the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

as his interest, partly together with the same internalization of theprinciple by the other members of the collectivity, and to this extent thegiven social class remains a collectivity; and partly against the otherindividuals and collectivities of the society, thus defeating that very collectivitywhich maintains his private right, and the public right of which,as the externalization of his own interest he, under the opposite conditions,maintains. The conflict of the internalized interest of the propertiedclass and its wholly external resolution in the form of the State is at oncean objective and a subjective opposition of the individual in civilizedsociety. The various moments of the dialectical process of State formationwere posited in their separation and juxtaposition and in their subjectivityby Hegel in his Philosophie des Rechts, as had been pointed out byMarx in his Critique of 1843, and by Marx together with Engels in theHeilige Familie and the Deutsche Ideologic. In the latter, the thesis of theState as an independent formation and the mythical history of the Statecommunitywere criticized, and the relations between the real and theillusory interests broken down into their parts.119 The newly introduceddata and their systematization by Morgan gave Marx the occasion toreturn to the problem in the ethnological notebooks, to counterpose theobjectivity to the subjectivity in their combination, which he made increasinglyexplicit in the excerpts from Morgan and in the reorganizationof the Morgan materials; he then made his conception into an instrumentin the notes and excerpts from Maine. Marx’s reference to society and itsState was made to elucidate the matter for its own sake, the exposition ofthe State as a social institution in the Maine excerpts was made both forits own sake and in order to refute the theory of the Analytical School.Engels brought in the objective side of the invention of the State as aninstitution of society through the introduction of the factor of accumulationof property; the subjective side was brought out by Engels as greed,the driving spirit of civilization.120The State - early or late, it makes no difference - has as its object theregulation of conflicting interests of property both internally among itsowners and as between them and society and the State; in this sense theState is the organ of dominance over the propertied class. The propertiedinterest is a contradictory one: on the one hand it is a relation of publicobligation as a necessity, on the other it is an interest of private exceptionas a right. He who is with property wants a rule governing the paymentof taxes or the regulation of commerce for others, a loophole for himself.During the period of the development of capitalism, the relation oflanded, mercantile and manufacturing interests to public regulation (bythe State and its organs of government) was a matter of the deepestconsciousness: above all, in the doctrine of the categorical imperative ofImmanuel Kant, and the political philosophy of Adam Smith, as in theProtestant ethic generally. The private interest has not internalized the68