the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

organization, in the early part of his work,50 but solely on the objectiveside, without the internalization as interest, collectivity of interest andconflict of interest of the collectivities according to the unequal distributionof property. Marx noted that the criterion of property fell awayin Morgan’s analysis of the dissolution of the gens and the formation ofpolitical society, and that moreover, the interrelation of the objective andthe subjective sides as social interest was not taken up by Morgan, but isnevertheless an implicit part of the entire analysis.The difference in the amount of property and its uneven distributionwas further particularized by Marx as land and cattle, and, with thedevelopment of slavery, capital in money form. The interest is theninternalized differentially among the collectivities as capital (in moneyform or in cattle) which is more readily alienable than land, and land itselfis improved by labor upon it of slaves, with the help of cattle, instrumentsas mechanical devices, etc. These proceed through their history as beingfirst organic, and then mechanical, as Marx had noted in his comment onDescartes.51 The slaves are both the means of the unequal distribution ofproperty, being themselves property, and the antagonistic interest insociety against the property, being themselves human. The relation ofmaster-slave, of unequal distribution of property, the individual ownershipof property, whether land, cattle or slaves, the circulation of capitalin money form and the antagonistic interest in society arose in the periodof dissolution of the gens, and accomplished the transformation ofgentile into political society. The relation of temporal juxtaposition ofthe events and participation of these in the process of transformation isthen brought together in the formation of the subsequent form of sociallife, with predominance of private ownership of property, formation ofantagonistic social classes, monopoly of political power by the one ofthese which has the greatest amount of property; it is at the same timethe process of formation of social institutions of property, privativeclasses, and the State. The internalization of the social forms by thegroups of individuals as collective interests was posited by Marx as thetransformation of the unity of interests into the mutually antagonisticcollectivities within the society.The field of religion was the classical locus of development of thedialectic in the post-Hegelian schools of right and left, in which BrunoBauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and others, such as S. Kierkegaard, playedtheir parts, Marx and Engels having made great play with these conceptionsin the Holy Family and the German Ideology. Marx applied thedialectic in this regard in the chapter on Commodity Fetishism in thefirst volume of Capital·, and in the last chapters of the third volumeEngels brought out the materials by Marx on the subject of reification(Verdinglichung) which further developed the same ideas. The religiousfield was then subjected to dialectical critique not because it afforded the22