Eric Wolf Quotes (1923-1999)

“In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.”

“There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance.”

“To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Anthropology is the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences. (1964) https://www.berose.fr/article2894.html?lang=fr”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on.”

“Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capitalist entrepreneurs can hire and fire laborers or very their wages in response to changing circumstances.”

“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.”

“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.”

“By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital".”

“The German catastrophe was of course the vortex of other catastrophes : Jewish, French, Gypsy, Polish and Russian, to name but a few way stations on the descent into hell. What the National Socialists wrought is, without a doubt, a cause of moral outrage, but outrage is not enough. It is vital that we gain an analytic purchase on what transpired, precisely because it embodied a possibility for humankind, and what was humanly possible can happen again. https://www.berose.fr/article2894.html?lang=fr”