the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

excerpts, p. 170), who cited as an example of this theory the conversionof personal service to slavery in Russia. The contractual obligation is awholly externalized interest of both sides, of him who imposes and himwho owes it. As external it is public, official, social; it is the final end ofthe communal and personal relation of service, which is that of status inMaine. A recurrent theme is Marx’s systematic and uncompromisingrejection of race, racism and biologism generally as a determinant withoutfurther qualification of social affairs (Maine excerpts, pp. 162, 164, 187,etc.).Marx rejected Maine’s reconstruction of the history of Irish land tenuresin severalty (excerpts, p. 162), the latter’s proposed relation of Romanand English property in land, and of Continental, English and Americanlandowning practices (Maine excerpts, p. 164); likewise, he reducedMaine’s theory of the twofold origin of landed property to one (I.e.), inconnection with the separation of the chief and family head by Marx.Marx further noted his view of interests of social groups and individuals(Maine excerpts, pp. 166, 178, 191), which had been given in the Morganexcerpts; this is developed in the Maine excerpts in relation to the useof fictions.Marx continued his systematic separation of the family from other institutionsof primitive society, wherein he followed Morgan’s initiative,applying the differentiation to the separation of patriarch/paterfamiliasfrom gens/ tribe chief, likewise to the relevant forms of property and itstransmission. Private property in land is not to be directly derived inour theory from the collective property but came gradually to replace itin the transition to political society, just as control over the gens to thefamily; inheritance within the private family is opposed to the Tanaistrule of passage of the chiefry by election, usually to the brother and notthe son (Maine excerpts, p. 178). At this point a public fiction is introducedwhich maintains the old rule of gentile succession as an anachronism.The opposition of public and private, of official and unofficial,which had been first expressed in the Morgan ms. notes, is here developedmore fully in connection with the passage from barbarism to civilization,the formation of the State, and the dissolution of the archaic communalrules of inheritance and authority. The public fictions are applied thenas the social interests become separate and antagonistic. But in Marx’sconception the office of the chief had been opposed to the collectivitywithin it not only in the period of the dissolution of the gens and tribe,but before, since, contrary to Morgan, the chief was elected only in theory(Maine excerpts, p. 177); the election is therefore other than any modernconception of it, both in reference to current practice and in referenceto naive ideas of primitive democracy. Practically the office of chief istransmittable (Maine excerpts, p. 175); here the context clearly indicatesthat the opposition in Ireland of election in practice and election in37