the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Anti-teleology in nature is interrelated with anti-necessitarianism inhuman history, each reciprocally presupposing the other. On the oneside, moreover, the human is wholly comprised within the naturalhistory; on the other, the matter of the form and the content of each iswithout difference from the other. On the human side, Marx’s thoughtimplicitly and explicitly opposed the painting of pictures of the future(‘Zukunftsmalerei’) as he opposed the fixity of process and determinacyof form into which a society develops (see note 89 of this Introduction).Finally, Marx, having expressed these thoughts, buried them in hisworkroom. Yet their incomplete form has nevertheless indicated thetransition of Marx from the restriction of the abstract generic humanbeing to the empirical study of particular societies. The transition madeby Marx is likewise that of the development of society and of anthropologyin the same period. The posthumous publication of the ethnologicalparts of his notebooks forms a portion of Marx’s legacy, at once continuousand discontinuous, posing anew the open questions of control ofhuman development by human intervention, a wholly human teleology,and the natural science of man as its potentiality. The present generationbears an ambiguous relation to these questions; regarding the future ofsociety, and the lessons to be learned from the past, we get no guidancesave that which we can work out for ourselves.85