the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

While much has been written about military democracy as the transitionfrom the gentile to the political society, Marx did not regard this transitionas a formal historical, still less a dialectical, category. Morgan developedthe idea of a military democracy first as an elucidation of a positionof Aristode, and in separating the functions of the civil from the militaryleadership of the gens and tribe. Marx supported Morgan in this connectionand likewise against the application of the idea of the militarycommander to the notion of the ancient monarchy by George Grote.Marx wrote, .. basileia [the office of military commander] is, togetherwith the council and the agora - a sort of military democracy. Basileia isapplied by the Greek writers to the Homeric kingship because generalshipis the chief feature of the king.” (Marx, Morgan excerpts, p. 74).52 Thereference to the office of basileia in this way cannot be made into thebasis of a definite stage or sub-stage of history. Engels, returning toMorgan’s form of expression, eliminated the word “ Sorte” from hisformulation, which has encouraged later thinking of the issue in termsof a developmental stage, but does not report exactly Marx’s conception.Marx differed from Morgan likewise in regard to the method of electionof the barbaric chief, basileus and rex. These were conceived by Morganaccording to his idea of the Iroquois practices and functions; Marxconsidered that the Iroquois model had limitations, which will becomeclearer in connection with the ms. notes on Maine, in regard to the electionof the chief. The scepticism of Marx relative to the use of theIroquois data as a model for interpretation of other societies constitutes afurther movement away from the fixity of categories, and carries thegeneral loosening of the stages of evolution both forth and back in time.The model upon which Marx based his idea of the administration ofbarbaric justice, for instance, was that of the Germanic peoples (Morganexcerpts, p. 75); this is noted in passing.There are several points in which Morgan did not make his own systemclear. The first is in relation to the functions of the basileia, military andpriestly, but not civil. Yet the basileus was at the same time a judge, therex a magistrate.53 Morgan’s theory was that the kingship, magistracy,etc., arose out of the military leadership in the status of barbarism. Yethow the function of the judiciary in the magistracy was excluded fromthe civil institution was not explained by Morgan; this refers to thebeginnings of the magistracy, not its subsequent forms. Again, Morgandescribed the Roman wife as a co-heiress, but at the same time held thatthe property of. the deceased paterfamilias was kept within the gens.54Yet the wife came from another gens. He failed to add that the wife’sright in the inheritance could not pass outside the husband’s gens, butremained with his children and that she could not otherwise bequeath,devise or assign it, etc. This confusion is further expanded when Morgandescribed the Attican gens as ‘a great family of kindred persons’.66 Marx30