the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

within the contexts of Phear and Maine regarding the oriental communities.These points were made more explicit, in the ms. notes on Maine;they appear likewise in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, Capital, thecorrespondence with Zasulich, and the Introduction of 1882 to theRussian translation of the Communist Manifesto.The universal measure of equality and democracy by which Morganjudged the progress of the family and the distorting effect of propertyaccumulation is not an actuality but a potentiality of the history of thesociety to which it is applied. The fact that it is not an actuality is developedby Marx on the one side in his positing of the alternatives open tothe Indian and Russian rural collective institutions; this opposition wasabstractly developed by Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts,concretely in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, and in his ms. notes onMorgan and Maine. The matter is adumbrated in the Introduction to theRussian edition of the Communist Manifesto.In the depiction of the causes of the outflow of tribes from particularplaces, Morgan developed a geographic or natural determinism whichMarx assumed in turn, whereby the economic factor is reduced to theecological or the direct imposition of the forces of nature upon primitiveman. On the other hand, Marx posited in a general way the determinationof the economic system relative to the juridical, political, etc., in theprimitive as well as the civilized statuses of mankind. The two positionswere brought out separately by Marx in his notes on Morgan; in theMaine excerpts he added some qualifications to the determination of theeconomic in relation to Maine’s moral or traditionary factor in history;in effect, therefore, they were brought together.Marx referred to the factor of diffusion of cultural traits in the Morganexcerpts. The diffusion to a given society and the borrowing by it aremoments along the same path, opposed to each other by the vectors of theinitiative in the movement; thus, diffusion is not a wholly external factorin a given social development. On the one hand, it is a relation to thesocial environment of the given people. As such it is in part a passive, inpart an active relation to that environment, for within it a selectivity ofdiffusive traits takes place; the passivity is an indirect activity, imposing aqualitative canon of what kinds of traits may be received or diffused, anda quantitative canon of the degree or amount. These passive and activefactors and the quality and quantity of the relations are an internalizationof their externality, and the potentiality of the given society to realizethese potentialities and make them its own. On the other hand, it is arelation of a superstructure to an infrastructure, as the capacity for thedevelopment by diffusion of the society which takes, the diffusion proceedingthrough its own dialectical process in this way. Thus it is butindirectly active upon the internal developmental relations of the society;nevertheless it cannot be relegated to the domain of mere accident.29