the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

society, or whether it is socialist or capitalist in either case. The relationof the individual and society on the one side and the mutually antagonisticrelations of the collectivities on the other cannot be separated from thepolitical conflicts of western society which extend from 1789 down to thepresent; at the same time these conflicts obscure the individual and collectivesocial relations. The praxis is the expression of the theory of therelations ; it is at once the complication of the resolution of the conflict ofthe relations in theory and the sole means for their resolution as therealization of the potentiality of the unity of society. The potentiality ofthat unity lies in the negation of the actual privative relation. The formthat the potential may take can be posited, the relation of the form to thecontent, as of the objective to the subjective side and the converse, however,can only be adumbrated.There is little interest shown in empirical anthropology at present inthe questions of the priority of the communal and the individual possessionof the soil, or the origin of civilization out of the one or the other;likewise the question of the antecedence of the individual over society,whether as a logical or a chronological antecedence, is not often discussed.The manner of posing these questions is onesided; they are no more thanhalf-questions. It is only by taking the individual in relation to society,the collectivity, or the primitive commune, and these in relation to theindividual that the history and evolution of property, culture and civilizationcan be discussed at all.7. R E L A T IO N O F E N G E L S TO M A R X A N D M O R G A NEngels took up the primitive and communal institutions briefly in thewritings of the 1840s (in conjunction with Marx: The Holy Family, TheGerman Ideology, The Communist Manifesto), and in the last chapter of hisAnti-Dühring (1878). On Marx’s initiative he excerpted Bancroft in 1882.(See Addendum 2.) In his work on the Mark, Engels dealt with theorganization of the ancient Germans according to kinship and commonproperty, his source being Maurer, treating briefly the evidence ofCaesar and Tacitus in regard to the communal property of the Markassociates or members, the long duration of the collective institution andthe transition to private property in land in the nineteenth century (theBavarian Palatinate was singled out by him). Engels dealt with Germanicantiquities in two longer manuscripts, but returned to the question ofthe Mark, its organization and membership, property ownership onlyfor review.141In the following year, while going through Marx’s posthumous papersEngels came upon Marx’s excerpts ; this discovery is adumbrated in hispreparation of the third edition of Capital·. Marx had written ,“Innerhalbeiner Familie, weiter entwickelt eines Stammes, entspringt eine natur-76