Abstract
This essay argues that examining everyday dynamics in working-class communities, variable as they are through race and gender intersections, gives us a way of investigating the persistence and partial reproduction of primitive communism within capitalist social formations. Visible through occasions and needs demanding the creation of use-values beyond mere consumption, a resistant and non-capitalist set of work and exchange relations exist alongside—and at times in opposition to—institutions and dynamics that reproductive of capitalism. These non-exclusive spheres of kin-constituting work, pooling, and sharing in structurally precarious neighborhoods and transnational networks are ways of trying to ensure relative security, continuity, and sustaining relationships. Within them, we need to reconceptualize work as distinct from labor and query the labor theory of value as inappropriate for appreciating the core relations of primitive communism. By this kind of analysis, we find a way to bring feminist approaches to revitalize articulating modes of production debates in Marxism and to permit appreciating in practice the meaning of making use-values in producing enduring resistance.
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Notes
This essay is part of a larger project examining primitive communism in relation to other modes of production.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank the graduate student organizers of the James Young Colloquium “Knowledge Production, Theory, and Standpoint: Papers in Honor of Thomas C. Patterson” at the University of California, Riverside (March 11, 2016), where I delivered an early version of this paper. I also thank Tom Patterson for his helpful comments on a later draft, and Winnie Lem for inviting me to submit the paper. I have been asked to relate a bit about my relationship to Dialectical Anthropology. New School anthropology graduate students who worked with Stanley Diamond sometimes were invited to edit reviewed manuscripts for the journal. I was one of these doctoral student editors from 1976 to 1981, when I received my Ph.D. After that, my relationship to both Diamond and the journal changed. I reviewed relevant submissions as well as edited approved ones. More importantly and pertinent to this essay, Stanley became a surrogate father to me. The kinship that developed made me a sister to Josephine Diamond and auntie to Sarah Diamond. When my daughter came home to me shortly after Stanley died in 1991, she renamed herself after Sarah Diamond. For those who knew Stanley, he was in but fundamentally against capitalism, from his notorious monetary fiascos and love-hate relationship with telecommunications to his utter contempt for bureaucracy, although he understood and manipulated institutional politics effectively as only a blind-siding outsider can do. Dialectical Anthropology showed his imprint in the strongest period in his intellectual life, from 1976 to 1991.
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Gailey, C.W. Locating primitive communism in capitalist social formations. Dialect Anthropol 40, 259–266 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9431-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9431-8