the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Civilized society is artificial, being pervaded with fictions, practices notfound in primitive communities. The joint family has a secondary characterand is separated from the primitive commune where there is noopposition of town and countryside or of rich and poor (excerpts, p. 164).Maine wrote76 that the power of distribution of the inheritance comes toresemble ‘mere administrative authority’ in the degree that ‘the JointFamily, Sept or Clan becomes more artificial.’ Marx commented: “Thematter is just the reverse. For Maine, who cannot get the English privatefamily out of his head after all, this quite natural function of the Chiefof the gens, further of the tribe, natural because he is its chief, (and istheoretically always “elected”) appears as “artificial” and “ mere administrativeauthority” , whereas the arbitrariness of the modern paterfamiliasis just as “artificial” as the private family itself from the archaic standpoint.”The artificiality, according to Maine, is by comparison with, ornonsuitability to, the modern situation of the family, its position inmodern society with respect to inheritance of the estate; according toMarx the artificiality is by comparison to the archaic condition. In hisargument against Maine’s reversal, Marx separated out, along Morgan’sline, the condition of the gens and tribe, and the chief of each, from thefamily and its head, in opposition to Maine who placed the joint family,sept, and clan on equal footing in the same social category. Likewise,Marx entered reservations against Morgan’s idea of election of the chiefof gens or tribe, clan or sept, which office is only elective in theory, buttransmissible in practice, as we have seen. Maine’s criterion for artificialityis that of anachronistic survival, Marx’s that of the social divisionsand antagonisms of the civilized condition as such, wherein artificialityarises from the alienated condition of civilized man, exploited, dismembered,set against his fellows and against himself, by comparison with thearchaic condition of community, satisfying, nondespotic and equal. Inthe Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx had analyzed thehuman condition into its active components: the condition of man asalienated is that of the selfalienation of man, the alienation of man fromthing.77 The process of Aufhebung or sublation of the selfalienationfollows the same path as the selfalienation (Private Property and Communism).78In the Holy Fam ily this is further analyzed, in such a way thatthe possessing class and the proletariat present the same human selfalienation;it is their relation to the social alienation which differs fromone class to the other.79Marx has pointed to the beginnings of the separation of theory frompractice in the excerpts from Maine, continuing the mode of analysisthat was noted in the Morgan excerpts, wherein the official and the unofficialwere separated and the public from the private, in the transitionfrom barbarism to civilization.Marx (Maine excerpts, p. 191) opposed the oldfashioned (positivist)42