the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Notes to Introduction, p. 43.language. Lubbock as a youth came under Darwin’s tutelage. SeeR. J. Pumphrey, Science, v. 129, 1959, pp. 1087-1092. Ryazanov,Novye Dannye, op. cit., p. 368, (Neueste Mitteilungen über denliterarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Archivfür die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegnug, v. 11, 1925,p. 399) wrote with especial bearing on these excerpts: “Marx preservedthis methodical and systematic way in his work to the end ofhis life. If in or around 1881-1882 (k 81-82 godu) he lost the abilityfor intensive independent mental creativity, yet he never lost theability for research.” In order to clear up any ambiguity that may beresidual in Ryazanov’s text, we will relate the chronology set forthin his comment to the corpus of Marx’s manuscript materials onethnology. The excerpt notebooks of 1880-1881, containing theMorgan, Phear, Maine materials are thus set on one side, the Lubbocknotes of late 1882, hence some four months before Marx’s death, onthe other. The time period ‘around’ or ‘towards 1881-1882’ is nota meaningful one. Examination of the content of the notebooks filledin 1880-1881 reveal that Marx was in full mental vigor; the questionof impairment of Marx’s faculties at this time is not to be raised. Allthose, as Kautsky, Kovalevsky and Hyndman, who visited Marxduring 1880 and 1881 have left behind correspondence and memoirsthat testify to this (on Kovalevsky see note 13, on Hyndman, note165). Ryazanov’s comment has a bearing possibly on the Lubbockmaterials; yet here, Marx’s critical capacity and ability to link up themost far-ranging allusions, as in the Cervantes quotation (q.v.), andwith reference to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Lubbock excerts,p. 8), were undiminished. The comparison of the Morgan-Phear-Maine corpus with the Lubbock materials indicates, by thebrevity of the latter in general and of his own positions in particular,that his physical endurance was lessened in the months before hisdeath.The works of Morgan, Phear and Maine were all published between1875 and 1880, after the work of Lubbock. Marx followed thedevelopment of the theoretical constructions and apparatus of theempirical science of ethnology then in the process of development:the gens in relation to the family and tribe, and the like developmentsin regard to property ownership, community organization, justice andthe law. Engels perceived these matters within the categories ofMarx. The relation of the social class of the individual in society inthe period of dissolution of the gentile institutions, the objectivity inrelation to subjectivity of social interest, and the critique of thehistorical and cultural bondage of the romanticist and Victorian conceptionsof society as an organicism fell outside his scope. On theother hand, Engels was alive to the successive accumulation ofethnological data, and its impact on the development both of particularinterpretation and of general theory in the newly forming374