the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

of his social relations is externalized. In the opposition of human formand content, man has undergone the separation of his public and privatelives, the externalization of his relations to nature and to society, and theformation of classes of social interest which are mutually antagonistic.These interests are in the first place a wholly externalized and publicformation of social relations; wants and needs then become expressed asgroup interests; the existence of classes of individuals in society is relatedto these interests as their expression on the one side, their determinationon the other. They are the social means to meet the wants and needs andthe modus of their satisfaction in the given society.The study of the family, society and the State was taken up by Marxin his Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, written in the summerof 1843; here he set forth Hegel’s account of the State as the higherauthority over the family and civil society, of which they are the parts,and which presupposes them.114 Marx did not directly oppose theseideas, but rather the pantheistic and mystical expression given to themby Hegel. However, Hegel in Para. 305 of the same work proposed thatthe family with property has as its base the natural ethic, hence is constitutedfor the political life, i.e., is capable of serving the State withoutselfserving. Marx held that this conception of Hegel’s is the barbarity ofprivate property against family life, the illusion of family life, the spiritlessfamily life.115 Thus, the family bears, according to Marx’s conception atthat time, a complex relation to society and the State in civilized society.In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels held that the family in the life ofsavages is the sole social relation, whereas in higher social developmentincreased wants create new social relations.116 This conception wasfurther developed by Marx in relation to Morgan’s theory of the gens,particularly in reference to the family in relation to the gens. The intermediationof increased wants at the same time is the subjectification ofthe subject-object relation, which was later replaced by a wholly socialconception of man already initiated in the Theses on Feuerbach by Marx.Hegel posited the relations of the subjective to the objective sides ofman in his works (of the Jena period) from 1802 to 1806, the System derSittlichkeit, the Naturrecht, the Realphilosophie, and in his Phänomenologiedes Geistes, of 1807; positions were developed there in regard to labor andeconomics generally, to the system of human wants, to anthropologyand psychology, and to the human institutions of right, law, ethics andmorality. (See Georg Lukäcs, Der junge Hegel·, the relation of Marx tothese Hegelian positions is there raised.) The further development byMarx and Engels of these matters in the Holy Family and the GermanIdeology bears directly upon the issues raised in the ethnological notebooks,particularly in reference to the relations of primitive and civilized man tonature on the one side and to the family and society on the other; thefamily is taken out of its direct subsumption under the category of62