the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

outlines, but our depth is limited. Engels accords with the position ofMarx in general, but there are significant differences between them;Engels was less deep and less precise than Marx; such was the selfestimationof Engels as well. The system of Marx is incomplete, for heonly sketched in his originality, the points of difference with Morgan,and the system raised thereon; the points that he raised in regard to Maineare, in their negativity, more important because more extensive; they areless well-known hence in their subjectivity as well, in regard to thecritique of the historical and analytical theories of the State and Law, ofthe Oriental commune and society, of the early history of the developmentof capital and landownership in the Occident, and of the origin ofcivilization. Above all, his empirical and philosophical anthropology inits relation to social critique and practice, and of the social critique in itsrelation to the latter are here presented from many new sides: the interrelationof the interest of society, collectivity, and individuality; therelation of these to the formation of civil and political society, and aposition in regard to their outcome.Marx wrote in 1844156, “The greatness in the Hegelian Phenomenologyand its end-result - the dialectic of negativity as the motive and generativeprinciple - is thus, first, that Hegel grasps the self-generation of man asa process, the position of the object as its opposition (Vergegenstàndlichungals Entgegenstàndlichung), as alienation and as sublation (Aufhebung)of this alienation; that he grasps the nature (Wesen) of labor andconceives objective man, true because actual man, as the end-result ofhis own labor” (Vergegenstàndlichung is objectification, the positing ofthe object; Entgegenstàndlichung is both opposition, standing opposite,and disobjectification, the disembodiment of the object. We haveunderstood Wesen der Arbeit as ‘nature of labor’ because labor as processhas no Wesen (or essence, being as such) which exists independently ofthe process leading to the product, man himself, the object destroyed byits objectification.) Having posited the self-generation by man as theprocess of his own labor and as its product in consequence, Hegel thenconceived man as a being with a history, or as a participant in temporalprocesses of which history is one. To this end, Marx comprehended manas social man first, as having no inner essence that stands outside time,hence as having no essence other than his relations in society and in socialproduction, including the production of himself. These temporal processes,as self-generation, history, and the development of the relations ofsociety, self, and history, are at the same time external and internal to man.They develop as the relation to inner needs and drives, as the relation offunction to external form, as that of man to the natural world. Hegel82