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Marxism and Culture

by M. W. Thompson

Dr Michael Thompson, of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, is also the translator of A. L. Mongait's Archaeology in the U.S.S.R. (London, 1961), and of Semenov's Prehistoric Technology (London, 1964). This article is a modified version, which we requested him to prepare for the readers of ANTIQUITY, of a lecture given to the Conference of the Prehistoric Society on Culture and Culture Change in April 1964. The maps, adapted from Vol. I of Ocherki Istorii (Moscow, 1956), are of especial interest.

IT WILL be useful first of all to recall some dates: 1848 - the Communist Manifesto; 1859 - Contribution to a Criticism of Political Economy, in the introduction to which Marx made his clearest definition of the materialist conception of history. It was also the year of Origin of Species and the authentication of Boucher de Perthes' handaxes. 'Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economical forms of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species' [1]. This quotation is from the first volume of Capital published in 1867, which Marx had wished to dedicate to Darwin; Darwin declined the honour [2]. We know from the chapter 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man' in Engels's Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s but published posthumously 40 years later [3], that Engels had been thinking about prehistoric man, although he evidently had not got very far beyond Marx's description of labour in Capital.

The views of Marx and Engels were transformed by reading Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society which appeared in 1877. It was read by Marx in 1880-1, who filled many notebooks with notes on it, and these were used by Engels in writing his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State published in 1884.

Morgan's book is based on the assumption that if we arrange the existing non-literate peoples in order of ascending material culture we can reconstruct the course along which prehistoric man passed in his ascent to civilization. The final stage before civilization is documented by the records of the Greeks and Romans about their origins, and was the last of six stages of ascent: three of savagery and three of barbarism. Morgan was primarily interested in social evolution, that is in the forms of blood relationship that existed in pre-civilized societies. Here he believed an evolution from promiscuity, through various stages of collective marriage, to monogamy on the one hand, and on the other a social organization based first on the matrilineal and then on the patrilineal clan or gens, could be established. The driving-force behind this evolution, with a gradually accelerating influence, which in the long run led to the break-up of society based on kindred and its replacement by political society, was private property. 'Commencing at zero in savagery, the passion for the possession of private property, the representative of accumulated subsistence, has now become dominant over the human mind in civilized races' [4]. It was the need to safe-guard the inheritance of private property that caused the change from matrilineal to patrilineal clan, and similarly led to monogamy. According to Engels, when commodity production, which replaced subsistence production, reached a certain stage (characterized by the use of money, the existence of merchants, private ownership of land and the use of slave labour), society based on kindred burst asunder; the creation of a state was necessary simply to prevent society from dissolving into anarchy due to the antagonisms that had arisen [5].

The Morgan/Engels addition to marxism is fundamental, since it purports to show the origin of classes and the state. We have a kind of cyclical picture; from a stateless, classless, communistic prehistoric society we have to pass through a sort of purgatoty of class society (slave-owning, feudal and capitalistic), until we return to a communistic society, freed of the horrors of class and the state, but furnished with the technological advances that have accrued on the way [6]. The internal contradictions that arose with civilization will be removed, so the state will become unnecessary.

When we use the expression 'Wessex chieftains' this is evidently an ethnographic parallel, since there is no direct evidence of the form of society in Wessex in 1500 B.C. The sort of picture we have in mind is probably a confederacy of tribes with a common language. At all events we can reasonably infer that there was some kind of social organization, and that it was based on kindred. However, as prehistoric archaeologists we recognize that there are large sectors of the life of the people that we study that we can never know: their religion, language and social organization; because they have left no trace, or very enigmatic traces, in the archaeological record. These things have gone with the wind; we are content to study what is accessible to us and leave it at that.

For the marxist this is not the case. The economic foundation, the means of production or subsistence, can sometimes be studied in detail, but unless he knows the superstructure that this bore, one side of the equation is missing. What Morgan claimed was that in studying vanished pre-literate societies you could fill in the equation from the evidence of existing non-literate societies.

We can criticize the principle - that all vanished peoples have living analogues - or the details, for Morgan may have selected or interpreted wrongly the features he chose among modern primitive peoples. No doubt he was right in a general sense that private property was incompatible with primitive society, but if on his own admission the desire for it led to civilization, surely it is be praised, not condemned? Like Tacitus or Rousseau, Morgan was using the virtues of primitive society - and passing over its vices - in order to express his dissatisfaction with contemporary civilized society. Ancient Society is certainly one of the remarkable books of the 19th century, but for stimulating thought, rather than serving as a basis for a dogma or credo.

If Morgan and Engels sketched out the history of pre-literate man then the function of archaeology is a fairly humble one, to dot the i's and cross the t's, to illustrate events already decided. To some extent this is what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1930s when marxism was imposed, and a system of divisions of clan and pre-clan society was worked out. However in practice it has not proved possible to correlate the archaeological data with such a scheme, since the information that can be obtained from the former is largely irrelevant to the latter. There is a fairly wide measure of agreement that the scheme is in need of revision, although how drastic this revision should be is likely to be a matter of controversy [7].

In marxist theory cultural remains are mainly of interest in illustrating a preconceived form of social evolution, but in marxist practice in the Soviet Union two further factors have to be taken into account.

The first is language, and the New or Japhetic theory of language propounded by N.Y. Marr. Marr was an expert in Caucasian languages, indeed a native of that area, and had formulated his theory before the Revolution [8]. It was originally prompted by a supposed resemblance between Georgian and the Semitic languages, but grew into a theory of the origin and development of language generally. To some extent no doubt it was a reaction against Indo-Germanic studies. It became inextricably mixed up with orthodox marxist ideas, and all sorts of changes and mixing of languages were envisaged on its basis. Although Marr died in 1934 his views commanded wide support until 1950, or at all events received official sanction. As this was the official theory during the years of oppression in the 1930s the term 'Marrism' has come to be associated with the terrible events of that period.

The second factor that has to be taken into account is patriotic or national feeling. The unexpected isolation of the Soviet Union after the Revolution led inevitably to a gradual growth of Russian patriotism within Soviet thought, and patriotism was, of course, officially sponsored first to stimulate the industrial projects of the 1930s and then on a large scale during the war. After the war in a completely changed world the Soviet Union has had to deal mainly with non-industrialized peoples, for whom classical marxism meant very little but among whom nationalism was the main common denominator.

The relationship between these two factors, language and national feeling, was resolved by Stalin in a series of articles in Pravda in 1950, later published as a book [9]. The result was the complete overthrow of Marr's Japhetic theory, which was denounced as a vulgarization of marxism.

Stalin argued like this: I speak the same language now as before the Revolution, but in the meantime the old capitalistic basis of society has been liquidated. Similarly since the days of Pushkin there have been two social revolutions, but the language is virtually unaltered. In other words language does not change when the economic foundation and superstructure change but is something quite outside both. He could hardly say that it transcended them, being a materialist, but just that it was something different. Marr's error was to confuse language with culture, which is of course part of the superstructure and changes with it. Language is only modified in the course of many centuries and is a means of communication for a clan, tribe, fold and finally, nation.

The essential point is that whereas Marx himself and early marxists, concentrating their attention on economic factors, emphasized the discontinuity of history, Stalin was laying emphasis on the opposite feature, ethnic and linguistic continuity. Marr, like other pre-war marxists, saw progress as a series of jerks, stadialism (stadialnost), whereas for Stalin there was a continuity, outside the economic sphere at all events.

Theoretically Stalin's pronouncements did not affect culture, but if we compare the entries for the word culture in the two editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1937 and 1953, there is a considerable change. To quote from the second edition: 'Each nation has its own special qualities, its own specific character, which belong to it alone and are shared by no other nation.' In the first edition the concept of 'Kulturkreis' is described as reactionary (p. 474), but the second edition has a short article on archaeological cultures, which had indeed taken on a new interest since they had become an instrument for tracing the origins of linguistic or ethnic groups. 'Among Soviet archaeologists it is fairly widely held that the creation of archaeological cultures had its origin in the process of formation of different ethnic communities, the isolated existence of which in different areas produced the phenomenon of local traits in the material culture.' The second of the four basic tasks of Soviet archaeologists under the seven-year plan announced in 1960 is the study of 'Problems of Ethnogenesis and the Formation of Nations'.

A very different view is taken of cultures in the earlier prehistoric period, in Palaeolithic times. Breuil has been taken to task for referring Palaeolithic cultures to ethnic groups [11]. In the Upper Palaeolithic period, owing to the lack of a clear stratigraphy from caves, or proper Solutrean or Magdalenian industries, the cultural sequence in Russia is confused. The cultural terms are used by Soviet archaeologists to describe periods, and cultures as we use the term are not recognized. An interesting theory is that of Semenov who regards the cultural terms as representing technological stages, as was done by some 19th-century archaeologists [12]. While we may have neglected technology too much in Palaeolithic studies, and no doubt Semenov's work will have a considerable influence on the subject, it is hard to believe that a very closely defined, possibly indeed one of the best defined cultures, the Magdalenian, can be explained entirely or even primarily in technological terms.

This brings us to what in my opinion is the central difference in the interpretation of culture between English and Soviet archaeologists. Since Sir Cyril Fox's Archaeology of the Cambridge Region appeared in 1923, it has been a commonplace among English prehistorians that archaeological remains can be employed to reveal the relationship to their environment of the people to whom they belong, that by plotting the distribution of the remains on a map the influence of this or that environmental factor, geology or vegetation, can be demonstrated. The tendency of the 'geographical school' has been to push the matter further and to interpret nearly all the remains in economic terms. It is perhaps overlooked by critics that the evidence by its very nature allows itself to be used for this purpose, and the fact that it is silent on many other aspects of primitive life is also why the archaeologist using the evidence is silent, not because he denies their importance. It is a method rather than a theory which has grown from the material itself, whereas the besetting weakness of all Soviet theory is precisely that it is theory brought in from elsewhere.

The marxist sees man overcoming nature and not nature overcoming man, and also sees the form of society dependent, not on the direct influence of the environment, but on the level of the productive forces, the means of production [13]. Soviet criticism of the preoccupation of some English prehistorians with matters of environment has produced the curious paradox of avowed materialists denouncing alleged idealists for attributing too much importance to the material environment.

Although the late Gordon Childe was widely admired and respected in the Soviet Union his views were never regarded as orthodox and would be quite unacceptable to a marxist purist. Childe frequently introduced into his interpretation of primitive society concepts that according to Morgan and Engels were foreign to it, that only arose in later times - 'modernism' as it is called. Moreover diffusion from areas of higher culture in the east Mediterranean, the main theme of the Dawn, cannot be reconciled with the Soviet view of the independent development of native cultures in Europe. On account of the rarity of objects certainly imported into Europe before La Tène times it is not an easy thing to prove, as Childe himself recognized.

Three consecutive influences can be distinguished in the interpretation of prehistoric cultures in the Soviet Union: original marxism, a linguistic theory and a new interest in race and nationality. All three have been injected from outside the subject, and none of them lends itself easily to archaeological study. Nevertheless ethnic interpretation does differ markedly from the other two. The motive is in part an identification of the student with the race he is studying; Russians look for Slavs and so on. The desire to trace one's origins is surely a legitimate, indeed perhaps the primary motive, in archaeology. Secondly, inevitably an ethnic interpretation allows the people responsible for the culture to play a bigger part than the other two purely deterministic interpretations. The general result is to make Soviet ideas a good deal more intelligible to westerners.

The three accompanying maps are taken from Volume I of the Ocherki Istoni (edited by P. N. Tretyakov and A. L. Mongait, Moscow, 1956), suitably modified for publication in an English journal (FIGS. 1-3). They are arranged in inverse order chronologically, since seen retrospectively ethnic interpretation is more readily understood*. We may recall Marc Bloch's famous simile of winding back the reel of history.

Map 1 shows the tribes of the European part of the U.S.S.R. in 500 B.C. At this date the Greek cities were just being founded on the north coast of the Black Sea, so that this is the dawn of written history. The evidence is partly historical, partly linguistic and partly archaeological, and the parts marked with different symbols indicate areas occupied by different linguistic groups of tribes.

Map 1 (Click image to enlarge)

Map 2 shows Bronze Age material cultures over a somewhat larger area (the original Russian map is in colour). The cultural areas coincide or overlap, because the map covers the whole period of the Bronze Age. In the west, after the early Bronze Age, interest tends to shift to the elaborate typological sequences created by Montelius and Reinecke, but in Russia hoards, on which these are based, are less common and so there are no typological sequences.

Maps 2 & 3 (Click images to enlarge)

In maps 2 and 3 the cultures are shown as independent entities and no attempt is made to show the geographical background. One suspects for instance that the Neolithic and Eneolithic cultures in map 3 might be a good deal more intelligible if natural vegetation belts had been shown.

Map 4 (Click image to enlarge)

Map 4 on a more ambitious scale shows the whole of Eurasia in the 4th to 2nd millennia B.C. In this also the areas overlap and coincide because the cultures were sometimes consecutive. As the text explains (p.59): 'As archaeological researches of the last few years show and as may be assumed from linguistic evidence it is to the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. that must be assigned the initial formation of the ethnic groups which constituted the basis of the majority of European and Asian peoples known to us later from written sources.' It is then the ethnic aspect of these cultures to which the Soviet archaeologist's attention is especially directed.

In a short essay of this kind complicated matters have been oversimplified. A common material culture requires a similar environment and a common way of living in this environment. The latter may imply a shared tradition and linguistic and ethnic affinities, although ethnography, or indeed a map of Europe, shows that this need not be so. The material remains available to the archaeologist provide positive information about the environment whence they derive, but the information they yield is increasingly untrustworthy the more it is sought outside this field. In England the old tribal groups were obliterated by the Roman Empire and a more detached attitude to our prehistoric past is possible, but in Russia, where there is continuity, it is perhaps understandable that prehistory, and the concept of culture that it employs, should be used to try to trace the antecedents of the existing peoples of the country.

Footnote:
* Cultures are not of course crudely equated with ethnic groups (pp. 10-11). Return to text

Notes

The Russian periodical Soviet Archaeology is abbreviated to SA. Up to 1957 it bore a volume number, but since 1957 a large quarterly journal with this name, bearing only the year of issue, has been published in Moscow.

[1] K. Marx, Capital (Eng. trans., 1887), I, 158. Return to text
[2] I. Berlin, Karl Marx, His Life and Environment (2nd ed., London, 1948), 232. Return to text
[3] Published by the Marxist-Leninist Library, London, 1941. Return to text
[4] L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society (London, 1877), p.3. Return to text
[5] F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Eng. trans., Moscow, 1948), 241, 250. Return to text
[6] For the views of Engels on primitive communism before he had read Morgan, see AntiDubring (Eng. trans., Moscow, 1959), 190. Return to text
[7] SA, XVII, 1953, 17-18. In this editorial the need for complete revision is acknowledged. Return to text
[8] W. K. Matthews, 'The Japhetic Theory', Slavonic and East European Review, XXVII, 1948, 172-97. Return to text
[9] J. V. Stalin, Marksizm i Voprosy Yazykoznaniya (Moscow, 1950. Eng. trans. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics). For the bearing of this on archaeology see A. D. Udaltsov, ed., Protiv Vulgarizarsii Marksizma' v Arkheologii (Moscow, '1953). Return to text
[10] SA, 1960(1), 5-8. Return to text
[11] S. A. Semenov, Prehistoric Technology (Eng. trans., London, 1964), 61. Return to text
[12] Ibid., 61, 203. Return to text
[13] A. Y. Biyusov's Preface to the Russian edition of J. G. D. Clark's Prehistoric Europe (Moscow, 1953), 5. See also for this and next paragraph, SA, XXVII, 1957,5-13; SA, 1957(1), 5-12; SA, 1958(3), 284-87. Return to text

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