the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

School. The rejection of Morgan by Boas and Lowie has been replacedwith a partial acceptance by Fenton, and of his synchronic analysis aloneby Fortes, following W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon. Morgan hadlittle to say about the sufferings, actual genocide and ethnocide whichthe Indians of North America were undergoing at the time of his studies ;this reason, when coupled with the notion that Marx found Morgan aloneof the army of evolutionists of his day in the least critical of westerncivilization, makes his appraisal a complicated matter. This should betaken together with the consideration that Phear110 associated himselfwith expressions of contempt for the intellectual and artistic attainmentsof the peasants of Bengal; Marx (Phear excerpts, p. 136) was critical ofthis side of Phear, as he was of Maine’s unfeeling blandness regardingthe fate of the Irish - save where their law was concerned. Marx likewisecriticized Lubbock’s ethnocentrism as he did that of Grote, Gladstone,and Bachofen.6. CO M M U N ITY, C O L L E C T IV ISM A N D IN D IV ID U A LISMIndividualism in its extreme forms of laisser faire capitalism, anarchy,egoism, arose among the forerunners, partisans and followers of theFrench Revolution ; it was a caricature of the doctrine of man and societyof Thomas Hobbes’ war of each against all, itself a caricature of itself.Gracchus Babeuf as an extreme of the Left of the French Revolutionadvocated nothing more radical than the allocation of small parcels ofland to individual owners, hence the proliferation of proprietorships.Jean Jaurès denounced the program of Babeuf as ‘communisme parcellaire’,an oxymoron, a contradiction between adjective and substantive.The communism of private properties frightened the Directory. Theopposition inherent in this doctrine is connected directly in action andthought to the conflict of capitalism and socialism, and in the first instanceto the collectivization of agriculture of the USSR and the organizationof the agricultural communes of the Chinese People’s Republic.The issues both historical and actual, no less than the literature about themare vast. Conscious of their scope and complexity we will thereforereview, in brief, one segment as it concerns the origins of property asprivate or collective, and of early society as individual or communal.Likewise, the doctrine of individualism as the absence of collectiveinstitutions of western society in the capitalist period being but a figment,we will allude to it only to set it aside while taking up some of its consequencesas Social Darwinism.The origin of civilization was sought during the nineteenth century inan antecedent form of society whose relations both to man and to naturewere predominantly communal. It was shown that the civilized societywas not a primordial condition of mankind, but a comparatively recent58