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1923–1999 Austria
Eric Robert Wolf (February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999) was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology. He held a joint position as a Distinguished Professor at both Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center beginning in 1971, where he spent the remainder of his career.
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Everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections.
There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance.
Preface (1997)
Man rises up against nature by means of what we would today call culture.
In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.
The capitalist state exists to ensure the domination of one class over another.
To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste.
The development of industrial capitalism did not move in a smooth ascending line.
If history is the working out of a more moral purpose in time, then those who lay claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history.
Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution.
Wealth in the hands of the holders of wealth is not capital until it controls the means of production, buys labor power, and puts it to work, continuously expanding surpluses by intensifying productivity through an ever-rising curve of technological inputs.
I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology.
Preface (1997)
The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer dependent on the continuation of the slave trade.
American wheat, sold in Europe at lower prices than the domestic product, brought on a crisis in European peasant agriculture, sending a migrant stream of ruined peasants to seek new sources of livelihood in the burgeoning Americas. Ironically many of them made the journey westward on the same ships that carried to Europe the wheat that proved their undoing.
Before capitalist relations could come to dominate industrial production, a set of related changes was required to guarantee the new order. The state had to be transformed from a tributary structure to a structure of support for capitalist enterprise.
Our methods were becoming more sophisticated, but their yield seemed increasingly commonplace. To stem a descent into triviality, I thought, we needed to search out the causes of the present in the past.
Preface (1982)
The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor.
The capitalist mode acts to accumulate capital through the hiring of labor power, but is marked by the cyclical alternation of labor mobilization and labor displacement; each intake of labor power uproots some prior adaptation, while each sloughing off of labor power creates a new cohort of the unemployed.
The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.
Under the conditions of the new mode, capital was able to embark on a process of continual internal and international migration, drawing ever more groups of people into its orbit and reproducing its strategic relationships wherever and whenever it took root.
First, capitalists detain control of the means of production. Second, laborers are denied independent access to means of production and must sell their labor power to the capitalists. Third, the maximization of surplus produced by the laborers with the means of production owned by the capitalists entails "ceaseless accumulation accompanied by changes in the methods of production."
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