the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

nature by Marx, in contrast to Hegel. However, the matter is yet morecomplex. Bachofen, Maine, Lubbock, Morgan, McLennan, Engels, heldin various ways that the earliest form of human life was in a promiscuoushorde. This was modified under the term of hetairism by Lubbock andMcLennan, which aroused Marx’s sarcasm (see below, Marx, Lubbockexcerpts, p. i), a modification which did not change the issue substantially.Darwin (Descent of Man, ch. 20) on the other hand, attacked theconcepts of primordial promiscuity and communal marriage. Marx atthe beginning of his excerpts from Morgan’s Ancient Society, Part III,The Growth of the Idea of the Family, introduced phrases of his own, notfound in Morgan at that place, (Morgan excerpts, p. 4): “ Oldest of all:horde organization with promiscuity; no family; only mother-right canhave played any kind of role here.” If this is so, then the horde is a formof organized society; however, family and society are indistinguishableunder these circumstances. Taken as an abstraction, this prehistory offamily and society is then developed by Marx (Morgan excerpts, p. 8) suchthat in the first ethnical period for which there is empirical evidence, thefamily in its consanguine form is not separated from society; i.e., in thissense it is “ the first organized form of society” . This position is thenproffered without further development in the Morgan excerpts, pp. 19-20.The problem of incest has aroused anthropological discussion for manycenturies, including the question whether the taboo of incest is a universalinstitution of the human family and society. Without going further thanto adumbrate this issue, we will confine our comment to the question,raised by Marx, of the relation of family and society in the primitivecondition, of the family in relation to nature in reference to the procreationof children, their rearing, etc., and the external in relation to theinternal composita of man in the various social contexts, or cultures, thatis, his objective and subjective sides.With reference to the thematics of Marx, as developed in the writings ofthe early and middle 1840s, the positions that he took up in his ethnologicalstudies continue them and in part change them. The relation ofthe family to society at the onset of the prehistoric process is interestingfrom this point of view only insofar as it is related abstractly to thequestion of the relation of the family and society in the period of gentilesociety and its transition to civilization; otherwise the question of thehorde is entirely a conjectural matter. The comments introduced byMarx into the excerpts from Phear, Maine and Lubbock reveal thedevelopment of his thinking, and the direction that he took in the courseof working them out: in the development of society from savagery tocivilization, the family in its various forms was separated from society,and became one of the sets of relations maintained by its members. Onthe one side, the individual is developed as a human being first only inand through the social relation, the collective institutions, second, as he63