the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

and its primary internal functions. Morgan’s objective fact was thusdifferentially internalized by the social institutions.Morgan’s conception of the changing relations to property as a developmentof society was taken by Marx as common ground; Engelsconceived this as the rediscovery by Morgan of the materialist interpretationof history. The common ground has since been overemphasized:the explicit optimism and utopism of Morgan was transformed by Marxinto the social conflict in the state of civilization. There is a second reasonfor questioning the emphasis that has been placed upon the commonground between Marx and Morgan: The anti-teleological element inMarx’s thought found support in his reading of Darwin, but thereby heseparated the science of man from the science of nature, given both therespective states of both sciences and the separation of man in his actualityfrom nature. Marx criticized Darwin’s use of the model of contemporaryEnglish society in the study of the animal kingdom.167 From thisit follows likewise that Morgan wrongly because onesidedly and toofacilely proceeded from nature to man by application of the model in theinverse sense.Marx expressed a scepticism regarding the scientific doctrines of Cuvier,Darwin, Lubbock, Morgan, among others. The objective side of thisscepticism is the critique of the respective sciences as doctrines internallyto the disciplines themselves, and externally in relation to their socialetiology and inspiration. The internal side of the critique is the layingbare of their implicit organicism posited as generalities without concretionin identified empirical processes and methods for their observation,control, and the like. The negative side of this internal critique is thespeculative reconstructions detected by him in Cuvier, Morgan, Phear.The external critique of the sciences has as its object the internalizationeffected, even by their best representatives, of the social prejudices,ethnocentrisms, uncritical borrowings of the preconceptions of theirsocial origins, and the return to the society in question of the scientificconclusions in an altered form: evolution made over into evolutionism, adoctrine comforting and comfortable to the sustainers of the givencivilization as the telos of evolutionary progress; the incorporation ofthe subjective values of the civilization as the end-result of the evolutionas the ground for self-satisfaction. The past was reconstructed to theseends, strengthening by the moral means derived therein the dominanceand exploitation of one nation by another; the forceful hand of thecolonialists was supported by the scientific-pseudoscientific apparatus.Marx’s reserve was, however, the withholding of total commitment,which did not diminish his recognition of scientific advancement inpaleontology, systematic and evolutionary biology, ethnology and humanevolution, and the contributions of the scientists mentioned above to oneor another of these fields.84