The Importance of Anthropology in Communism
Communism is a field of applicable economic policies that range from ideologies like Marxism, Leninism, Marxist-Leninism, Titoism, Hoxhaism, Maoism, and so on and so forth. Some communists will argue that it supersedes culture. That is, the goals of communism surpass the existing conditions of cultural practices. Any and all cultural practices can, and in some cases the argument is made should, be completely abandoned in order to establish a communist system. While the argument can indeed be made that certain cultural practices, such as hierarchical or hereditary systems antithetical to communism should be investigated and challenged, the belief that we can surpass or move beyond culture is incorrect. Culture, as much as it is a tool of the anti-communists, is as human as it can possibly be. In challenging a culture, a communist system is not moving beyond it, or creating a further "evolved" form of culture than any others around it, they are simply creating a new culture in place of the one preceding it. Maoist China's Cultural Revolution is proof of this. Instead of developing a post-cultural society that abandoned the cultures of old across the various diverse regions of China, it simply created a new Han majority culture based around the ideals created by the Chinese Communist Party at the time. A culture, mind you, that modern Chinese leadership is working to reverse through policies of local language support and cultural study and preservation. Anthropology, thus, is the premier tool to assess and to perceive the potential and historical impacts communism has had on culture, and in turn, how culture has shaped communism. Implementing new policies, or organizing a people, or supporting ethnic minorities, those all require detailed and comprehensive understandings of the cultures with which they interact.
Anthropology as a discipline has a storied past. As an anthropologist myself, I remember semester after semester learning about the mistakes in our field from its inception as a tool to justify colonialism, to ethical violations of individuals like Napoleon Chagnon, and more. However, that is the crucial point. Our field began in a terrible and unjust place. It benefited those in power of imperialist powers, and subjugated those under their thumbs. Despite this, we have learned as a discipline to move beyond those flawed means of thinking, and to develop what is arguably a field that is today the antithesis of the "anthropology" of old. There are days worth of readings regarding analyzing mistakes in the Anthropological field across the spectrum of political opinion. Each piece of work contributing to a furthered improvement to our field by learning from the mistakes, and developing better ethnographic practices to study and speak on cultures across the globe.
Anthropologists employ many different frameworks to approach the world of culture. From things as simple as emic versus etic understanding (emic being the perspective of someone within the culture being studied, etic being the perspective of someone outside of that culture), to structural functionalism, to the controversial cultural relativism. Let's discuss that last one, because the reason for its controversy might surprise you. Cultural relativism is an approach to cultural understanding that includes accepting that each culture has the right to, and the ability to, view the world through its own lens. It also has the right to be equal to all other cultures with regards to respect for it, no one culture is better/superior or worse than another, nor more or less civilized. Opponents of cultural relativism often point to murder, stating that through cultural relativism, murder is justified if the culture says it is. On many levels, this is a mischaracterization of cultural relativism. Firstly, murder as a concept is an unethical or unlawful killing of a person, and all cultures universally do contain a form of idea regarding what "murder" is and that it is bad. Secondly, someone applying cultural relativism, for sake of example, to the Aztecan human sacrifice practices in precolonial Mesoamerica would be correct to state that ethically, mass human sacrifices is amoral. However, the anthropologist instead of labeling the practice as amoral and not going further, would instead apply cultural relativism to understand the cultural and social mechanisms behind the practice, to assess the understanding of the practice through the lens of the Aztec people, and express these studies in an empirical way. Granted, the murder discussion is the extreme end of criticism of cultural relativism, but it is the most common critique. Cultural relativism is also seen as a tool in an anthropologists massive library of other tools, and often no one framework should be used universally to examine the world around us. It's important here to introduce the most prominent few, to express how they may be used to establish a cultural understanding.
Applying anthropological practices to a culture not like your own, especially with regards to coordination and cooperation towards developing, organizing, and achieving communist goals from anything as small as a local community event all the way to global revolution, is crucial to success. Understanding that a worker in a country like Tajikistan and a worker in Guatemala both have significant cultural differences, and understanding how those differences affect behavior, resource allocation, addressing physical and social needs, and so on, provides a communist with the ability to appropriately bridge those differences, create successful programs for each worker equitably, and creates a path to achieving communism in both places simultaneously. Juxtaposed to this, a communist who refuses to understand those differences may alienate the Tajik worker for a behavior deemed it anti-communist, or might fail to organize a movement amongst the Guatemalan workers because they don't understand the social and familial dynamics in Latin American cultures.
Failing to understand culture often leads to lack of success in communist spheres. We see great success of achieving communist driven goals in more homogenized cultures, such as Vietnam and the DDR, and less success in countries like the USSR and Ethiopia. Granted, successes exist, but those successes arise from a cultural coordination, not from a cultural homogenization, in those countries. Industrialization and the rise of living standards across the ethnically distinct Soviet Republics arose not during the early Stalin Era push to Russify the country, but rather from later efforts to appeal to local cultures and languages towards the end of the Stalin Era and later Soviet Leaders. In Yugoslavia, a decentralized strong government allowed the constituent republics to develop worker led initiatives that created much success such as that in Slovenia. These successes, and these failures, demonstrate the need to understand cultures deeply. This understanding drives better implementation of policy, better coordination between cultures, and better tackling of problematic cultural aspects.
If we were unaware of harms created by capitalism, how can we be expected to combat them. If we're unaware of the social needs and social behaviors of our neighbor, how are we to address them. Ignoring a core and fundamental part of the human condition is bound to create failure. Anthropology is a diverse field. There are many niche areas of study, there is rich and troubled history, there are many schools of thought. Despite this diversity, it is still our best tool at approaching, understanding, and responding to culture in just about everything, communism included. Adopting an anthropological worldview, and approaching cultures through anthropological lenses, is your best tool to beginning to fix the world's problems. Ethnocentrism and Cultural Globalism should be abandoned in equal measure, as neither contribute to furthered progress made across cultures by communists.
Overall, this has been a cursory look at the importance of cultural understanding in communism, however it is much deeper than this. In future articles, we will analyze specific anthropological practices and how they relate to and can be used to benefit a communist cause.
In Solidarity,
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Sources:
- Rules, Manipulating Kinship. "NAPOLEON A. CHAGNON." Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (2017): 115.
- Spiro, Melford E. "Cultural relativism and the future of anthropology." Cultural Anthropology 1, no. 3 (1986): 259-286.
- Rabich, R. G. "Changes in the Structure of the Working Class in the Uzbek SSR during Socialist Industrialization." Soviet Sociology 23, no. 3 (1984): 15-26.
- Bookman, Milica Zarkovic. "The economic basis of regional autarchy in Yugoslavia." Soviet Studies 42, no. 1 (1990): 93-109.
- Thomas, Nicholas. Out of time: history and evolution in anthropological discourse. Vol. 2. University of Michigan Press, 1996.
