Understanding How Different Societies’ Gender Arrangements Produced Fundamentally Different Metabolic Relations
Discussion
Antonia Majaca:
"As Leopoldina Fortunati demonstrates, this operates structurally: “The man/woman relationship is not a relationship between individuals, even if it is represented as such. It is a relation of production between women and capital mediated by men.” The gendered division of labor became the point-zero premise of capital’s violent “organization of nature,” to use Moore’s term.
Marx’s ethnological notebooks, viewed from this perspective, could be seen as an attempt to understand how different societies’ gender arrangements produced fundamentally different metabolic relations—and thus different possibilities for organizing human-nature metabolism. In his reading of ethnographic studies by Morgan, Kovalevsky, and Maine, Marx documented societies where gender relations structured social metabolism. The Iroquois councils, where women and men made decisions together on all questions, represented sophisticated arrangements where those managing reproductive processes controlled social governance.
In 1884, the year following Marx’s death, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In Connection to Lewis H. Morgan’s Research, based on the synthesis of Marx’s notes and Engels’s own reading of Morgan’s evolutionary anthropology. Yet Engels’s interpretation diverged significantly from what Marx had actually written. Where Marx saw complex, nonlinear possibilities in these alternative gender arrangements, Engels forced them into a rigid evolutionary framework. He treated women’s subordination as a “world historic defeat” that nonetheless marked humanity’s “great historical advance” toward civilization—inadvertently justifying patriarchy as historical necessity.
Raya Dunayevskaya was one of the first scholars to systematically study Marx’s ethnological notebooks, and emphasized already in the 1980s how Marx noted elements in Morgan’s text that pointed to women’s autonomy and power in pre–class-based societies. Dunayevskaya writes that
- Marx, in copying quotes about both the Iroquois women and the Greek women, draws the sharpest contrast between the power of the Iroquois women and the degradation of the Greek women in civilization; Engels, on the other hand, while acknowledging the “supreme power” of the Iroquois women, spends a great deal more time describing the gradation of the development of the monogamous family, which he calls “a great historical advance” even as he notes that this was also the beginning of slavery and private property.
This illuminates why Marx’s correspondence with Zasulich contained such catalytic potential. The Russian commune, like the other earth communities documented in Marx’s notebooks, maintained metabolic and property relations that resisted the very separation his early work had identified as capitalism’s defining feature—the same dynamic Silvia Federici would later examine in Caliban and the Witch.
Curiously, Marx was adamant that North American Indigenous communities had “incomparably greater vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies.” Rather than an exoticization, one could also read this as indicative of an epistemological rupture because Marx acknowledges that other social systems might be more generative for political subjectivation than those found in so-called “advanced” societies. Reading this along with his struggle to respond to Zasulich reveals how what Marx identified as “superior” corresponds to these societies’ maintenance of reciprocal metabolic and political relations with their ecological contexts. Or, to invoke Cedric Robinson, socialism need not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism.
Echoing and expanding Dunayevskaya’s pioneering reading that recognized how Marx in his late notes reconnected with his early humanism, I want to read Marx’s late turn toward anthropology not as an incidental or whimsical detour from his historical-materialist investigation but as essential to resolving modernity’s metabolic contradictions. While capitalism is undoubtedly a totalizing force, in order to consider human-nature relationships in a differentiated way adequate for the age of climate breakdown we must first rethink the very notion(s) of “human-nature” as being anthropologically nonuniversal. Wynter’s formulation of “being human as praxis” provides the theoretical framework for understanding what Marx was approaching but couldn’t fully articulate. For Wynter, the human is not a biological given but an ongoing enactment; we perform ourselves into being through historically specific “genres” of humanness. Her critique of “Man”—the Western bourgeois subject who overrepresents itself as the human as such—reveals how capitalism doesn’t simply organize human societies but institutes a particular genre of being human: one defined through possessive individualism, linear temporality, and, we could add, separation from nature. What Wynter calls the “sociogenic principle” demonstrates that humans uniquely auto-institute themselves through symbolic-material practices that are simultaneously cultural and biological, discursive and metabolic. The communities Marx studied in his ethnological notebooks were different praxes of being human, each producing distinct metabolic relations with their ecological contexts. Their gendered divisions of labor didn’t merely organize work differently; they enacted fundamentally different modes of human existence. When Marx noted these communities’ “incomparably greater vitality,” he was recognizing what Wynter would later theorize: that the Western genre of Man, despite its claims to universality and evolutionary superiority, represents only one possible—and particularly destructive—mode of being human. This is why the defense of communal land rights is not just resistance to dispossession but the maintenance of alternative human praxes."