the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Fourier; the other possibility raised by Bernstein is irrelevant. Yet Engelspointed only briefly to the collective institutions of social life and propertyin their primitive context, and even more briefly to the same in theirmodern context, being chiefly concerned with these in connection withtheir dissolution in the development of civilization. The dialecticalpassage of the collectivity into its opposite, the individuality-privativity,is implicit in Marx’s attention to the given excerpts from Morgan; thenature of the collectivity in the dialectical passage from the privative wasadumbrated by him in the ethnological notebooks and others of hiswritings. The excerpt from Morgan expressing the paramountcy of thesocial interest over the individual interest juxtaposes its antithesis to theunmanageable power of property and the evanescence of a mere propertycareer. Engels expressed these points in their transition from one to theother in the last pages of The Origin of the Family; his thesis, also that ofMarx and Morgan, was that man’s character was laid down as a collectiveand social creature over a long evolutionary period, and that this characterwas distorted in the brief career of civilization. The thesis, with theexception of the factor of time depth, was that of Fourier as well.Morgan had posited equality, democracy and universality of right asthe measure against which the low position of the married woman, andthe disharmony and injustice of civilized society under the regime ofproperty is judged.155 His perspective rested on the optimistic judgmentthat the property career contains the elements of self-destruction. It isan organicism, positing no specific mechanism whereby the inequity ofrights and the disharmony of the civilized condition is to be overcome; ithas remained an abstraction, without a concrete course of action. As suchit has common features of the Hegelian historical entelechy, but since it islimited in its organicism without the critique of the latter as that had beenposited by Hegel, Morgan’s evolutionary progressism was already surpassedas an explanation of the rise of civilization in the generation priorto Marx.The positivist criticism of Morgan’s evolutionary doctrine of progresshas rested primarily on its abstraction and its lack of concrete mechanismsof social development. Engels had in mind that further empirical datawould cause the scientific categories and particular analyses of Morgan tobe changed; but this would not change the perspective of progress whichthey shared. Engels did not overcome the objections to the utopianismand teleology of Morgan, nor did he overcome Morgan’s utopianism andteleology within his Origin of the Family. Engels’ dialectic here is thejuxtaposition of Morgan’s idea of the evanescence of property to thegeneral and, in this case implicit, unexpressed perspective known to havebeen shared by Marx and himself. In the footnote and the end of hisOrigin of the Family Engels proposed that he would take up the critiqueof civilization in the line of Fourier’s brilliancy.80