the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

not only accepted this, but rendered it into German, ‘nenne es Geschlechtsfamilie’(excerpts, p. 95). It was neither a clan-, lineage- gensfamily,nor any other sort of family, according to Morgan’s system, forthe family contained members of other gentes.Morgan66 had written that in all ages, the relation of mother and childwas ascertainable, that of father and child, until the development ofmonogamy, was not. Marx questioned this (excerpts, p. 6) by differentiationbetween public and private relations, public ethic and privatemorality, official and unofficial ascertainment of fatherhood. The differentiationis posited by Hegel in his System der Sittlichkeit and in his Rechtsphilosophie,it is adumbrated in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, and outlined in hisEnzyklopädie, Pt. III. The difference was not restricted by Marx tocivilized society, but it can only be posited where the public and theprivate life are separate; it cannot be applied where they are not, as in acommunal society, with its related family life and ethic.Marx added the example of the Slavic village collectivity at severalpoints (excerpts, pp. 13, 16) where Morgan mentioned the communal lifeof the savage (consanguine and punaluan) and the barbaric (Germanic)families. Here Marx developed a different thought from Morgan whomade communism in living a relation of a given family organization inthese contexts. This position was more fully worked out by Marx in hisnotes on Maine, for it presupposes that the family is separate from itscommunal village collectivity, seeking shelter within it, etc. This wastrue when the collectivity in the nineteenth century had radically changedits communal character, but would not apply to a social relation of thepunaluan sort, as it was posited by Morgan. Marx was directing hiscritique of the commune of the nineteenth century in rural parts ofeastern and southeastern Europe; here the differentiation of the publicand the private or the official and unofficial, was already made while theform remained, at least in a degree, communal. This is relevant to hisposition on the mir and zadruga in the Introduction to the Grundrisse andin Capital, rather than to Morgan. It also represents a development fromthe position of the Communist Manifesto, in the body of the Grundrisse,57and the background to the letter to Zasulich.2. M ARX’S EXCER PTS FROM PHEAR, T H E A R Y A N V I L L A G E Phear’s work relates directly to Marx’s interest in the oriental society, inparticular to the oriental commune. (Marx in fact referred to Phear inhis notes on Lubbock, excerpts, p. 4, as the author of the “Aryan Commune”.) Phear provided descriptive material in the first chapters of theagricultural, village and family institutions of the East Bengal and Ceylonesepeasantry in the mid-nineteenth century, and their relations to thelandlords, money-lenders, the government tax and judicial systems. None3i