Brad:
>Illiteracy? Patriarchy? Serfdom? Antisemitism?
Not for the first time Hobsbawm gets it wrong. Marx's Ethnological Notebooks are pretty damning of primitive community. These excerpts from the Krader edition
WARLIKE
"Die Iroquois pursued a war of extermination gegen [against] their kindred tribes, the Eries, Neutral Nation, the Hurons u.d.[and the] Susquehannocks." P160
"Confederation of Iroquois u. [and] that of the Aztecs were the most remarkable for aggressive purposes." P163
"Precarious subsistence u. [and] incessant warfare repressed numbers in all the original tribes, inclus. the Village Indians." P165
Quoting Morgan
'Military. "their [the Iroquois] career was simply terrific. They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."'
P145 -------------
CANNIBALISTIC
"der savages, had finally organised gentile society u. Developed small tribes with villages here and there ... ihre rude energies and ruder arts chiefly devoted to subsistence; nocht nicht the village stockade (Pfahlwerk) for defence, no farinaceous food, still cannibalism."
P128
"In dieser Form ward Cannibalism gefunden in d. Principal tribes der U.St., Mexico u. Central America. Erwerbung v. Farinaceous food Ha<u>ptmittel to extricate mankind von this savage custom."
"D. Aztecs. Wie d. Northern Indians, neither exchanged <nor> released prisoners; the stake their doom bei the Northern Indians unless saved by adoption. Unter d. Estern ... offered as a sacrifice to the principal god worshipped. Unter d. American aborigines erscheint organised priesthood erst im Middle Status of Barbarism [ie Aztecs] , connectioon mit der invention of idols u. human sacrifices as a means of acquiring authority over mankind."
P189
(I think it is right to say that contemporary anthropology is more sceptical about reports of cannibalism than Marx.) --------
MORALLY RESTICTIVE
"Marriage hier founded not upon "sentiment", but upon convenience and necessity. D. Mothers arranged the marriages of their children. ... Prior to the marriage, presents to the gentile relations of the bride, partaking in the nature of purchasing gifts, became feature of these matrimonial transactions."
P 116
"The ancient practice of blood revenge ... had its birthplace in the gens. Tribunals for the trial of criminals prescribing their punishment, came late into existence in gentile society. Unter d. Iroquois and other Indian tribes generally, the obligation to avenge the murder of a kinsman universally recognised."
P147
"In some Indian tribes the youth was required to go out on the war-path and earn his second name by some act of personal bravery."
P148
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GOVERNMENT
Excerpting Morgan:
"All the members of an Iroquois gens personally free, bound to defend each other's freedom; equal in privileges u. Personal rights. Sachem u. Chiefs claiming no superiority; a brotherhood bound together by ties of kin. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, though never formulated were cardinal principles..."
At this point Marx departs from Morgan, adding
"Zur zeit der europaischen Entdeckg waren d. [At the time of the European discovery] American Indian tribes [were] generally organised into gentes, with descent in the female line. ... in this early condition of society, individuality of persons was lost in the gens"
p 150
In other words the slogans of the French revolution were inappropriate to the Iroquois society, because the restrictive character of the gentes militated against the development of individual personality. Marx was highly critical of Maine's tendency to imagine that he saw capitalistic institutions in Indian society. Here he would seem to be making a similar, if friendlier, criticism of Morgan. Engels, who reproduces these passages in Origin of the Family.. omits Marx's qualification.
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PRIMITVE COMMUNISM
"Communism in living seems to have originated in the necessities of the consanguine family, to have been continued in the punaluan and transmitted to the syndasminian unter d. [under the] American aborigenes, with whom it remained a practice down to the epoch of their discovery - (and the South Slavonians? And even the Russians to a certain degree?)"
p115
Quoting Rev Asher Wright on the Seneca
"Usually, the female portion ruled the house ... The stores were in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing."
P116
Here it should be noted that communism meant holding property in common, and should not be identified wholly with the Communism that Marx and Engels agitated for. Primitive communism was common ownership on the basis of scarcity, on a very low level of productivity, whilst advanced communism was to take as its basis abundance, arising from the development of social productivity.
"When discovered the Iroquois were in the lower status of barbarism ... each household practised communism in living; were unacquainted mit [with] the use of stone or adobe-brick in house architecture u. mit d. [and with] use der native metals."
P 145
Marx's addition to Morgan's schema on stages of civilisation makes clear that the development of property relations, entailing the end of primitive communism was a social advance, though one at the considerable cost of introducing class differentiation.
(To avoid any confusion, this is an empirical observation of Marx's, not a positivistic schema of historical evolution.)
"It is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was the power that bought the Aryan and semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation .. Governments and laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It introduced slavery as an instrument in its production. With the establishment of the inheritance of property in the children of its owner, came the first possibility of a strict monogamian family."
P126
To modern ears it seems grotesque to hear the introduction of slavery described as an 'advance', but it should be borne in mind that Marx is not concerned with a moral advance, but an advance in man's productive power and social institutions, all of which create the possibility of a moral advance.
"The custom upon which these rules of proprietry possession and inheritance depend, are determined by the condition and progress of social organisation. The growth of property is thus closely connected with the increase of inventions and discoveries, and the improvements of social institutions which mark the several ethnical periods of human progress."
P127
"Process constantly repeated that the more advanced tribes lifted up those below them, as fast as the latter were able to appreciate and appropriate the means of progress."
P129
Marx shows that the much-praised practice of adoption of prisoners by the Iroquois arises out of simply practical considerations, principally the fragility of their primitive division of labour.
"Captives taken in war either put to death, or adopted in some gens; letzres mit women u. children, taken prisoners, usual. Adoption not only conferred gentile rights, sondern auch d. Nationality of the tribe. ... Slavery, which in the Upper Status of Barbarism became the fate of the captive, was unknown among tribes in the Lower Status of the aboriginal period. Captives when adopted were often assigned in the family the places of deceased persons slain in battle in order to fill up the broken ranks of relatives."
P148-9
Adoption was a release for those who were granted it, but just as likely was the outcome of execution, as the Iroquois lacked the means and the social insitutions that would allow them to keep prisoners. ----------- CONCLUSION
There seems to be little evidence of a theoretical break in Marx's attitude to primitive societies in his Ethnological Notebooks. Certainly there is a sympathetic reading, but we would expect no less of Marx. Many years earlier he had expressed similar sentiments about the art of the ancient Greeks, and its child-like simplicity, in comparison with our practical loss of wonder.
Certainly, Engels' account in The Origin of the Family... would seem to be in accord with the notebooks from which it was drawn:
"But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse, as will soon be apparent, and was already apparent in the attempts at subjugation by the Iroquois. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America, presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens, and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still attached to the navel string of the primitive community [reference to CapI, Ch1, Sec4]. "
pp 88-9, 1994 ed.
-- James Heartfield