the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

to his own, hence providing an objective support of Marx’s argument,without Morgan’s will to do so, or have it done for him. In his letter toZasulich, Marx cited Morgan in support of his idea that the presentsociety would return to the archaic practice of common ownership ofproperty. Marx pointed out that Morgan had been supported in hiswork by the American government (this refers to Morgan’s Systems ofConsanguinity and Affinity). Morgan did not conceive that the modernsocial system is in ‘a crisis that will end only by its elimination’ ; yet Marxand Morgan in different ways called for the revival of the archaic communewith regard to property, equality and the organization of society.(Ste Addendum i.)R. H. Lowie criticized L. H. Morgan’s conception of primitive societyon the ground that it is atomistic101: Morgan did not take account ofterritorial and police-military associations, nor of political behavior andrelations, of differentiation by stratification and ranking in primitivesocieties. Lowie’s criticism of Morgan’s Ancient Society has as its presuppositionthat Morgan’s work is an abstraction from primitive society,a criticism that can be made of Maine’s idea of status versus contract, ofDurkheim’s idea of collective representations and of mechanical solidarity,of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s idea of the pre-logical savage thought, etc.W. N. Fenton, who has worked among the Iroquois, has written thatMorgan omitted mention of their village community or local territorialorganization.102 On the other hand, Marx connected the gens and thevillage community as institutions of primitive, Greek, Roman, andoriental societies, but did not tax Morgan with having missed the connection.However, several of these criticisms when added to the generalschema of Morgan help to reinforce the direction of Marx’s ideas:differentiation of the social strata according to the amount of propertyowned by each contains in germ the organization of the differentiated andoppositive civil society, which is the civilized condition when developed;likewise the territorial, military, and other nonconsanguineal associationscontain the germ of the institutions of political society (i.e., not the germof political society as such). The idea of a germinal State as the laterdevelopment out of these earlier institutions, in addition to those containedin Morgan’s work (property, territorial settlement), is shared withhim in writings of Lowie, White, M. H. Fried, M. Sahlins and the presentwriter. Boas, moreover, held that political organizations evolved fromsmall to great in size over time. In the way that the evolutionary canon(if not the doctrine) was developed by this tradition in empirical anthropology,it is an organicism without teleology but it is a weak developmentof the technical-mechanicist side, as in Morgan, and without aninterrelation of the different sides. Lowie’s criticism of Morgan as anatomist misses the mark because it fails to take account of the overridingevolutionary organicism of Morgan.50