Marx and Anthropophagy: Notes for a Dialogue Between Marx and Viveiros de Castro

Jean Tible

Published in: Pedro Neves Marques (ed.) The forest and the school / Where to sit at the dinner
table. Archive Books, Berlin, Akademie der Knste der Welt, Kln, 2014, p. 455-484.

On the one hand, a revolutionary European thinker from the nineteenth century; on the other, a
conceptual Amazonian imagination (both mythical and contemporary). Why write a dialogue
between Karl Marx and Amerindian perspectivism, that is, what happens to Marx once confronted
with Amerindian struggles and the anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro? Are not each
theory located in radically distinct worlds, one addressing indigenous collectives and the other the
capitalist society-world, thus invalidating the dialogue? Or even, following Deleuze and Guattari,
why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own lives? 1
Contemporary capitalism itself poses this question; in its permanently expansive impetus,
reaching all peoples. There is no longer anyone outside of capital, with globalization pushing
capitalist social relations to penetrate all spaces of the planet and interfere, or being able of
interfering, in all modes of life, including those of the most isolated and refractory populations, such
as indigenous peoples,2 recalling the idea of capitalism as an immanent system ever expanding its
own limits, ever in need of opening new markets so as not to perish.
However, which Marx are we dealing with here? An actualized Marx, as in the reading of
Friedrich Engels who, in the 1888 preface to the Communist Manifesto, emphasized the aging and
the historicity of his and Marxs thoughts. Jacques Derrida reflected on Marxs legacy (Marxism)
and proposed it as a task rather than a given. The French philosopher asked, What other thinker
has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the
transformation to come of his own thesis? [...] so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible
programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens? 3
Confronting Marx with the anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro implies an essential
methodological element: the ties between theory and (political) practice. Both theories rise and feed
on the creativity of specific actors, the proletariat and the Amerindians respectively. The strength
and the specificity of Marxs thought are found in the bond between his theories and political
struggles, in its capacity to change along with the struggles. Against the externality of knowledge
and critique (be it rationalist or utopian), Marx opposed an immanent critique of the present. In

1 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 209.
2 Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Politizar as novas tecnologias (So Paulo: Editora 34, 2003), 10.
3 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14.
doing so, Marx criticized the space of autonomy and transcendence that philosophy allows itself,
which in turn limits it. The weavers insurrection of July 1844 in Silesia pushed him towards a
theoretical-practical inversion stemmed by the concrete, revolutionary potency of the proletariat.
For Marx, philosophers should no longer guide action; rather, he starts to see the proletariat not as a
passive element but as active. Thereby, in The German Ideology, Marx defines the revolution rather
than critique as the engine of history.
In turn, the history of the discipline of anthropology is marked by three main polarities:
primitive and civilized; individual and society; nature and culture. These forms of the Great Divide
have been instruments of conquest (pagan/Christian), exploration (savage/civilized), and
administration (traditional/modern). In the attempt of taking so-called primitive societies seriously,
the anthropologists, Marcio Goldman and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argue that such conceptual
oppositions are becoming less and less relevant, and propose alternative languages, such as the
concept of symmetry in relation to the distinction between us/them. These other collectives reveal
to us neither our past nor our human nature, but rather other social relations and ways of living
together, helping to problematize our present andwho knowsimagine our future. 4
In this context, Claude Lvi-Strauss elaborates in his Mythologiques on the first attempt at
apprehending the continents societies in their own terms, in their own relations, his purpose being
to know how others represent their others. That is, an anthropology which acknowledges how
its theories have always expressed a compromise, in continuous historical negotiation, between the
worlds of the observed and the observer, and that all good anthropology will always be a
symmetrical anthropology in search of a common world.5 Similarly, in his book Mtaphysiques
Cannibales, Viveiros de Castro argues that the styles of thought proper to the collectives under
study are the engine of the discipline, and asks, what does anthropology owe to the peoples it
studies? This implies an exchange of perspectives, given that anthropological concepts and
problems feed on the richness, creativity, and imagination of the peoples and collectives under
study. Such an anthropology unites with the savage thought to form a plane of common
immanence.6
This is perhaps the originality and revolutionary strength of anthropology. With Roy Wagner
in mind, Viveiros de Castro conceives of anthropology as a bridge between worlds, between
anthropologies, connected to a relational objectivity. Indigenous concepts are neither true images
4 Marcio Goldman and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Abaet, rede de antropologia simtrica, in EncontrosEduardo
Viveiros de Castro, ed. Renato Sztutman (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2008).
5 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Etnologia brasileira, in O que ler na cincia social brasileira (1970 - 1995), ed. Sergio
Miceli (So Paulo: Sumar/Anpocs, 1999), 109-223.
6 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques cannibales: lignes danthropologie post-structurale (Paris: PUF, 2009), 7,
Ibid, 193. Furthermore, one could add that it is as much scientifically relevant to study indigenous cosmologies as
Western ones; just as the concept of dividual proposed by Strathern is as relevant as the possessive individualism of
Locke; indigenous chief hood according to Pierre Clastres as the Hegelian doctrine of the State; perspectivism and
Leibnizs system; Mori cosmologies and Kantian antinomies. (Ibid., 164).
of indigenous cultures (the positivist dream) nor illusionary projections of the culture of the
anthropologist (the constructivist nightmare). 7 Anthropology is seen as the relation between
concepts, the dialogue between them.
There has always been a bond, even if underdeveloped, between certain classics of
anthropology and Marx. One can think here of the Marxist origins of Lvi-Strauss; the hope that
Marcel Mausss The Gift could contribute to socialist theories; or even that the sections on classless
pre-capitalist societies occupy half of Rosa Luxemburgs Introduction to Political Economy, her
lectures on capitalism to German workers. In affirming that throughout the nineteenth century, a
wealth of material came to light that eroded and soon tore to shreds the old idea of the eternal
character of private property and its existence from the beginning of the world. Luxemburg
highlights the subversive role of anthropology. The author dialogues with Georg Ludwig von
Maurer, Henry Maine, and Lewis Morgan, acknowledging how they were the first to recognize the
universality of agrarian communism, and defends that Morgans Ancient Society formed as it
were a subsequent introduction to the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.8
As such, a Marxism interested in indigenous struggles but distant to anthropology may prove
a weak partner. If Marxism is the theory of the struggles, ethnography is the theory of native
practices. This leads us to Tim Ingolds definition, used by Viveiros de Castro, that anthropology is
philosophy with the people in; people meaning both common people and peoples. A fertile
parallelism can then be made with the critique of the young Marx that philosophy should join
political struggles, life, and difference. In sum, this is a dialogue between political struggles, both
conceptual and concrete. Given this affinity, one will be able to better understand the dialogue
between the reading of the Amazonian conceptual imagination made by Viveiros de Castro and the
theories of Marx.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the Amazonian conceptual imagination

Kinship, Affinity, Cannibalism

Viveiros de Castros theory of Amazonian predation is an anthropological theory structured around

an indigenous, Amerindian theory, with the analysis of kinship in mind. In Ancient Society, Lewis
Morgan defined kinship as anthropologys main contribution to social theory, locating the Great

7 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, O nativo relativo, Mana, vol. 8, no. 1 (2002): 128.
8 Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1:
Economic Writings 1 (London: Verso, 2013), 156, 163. Originally published 1925.
Divide between, on the one hand, civilized and barbarian (or savages), and on the other hand,
kinship societies and those of property/territory.
Viveiros de Castro elaborates on the ties of kinship and affinity, the latter manifesting in three
ways: [1] an effective or actual affinity (brothers-in-law; sons-in-law; etc.); [2] a cognatic, virtual
affinity (cross cousins; maternal uncle; etc.); [3] a potential or sociopolitical affinity (distant
relatives; non-relatives; formal friends; etc.). This conception of affinity is tied to Amazonian ways
of dealing with differenceincluding relations between humans and non-humans. Affinity is both
necessary and dangerous, as the condition and limit of the social, and therefore as that which begs
to be both established and conjured. 9
Amazonian social relations articulate both interiority and exteriority. Inwards, the relations of
(re)productionbetween men and womenwhile outwards the relations of predation-exchange. In
this context, the necessity of affinity is the need for cannibalism, so that kinship is encompassed
by the category of potential affinity, the local order of marriage by the global order of symbolic
exchange, and similarity by difference. As such, affinity and cannibalism are the two sensible
schemes of a generalized predation, which is the prototypical modality of Relation in Amerindian
cosmologies.10
Kinship and external relations (relations with others) are circumscribed by a symbolic
economy, where the predation of the outside is essential for the internal production of the social.
Finally, we arrive at the thought of a cannibal politics. Amazonian social relations (and their
cosmologies) are based in anthropophagic practices and thoughts, a generalized cannibalism
where to incorporate the other is to accept its alterity. 11
Recurrent in sixteenth century accounts such as those by Hans Staden, Jean de Lry, Andr
Thevet, Fernando Cardim, or Gabriel Soares de Souza, among others, the anthropophagy of the
natives spawned repugnance and was considered proof of the savagery of such peoples (for
example, the writings by Morgan Lewis). However, other authors understood it differently. Only by
drawing inspiration from Montaignes Of Cannibals could Oswald de Andrade define
anthropophagy as a high ritual carrying with it a Weltanschauung, that is, a conception of life and
world.12 In turn, Viveiros de Castro conceives of anthropophagy as constituting of a highly
elaborate system of capture, execution, and ceremonial devouring of enemies. 13

9 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, O problema da afinidade na Amaznia, in A Inconstncia da Alma Selvagem e Outros
Ensaios de Antropologia (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002), 103,128.
10 Ibid., 164.
11 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, O mrmore e a murta: sobre a inconstncia da alma selvagem, in A Inconstncia da
Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002), 224.
12 Oswald de Andrade, A reabilitao do primitivo, in Esttica e Poltica, ed. Maria Eugenia Boaventura (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Globo, 1991), 231. Originally published 1954.
13 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques cannibales: lignes danthropologie post-structurale (Paris: PUF, 2009),
110.
 Hans Staden, German adventurer who shipwrecked in the Brazilian coast, already affirmed
that cannibalism was not meant to satiate hunger but rather satisfy feelings of enmity and hostility.
Upon arriving at the village, the captive was incorporated in the kinship ties, marrying women of
the tribe and becoming a brother-in-law to several men. The captive was well fed, receiving meat to
fatten him. Between his capture and execution, several years could pass. In preparation for the
ceremony, Indians from other villages were also invited to participate in the feast. A true solemnity,
with dances and drinking, rituals, rules, and well-defined roles (dialogues, dances, womens chants).
Staden narrates a dialogue between an executioner and his victim. The former says: I am he that
will kill you, since you and yours have slain and eaten many of my friends, to which the latter
replies, When I am dead I shall still have many to avenge my death, highlighting the honor of
being eaten and dying with courage. 14
Two important aspects marked this ceremonial activity. On the one hand, its systematic
dimension: all prisoners of war without exception were killed and eaten, and no part of the victim
was wasted.15 On the other hand, everyonemen and women, young and old, members of the tribe
and outsidersate from the enemy. Children were washed in the enemys blood, while others
sucked from breasts soaked in blood.16 All had a taste of the other, except the executioner who
entered a period of reclusion and mourning.
The captives death was part of a rite of passage. Besides earning a new name, the killers
body was ritually marked, generating scars that translated into honorable ornamentation. The
breaking of the enemys skull allowed the young killer to marry and have children; a new cycle was
opened, every child was the child of a killer, and women refused to join those who had not yet
killed.17
Anthropophagy forms part of the American mismatch beginning in the end of the fifteenth
century. While the Europeans saw the Indians as animals or future Christians, the Tupi desired the
Europeans in their fullest alterity, which appeared to them as the possibility of auto-transfiguration.
In contrast to the intention of Europeans to impose their supposedly superior identity, the
Amerindians desired the other, the different. Equating the otherworldly Europeans to their dead or
gods/sanctities, they wished to absorb the other and transform themselvesthe other was not a
mirror, but a destiny.18

14 Hans Staden, Hans Staden: The True history of his Captivity (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 149-150.
15 Hlne Clastres, Les beaux-frres ennemis: propos du cannibalisme tupinamba, Nouvelle Revue de
Psychanalyse, no. 6 (1972): 72; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Vingana e
Temporalidade: Os Tupinamb, Journal de la Socit des Amricanistes de Paris, vol. 71 (1985): 193.
16 Andr Thevet, Les singularits de la France Antarctique (Paris, 1558), 162.
17 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Vingana e Temporalidade: Os Tupinamb, Journal
de lla Socit des Amricanistes, vol. 71 (1985): 194.
18 Viveiros de Castro, O mrmore e a murta: sobre a inconstncia da alma selvagem, 219.
 This explains as much the lethal warfaring of the Tupi and their permanent hostility against
neighboring indigenous collectives, as their hospitality and openness to the European Christians.
The latter, were figures of a potential affinity, modulations of an alterity that should attract and be
attractive; an alterity without which the world would wane in indifference and paralysis. In
contrast to Europe, there were no religious wars, only a religion of war in which vengeance was
the finest institution of the Tupinamb society. 19
Furthermore, the war of the Tupinamb was not a return to an Origin, an effort to restore a
Self from the corrosive assaults of an exterior becoming. It was more an act of creation than of
reproduction; an openness to the unfamiliar and the beyond. The others were indispensable, given
that the philosophy of the Tupinambs affirmed an essential ontological incompleteness: the
incompleteness of sociability and, in general, of humanity. Here, interiority and identity were
hierarchically subordinated to exteriority and difference, where becoming and relation prevailed
over being and substance.20
Predation implies an act of humanization; enemies and others are not inert or naturalized, they
are subjectivized, allowing for the establishing of relations. Cannibalism is a relation between
subjects. Here, predation is not production, but communication, exchange, struggle, 21 involving
an exchange of perspectives and points of view between the subject and its enemy, humans and
non-humans, the living and the dead.
Such practices may very well define a cannibal epistemology, a philosophy of nourishing
predation, where eating is an act of strong logical potency and deep ontological seriousness. Its
relations possess the following key positions: Eating like the other, eating with the other, eating
the other, and be eaten by the other. 22 The Amerindian world thinks itself in anthropophagic
terms, terms of predation, so that the prototype of relation [...] is predation and incorporation, and
subject and object are reciprocally constituted by the incorporating predation. 23 A generalized
relationism motivated by difference (affinity) and modeled on the idea that my wife is your sister
and that what unites us is what distinguishes us.24 In Tupi, enemy and brother-in-law are
expressed by the same word, tovaja.

19 Ibid., 207; Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro, Vingana e Temporalidade: Os Tupinamb, 196.
20 Ibid., 205; Viveiros de Castro, O mrmore e a murta: sobre a inconstncia da alma selvagem, 220-221.
21 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Apresentao, in Aparecida Vilaa, Comendo como gente (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ,
1992), xviii.
22 Ibid., xvii.
23 Viveiros de Castro, O problema da afinidade na Amaznia, 164.
24 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Atualizao e Contra-Efetuao do Virtual: O Processo do Parentesco, in A
Inconstncia da Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002), 423.
Predation and the Economy of Alterity

In the Amerindian world relations are driven by difference, by the desire for that which is distinct.
Beyond kinship, that is, the production, circulation, and reproduction of people, one finds an
economy of alterity.
Production is located more within the realm of people than that of things. Hunting, for
example, is linked more to commerce and exchange rather than to work. Furthermore, it is tied to
an indigenous theory according to which different sorts of personshuman and nonhuman []
apprehend reality from distinct points of view. 25 Predation is subjectifying, contrasting radically
with the objectifying production of the moderns, who see relations between subjects and objects as
neutral. This is an unacceptable idea for Amerindian practices involving distinct subjects beyond
any type of naturalization.
As such, Viveiros de Castro states that the Amerindians are perspectivists: the Amazonian
view is that man and all other subjectivitiesspirits, plants, gods, objects, meteorological
phenomena, animals, and geographic traitssee themselves as humans. Put differently, the way
humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world differs profoundly from the
way in which these beings see humans (and see themselves). 26 A multiplicity of points of view. For
Viveiros de Castro, perspectivism is a cosmopolitical theory, in which there is no clear line
distinguishing politics from nature. Agency extends beyond humans, and any being can be
revealed (or be transformed into) a person; animals and other components of the cosmos are
intensely and virtually persons.27 Therefore, the condition of person precedes that of human, and
the capacity to occupy a point of view is not a function of the species but rather of a position, of a
context. The ontological quality of humanity is a potency, and it is related to a generalized predation
found in the Amazonian conceptual imagination.
Viveiros de Castro highlights the Western ambiguity between the concepts of humankind, in
which man is an animal among many others, and humanity, a condition from which animals are
excluded. Amerindian cosmologies thread this division between man and animal differently, for the
common origin of man and animals is found not in animality but in humanity. It is not a matter of
man separating itself from nature through culture but rather of animals losing their culture. Myth,
then, is a history of the times when man and animal were still the same, 28 and Amerindian myths
speak of a state of being where self and other interpenetrate, submerged in the

25 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian
Ontologies, Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3 (2004): 466.
26 Ibid., 350.
27 Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques cannibales: lignes danthropologie post-structurale, 22.
28 Claude Lvi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De perto e de longe (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005), 196.
same immanent, pre-subjective and pre-objective milieu, the end of which is precisely what the
mythology sets out to tell. 29 The Amazonian ideal of knowledge perceives all relations as social
and in terms of difference. Multiverse instead of universe, in a multiplicity of agencies instead of
their unification or reduction to an objective representation, where the other becomes a thing.
Perspectivism is a relationism.
All beings can, potentially, occupy the position of a subject, signaling a multiplicity of worlds.
In a savage economy, all activity is a predatory form of expansion. 30 How does this relate to
production? It is an economy and politics of multiplicity, an in-between, a production of differences.
The Amerindian emphasis on relations allows the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro to shift from
production to predation. It is an economy of people and alterity that contrasts with classical political
economy. While the latter unifies man and nature, the former treats relations as heterogeneous.
The concepts of alliance and affinity are inevitably bound with that of exchange. Viveiros de
Castro states that the relation between killer and victim, quintessential in the struggle between
man, belongs undoubtedly to the world of the gift. 31 Thus, to think of production in the Amazonian
and Amerindian context can only lead us to reflect on the opposition between the gift and
commodity, for if, in a mercantile economy, things and persons assume the social form of things,
in an economy of the gift they assume the social form of people. 32
The gift is the form things take in an animist ontology; it is another characteristic of a
generalized predation, of a symbolic Amerindian economy. As such, the gift is understood as
relational and reciprocal, and it is never free or gratuitous. The free gift is an horrendous exercise
of power, for it is just another name for absolute power. Only an absolute power can give for free
because it asks for everything in return. The free gift is that for which payment is infinite because it
is beyond any possible payment; the free gift is that which is never possible to pay back, it is the
divine gift.33 Furthermore, if the mercantile economy, that is the economy of commodities,
distinguishes between the social form and natural forces, between exchange value and use value, the
gift allows us to question the divide between nature and culture. This is perhaps why Viveiros de
Castro defends that non-modern economies of the gift are unconscious of such a duality, for they
operate on the basis of a unified world of form and force, that is, a magical world developed in

29 Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian
Ontologies, 464.
30 Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques cannibales: lignes danthropologie post-structurale, 121.
31 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Imanncia do inimigo, in A Inconstncia da Alma Aelvagem e Outros Ensaios de
Antropologia (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002), 291.
32 Chris A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic, 1982), 41. For further discussion see Marilyn
Strathern, Gender of the Gift (California: University of California Press, 1990), 134.
33 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Temos que criar um outro conceito de criao, in Encontros, ed. Renato Sztutman
(Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, 2007), 179.
the absence of the necessity of dividing the universe between a moral sphere and a physical sphere
or in kinship terms, between juridical and biological relations. 34

Predation and Production

Viveiros de Castros Critique of Marx

A critique of Marx is already implicit in the opposition between production and predation made by
Viveiros de Castro. For the Brazilian anthropologist, Marx is seen as anthropocentric, in that Marx
follows the modern view of production and of the relation between nature and culture. If Viveiros
de Castro criticizes both Marx and the modern Western civilization, for him in certain moments
Marx becomes almost its archetype.
According to an indigenous conceptual imagination, as understood by Viveiros de Castro,
production involves in and of itself nature-culture, man-animal relations. For the anthropologist, the
Amerindian and Western world occupy opposing cosmological visions. The Western world, in its
evolutionist version, is anthropocentric, while the Amerindian perspective is anthropomorphic.
Hence why Viveiros de Castro quotes Marxs Manuscripts of 1844:

In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature,
man proves himself a conscious species-being [...] Admittedly animals also produce [...]
But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces
one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally [...] An animal produces only itself, whilst
man reproduces the whole of nature [...] An animal forms only in accordance with the
standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce
in accordance with the standard of every species. 35

Viveiros de Castro accuses Marx of saying that only man produces universally, and that man is
therefore the universal animal. This represents the inversion of the Amerindian notion that sees
humanity as the universal form of agency.
Marx belongs thus to the perspective that sees Man as the sole bearer of the condition of
Subject and agent before a nature which is regarded as an Object and patient, submissive to a
Promethean praxis. Production, in modern terms, is understood transcendentally, and thus the

34 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Le Don et le Donn: Trois Nano-Essais sur la Parent et la Magie,
ethnographiques.org, vol. 6, last modified November 2004, www.ethnographiques.org.
35 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Mineola: Dover, 2007), 75-76.
human produces and produces itself against the non-human.36 Production is what allows for the
mediation between man and nature, yet nature is understood as subordinate to the will of the former.
Amazonian collectives, however, conceive of production in terms of reciprocity. Through
exchange, subjectsboth human and non-humanconstitute themselves mutually. The nature-
culture divide is meaningless because nature is part of society and the relations between society and
environment are understood as social relations between subjects. Amazonian knowledge is founded
in a wide understanding of agency and intentionality. In its sociomorphic conception of the cosmos,
the position of subjecthood is not subject to monopoly, and nature is not regarded as inert, or
passive. This leads to an internalization of nature, a new immanence, and a new materialismthe
conviction that nature cannot be the name of what lies outside, for there is no outside, nor inside. 37
This is why in the nature-culture divide, technology falls into the latter. Technology separates
nature (the productive forces) from culture (relations of production). In the former, we find man and
the forces of nature; in the latter, man and the spirit. Therefore:

technology is like a locomotive leading the historical process. Here, development of

productive forces anticipates the development of the relations of production, and the
technical machine (the locomotive) pulls the social machine, which must always follow
or else it will derail. So, revolution is when the technical machine bumps against the
social machine and pushes it a notch further. This is the Marxist model of revolution as
adaption of the relations of production to the new stage of development of the
productive forces, as we used to say in the good old times. 38

Meanwhile, in the Amazonian world the questions are posed differently. The social machine
englobes, controls, includes and circumscribes the technical machine. The distinction, which we
make in an ontologically founding way, between productive forces and relations of production is
inexistent, for in the indigenous world, as we have seen, relations with animals are social: the
productive forces are relations of production. 39 Nature is not isolated from culture, there are
incessant interactions between nature and culture. A pristine forest is something that does not exist,
for it is the product of centuries of human intervention; most of the useful plants of the region
proliferated differently as a consequence of indigenous techniques of using the territory. Vast areas

36 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Prefcio, in Um artifcio orgnico: transio na Amaznia e ambientalismo (1985-
1990), ed. Ricardo Azambuja Arnt and Stephan Schwartzman (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1992), 15.
37 Ibid.
38 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Identidade na Era de Sua Reprodutibilidade Tcnica: Entrevista a Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro, Revista Nada, no. 11 (2008): 49.
39 Ibid., 49-50.
of the Amazonian soil are anthropogenic. 40 In other words, nature is part, and a result, of a long
cultural history and of an applied human activity. 41
But this divide between nature and culture, humanity and animality, also has another
dimension which must certainly be of interest to Marxists, in that it demarcates social inequalities.
In a famous passage from the essay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man,
Lvi-Strauss states that the separation of man from nature placed him as its sovereign. But it also
distanced man from the property he shares with all other living beings, opening thus the door to all
abuses. By excising radically humanity from animality, celebrating the former in detriment of the
latter, Western man [...] initiated a vicious cycle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would
be used to separate men from other man and to claimto the profit of ever smaller minoritiesthe
privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth. 42

Marx, Nature, and Production

Is this critique justified? And what is Marxs perception of the relation between man and nature?
And between nature and production? Going back to Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
quoted by Viveiros de Castro, the French philosopher Franck Fischbach defends that Marx develops
his idea of the man-world relation as man being immediately of the world and of nature. For Marx,
the world is an unlimited whole, without beginning or end, that is, a non-totalizing totality of
social relations, historically tying living creatures together, all of which determined to produce their
environments for the perpetuation of their existence in the world. 43 As for productive labor, this
vital activity involves the production of objects, but also, and above all, production of subjectivity,
of oneself and the world. Production of things, but also of workers, and of man at large. Activation
of oneself and the constitutive activity of the world.
Production and nature. According to Marx, the worker can create nothing without nature,
without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it
is active, from which and by means of which it produces. 44 Therefore, man is not an exception to
the natural world, and production cannot be understood separately from nature. In his productivity,
man announces his unity with nature.

40 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Histrias Amerndias, Novos Estudos, no.36 (July 1993): 28.
41 Eduardo Viveros de Castro, Une Figure Humane Peut Cacher un affection-Jaguar, Multitudes, vol. 24 (2006): 44.
42 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man, in Structural Anthropology II
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 41.
43 Franck Fischbach, La production des hommes (Paris: Actuel Marx Confrontation, 2005), 16.
44 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 81.
 Rather than excising man from the realm of nature, work and production are natural activities,
through which man mediates his actionsan idea that accompanies Marx up to Capital. The
production of surplus value, however specific to man, does not rupture mans relation with nature.
Man mimics nature, transforming it by a combination of forms, forces, and pre-existing materials,
as an extension of natures activities. According to Marx, man lives on nature, and this means that
nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That
mans physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for
man is a part of nature. A dialectics of man and nature. Human activity shows that society is the
consummated oneness in substance of man and naturethe true resurrection of naturethe
naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment. 45 A naturalization of
man and a humanization of nature. Man is the transformed production of nature, with labor
mediating a constant interaction between society and nature.
Furthermore, for man, there exists only an already humanized nature, which is collectively
and socially appropriated and transformed. For Marx, history means nothing but the social
process of appropriation and transformation of nature. Marxs naturalism is influenced by
Feuerbach and Spinoza, and impels him to break with Hegelian idealism, given his understanding of
an ontology of production as an infinite, natural activity, necessarily and materially productive,
which unfolds into an ontology of immanence. Via Spinoza, Marx conceives of man as finite.
Infinitude is alien to man, possible only in the delirium (on which capitalism is founded) of
unlimited knowledge and domination, that is connected to an indefinite accumulation of riches,
an endless valorization of value. Marx searches for a cure to such delirium in the restitution of
finitude and the limits of a being that, as a part of nature, can only prove impotent in his attempt at
totalization, to cure himself of such a dream of totalization, one must go further and state that
totalization is impossible not only for man but also in itself. 46 In this way Marx eludes the idea of
an unbounded totality. A totalizing point of view would be pointless, for it would imply that a being
of nature would reach a totalizing point of view, which he himself discounts.
Therefore, in respect to science, Marx refuses the rupture between nature and history,
criticizing it as the result of an idealist (and ideological) conception, for nature and history are
reciprocally conditioned. There is no historical fact that is not also natural, and vice versa. The
individual is not self-contained, independent from others and nature. Marx highlights the relational
character of the social and of the natural, for the essence of man is found in the commerce
(Verkher) of men, or put differently, the essence of man is found neither before nor beyond human
beings. As such, individuals do not pre-exist exchange, rather they become individuals in and of

45 Ibid., 84, 107.

46 Fischbach, La production des hommes, 27, 71, 125.
exchange; it is the reciprocity between exchange and trade that constitutes them. 47 All is relation
and exchange, the activity of man being one of cooperationproduction and interaction; exchange
is always already productive.
One finds in Marx an ontology of relation. This is another Marx, who says wherever
there is a relation, it exists for me. 48 Marx refuses the opposition between nature and history, man
and nature, production and nature. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx already says, the essence of
man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social
relations.49 Furthermore, Marx comes to think of communism as a fully developed naturalism,
equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism, equals naturalism. Communism, therefore,
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and manthe
true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-
confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. It is the
riddle of history solved.50
How does this immanent critique developed by Marx relate to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro?
The former portrays man and animal as sharing a vital productive activity, where both become
indistinguishable. Yet a decisive distinction remains, for the animal is immediately identical with
its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is life-activity. Man makes his life-activity
itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. Hence,
conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity. 51 We can see then a
paradox in Marxs thought. For Marx, production and nature cannot be ontologically and radically
distinct; to the contrary, there is a reciprocal constitution between each sphere, and communism
comes to be seen as the resolved enigma. For Viveiros de Castro, however, there is a consciousness
of the active relation between production and nature, and a significant difference between
production and predation. How, then, to conceive this dialogue? One must verify how Amerindian
thoughts and practices (mediated by the ethnology of Viveiros de Castro) interrogate Marx. In this
respect, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers help us rethink Marx today, for the crucial point is
not to reach agreement on what Marx wrote, but to prolong the question that he created, that of this
capitalism whose hold it is a matter of combating. 52

47 Ibid., 139.
48 Haroldo de Campos, Uma Potica da Radicalidade, in Oswald de Andrade, Obras Completas/Pau Brasil (So
Paulo: Globo, 2003). Originally published 1975.
49 Karl Marx, The German Ideology: including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 570.
50 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 102.
51 Ibid., 75.
52 Philippe Pignare and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), 12.
Marx and Cosmopolitics

According to numerous Amerindian myths, the constitution of the Indians implies also that of the
non-Indians. In this mutually constitutive existence, the white people came to occupy one more
step in the ladder of reiterated dichotomies between the positions of self and other that could
already be found flowing within the myths well before 1500: creators and creatures, humans and
non-humans, relatives and enemies. There has always existed a relation of the Indians with white
people, for there wasnt, nor is there, any contact that isnt an actualization, no matter how
disastrous, of a virtuality found in the discourse about the origins. 53 This relation is, in its own way,
already predicted in the duplicity of Amerindian thought, in which the word and its opposite are
inseparable. Therefore,

the challenge or the enigma of the Indians consists in verifying if it is truly

possible to use the technological potency of the whites, that is, their mode of
objectificationtheir culturewithout being poisoned by their absurd violence,
their grotesque fetishization of commodities, their unbearable arrogance, in other
words, their mode of subjectivationtheir society. 54

This is the touchstone of an Amerindian anti-capitalism. As seen, Viveiros de Castro tries to build
an anthropological theory from a native theory: perspectivism as a cosmopolitical Amerindian
theory. In doing so, however, does he not stumble into Marx, particularly Marxs mapping of
capitalism and the agents that refuse it and fight against it?
The idea of the proletariat as a working class was structured along a series of exclusions:
industrial labor against non-industrial labor; men against women; civilized against uncivilized; the
employed against the unemployed; proletarian against the lumpen proletariat. From this perspective,
it would appear futile to establish a dialogue between proletarian struggles and indigenous
struggles. However, late in life, Marx incorporated other actors into his theory, such as the
colonized and the peasants.
In On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin states that Marxism is meaningless if placed
outside of the context of centuries of struggles and emancipatory dreams, with each struggle of the
oppressed questioning not only current modes of domination but also yesterdays victories. For
Benjamin, the proletariat is the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of
emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness,

53 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, "A Histria em Outros Termos," Povos Indgenas no BrasilISA (2000), accessed June
27, 2008, http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/portugues/indenos/evcapres.shtm.
54 Ibid.
which for a short time made itself felt in Spartacus. 55 Ironically, in his Proust Questionnaire
which Benjamin certainly didnt know aboutMarxs favorite hero is... Spartacus! Benjamins
Marxism opens up the idea of class struggle beyond the worker of industrial capitalism, to forge a
deep bond between resistance movements from distinct historical periods and geographical
locations.
But there is also Marxs view on capitalism and the colonial system. In the final chapters of
Capitalthe So-Called Primitive Accumulation and The Modern Theory of Colonization
Marx focuses on the relation of England to the rest of the world, and details the transformation of
money into capital, capital into surplus value, and back to capital. Marx retraces Adam Smiths
previous accumulation, an accumulation that comes before capitalist accumulation, framing it as
the political economys equivalent to the original sin in theology. In contrast to classical economics,
Marx describes primitive accumulation as the violent production of the conditions for the
possibility of capitalist relations of production. The focus shifts from historical necessity to
conquest proper. Against the idyllic vision of original accumulation, Marx narrates the historical
expropriation of the means of production from rural producers. The history of this expropriation is
written in the annals of history in letters of blood and fire, with capital dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt. Its classical form occurs in England at the end of the
sixteenth century, with the pillage of church goods and the enclosure of communal landsthe
Enclosure Actswhich allowed for expropriation and created for the urban industries the
necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians. Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly
expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped,
branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the
system of wage-labour. Such violence cannot be understood without referencing the conquest and
exploration of the colonies, the strange God who perched himself side by side with the old
divinities of Europe on the altar. 56 Marx finds the secret of the capitalist mode of production and
accumulation in the New World, for capitalism would not have been possible without the
expropriation of the Indians out there and of the peasants within, that which economists call
previous or originary accumulation, but which should be called originary expropriation.57
According to Isabelle Stengers, the enclosuresas the condition for the birth of capitalism
led not only to a destruction of the subsistence of the poor peasants, but especially to the collective
intelligence that came from the commons all depended on. 58 A patrimony of collective creativity,
forms, images, affects, relations, for the common is not only the earth we share but also the

55 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 4: 1938-40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 394.
56 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 875-926.
57 Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profit (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 46.
58 Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps Des Catastrophes: Rsister la Barbarie Qui Vient (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2009), 108.
languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our
relationships.59 This is a broader and more stimulating image of the common, in detriment to its
usual reduction to natural resources only.
Stengers proposes a shift in the famous sentence of the Manifesto that reduces history to the
history of class struggle, and says that we either descend from witches, that is, from pre-capitalist
collective forms, or from their persecutors, either from the dominant and unifying capitalist
mentality or from the multiplicity of the commons. And what would unite all the different pre-
capitalist social relations? At least the fact that the expansion of capitalism tries to destroy them
all.60 Or, in more Marxist terms, the opposition of those distinct socioeconomical forms to private
appropriation. Only so can one grasp the colonial ties that bind capitalism to indigenous issues, for
the birth of capitalism is above all the struggle against the infinity of possible worlds that preceded
and surpassed it.61
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx quotes the French economist Jean-
Baptiste Say as stating, landlords right has its origin in robbery, recalling that landed property
[is] the root of private property.62 Throughout, capitalism is founded on theft, the extraction of
surplus value from its producers. Similarly, Viveiros de Castro says, private property is a theft, a
robbery. Theft is at the origin of capitalist social relations. 63 Today, we are witnessing the
increasing appropriation of the commons, their exploration as expropriation.
Creation without (capitalist) capture is the true, Copernican revolution. The mercantile
economies must be considered from the perspective of those that came before it, as if the
commodity were a transformation (or deformation) of the gift, rather than the opposite [...] given
that the point of view of the gift on the commodity is not the same point of view as that of the
commodity on the gift. What must be explained is the separation of the workers from the means of
production. This, and not its opposite, is the exception. For Marx, this is the revolutionary potential
of other social forms, where primitive communism refers more to an antagonism to private
appropriation than to a form shared by all peoples at the beginning of historical time. This is the
strength of anthropology, for the several forms of primitive communism, including the pertinence
or not of the concept, cannot be thought of beyond their specific contribution. Anthropology as the
permanent practical and theoretical decolonization of thought. 64

59 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2009), 139.
60 Isabelle Stengers, conversation with the author, 2014.
61 Maurizio Lazzarato, Revolues do Capitalismo (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 2006), 188.
62 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 52, 62.
63 Viveiros de Castro, Temos que criar um outro conceito de criao, 180.
64 Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques cannibales: lignes danthropologie post-structurale, 4, 92.
Conclusion

In its typical version, Marxism aims at a global universality anchored in the development of the
productive forces and the expansion of capitalism. However, once connected to political struggles,
the universal, or the common, ceases to be a given and becomes a project to be built collectively by
the interconnection of multiple struggles. If Marx is to be relevant today, it must be connected to a
series of concrete, conceptual struggles. In this case a Marxism in dialogue with the pan-American
cultural milieu.
Marx contaminated by other worlds. Marx from the perspective of difference. Following
Viveiros de Castro, life stems from difference: every time difference is silenced, there is death.
Diversity is lifes supreme value, it is difference, not unity that is found at the heart of things. 65
In abandoning its transcendental (naturalized) and hierarchized (by the market ideology of
privatization and individualist fragmentation of relations that finds its legitimation in the logic of
scarcity), production changes into differential and heterogenous ontology [...] a creation of
meaning, of worlds.66 Production, predation, difference.
Here, Oswald de Andrade appears as a catalyst of dialogue between both authors. For Viveiros
de Castro, perspectivism is the recovery of Oswalds anthropophagy in new terms. Oswald de
Andrade and Viveiros de Castro see the Amerindian world in terms of eating (odontology as
ontology, according to De Andrade). The Amerindians, as shown, possess a cannibal perspective of
life. What one eats is always a relation; relations eating (relating) relations, consuming
incorporealitiesspiritual cannibalism, that is, ritual cannibalism. 67 It is pointless to differentiate
between a literal and figurative anthropophagy. Cannibal dialogue, for what was devoured in the
anthropophagic ritual was an alterity, another.
Oswald de Andrade himself makes a cannibal reading of Marx, or Marxillar. 68 The
Communist Manifesto, carries an innovating lyricism capable not of transforming but of
swallowing the world. For him, the worse of encounters, the birth of inequality, the beginning of
serfdom and of the class struggle, is a consequence of the end of cannibalism. Furthermore, his
critique of Marx is based on what Marx had missed, the potential of a primitivism repressed by
centuries of the weak domination of the bourgeois elites. 69 To sum,
65 Viveiros de Castro, A Identidade na Era de Sua Reprodutibilidade Tcnica: Entrevista a Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,
34-51.
66 Giuseppe Cocco, MundoBraz: o Devir-Mundo do Brasil e o Devir-Brasil do Mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record,
2009), 205.
67 Viveiros de Castro, Apresentao, xviii.
68 Answering back to the national, conservative ideology of the Verde-Amarelistasa modernist movement from the
same time as AnthropophagyOswald de Andrade signs the article, Porque Como (Why I Eat) published in the
Magazine of Anthropophagy in 1929, with the name Marxillar; a phonetic pun combining the name Marx with the word
jaw (maxilar, in Portuguese).
69 Oswald de Andrade, O Antropfago, in Esttica e Poltica, ed. Maria Eugenia Boaventura (Rio de Janeiro:
Editora Globo, 1991), 247-250. Originally published 1954.
 the anthropophagous will inhabit the city of Marx. Having done with the pre-
historic dramas. Socialized the means of production. Once the synthesis we have
searched for since Prometheus is found. When the last cries of war announced by
the atomic era finally cease. For the last man transforming nature will transform
also his nature. Marx [...] There is nothing beyond Devoration. Being is pure and
eternal Devoration.70

This dialogue between Marx and Viveiros de Castro could thus find a possible mediator in the only
philosophy original to Brazil. 71 Marx in the golden age proclaimed by America, where we
already had communism. Encounter between Marx and the Amerindian Weltanschauung
anthropophagy as a worldview, a way of being. Encounter between Manifestos, from 1848 and
1928, the Communist and the Anthropophagous. Processual exchanges, perceptible in several
contemporary struggles. A possible dialogue if in the tone of anthropophagy. Not the classical
dialectical synthesis of Marx, but rather Marx and the Amerindian struggles. A savage Marx. A
dialogue of worlds. Marx and the decolonization. Decolonization of Marx. Marx and
Anthropophagy. Anthropophagy of Marx. Only anthropophagy can unite them (Marx and the
Indigenous America). The deglutition of Marx.

70 Oswald de Andrade, Mensagem ao Antropfago Desconhecido, in Esttica e Poltica, ed. Maria Eugenia
Boaventura (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Globo, 1991), 286. Originally published 1946.
71 de Campos, Uma Potica da Radicalidade, 2003.