the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Marx were surveyed at this time on the basis of the Russian version of1941.Marx’s notebooks, containing the ethnological manuscript excerptstogether with further bibliographic indications, are deposited in theInternational Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.We will refer to the contents of all these manuscript materials asrelating comprehensively to the study of prehistory, proto-history andearly history of mankind, and the ethnological study of living peoples.These studies were being developed in the form, and with the givensubdivisions and nomenclature that they now have, during Marx’s lifetime,a development which he followed closely. Further, the empiricalstudy of mankind in all these disciplines and subdisciplines was at thistime being separated from the philosophical tradition of anthropology,which preceded the empirical study historically, and whose substantiveconnection to the former will be examined; Marx himself participated inthis transition.The manner in which Marx took up these ethnological materials remainsto be examined, likewise his relations to the ethnologists and the writingswhich he excerpted.The ground held in common by Lubbock, Maine, Morgan, Phear,widely shared in the later Victorian period, is that man is the productof his own agency, which is subject to organic development. The growthof human manual and mental dexterity justified an optimism in regard toall problems of human society; although man created and has advancedhimself by his own efforts, the growth of the human faculties of technicalskill and reason is subject to natural, unconscious, undirected extrahumanlaw. The opposite of a teleological, directed law of nature andman attracted Marx to the conceptions of Darwin.1 Human society lieswithin the natural continuum, and was conceived by Auguste Comte,Herbert Spencer, Paul Lilienfeld, A. E. F. Schaeffle, Oskar Hertwig,Maine, and Morgan as an organism subject to the laws of nature; fromthis followed the notion of Spencer that the development of specializedfunction in nature, hence, the division of labor in society, as the mechanismof progress is thereby vindicated; Emile Durkheim shared thisconviction. On the other hand, the actual separation of man fromnature, and the potentiality of his reunification therewith, was proposedby Marx, in connection with and at once in opposition to Hegel’s theoryof alienation, first as a philosophical doctrine; it was then given an empiricaldirection by his ethnological researches, particularly in referenceto the work of Darwin’s followers, as well as that of Morgan, and ofMaine.At the same time, Marx opposed as a groundless utopianism the doctrineof general evolutionary progress then advanced by ethnologists.The positivist and utilitarian doctrines on the one side, the utopian on2