the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

has virtually disappeared from most other scholarly fields, although atone time philosophers, sociologists, economists took part in it. No recentexpression on either side has been advanced with the confidence of theforerunners. Social Darwinism has been rejected as a biologism, togetherwith the ethical trappings which it wittingly or unwittinglyborrowed from the social doctrine of atomistic individualism of thepreceding centuries. Since then the collectivists have added no new dataor critical insights. The energies have been spent in the overcoming ofethnocentrism and avoidance of the chimeras of speculative reconstructionsof the past; (Marx was particularly conscious of the methodologicalshortcomings of his contemporaries under these headings).Unsolved problems of the history of the concepts of collectivity,collectivism, commune, community can be noted in past and currentusages. The differences in their use not having been systematicallyexamined, the concepts and terminology of socialism and communismpresent problems of meaning and derivation in consequence. The relationsof communism to community or Gemeinschaft and of socialism tosociety or Gesellschaft are obvious, but they are not clear.The primitive community as it was conceived by Marx established thecontent as well as the form of man’s primordial existence and his consequentand subsequent social character. It is carried into the modern eraby the primitive and the rural where these are opposed to the urbaninstitutions of recent and current times. The communal institutionspreceded the formation of political and of industrial society, and in thatformer period formed the urban institutions and their modes of production.At the same time these ancient rural communal institutions haveprovided a model even in distorted form for the formation of the ruralinstitutions of socialist society and the character of the internal socialrelations of the non-rural social institutions. The ancient rural form ofcollectivity has determined the modern. But the relation of content toform in the past example differs from that of the modern, and the samecriticism directed against the parallel between elections in ancient and inmodern society by Marx applies to the concepts of democracy, communityand collectivity. The relation of actual difference to potential unityvaries likewise in reference to theoretical parallels drawn between cooperationfor production and distribution in the ancient commune and themodern; the relation of content to form differs between the types ofcommune, the parallels being drawn upon the basis of form. (See Marx,ökonomisch-Philosophische Manuskripte and drafts of letters to Zasulich.)Marx examined the primitive and the Oriental and European peasantcommunities in the Grundrisse, the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, inthe three volumes of Capital, and in the Theories of Surplus Value; of these,the most prominent are in the sections on commodities and exchange ofthe first volume of Capital. “In the modes of production of ancient Asia,73