ABSTRACT
Karl Marx’s empirical anthropology was underpinned by a historical-dialectical notion of society. In this regard, his views bore a generic resemblance to those of Georg W. F. Hegel. Both saw human society as a process of becoming. Marx distinguished and contrasted the capitalist mode of production from a series of pre-capitalist modes of production. Modes of production have been described as the “bare bones of a Marxist analysis of historical process”, and as “the base of our understanding of the variety of human societies and their interaction, as well as of their historical dynamics”. Marx was struck by the diversity of human societies, past and present. He suggested that a relatively small number of modes of production, representing alternative pathways out of the archaic or primitive communal forms of society, underpinned this diversity. The formation of social-class structures and state-based institutions never appear in isolation from one another or from other changes in a society.
