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ABSTRACT
Between December 1880 and June 1881, Marx’s research interests focused on a new discipline: anthropology. He began with the study of Ancient Society (1877), a work by the U.S. anthropologist Lewis Morgan. What struck Marx most was the way in which Morgan treated production and technological factors as preconditions of social progress, and he felt moved to assemble a compilation of a hundred densely packed pages of excerpts from this book. These make up the bulk of what are known as The Ethnological Notebooks. They also contain excerpts from other works: Java, or How to Manage a Colony (1861) by James Money (1818–1890), a lawyer and Indonesia expert; The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon (1880) by John Phear (1825–1905), president of the supreme court of Ceylon; and Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875) by the historian Henry Maine (1822–1888), amounting to a total of another hundred sheets. Marx’s comparative assessments of these authors are fundamental to have a clear idea of the main theoretical preoccupations of the “late Marx” and suggest an innovative reassessment of some of his key concepts.
Notes
1 See, for example, Mehring (Citation2003, 501–532), Rühle (Citation2011, 359–370), Vorländer (Citation1929, 248–278), Nicolaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen (Citation1976, 392–407), and McLellan (Citation1973, 412–451). Even Maximilien Rubel (Citation1971 [1957], 416–434), justly famed for his close textual studies, did not go beyond the limits of his predecessors in Karl Marx. Essai de biographie intellectuelle. In Marx: Life and Works, the French scholar wrote that “the last ten years of Marx’s life were like a slow agony” during which “his activity [was] limited to correspondence and a few articles”. But he added:
Nevertheless—even in a period so poor in published work—Marx filled about 50 notebooks, almost exclusively devoted to extracts from his reading. His ‘literary bulimia’ yielded nearly 3,000 pages of microscopic writing. To this should be added, finally, “tons” of statistical material which, at his death, left Engels dumbfounded. (1980, 100)
2 Biographies published in recent years exemplify how, even since the resumption of the MEGA2 project, the work of the “late Marx” has been overlooked by the vast majority of scholars. Jonathan Sperber’s (Citation2013) insignificant Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life simply ignored Marx’s late writings. Gareth Stedman Jones’s (Citation2016) lengthy Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion examined the whole period from 1872 to 1883 only in a short epilogue, while devoting five chapters (170 pages) to Marx’s early life (1818–1844), when he published only two journal articles and had just initiated the study of political economy, and three chapters (150 pages) to the time frame 1845–1849. In Sven-Eric Liedman’s (Citation2018) 750-page A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, there are only two very short sections dedicated to what Marx did after the Critique of the Gotha Programme. One of them—a superficial analysis of Morgan’s Ancient Society (Liedman, A World to Win, 507–513)—is strangely located before the consideration of writings like Herr Vogt (published in 1860) and Marx’s participation in the International Working Men’s Association (1864–1872). The choice of a non-chronological order impedes a clear understanding of Marx’s theoretical evolution during the final phase of his life. Common to all three of these biographies is a scant attention to the secondary literature.
3 To learn about the way Marx used to work and take notes from the books he used to read see Musto (Citation2020c).
4 This title was given posthumously by Lawrence Krader (1919–1998), the editor of these manuscripts. However, the content of these studies is more accurately related to anthropology, hence the title of the section in the present article.
5 The parts from Phear and Maine were included in Karl Marx (Citation1972, 243–336); Marx did not leave a precise dating of his work. Krader, the main researcher of these texts, argued that Marx first familiarized himself with Morgan’s book and then compiled the excerpts – see “Addenda” (87). See also Kautsky’s testimony from his trip to London in March–June 1881 that “prehistory and ethnology were then intensively preoccupying Marx” (Enzensberger Citation1973, 552).
6 According to Maurice Bloch (Citation1983), Marx wanted first of all “to reconstruct a general history and theory of society in order to explain the coming to be of capitalism.” But he also had a “rhetorical” interest linked to the need for “examples and cases to show that the institutions of capitalism are historically specific and therefore changeable.” However, this second “rhetorical use of anthropological material was never completely separate from the historical use, and the mixture of the two became (…) the source of many problems” (10). Dardot and Laval (Citation2012), have written that “Marx’s main effort in his final years was to give a new historical foundation to the perspective of communism, at the risk of seriously endangering a theoretical edifice constructed on the basis of the nineteenth-century evolutionist and progressivist episteme” (667). Polemicizing against those who underrate the importance of Marx’s last notebooks, Heather Brown (Citation2012, 147) argued that they “contain some of his most creative attempts at working through the development of human society.” On Marx’s conception of post-capitalist society see Musto (Citation2020b).
7 The gens was a unit “consisting of blood relatives with a common descent,” see Henry Morgan (Citation1877, 35).
8 In a note to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Engels wrote:
The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan’s crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. (Marx and Engels Citation1976, 482)
9 In this work, Engels actually published some of Marx’s comments on Morgan’s book.
10 Compare with Raya Dunayevskaya (Citation1991, 173): “Marx (…) showed that the elements of oppression in general, and of women in particular, arose from within primitive communism, and not only related to change from ‘matriarchy.’”
11 Compare with Brown (Citation2012, 172): “in ancient Greece (…) women were clearly oppressed, but, for Marx, their mythology had the potential to illustrate to them (…) how much freer they could be.”
12 Brown (Citation2012, 160ff), has diligently compiled many other considerations that attracted Marx’s attention.
13 The words in brackets were added by Marx (Citation1972, 139).
14 For a critique of any possible “return to an original state of unity,” see Daren Webb (Citation2000, 113).
15 Engels wrongly believed that Morgan’s political positions were very progressive. See, for example, Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, March 7, 1884, where he wrote that Ancient Society was “a masterly exposé of primitive times and their communism. [Morgan had] rediscovered Marx’s theory of history all on his own, (…) drawing communist inferences in regard to the present day,” (Marx and Engels Citation1995, 115–116). Marx never expressed himself in such terms. On the thought of the American anthropologist, see Daniel Moses (Citation2009).
16 According to Krader (Citation1972, 14): “Marx made it clear, as Morgan did not, that this process of reconstitution will take place on another level than the old, that it is a human effort, of man for and by himself, that the antagonisms of civilization are not static or passive, but are comprised of social interests which are ranged for and against the outcome of the reconstitution, and this will be determined in an active and dynamic way.” As Maurice Godelier (Citation2012, 78) pointed out, in Marx there was never any “idea of a primitive ‘El Dorado.’” He never forgot that in primitive “classless societies” there were “at least three forms of inequality: between men and women, between senior and junior generations, and between autochthons and foreigners.”
17 In this work, Marx analyzed the “opposition” between “civil society” and “the state;” the state does not lie “within” society but stands “over against it.” “In democracy the state as particular is merely particular. (…) The French have recently interpreted this as meaning that in true democracy the political state is annihilated. This is correct insofar as the political state (…) no longer passes for the whole” (Marx Citation1975a, 30).
18 Thirty years later, the critique is more sharply focused: “At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism” (Marx Citation1986, 329).
19 See also Engels’s view of Money, as he wrote in his letter to Kautsky dated 16 February 1884: “It would be a good thing if someone were to take the trouble to throw light on the proliferation of state socialism, drawing for the purpose on an exceedingly flourishing example of the practice in Java. All the material is to be found in Java, How to Manage a Colony (…). Here one sees how the Dutch have, on the basis of the communities’ age-old communism, organized production for the benefit of the state and ensured that the people enjoy what is, in their own estimation, a quite comfortable existence; the consequence is that the people are kept in a state of primitive stupidity and the Dutch exchequer rakes in 70 million marks a year” (Marx and Engels Citation1995, 102–103).
20 The words in brackets are Marx’s, while those between quotation marks are from the Annales de Assemblée Nationale, 1873, VIII, Paris 1873, included in Kovalevsky’s book.
21 According to Anderson “these passages indicate a shift from [Marx’s] 1853 view of Indian passivity in the face of conquest;” he “often ridicules or excises (…) passages from Sewell portraying the British conquest of India as a heroic fight against Asiatic barbarism”. Since the articles on the Sepoy revolt, which Marx published in the New-York Tribune in 1857, his “sympathy” for the Indian resistance had “only increased” (Anderson Citation2010, 216, and 218).
22 Marx was referring to the war of 1882, which opposed Egyptian forces under Ahmad Urabi (1841–1911) and troops from the United Kingdom. It concluded with the battle of Tell al-Kebir (13 September 1882), which ended the so-called Urabi revolt that had begun in 1879 and enabled the British to establish a protectorate over Egypt.
23 Karl Marx, IISH Amsterdam, Marx-Engels Papers, B 168, 11–18. See David Smith (Citation2021), whose comments on these notes bring out their relevance for us today.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marcello Musto
Marcello Musto is Professor of Sociology at York University (Toronto – Canada) and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford University Press, 2020). Among his edited books there are Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Routledge, 2008); Marx for Today (Routledge 2012); Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014); Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, (Routledge, 2019); The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). His writings—available at www.marcellomusto.org—have been published worldwide in twenty-five languages. Musto is also the editor of the book series Marx, Engels, Marxisms (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism (Routledge).