By: Jafe Arnold

Marx and the Indo-European Mode of Production

f the three main socio-political ideologies of modernity – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism (and their offshoots) – Marxism is arguably the most complex, scientific, and paradoxical. On the one hand, the theories of Karl Marx are no less contextually rooted in their 19th century Western European environment than other thinkers and currents that contributed to the first and third political ideologies. On the other hand, Marxism proved to be something more historically commanding and globally relevant than the myriad of other 19th century frameworks and theories which proposed a socio-political trajectory of modernity based on one or another meta-historical philosophical narrative. Societies claiming to be consciously guided by Marxist ideology and realizing its political pivot – the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – once covered nearly half of the globe for half of the most turbulent 20th century, thereby shaping a unique experience of modernity for more than a billion people and rather convincingly insisting that communism would be “the end of history.”

In this installment, we will address the dilemma of Marxism from two standpoints: (1) weighing the benefits, downsides, and paradoxes of Marx’s framework, and (2) demonstrating the relevance of Marxism’s identification of the relations of production and class to understanding the mythological, sociological, and political-economic developmental trends that uniquely affected primordial Indo-European society. With these analyses integrated into our arsenal, we can move ever closer to understanding the modernity that we are leaving, how it came about, and the multipolar world into which we are moving.  In order to broach such, we must first establish why it is worth picking Marx up again at all.

If we analyze Marx’s corpus as a whole (from the 1840’s to his posthumous publications by Engels in the 1880-’90’s), we can discern a tripartite thematic thread. We have: (1) Marx’s philosophical writings in which he arrived at his dialectical materialist understanding of history, (2) his translation of such into socio-political equations which culminated in the 1848 communist manifesto, the 1850’s narratives on class struggles in France, and in 1871 with The Civil War in France; and we have (3) Marx’s economic dissection of the capitalist mode and relations of production enshrined in his economic manuscripts, pamphlets, and, of course, Capital which preoccupied him from the late 1850’s until his death in 1883. These texts were used as Bibles, blueprints, and laws by more than a few states in the 20th century. Now, several decades after the end of the bipolar capitalist-socialist world, and amidst the collapse of the unipolar liberal world order and rising multipolarity, we have sufficient grounds, and necessity, for re-examining what is veritable and what is problematic in Marx from beyond the confines of modernity. Our re-reading of Marx, naturally, will be attempted in the context of the archeofuturistic paradigm of onsetting multipolarity, the rediscovery and imperative addressing of the Indo-European heritage of much of the spaces on the Eurasian continent, and in light of the relevance of geopolitics.

In the above-mentioned tripartite corpus, Marx accomplished three major points. First of all, Marx demonstrated that the logic of modern philosophy’s gravitation towards materialism can itself be explained in terms of material processes. Hence Marx’s proposal to turn forerunning philosophical trends “on their head”, i.e., towards a materialist understanding of historical processes and the formation of the concrete social bases for philosophy and ideology. That materialist modernity has decisive roots in material processes, which Marx identified as the historical trajectory of modes and relations of production, was a revolutionary thesis which was – rightly or wrongly – advertised as “demythologizing” or “demystifying” the “spiritual” narratives of modernity such as Hegel’s.

It was Marx who laid bare the raw material relations of modernity in capitalism, traced the latter’s emergence in Western Europe, and pointed towards the “world-historic” repercussions of capitalism to the globe, especially the billions of toilers who create material value. In so doing, Marx exposed modernity for the myth that it is, as a product of, by, and for the relations of production and class relations which express themselves ideologically. Even if he considered such to be natural or historically progressive, Marx recognized that modernity is indeed a product or force of alienation expressed in socio-economic processes: 

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. [1]

In turn, Marx argued that this alienation must be “abolished”, in part by “demystifying” the concrete socio-economic relations of this modernity’s “world market.”

Secondly, to this end, Marx qualitatively systematized modern political-economic thought on these material processes into a scientific framework of analysis. The resulting Marxian “science”, dealing with equations of modes, means, and relations of production, class contradictions, capital and production cycles, technological tendencies, etc., has been “revised”, ideologically instrumentalized or moralized by different political forces, but it has not been refuted on its own grounds, much less has it been surpassed as a compendium of political-economic thought. The potency of Marx’s framework for analyzing capitalism and its accompanying historical processes might be dogmatized, misapplied, or instrumentalized by different ideological projects, but the trends and equations of capital he discerned have not been disproven. On the contrary, they have proven so useful that bourgeois economists themselves have turned to Marx for answers in understanding the cycles of capitalism and global trends. Hence also Marx’s appropriation by establishments, schools of thought, and movements which are otherwise plainly non-Marxist.

Thirdly, Marx developed an alternative socio-political vision for modernity positing its own unique trajectory of these material processes towards communism. This socio-political alternative was attempted to be installed in various forms and circumstances across much of the “non-West”, starting in Russia-Eurasia in 1917 and straggling along to this day in Cuba and several Asian countries (in the very neutral least, nominally). Marx proposed that capitalism be replaced by socialism under the auspices of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in time wither away into a communist utopia. Attempts at mimicking this utopian endeavor made up the greater part of the 20th century, with paradoxical repercussions which we just might be beginning to sense. For example, the fact that the former socialist countries of Europe are more conservative, religious, and ethno-sociologically conscious immediately begs the intriguing recognition that “modern, materialist, atheistic Marxism” rendered a paradoxical experience of modernity in these spaces which engendered societies tangibly more ideologically and socially pre-modern than their Western liberal neighbors. But this is an investigation for another time.

The above are, in my opinion, the three qualitative keys which distinguish Marxism.

We can also highlight some of the crucial limitations of Marxism with regards to its modernity. It is no secret that Marx’s materialist apperception and deconstruction of modernity led to an internalization of such as normative, and a reifying of this paradigm back into history. His correct identifying of the materialism of modernity came to entail an appreciation of such as progress, as truth by virtue of its material factuality. Thus, Marx’s revelation of the logic of material relations was – necessarily or unnecessarily – taken to exclude the value of anything metaphysical in history. In On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State of 1884, Engels turned Marx’s notes on modern anthropology into a crudely positivist narrative of human history which overshadowed any potential nuances it might have contained. If Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was still obscure and not entirely secular, then Marx’s “invisible hand” was raw accumulation in all of its economic reductionism. While this might be analytically heuristic in certain cases, it can be justifiably criticized as a negation of the metaphysical, which indeed, can render it intrinsically problematic when looking at “pre-materialist” and especially “pre-class” worldviews and societies. This is also one of the many points against Marxism validly voiced “from the right.” Another example is how Marx and Engels’ historical-materialist, class analyses of the origins of such institutions as the family, clan, marriage, ethnos, and other pre-modern collective identities altogether were violently construed to indict such collective identities altogether because of their specifically perceived social manifestations under capitalism. 

Joaquin Flores has inquisitively posited that this materialism might have been a “noble lie” intended to save a gnostic understanding of modernity and harness the potential for a mass movement, behind which lurks an undiscovered, “esoteric” Marx [2]. By all means, there definitely was a popular element implied in Marx’s otherwise erudite analyses – after all,  Marxian political-economic diagnosis does not require a priestly or intellectual caste, and one of the essential implications or aims of Marx’s analyses would be the raising of popular “class consciousness” and “class revolutions.” Be that as it may, it is clear that Marx did commit to materialism as normative, and Engels and Marx’s 20th century subscribers sealed precisely this seal. Lenin’s 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism beat the dead horse, canonizing radical materialism as an ideological requirement for any Marxist political project. The consequential politics of this idea led to thousands of years of Chinese history being physically destroyed.

What’s more, Marx’s material, socio-economic observations themselves were largely based on the experiences of only two Western countries – England and France – which, from a long-term historical standpoint, were anomalies even within their own civilization, but he internalized their experiences (like modernity as a whole) as universal and normative. Marx “bought the bluff” that capitalism was only an historical deviation from what Saikat Bhattacharyya calls “Eurasian Normality.”[3] In some interpretations,  Marx even intended such as policy blueprints for German statecraft. 

In the 20th century, Marx’s Western-referential model would face the paradox of being appropriated by non-Western societies, which inevitably had to contribute their own ideological revisions to this dilemma in order to survive in their respective environments. Different superstructure vs. base equations would yield Lenin, and the establishment of the Soviet Union had to justify a “workers revolution in a peasant state” and “socialism in one country”; China would yield Maoism and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” or the “market socialist” model; revolutions in colonial countries yielded the “Third Worldist socialisms”, etc. Finally, Marxism would ultimately be applied in alternative experiences of modernity, i.e., alternative socio-economic development models for colonial countries (hence the numerous Third World “socialisms”), alternative ideological justifications for liberal modernity (especially in academia and “identity politics”), or conveniently form alternative modern political shells for relatively archaic cultures (e.g., the Stalin era USSR, Juche in North Korea, Chinese socialism for characteristically Chinese ancient bureaucratic models). These unique socialist experiences themselves can crucially inform us as to the paradoxes of Marxism’s modernity. 

Despite these limitations, the relevance of Marxism remains that it, as the most robust political-economic ideology of modernity, offers to explain how modernity itself came about as a result of material, class processes, and therefore might offer some guidelines as to where modernity is going. In order to grasp this, however, we have to stake our position in the space and  history of the Indo-European culture(s) of whose modernity Marx became a penetratingly self-reflective part and parcel.

Marx’s postulation of the development of productive forces, at the very basic, common denominator, recognizes the variable of geographic environment. For Marx, geography was not only a referential marker for investigation, but could also be enshrined in modes of production. This can be seen in Marx’s critique of Feuerbach in his 1845 The German Ideology, in which he stressed the variation of historical development of the division of labor in terms of both “nations” and “town” and “country.” A geographical factor in history – no doubt a residual harkening to Hegel’s geographical impulse – indeed rears its head throughout The German Ideology, but by the time of Capital, Marx had abandoned space altogether in favor of time. Granted, Marx frequently evoked differences between “nations”, and at times linked “national” or “civilizational” factors to mode of production (such as the “Asiatic mode of production”). In his 19th century German intellectual context, this might have borne connotations of space which we no longer associate with such terms, but, nevertheless, the progressive situation of Marx’s analysis on the basis of his observations of 19th century Anglo-Saxon society internalized the concentration of time as superseding that of space. But as we have affirmed contrary to the myth of modernity, space is a value, and it is not universal – there are different spaces, different civilizations, and the attempted universalist reign over time and space of the liberal-capitalist market of modernity is on its way out. To make Marx relevant to understanding the Indo-European legacy, we must therefore free Marx’s framework from its prejudices of progress and time and situate ourselves in the Proto-Indo-European space, in the pre-historic Pontic-Caspian Steppe in which such modern prejudices and concepts were unknown and antithetical to even later really existing Indo-European societies. 

It should be clear that one of the most crucial dimensions of Marx’s major theoretical accomplishments was the deciphering of “class” as an essential factor in this history, especially in what would become the West, out of which arose modernity with its bourgeoisie and proletariat. Socio-economic-cum-socio-political “classes” or functions were not Marx’s preoccupation by accident. They were a distinguishing feature of Proto-Indo-European society on the map of human civilizations and were a crucial legacy of the Indo-Europeans’ impact on the societies of a significant portion of Eurasia. The contradictions and dialectics between functions, castes, and later classes form significant content of many Indo-European mythological narratives, the sum of which has been attempted to be addressed by the Traditionalist school. Hindu legends of the revolt of the Kshatriyas (warriors) against the Brahmins (priests) and their respective punishment were interpreted by René Guénon as the revolt of temporal power against spiritual power representing a degradation of traditional values in history [4]. Julius Evola offered an exegesis largely preferable to European pagan traditions in which the warriors of traditional society were themselves imbued with initiatic quality, which the priestly caste boasts only in a truncated or particular form whose hegemony is potentially corrupt; therefore, the warriors are the true traditional ruling class fusing action and contemplation [5]. For both Guénon and Evola, modernity in the West is the product of a long process of the degradation of caste power and corresponding metaphysical positions, a process which can be grasped through traditional myths. Alexander Dugin has critiqued Evola’s schema “from the left”, arguing that Evola’s identification of the proletariat, and more generally the “people” in modern society as the least desirable class, the final degradation of “society”, is based on a misreading of early Indo-European caste developments and an unjustifiable denial of the Volk as a retainer of traditions, a position which contradicted Evola’s otherwise consistent denunciation of everything “bourgeois.”[6] As is the case with many “grand typological narratives”, divergences or conflicting interpretations are usually based largely on inflations or misrepresentations of context [7]. Yet both Marx’s materialism and the Traditionalists’ metaphysical narratives harbor discourses on class dynamics which can be useful in deciphering the historical trajectory of the Indo-Europeans. 

If we can recognize that the Traditionalists’ narratives on the devolution of castes addressed a central, recurring theme of Indo-European mythology and “esoteric historiographies”, and if we realize that it is precisely the material dynamics of social class and relations of production as “engines of history” that were the subject of Marx’s analytical framework, then in the intersection between these two inverse approaches, we can excavate a hermeneutical kernel for explaining the fate of the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ social structures, the dispersion of the Indo-Europeans, and their path of historical development up to modernity. The fruits of such an analysis would also help illuminate both the archaic and future-oriented elements of the Indo-Europeans’ experience of emergent multipolarity in our time.

One of the distinguishing traits of the Proto-Indo-European people in their time and space was their social and caste hierarchies. The patriarchal, tribal social hierarchies of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe which would overtake the largely egalitarian, matriarchal societies of Old Europe on one end are archaeologically, linguistically, mythologically, and genetically identifiable with none other than the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European term for village chieftain or tribal leader is the compound weik-potis, composed firstly of the sacral term weik, which means to “consecrate” or to “set aside as sacred” (from which derive Latin victima – “sacrificial victim”; Old Norse vigja or “consecrate”; Old English weoh – “relic, sacred image”, etc. [8]), and potis, meaning a male “master” or “lord.” Related to weik is the root reg, from which we have the major Indo-European words for “king” (Italic rex, Celtic rix, Sanskrit raj-, etc.) which “might originally have referred to an official more like a priest, literally a ‘regulator’ (from the same root) or ‘one who makes things right’ (again the same root), possibly connected with drawing ‘correct’ (same root) boundaries.”[9] The fact that rex, rix, and raj- survived only on the extremities of the Indo-Europeans’ expansion, in the Italo-Celtic and Indic spaces, is an argument in favor of such, since Roman and Vedic societies were distinguished precisely by archaic, complex, and powerful priestly, and in general, religious institutions.[10] The fact that such was originally a function, not always one person or “caste” in the strict sense, explains peculiar variations and later developments among Indo-European peoples as well. Be that as it may, Émile Benveniste’s Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society rigorously argues: “In the most ancient world of Indo-European concepts the king had a role which was both political and magical. He assumes complete power, ruling over the relations of men among themselves and also their relations with the gods. Because of this he is possessed of a formidable power that consists of law and magic.” [11]  The original weik-potis therefore probably engaged in both “consecration”, i.e., delineating the sacred, and thereby delineating the laws of the cosmos and society, and in “power”, or the exercise of such, both of which functions are contained in the original sense of “regulation.”

This means that it is not only probable, but likely, that any division into “sacred” and “temporal” power in Indo-European societies was a later development preceded by a ruling function which embodied or exercised both sacred and secular sovereignties. Indeed, it is curious that in the period of Proto-Indo-European formation in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, and indeed even before (with the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ immediate archaeological predecessors around 5200-5000 BCE) in the economic developments in the region that anticipated such, we see in the archaeological record (burials) the appearance of distinguished figures who wielded decorations and instruments indicative of both functions: weaponry or props in the likes of the mace which demonstrated coercive and regal vitality, and various ornaments made from boar (tusk pendants, tusk caps, tusk plates, etc.) which demonstrated sacrality. The latter can be seen in that the wild boar (PIE: tworkos or, heperos) was of cultic significance to ancient Indo-European traditions: for the Hittites it was one of “god’s animals”; for the Greeks it was the warrior’s animal and symbol; in Old Icelandic, jofurr (“wild boar”) also meant “prince” or “god”; for the Germanic tribes the wild boar was a totemic animal related to the divine brothers, the first of whom, Ibor, is a cognate for boar; for the Celts the boar could connote prince or priest, etc. [12] Hindu mythology also calls the northern ancestral land of the Aryans the “land of the boar”, or Varahi. The wild boar itself was probably a sacred “taboo” very much like the bear (“boar” is also a euphemism), and it is worth recalling that the boar was a primary figure of the faunal environment of the Indo-Europeans’ Ancient North Eurasian ancestors. [13]. In other words, some of the earliest distinguishing ornaments in the archaeological record of the Proto-Indo-European people were of a profoundly sacred significance that would be preserved in numerous Indo-European traditions, and such figured alongside (literally on the same persons) artifacts of martial, authoritative power (weapons, maces, etc.).

 

 

The socio-ideological divisions of Proto-Indo-European society have been conceptualized in Dumezil’s tripartite model as originating in “functions.” Although the Aryan and Greek models are usually taken as the most lucid historical touchstones, linguistic and archaeological data suggest that a trifunctional system was preserved by all Indo-European peoples long after their dispersion.

The first boar-cladden and mace-wielding consecrated/-ing chiefs rose as the rulers of hunters/foragers, but this combined sovereign seems to have given way to the dual sovereign with the rise of cow-keeping. The role of the cow (PIE: gwous) as the new means of production was definitive: cows feature centrally in all Indo-European mythologies and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European creation myth. Here is David Anthony’s basic reconstruction of two essential Proto-Indo-European myths, one of creation and the origins of the priest, and the other of the cattle cycle and the origins of the warrior:

*”At the beginning of time there were two brother, twins, one named Man (*Manu, in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin (*Yemo). They traveled through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacrificed body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm God of War, Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire, and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.”*

*”After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to ‘Third man’ (*Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent (*Ngwhi), the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it alone), and freed the cattle. *Trito became the first warrior. He recovered the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued.”*[14]

The cow economy might explain the development of the trifunctional system: cows were consecrated and sacrificed by  the priest, defended and seized by the warrior, and raised by the herder. If before the “magico-religious” and “martial” sovereignties were embodied in one ruling person or function, then with the new range of responsibilities associated with the cattle cycle, the division of labor was given impetus, as well as wealth inequality, which in turn demanded the reinforced oath, gift, and feast system characteristic of Indo-European society. Indeed, it is crucial to recognize that cattle-breeding, or livestock breeding in general, especially in the 6th millennial BCE Pontic-Caspian steppe, was a complex occupation which entailed the need for loans (feed and animals), sacrifices to demonstrate the subordination of wealth to cosmic and socio-political loyalty, oaths for loans and contracts, the recognition of boundaries for grazing, etc. Herders, warriors, and priests each had their fitting roles in the cycle of the occupation which sustained Proto-Indo-European life and became the symbol of wealth on earth and the cattle-granting divine. 

 

Thus, from the standpoint of an analysis of the material relations of production through the rising division of labor in the cattle-cycle among priestly, martial, and productive functions, we can preliminarily, summarily argue that it is out of the cattle economy that began the division of sovereignties. In fact, Engels argued that livestock breeding is one of the central developments in the transformation of “primitive” societies into increasingly “commodified” societies with the potential for the emergence of classes:

It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans…The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle…The wild buffalo-cow had to be hunted; the tame buffalo-cow gave a calf yearly and milk as well. A number of the most advanced tribes – the Aryans, Semites, perhaps already also the Turanians – now made their chief work first the taming of cattle, later their breeding and tending only. Pastoral tribes separated themselves from the mass of the rest of the barbarians: the first great social division of labor. The pastoral tribes produced not only more necessities of life than the other barbarians, but different ones. They possessed the advantage over them of having not only milk, milk products and greater supplies of meat, but also skins, wool, goat-hair, and spun and woven fabrics, which became more common as the amount of raw material increased. Thus for the first time regular exchange became possible. At the earlier stages only occasional exchanges can take place; particular skill in the making of weapons and tools may lead to a temporary division of labor. Thus in many places undoubted remains of workshops for the making of stone tools have been found, dating from the later Stone Age. The artists who here perfected their skill probably worked for the whole community, as each special handicraftsman still does in the gentile communities in India. In no case could exchange arise at this stage except within the tribe itself, and then only as an exceptional event. But now, with the differentiation of pastoral tribes, we find all the conditions ripe for exchange between branches of different tribes and its development into a regular established institution. Originally tribes exchanged with tribe through the respective chiefs of the gentes; but as the herds began to pass into private ownership, exchange between individuals became more common, and, finally, the only form. Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them – in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money. With such necessity and speed, even at the very beginning of commodity exchange, did the need for a money commodity develop. [15]

Anthony summates that it is precisely the socio-economic and religious norms accompanying the cattle economy that became “the foundation of Indo-European religion and society.” [16] Both archaeologically and linguistically, it is the domestication and herding of cattle that would thereby separate the Proto-Indo-European peoples from other tribes in the area, ultimately making Proto-Indo-European the language of the “cattle-elites”. The “mobile wealth” of the cattle can be seen as the economic base for the superstructure of both the development of the Indo-European functions, and later castes and classes, a nature which is reflected in mythology (and most famously concentrated in the Germanic rune Fehu, which not coincidentally has highly significant esoteric or cosmo-mythological interpretations [17]). Overall, it is thus clear that accessing the formative means and mode of production of Proto-Indo-European society as it took shape in the cattle economy, is a coherent and crucial key to understanding the development of Indo-European caste functions and their mythological narratives.

If the cow gave birth to the Proto-Indo-Europeans (figuratively in their myth and literally in their socio-economic formation), then the horse is what ultimately made them uniquely Indo-Europeans, gave impetus to the evolution of the martial function, and drove their expansion and migrations, from the contours of which we derive the name of this culture stretching from Europe to India. The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the first known people to domesticate and then tame the horse, an animal which would be just as impactfully enshrined in Indo-European mythology as it was transformative to the already existing Proto-Indo-European mode of production and socio-economic structure. 

If the cow impacted the further division of labor and functions in Proto-Indo-European society, then horse-riding, subsequently advanced by the introduction of wheeled vehicles in the steppes by 3300 BCE, had enormous implications to Proto-Indo-European society all the way up to and including the dispersion of the Indo-European peoples. The horse yielded the chariot-riding Indo-European warrior that would be immortalized in Indo-European mythology and who would finally migrate out of the steppes to the point that the original Proto-Indo-European language would be dead by 2500 BCE, its daughters having ridden their horses and chariots out into what would soon become historical peoples, their original steppe homeland becoming the site of intercontinental travel, trade, and conquest for millennia, eventually being absorbed as an integral part of the Russian-Eurasian space.

Therefore, in order to delve further into the material, historical trajectory of the Indo-European peoples from their primordial steppe societies all the way up to our archeofuturistic, multipolar threshold, we must turn to try to grasp the significance of the horse to the Indo-Europeans, reflected in their archaeology, mythology, language, and functional traditions. It might just be the quest to understand the full profundity of the “revolution” of the Indo-European horse, and the discourses and methodologies needed to do so, that will reconcile Karl Marx and Julius Evola. 

***

Footnotes:

[1] Karl Marx, The German Ideology (International Publishers, 2004), 55.

[2] J.V. Capone, “Advance and Follow: The Death and Resurrection of Karl Marx”, (Center for Syncretic Studies, 2013).

[3] See Saikat Bhattacharyya’s article on “Eurasian Normality” in the upcoming Journal of Syncretic Studies. 

[4] See René Guénon, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (Sophia Perennis, 2001). 

[5] See Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Inner Traditions, 1995)

[6] See Alexander Dugin, “The Mission of Julius Evola.” 

[7] Not only is the whole history of the search for the Proto-Indo-European homeland since the 19th century a glaring example of this, but so are the controversies between Traditionalists over identifying the original “Traditional society”, many of the different theories of which are merely based on one particular stage or space in the historical trajectory of the Indo-Europeans or another people as if they were originally universal or absolutely “primordial.” The debates over whether the “primordial society” was “patriarchal” or “matriarchal”, which formed a particular cornerstone of Evola’s sources and disputes, can be qualified with historical findings confirming a matriarchal Old Europe preceding later patriarchal Indo-Europeans – in other words, we are dealing with whole different eras and civilizations whose “traditional societies” were altogether different and might or might not have descended from the same source. The question of whether therefore Indo-European studies can be used to deconstruct, inform, and correct Traditionalist intuitions and narratives, and vice versa, obviously begs itself for a future installment.

[8] J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (Fritzroy Dearborn, 1997), 493. 

[9] David W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2007), 160.

[10] Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (University of Chicago, 2016), 308.

[11] Ibid, 359. 

[12] Thomas V. Amkrelidze, Vjaceslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture – Part I: The Text (1995), 435-436;  Mallory and Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, 425. 

[13] The Proto-Indo-European term for the boar and/or wild pig, heperos, is startlingly close to the name of the Proto-Greek space and tribes of Ήπειρος, or Eperos in Northern Greece – Epirus in English – where Aristotle believed the Greeks originated. To recall, the Vedic reference to the northern homeland of the Aryans was Varahi, or “land of the wild boar”, to which we can add that, according to Guenon, the Hindu designation for the whole present cosmic cycle, allegedly starting with Hyperborea, is Shwetavaraha-Kalpa, or “cycle of the wild boar.” While the Greek term for the primordial, archetypal northern civilization of Hyperborea is usually translated as “beyond the Boreas, or North Winds”, Borea can literally be understood as  “land of the wild boar” (René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science, 113-114). In fact, the very Greek word for “north”, voreos, is strikingly etymologically related to “boar.” This might be an example of how early Indo-European peoples’ expressed symbols and myths of their origins in toponymy and semantic structures.

[14] David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 134.

[15] Friedrich Engels, On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 14-15, 86-87.

[16]  Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 155.

[17] For interpretations of Fehu, see: Edred Thorsson, Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic (1992), 20-22; Colin Cleary, , “The Meaning of Cattle” in What is a Rune? & Other Essays (2015).