the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

period to bear that particular fruit or not, that which Aristotle called itsentelechy was at cause, or the actualization of its potential. The questionof the actual location of that potential in time and place, whether in theindividual or in the social group, was not posited by Morgan. So difficultis the position of this problem that it was the subject of unsuccessfulattempts by many other writers of that period, for it involves the questionof the objective reality of the social group in independence of the individual,and of the same order of natural, material reality.The problem of periodization, together with the criteria for classificationof concrete and particular societies in such terms, the homogeneityor heterogeneity of the societies in the different categories, aretoday even more complex than in the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury. We have attained a limited agreement on such generalities asthe social evolution from societas to civitas\ but how much more can besaid? Periodization of social evolution has been proposed as more thana device of classification of man’s past; it has been connected with thedoctrine of necessitarianism, iron laws, that is, solely with the objectiveand external side of man and his changing condition of social life. Thequestion is this, how can the subjective side be related to the objectiveside in this connection? Periodization as a convenience and periodizationas a predictive device are separable. The problem Morgan posited becomesthat of the dialectical relation of the one and the many lines ofevolution today, but in an altered form. Those categories of change takeup only the passive, external, objective, undirected tendencies in evolution.They do not take into account the directive, active, conscious actsof man in social change on the political side, the factors of social andnational revolutions, nor do they take into account the introduction ofnew scientific and technological changes, both in the sphere of inanimatematter and in the biological sphere. Thus far these interrelations existonly as abstraction and as possibility, the categories having been merelyjuxtaposed. But a dialectic of the science of man has not been developedthereby, for those who, as J. B. S. Haldane, have taken F. Engels’ D ialecticsof Nature as their starting point have brought out the objectiveside exclusively. The problem of involuntary evolution as objective,is in relation to the conscious control of the future as a subjectivity-objectivity.Marx raised the question of the subjective and the objective aspects ofman and society relative to the identity of interest of the individualwithin the collectivity, which is in turn connected to the identity of theindividual and to the process of formation of the individual in society asa human being: man does not become a human being in general, butbecomes human only in a particular way, within the particular collectivities.In the process of formation in complex society of antagonisticsocial interests, and in the process of formation of the state he becomes54