ABSTRACT
Karl Marx delved the surface of capitalist economic relations in an effort to reveal the basic mechanisms by which they operated in the nineteenth century and how they arose from organizationally simpler forms. Marx stressed that people encounter reality and their culture differentially based on the positions they occupy within a society. Marx’s original insights continue to inspire much social science research into political and economic processes as well as the varied ways power contests fragment societies. Eric Wolf was a prolific and productive scholar who, throughout a career spanning the middle to late twentieth century, did much to introduce Marxian analyses into anthropology. Drawing inspiration from Marxism, Wolf’s analyses focused on political economies, those relations among the exercise of power on the one hand and processes of production, consumption, and exchange on the other. Many Marxian analyses of ancient states, like those conducted by their processualist cousins, focus on developments that took place within particular societies.
