ABSTRACT
Marxist anthropology has stressed a mystical and highly nebulous concept of "structure" to the neglect of Karl Marx's basic analytical tool, the labor theory of value. Marxist anthropology must combine the insights of anthropology and historical materialism to better understand the nature of modern socio-cultural variation. Primitive communism, which occurs most typically among nomadic hunter gatherers but also among some horticulturists, is characterized by the following: all members of society participate directly in production through the expenditure of their own labor power, so that no one lives without working. Every human being in every known human society is dependent upon a system of social production in which human labor energy is used to transform environmental resources into culturally acceptable use-values before they are used to satisfy human needs. Although Marx's specific elaborations of the theory are limited to capitalism, the underlying insight, that the social relations of production can be analyzed thermodynamically, is applicable to all human societies.
