the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Notes to Introduction, p. 77.Marx’s drafts of the Zasulich correspondence the land and landownershipside was taken up (see Introduction, Addendum I). Theconsanguineal relation is not all that there is to kinship; Marx dealtwith the marriage ties in the Grundrisse, p. 375.143 See notes 14, 144-147.144 Engels, letter to Kautsky, March 24, 1884. MEW 36, 1967, p. 129.See n. 147.145 Engels to Bernstein and Kautsky, May 22 and to Kautsky, May 23,1884. Ibid., pp. 147-148.146 Engels, Origin, p. 162 n. Here Engels wrote, “I originally intended toplace the brilliant criticism of civilization of Charles Fourier besidethat of Morgan and my own. Unfortunately I have not the time. Iwill only observe that already in Fourier monogamy and privateproperty in land are the chief characteristics of civilization, and thathe calls civilization a war of the rich against the poor. The deepinsight is likewise found already in Fourier that in all societies thatare defective and split into oppositions, single families (les familiesincohérentes) are the economic units.” The source of Engels’ phrasingand possibly the line of argument to be advanced is indicated inMarx’s notes, given above. It is a complex line : First, the relation ofthe family to society and its State must be separated from the relationof the family to society without the State. The form of the family islikewise a variable. Second, the antagonisms of society and the Stateare only later broadly developed on the large scale, and the two kindsof antagonisms are therefore separated both in time and in quantity.Third, the family that contains a relation to services for agriculture isan economic unit both of production and of consumption. The singlefamily of civilization includes the family in industrial society, whichis a unit of consumption, but scarcely a unit of production. Engels’reference to the single families as economic units should be understoodwithin this framework. The starting point in this discussionof the history of the family in the strict sense is the derivation of theterm by Varro, De Significatione Verborum, s. v. familia, from theOscian, “ where the slave is called famel, whence the term for family.”This ethnographic notation has withstood the attempt of the grammariansto distinguish between servus and famulus. (A. Ernout,A. Meillet, op. cit., p. 215.) Marx brought out the difference, inreference to India, between urban and rural families and rich and poor.(Maine excerpts, p. 177.) The opposition, which was developed inthe period of dissolution of the Greek and Roman gentes, appearedin the oppositions of the modern Orient. The limitation on theperspective of Fourier was posited by Marx. (See above, with referenceto Marx’s notes on Phear.) (See also Morgan excerpts, below,note 255.)147 (“ ... Da er selbst das Buch bei den Deutschen einführen wollte, wieich aus seinen sehr ausführlichen Auszügen sehe” .) Engels, letter to387