the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

ethnological thought. It is an anachronism to impose our current antinaturalismupon the naturalism of the antecedent canon.Lowie,Opler, and Fortes are not alone in having joined Marx to Engels inseparablyrelative to Morgan’s work. It is now possible to reexamine thatcombination and to determine the degree and manner in which it is justified.The characteristic question of the nineteenth century writers is that ofthe fantasy versus the reality of periodization of societies, the subjectivearbitrariness versus the objective necessity of periodization, the determinateand unique versus the optional and many kinds of stages andperiods. Marx was more critical than either Morgan or Engels of hypotheticalreconstructions of the past based upon organicist assumptions inregard to the workings of society.The question of periodization in Morgan’s general account of theprogress of mankind is connected with his theory of culture (in regard towhich see note 16 below). Each period or stage of human development,according to this theory, has a characteristic mode of life, culture beingneither the matter of all mankind on the one hand, nor of a particularpeople or social group on the other; it is the matter of an ethnical periodwhich groups within itself a number of peoples in different parts of theworld. Moreover, the laws that govern the movement of the cultures, ormodes of life, from one period to the next are organic, being of thenatural order, and independent of the action of individuals. Thus, theinstitution of political society among the Greeks was not the work of anyone person, such as Theseus, who instead represented a period, or a seriesof events. The process of transition from one period to the next was inthis sense impersonal, in Morgan’s conception, therefore wholly objective.Morgan’s theory of primitive society posited a governmental planwhich was constituted of personal relations; he did not proceed to theintegration of the impersonal process, in the case of the transitionmental plan of the period which his representation overcame. The culturesthemselves are wholly objective in their processes and constitution,and were conceived as objective categories by Morgan. The culturalmatter in this conception is inert, but it is not a passivity, for it containswithin itself, that is, within the given mode of life of each ethnical period,the germ of its own dissolution and transition to the next higher ethnicalperiod. The various periods are marked by inventions and discoveries,as fire, the bow and arrow, domestication of plants and animals, iron,and writing. These inventions and discoveries, however, are not thework of individuals, the implication being, as the process is spelled outby Morgan in the case of Theseus, that they are independent of individuals;they would be invented by someone, regardless of whether theparticular individual to whom they are accredited was in his place at thetime or not, and whether he was active to the given end or not. The inventionor discovery is a matter of the ripeness of the particular ethnical53