This rigid scheme, which assume that all cultures developed along similar lines, constituted the framework for the empirical data that Morgan collected from various Native American cultures. To this, he added information from cultures other than North American ones – many of which had disappeared a long time ago – and he imagined he found similar patterns everywhere. These were ideas that guided many researchers from that era. One only need think of the British anthropologist and religious researcher James George Frazer, whose work The Golden Bough first came out as a two-volume edition in 1890. In it, the author sought to show, with almost pedantic precision, how the same religious practices recur from culture to culture as soon as a certain stage of development has been achieved.84
Characteristic of Morgan was his ascription of a crucial role for technological progress in the development towards higher stages. It was an important reason for Marx devoting the attention to Morgan that he did. One of Marx’s growing number of Russian friends, social scientist Maksim Kovalevsky, cousin to the famous mathematician Sophia (or Sonya) Kovalevskaya, had bought Ancient History during a trip to the United States. Kovalevsky himself was an outstanding specialist in the Russian mir, or peasant village; he now roused Marx’s interest in Morgan’s book and loaned it to him. As was his custom, Marx composed comprehensive excerpts before ‘the fat boy’ got his property back.85 Marx also took shorter notes from several other books that approached, in various ways, the same subject Morgan was dealing with.
Obviously, he wanted to acquire solid knowledge of societies that were considered to have preceded the breakthrough of private property and the state. But he got no further than the excerpts that Engels later found among the papers he left behind. These were the starting point and the foundation for one of Engels’s most widely read books: his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Morgan’s significance is emphasized even by the subtitle: ‘In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan’. In the first sentences of the foreword, Engels stresses that he had taken over the task of writing his book from Marx.86 The traditional perception has been that it actually was so. Only a more detailed comparison shows that Engels indeed quoted liberally from the excerpts of his deceased friend, but that his work is permeated with his own ideas and unique spirit.
Engels’s attitude towards Morgan is without a doubt also more positive than Marx’s. The difference can already be seen on the first page of the text (after the foreword). In Ancient Society, Morgan wrote that ‘mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food’.87 This is a statement that Marx could not feel comfortable with; he protested against it with a vigorous question mark followed by an exclamation point. Engels tried to smooth this over; in his zeal, he quoted Morgan incorrectly. Humanity had almost won unconditional dominion, it says in his text. Foster places great importance on Marx’s reservations, placing them in connection with his thesis that humanity’s exploitation of the soil has entailed a rift in the relationship between humanity and nature.88
With his little distortion of the quote, Engels tried to take the sting out of Morgan’s resolute formulation. It may seem to be a trifle; Engels was not writing an academic dissertation. But trifles are not isolated – they can fit into a pattern. Engels wanted to interpret Morgan so that the latter could be added to the same tradition as himself and Marx. In the foreword, Engels wrote that Morgan’s perception squares with the ‘materialist conception of history’ that Marx had ‘discovered’ forty years earlier.
The observation is also interesting for the fact that, by all appearances, this is the first time the expression ‘materialist conception of history’ occurs in the literature. Marx never used it. It is hardly likely that Marx would have viewed Morgan as an (unconscious) follower. Morgan’s emphasis on technological development was extremely appealing to Marx. But he placed an exclamation point after ‘ideas’ when Morgan spoke about ‘the earliest ideas of property’. Nor could Morgan’s statement that all ‘social and civil institutions’ developed from thought appeal to Marx.
This is pointed out by Lawrence Krader, the American ethnologist and anthropologist, who carried out what is without doubt the most thorough investigation of Marx’s excerpts from Morgan. Marx himself gave prominence to the significance of the collective in contrast to Morgan, and he maintained that politics is born when one tribe, or gens, seizes power over the others. With the gens, the ‘lamentable religious element’ becomes an important point.89
We have seen that the boundary between biological development and historical development was important to Marx (apart from the episode with Trémaux). It was not so for Morgan – nor, in fact, for Engels in his book Origins of the Family. What is relevant here is that Morgan turned Marx’s and Engels’s attention to the significance of the family in social development. But Engels went a step further than Marx. He not only said that production and reproduction constitute the foundation of historical development. He also said the production and reproduction were of a dual nature.90 On the one hand it concerns the necessities of life and other things that humanity reproduces; on the other, it concerns the production of new people. He apparently has Marxian support here; he quotes Marx’s words in the Morgan commentaries that while families develop, relations of kinship – that is, what constitutes the family – palpably lag behind.91
When Engels attributes the production of people to the base of society, a substantial change takes place. According to Marx’s foreword to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the base constitutes the relationship between the forces of production and the relations of production. Talking about relations of production in this context offers no difficulties: it is a question of the composition of the family, monogamy, polygamy, and so on. But how did Engels imagine the forces of production? They must be the tools with which people produce children – that is, the genitalia. But, however complex the genitalia may be, the method of functioning is a purely biological matter. They appear as historically constant, and thereby are generally not a historical matter. They have not evolved from time immemorial up to the present day.
Engels simply seems to be allowing biology to invade the field of history. He is tearing up the boundary markers he himself set up in Anti-Dühring in an important area. Many, such as Edward Aveling and Karl Kautsky, followed in his footsteps. Aveling’s contribution to the confusion is most clearly evident in his 1884 book The Darwinian Theory – incidentally, the book that Aveling wanted to dedicate to Darwin, but was told not to. Kautsky’s image of the relationship between the theories of Marx and Darwin emerges, for example, in his memoirs Erinnerungen und Erörterungen. This book did not affect the age he lived in, however; it was first published in 1960 by his son Benedikt. But, during his years of activity, Kautsky had fed his readership the conviction that Marx’s theory and Darwin’s fit together like hand in glove.92
Engels also devoted himself to a type of psychologizing that was foreign to Marx. For Marx, capitalists are forced to maximize their profits with the same necessity that workers must sell their labour power – the alternative is ruin. It does not matter whether as people they are greedy or generous. So it is generally in every class society. The roles are given. Individual actors could fill them with personal content up to a certain limit. Engels, on the other hand, charges the masters of the first class society with Habgier – greed. As Krader points out, this entailed an obvious deviation from Marx. Engels had fallen into an outlook that remained popular up until our own time. Large amounts of wealth or excesses and profit are explained by exceptional greed.93 Marx was more sophisticated than that.
But there was a central area he often ignored when he talked about society, its history, and its future: women. The notes to Morgan’s book, however, constitute an exception. There, he asked himself whether the tales of the great goddesses of Greece did not guard memories from another time when women had a better, freer position.94 That was all. But the comm
ent testifies to the fact that he assumed that the subjugation of women had to do with the development of class society, and thereby of the state and of politics. At one point, woman had been free and equal, like Athena or Hera. Someday, she would be so again.
It is impossible to determine what Marx would have done if he had worked out a text on the basis of his excerpts. Engels had much more to say in his book. He wrote in detail about sexual life among various species, and then came to humanity. As regards the ‘communist household’, he established that the woman was the master there. He polemicized heatedly against a conception he traced back to the Enlightenment, that woman was to have been man’s slave from the beginning. On the contrary, he said, woman had not only a free but a respected position in the early stages of societal development. Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen was of great significance for Engels’s idea; his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right) made a deep impression on Engels with its thesis that the patriarchy was preceded by an age in which women ruled (a gynaecocracy, as Bachofen called it).95
Engels’s description has played an important role in the modern history of feminism. This especially applies to one of the great classics in the field, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1948 work Le deuxième sexe (published in English in 1972 as The Second Sex). Beauvoir dismisses what she calls Engels’s ‘economic monism’, but this does not mean that he did not greatly influence her work. As Eva Gothlin showed in her dissertation Sex and Existence, early Marx and late Engels were important inspirations for Beauvoir.96
Social anthropology became an important concern in Engels’s life, while Marx never meant to give it anything but the attention he devoted to a number of other topics he adopted throughout his life, especially during his last years when he also managed to work his way through major works in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. It is not surprising that he would be fascinated by Morgan’s theses on early societies with communal ownership. His desire to go deeper into the subject was also intensified by his interest in Russia. This curiosity is also discernible in his excerpts. Morgan’s reports on communal ownership that still remained in certain Native American societies got Marx to wonder about how things stood with ‘the southern Slavs? and also the Russians to a certain extent?’ in that respect. We know nothing about how Marx intended to use his new insights over the longer term. They could scarcely be inserted as footnotes in the continuation of Capital. But was his interest perhaps politically conditioned?
We do not know. On the other hand, we can be sure it would not have been the type of work that Engels created, partially on the basis of Marx’s excerpts.
Interpreting the World and Changing It
The Manifesto says that the history of all hitherto existing society has been a history of class struggle. When, in the late 1880s, Engels published a new edition of the work, he added a footnote. The statement seemed correct at the time it was made, he said. But we now know that early society was in no way characterized by class struggle. It is thus an exception.
Lawrence Krader points out that with that, Engels turned ‘a political act into a learned debate’. It is an interesting observation. The thesis of ubiquitous class struggle is often interpreted as a general thesis about history. Engels did so. Krader hints that it was not so with Marx.97
But is it a reasonable interpretation? Is it not a question of historical generalization also for Marx? It is possible. As we know, he was fond of talking about general laws even when there was reasonably no such thing. But what consequences would there be from assuming that every historical course of events is permeated by class struggle?
First, such a law would be contrary to Marx’s (as well as Engels’s) most important meta-historical thesis, namely that the general guidelines for historical study sketched out in The German Ideology and elsewhere cannot be turned into a timetable according to which history can be arranged. The real picture of a historical course of events appears only in and through a detailed study.
Marx devoted attention of this kind only to the capitalist phase. But we can see that Capital does not deal only with class struggle, either, even if the relationship between capitalists and workers constitutes the dynamic centre of the account. The conflict between them emerges most clearly in the long chapter on the working day. But society also consists of classes other than both the main actors. Take a striking example: scholars of various types are directly or indirectly influenced by the antagonism between capital and labour, but the results they arrive at in their research are not permeated by class struggle. Such an account would conflict with another of Marx’s central convictions, namely that science understands reality better and better through its development.
In general, it can be questioned whether the thesis that everything is class struggle is consistent with Marx’s dialectical method. When it has actually been made absolute, such as in the dogmatic Marxism of Lenin and even more of Stalin, it has been heedlessly combined with the statement that knowledge reflects reality. These are two statements that can only square with each other through a strangely clever solution, according to which the truth (such as it is) emerges for the person who takes the right class standpoint – that is, the proletariat’s – which, upon closer inspection, simply becomes that of the communist party elite. The practical consequence is that scientific theories can be treated arbitrarily. For a long time, only the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko were permitted in the Soviet Union; for a somewhat shorter period, Einstein’s theory of relativity was branded as bourgeois and therefore to be condemned.98
This was absolutely not Marx’s standpoint (nor Engels’s, actually). Marx spoke on his own authority only on such things as he regarded as his own field. He did not break the self-evident rules of scientific specialization. When he studied chemistry handbooks, it was to learn something new. He could complain about Darwin’s dependency on Malthus, but that was due to the fact that the theories of Malthus directly contradicted his own in the field of the social sciences.
We will stop next at the question of what kind of area of scientific competence Marx claimed, and how these claims fit into the ideas about scientific authority in the time he lived. Finally, we will throw light upon the question of the relationship between statements and norms in Marx. With that we will find a natural transition to the next chapter, which deals with Marx the politician.
Every researcher must have a rather fixed area of competence. Within it, they can speak from their own authority and count on arousing confidence both among their colleagues and among a more or less interested general public. But the area of competence need not be the same as the area of activity. In a hierarchical scientific culture, those at the top have the competence to make statements about things they themselves are not working on. So it was, for example, in the world European universities in the seventeenth century. Theologians could censure well-founded physical theories with the argument that they went against the word of God.
In a specialized scientific culture, the fields of work and of competence tend to coincide. I conduct research on problems in a field in which I have my most solid and deepest knowledge, where I can quickly differentiate between good research and bad. My articles are published in the speciality’s own journals, my colleagues reproduce my results, and I count on government authorities and the general public regarding me as an authority within my field.
That is how the placid ideal image of a specialized scientific culture looks. But reality is ordinarily more chaotic and filled with conflict. There are struggles for fields of competence, particularly if there is a lot of research money, or strong and conflicting political and ideological interests there. Who can speak about the continent of Humanity with the greatest authority? Who is worth listening to regarding schools, physical health, or God?
The antagonisms are great, even in the rigidly specialized scientific culture of the early twenty-first century. The scientific world in which Marx moved was not at all as mapped out in detail as today’s, but nevertheless
it was considerably more specialized than that of the seventeenth century. But conflicts inevitably occurred. In Marx’s time, there were still large new areas of knowledge where no specialists had yet established themselves, but where enthusiastic amateurs competed with each other. Social anthropology was one such field.
To come to grips with the problems of specialization we must also grapple with another concept: professionalization.99 They are both often mixed up, but they are not identical. Having a profession entails practising an occupation for which you have a specific education and a diploma accepted by colleagues and government authorities. One does not need to be a specialist for this, nor does a specialist need to have their speciality as their profession. In nineteenth-century Great Britain, many of the greatest scientists were amateurs, professionally speaking. Charles Darwin is the grandest example. He had a flimsy, incomplete university education behind him; he conducted his innovative scientific work against the background of a private fortune. But he did become a specialist.
In the German sciences, speciality and profession coincided far more over the course of the nineteenth century. After the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the universities had what was up to then a unique position with their demands that professors should not only instruct, but also research. All research at the universities had the rank of science (Wissenschaft); the unanimity on this was nearly total. Historians and theologians were quite simply regarded as specialists, and in fact developed specialized research like nowhere else up to that point. But that also meant that those outside the universities, with their scientific professions, found it more difficult to get recognition or attention in general. Marx suffered from that kind of isolation.
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