf I could do away with explanations of the rise of Dalit and Adivasi identity politics that too simplistically attributed it to “globalization,” namely the transnational circulation of ideas, spread by international NGOs and activist networks.⁶ According to the CPI(M), such NGO networks were promoting “identity politics” in Kerala precisely to undermine the state's laudable achievements in terms of keeping capitalist dynamics at bay and promoting overall social well-being. A Wolfian analysis, however, avoids short-cuts like “globalization” and “circulating ideas” and rather starts off with the question of how social labor is mobilized and how the conflict between those appropriating the surplus and those producing it is playing out, always mindful of the fact that this is something orchestrated at the level of what Wolf called “structural power.” Thereby I was able to connect the dots between the ascendancy of financial capital as the dominant player in the contemporary world system and the fact that the Adivasi workers of the AGMS were less interested in politicizing their identity as workers than in claiming Adivasi land rights (see Steur 2017). They were losing their traditional role in paddy (rice) cultivation as more and more landowners switched to cash crops like pepper or ginger—crops requiring much more “flexibility” in their production. Meanwhile, land fit for housing was increasing in value as hotel chains and rich individuals from Bangalore were buying up land to build holiday homes. In such a context wage strikes seemed futile, while the need to claim ownership of a piece of land became ever more urgent. In combination with laws granting special land rights to those who could prove “Adivasi” identity and a gradually retreating welfare state, it became understandable why people would grow skeptical of the Marxist party in power, all the more when it came to be seen as facilitating these very processes of dispossession while offering only stale Marxist dogmas in return.

Marxian analysis helped me formulate an immanent critique regarding the ability of “Marxist politics” to live up to its own ideals—a critique shared by most of the Dalit activist interlocutors I spoke with. They would not agree, for instance, with the liberal interpretation offered by Ramachandra Guha that Marxism as an ideology is irredeemable and merely survives because Marxist leaders in Kerala in practice are not Marxist but Gandhian (Guha 2001: 212). Dalit organic intellectuals offered a radically different interpretation: they had once been party members and assured me that it was not Marxism that was the problem but rather the transformation of the Communist Party in practice. Criticizing the current leadership of the various Communist parties in Kerala, Ayinoor Vasu, a famous lower-caste (Izhava) radical organizer and disgruntled former member of first the CPI(M) and later the (underground) CPI(ML), told me frankly: “A good ideology [by which he was referring to Marxism] should be sharp, as sharp as that of the enemy and good for practical usage. Ideology should not be just an ornament [worn by party members] that is not being used; it should be a strong weapon. Ideology should not just be correct; it should be used!” (Steur 2017: 128). Against the idea that Marxism necessarily shuts down a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of caste oppression, he argued that in fact a better, earlier understanding of the writings of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (India's foremost Dalit leader and intellectual in the run-up to independence) would have helped him in resisting the “upper-caste tendencies” that came to saturate each of the different Communist outfits in Kerala, distancing them from the proletariat they were supposed to represent. He criticized the CPI(M) for “brainwashing” him to think of Ambedkar as a British agent and told me, “In fact Ambedkar did the class analysis, the work the CPI(M) should have done” (ibid.). While Ayinoor, as a radical Marxist, does not share Dr. Ambedkar's inclinations toward envisioning a bourgeois democratic government, he convincingly argues⁷ that Ambedkar's classic On the annihilation of caste is, as “only a Marxist will understand . . . actually a class analysis of India” (Steur 2017: 128). It is precisely Ayinoor's commitment to Marx's analysis and ideology, which in his radical practice thereof become one and the same thing, that, pace Guha, he has become critical of most Communist practice in Kerala while not rejecting Marxism.

In lieu of a conclusion, I will rather end this article by describing another conversation I had during my fieldwork in Kerala that I found particularly inspiring as an anthropologist trying to work in a Marxian/Marxist dialectic. I was talking to Soman, a Dalit activist and former Communist Party member of around sixty years old, born into a Pulaya (Dalit) family of agricultural workers. Like Ayinoor, Soman also emphasized to me that his many misgivings about the Communist Party did not concern Marxist ideology but rather the inconsistencies he saw between it and Communist practice. He told me, “There are many political parties in India but none of them analyzes issues as closely as the Marxist party does” (Steur 2017: 146). He had become embittered by the corruption in the party and had quit it, but he did not reject the Marxist analysis that he was taught by party leaders at a time when commitment and insight rather than formal education was still what mattered in the party. Indeed, despite his bitterness regarding the way the CPI(M) operated, Soman claimed that “theoretical clarity” was what made the party strong and mattered most to its survival. He said, “A well-taught follower will never leave the party” (ibid.). But Soman had in fact, after an intense conflict, left the party, while continuing to hold dear to the strength of the insights that his own Marxist analysis gave him, even in a position of political marginalization. Interestingly, in saying “a well-taught follower will never leave the party,” he did not make the effort to distinguish the party from Marxist ideology, nor Marxist ideology from Marxist analysis. Was this sloppiness on his part? Did he trust that the comradely professional intellectual would, when writing about his story, add the necessary conceptual fine-tuning to make sure that the “Marxian analysis” he was taught would not be mistaken for the “Marxist” ideological dogmas the party espoused in vain? Or was he perhaps—as the anthropologist following in Wolf's footsteps could likewise do—refusing to be dispossessed of the Marxist revolutionary horizon, where we find the contradictory unity of theory and practice and where ideology is nothing if it isn't effective utopia?