the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

collectivities are onesided in their development in that the oppositionsof the individuals with greater accumulations of property are more highlyelaborated than the oppositions of the individuals with lesser accumulations.The onesidedness is found on both sides insofar as the influenceof the rural and communal relations in the determination of all the socialrelations subsequently gives place to the predominant influence of theprivate, propertied, urban, industrial relations over the rural, etc. Marxposited, in the positive sense, the interaction throughout of the individualand society; in the primitive condition the interaction was between theindividual and the group or community, in the civilized condition it wasbetween the individual and the community in certain peasant groups, asfor example in India, Ceylon, Russia (the mir), South Slavs (zadruga). Hedrew attention at the same time to the difference between the communityin gentile society and in peasant society in civilization. The relation ofthe individual and the peasant community in civilization was different,in his conception, from that of the individual in the civilized urban,rich, etc., conditions. Factors of social class to begin with, and then ofother collectivities, in their interaction, shaped these relations once theyhad been introduced in civilization. In the negative sense, Marx positedthe unfreedom in the primitive condition, in contradistinction to Rousseau,as the non-despotic bonds of the group. Rousseau’s notion of thechains of civilization as opposed to the primitive state of freedom wasreconceived by Marx as the chains of primitive bondage which were,rahter, satisfying and comforting. Despotic, dissatisfying, discomfortingare the bonds of civilization.The primitive community in Marx’s comment on Maine was conceivedboth in continuity with and in opposition to the conceptions of Rousseauand Herder. According to Marx, the individual is already alienated fromnature in the primtive condition; he is alienated both from nature andfrom his own society in the civilized state, whereby, in the working outof the individuality, the parturition is painful. It is the individuality andnot civilized society that is formed by the parturition; this is the onesidednessin the elaboration of the transition to civilization from theprimitive condition, and at the same time it is the onesidedness in theelaboration of the relation of the individual and society. The chains arethe condition of civilized man, not the general human condition; this isthe working out of Marx’s critique, brought out in 1842, of the historicalschool of law; the opposition to the historical school of Maine is itscontinuation but on different grounds. In the earlier critique Marxdescribed the fiction of the eighteenth century which regarded the naturalcondition of man as the true condition of human nature, creating naturalmen, Papagenos, whose naivete stretched as far as their feathered skins.“In the last decades of that century they sensed the original wisdom of theprimitive peoples, and from all sides we bird catchers heard the twittering60