Marx and Morgan

Marx held that human society prior to the dawning of civilization represented a kind of communism, and this belief is widely thought to lend a rather tidy cyclical form to the pattern of history envisioned by historical materialism. This primitive -marked, as is communism proper, by the absence of socioeconomic classes -is the exception, noted by Engels, to the Communist Manifesto's claim that the history of all hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggle.1 On the other hand, Marx and Engels thought that early society offered no exception to their materialist conception of history; indeed, they held that scientific studies of society only corroborated their theory. Although Marx interpreted pre-history as conforming to his overall theory of historical development, he never elaborated fully his picture of primordial communism. Toward the end of his career, however, he became engrossed in historical anthropology. In the last years of his life, Marx buried himself in ethnological investigations. He was particularly enthusiastic about the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, wrote ninety-six pages of manuscript notes on the latter's Ancient Society2 and, according to Engels, intended to present to the German public Morgan's results along with some conclusions from his own investigations.3 A year after Marx's death, Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State-subtitled In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. ostensibly to fulfill this bequeathed project, drawing not only on Ancient Society but also on Marx's extracts and notes. Engels too, evinced nothing but the highest regard for Morgan's book. Describing it as one of the few epoch-making works of our time, he wrote that Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at.4

Epistemology · History · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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