the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

is at the same time Marx’s comprehension of Hegel. The formation ofmutually antagonistic collectivities, internalized as collective interests intheir opposition to each other, is the difference between Hegel and Marxin their respective comprehensions of civil society. This difference isobjective in itself, it is at the same time the difference between Hegel’ssubjectivity and Marx’s objectivity, and is the positing of the relation ofthe subjective to the objective in society, which is wholly on the side ofMarx. In the Morgan excerpts (pp. 76-77,87 and passim) and in the Maineexcerpts (pp. 191-192 and passim) Marx took up the question of theindividual in relation to the collectivity under the condition of the dissolutionof the archaic community and the formation of civilized society.Here Marx examined the interrelations of objective and subjective factorsin the relation of the individual in society to his collectivity as interests.G. Lukacs understood Marx’s position in regard to society solely on theobjective side, in opposition to Hegel. For this it is necessary to go notonly to the product of the given historical process, such as Hegel andMarx envisaged, that is, modern bourgeois society, but to the onset ofthe process of its formation, which is to grasp it as a temporal phenomenon.Marx set forth the history of the individual interests in theirconflicting relations to each other, resolved in the collective interestof the social class within itself; the resolution of the conflict is not whole,partly because the process of establishment of the new form of society isincomplete, in which the former communal relations are carried forward,albeit pro forma (cf. Morgan excerpts, p. 71, ref. Weihrauchsduft). Pardy,however, the conflict is never resolved in the new form of society becausethe interest of the subject is not wholly subordinated to the objectiveinterest; where property interest is at stake, man is as a shark to man, heknows no interest but his own, even when it is in his interest to subordinateit to the collective one. The interest of the subject is at the sametime subjective and objective, the objective interest being in part internalized,and the subjectivity and the internalized objectivity being bothexternalized in the behavior, relations and production of the group inthe society. Out of this internalization there is developed the partial,fragmentary comprehension of the individual in society as subject-object(v. Ernst Bloch) in mutual interrelation with the society. Yet the internalizationitself comprises both the unity and the opposition of theindividual in the civilized condition. The society is divided within itself,the individual is divided along two axes: by having internalized the socialdivision whole, and by opposing the social division after having experiencedthe comforting bonds of the foregoing communal existence.Finally, man in the civilized condition is subdivided, as society is divided,in the social division of labor. We thus proceed from the social atom tothe anatomized man in civil society, which was earlier laid bare by Marx’sanatomy of civil society, and now by the diachrony of its formation.46