the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

The latter98 had inferred that the Mohawks and Oneidas had each lostat least one phratry and one gens of the remaining phratry. Marx(excerpts, p. 38) exclaimed at Morgan’s words: ..//(!) it is supposed (!)that...” (Marx’s underlining). Morgan’s expertise in this matter wasthen recognized; the steps in reasoning are neither many nor do they defythe imagination. Yet Marx’s exclamations imply a doubt which is to beregistered a fortiori with regard to Morgan’s more sweeping speculativereconstructions.Opposed to Morgan’s conception was that of Franz Boas, who influencedAmerican anthropology in the direction of a mechanicism suchthat growth other than that of the individual biological organism and itsorgans was set down as antiscientific. This opposition was extended byR. H. Lowie further in the same direction of an objective, positivist,empirical mechanicism. On the other hand, A. L. Kroeber, togetherwith W. M. Wheeler in biology, L. Mumford in the history of urbanismand technology, S. A. Alexander, A. N. Whitehead, C. Lloyd Morgandeveloped a conception of organicism without any relation to mechanicism.To the organicist doctrine were related Emile Durkheim’sidea of mechanical and organic solidarity, H. S. Maine’s of status andcontract, and following him, F. Toennies’ of community and society,in whose work Marx figures. The closest to the Hegelian conception oforganicism in the history of law and society was Otto Gierke’s Genossenschaftsrecht,99which we translate as law or right of societas, (== L. H. Morgan’ssocietas). Joseph Needham has redefined mechanicism in relationto Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, giving it the name of neomechanism;Needham thereby gives biological laws an ‘interim’ characterinsofar as they are different from mechanical laws, but are deprived of anentelechy,100 in contrast to the entelechistic deism of Whitehead, Alexander,and Lloyd Morgan. Marx took up the organicist doctrine fromHegel, but in the light of Darwin, without Hegel’s implicit pantheism.Aside from the specific ideas and data-interpretations that Marx took fromL. H. Morgan and the other ethnologists, these general conceptions arenot their common ground. Marx pointed out the way through CharlesFourier in regard to the negative critique of civilization, which in adifferent way was taken up by Sigmund Freud as well. On the other hand,L. H. Morgan was part of an American movement of thought that wasstill alive to the common egalitarian tradition out of which both theAmerican and French revolutions arose. L. A. White did not find thatL. H. Morgan sympathized with the working class and the socialistmovements in American life in his own day; rather he was idealistic andutopian, anti-aristocratic and communitarian in his abstract oppositionto property. Thus, Morgan never proposed concrete means to carryout the program of abolishing the thing which had aroused his distaste.On the contrary, Marx identified Morgan as serving in the opposed camp49