Contribution short abstract:

My talk argues for the great use value of an anthropological Marxism focused on 'webs of life', relations of social reproduction, contradictions, and shifting 'regimes of value'; posing this against the idealist 'webs of meaning' that continue to dominate the discipline and its research agenda.

Contribution long abstract:

In an age of the hyper politics of identity and the public struggle between liberal moralisms and populist nationalisms, an updated and interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology grounded in relational realism can be of great use value, politically and analytically. If neoliberalism represented 'the counter revolution of capital' (David Harvey), progressive neoliberalism (Nancy Fraser) offered a series of 'cultural turns' that celebrated cultural diversity and intersectionalism while leaving 'living labor and lived social reproduction' up for grabs, politically and intellectually. Anthropologies of labor and class, and a new economic anthropology and anthropological political economy have emerged in the last twenty years to bring the 'lived' struggle for social reproduction back into focus. But they have been cautious in openly calling themselves Marxist, while some Left feminist perspectives in anthropology ('feminist substantivists') keep being openly hostile to Marxism and imagine they can deal with social reproduction without the contradictions of class and value that Marxism is centrally about. I will argue that this is nonsensical and self-defeating and that we need a Marxist anthropology of uneven and combined development (rather than 'difference'), of capitalism as a form of society rather than just an economy, with a focus on regimes of value, in particular on use value. I will illustrate this with a Marxist anthropological account of the rise of the revanchist and 'sovereigntist' Right in the Global North, and its emerging antinomies.