109

SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

Lawrence Krader

The concept of advancing society through the combined agencies o f evolution and revolution was at one time related in a single overarching theory. The opposition of evolution and revolution, on the contrary, stands to us not as a dialectical relation whose contradictions are to be resolved, but as an unresolved tension. Let us take first the concept of the evolution of society, expressed as the cumulation of vast numbers of unconscious adaptations and conscious adjustments, as the slow growth of mankind. The theory underlying social evolution is doubly linked to biology. It points back in time to the biological and biochemical matrix out of which humanity emerged through the action of inherent forces, forces which are outside human control, and it.points forward to the future mastery by human beings over their biology and society. Social progress in this sense is nonviolent and gradual, a growth cycle of long duration, ultimately leading to the maturation and realization of processes lying immanent within us. These processes are not dormant, for that would imply that the giant is full grown but asleep; the giant that we are to become is not yet full size, but the potentiality of growing to be that giant is our final end, our entelechy, the inherent finality. Humanity is the realization of the inborn potential of animal matter. The movement of the biological organism toward humanity is irreversible; it is a movement with but one direction. We are not the humanity that we can become. We hold ourselves to be human beings, and we are indeed partly human, partly socialized. The theory of evolution, furtherLawrence Krader is the Director of the Institute of Ethnology, Free University of Berlin.

more, expounds the objective working of involuntary laws of nature. Social evolutionists and social reformists talk of the arrow of time, and this is their second link to biological thinking. Their model of social action is passive, inactive, in the manner of the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, who waited, patient. Since the outcome is inevitable, assured by organic laws, it needs no coryphaeus to direct the process. The evolutionary doctrine as applied to society is a comfortable one, based on the biological analogy of the systematic advancement from fish to mammal to humanity. It is a metaphor formulated for and by those who are sure that their social class will serve as the model for all mankind. Since anthropologists characteristically promulgated the biological grounds for the progress of human society, it was known at one time as the anthropological argument.* The thesis of social revolution, on the other hand, was formulated by the enemies of the established order. Lenin did not point to the irresistible upswelling of blind involuntary forces as the bearer of social change; revolution is the overturn of the existing order by all possible means, including violence, and is subject to conscious planned direction. The evolutionists t o o k the utopian position, filling many volumes with their projections of the future. The revolutionists, prior to the seizure of power, hardly dealt with the future and were contemptuous of those who did. The evolutionists, who despair of reducing the *As I have observed in the Ethnological Notebooks (p. 4, note 1): " . . . more of the evolutionary school.., wrote with any relevancy on the theme of the deformation of man's character by civilization.

110 complexity of human affairs to order until such time as we have grown to mastery, who afortiori make so much of uncontrolled forces, cannot overcome the contradictions posed by their vision of the future. The contradiction is that although they are sure o f the future, they are unsure of the forces of t h e present at work. The contradiction is spuriously resolved by an act o f faith. The revolutionaries have as their object the identification of the enemies and o f the means to overthrow them. The subjective will of the many thereby generates the revolutionary consciousness of the individual and provides the revolution with its objective expression, historical action. The revolutionary contradiction is the contradiction o f the subjective inner will become objective, liable to contradiction by historical action. The contradiction of the evolutionists is a verbal contradiction, wordy utopias nullified by great unwilled laws. The evolutionary rhetoric is that of direction, order, movement, force. The direction of social change is conceived as unplanned, uncontrolled; the order is that o f nature, and is the natural order of society; the movement is that o f the natural order, subject to natural laws; the forces which govern it lie outside human control. The revolutionary rhetoric has the same words~ but with the meanings changed: human history is separated from natural history, it is the history of class struggles; the direction of history is assumed by the party of the revolution and given by the party directives; the forces of nature are left to the evolutionists, the revolutionary force is the force o f the proletariat under the direction o f the party. Biological thinking and analogies between human society and organisms appear readily in social evolutionist writings; if they appear in Lenin's works, it is by chance, an oversight. There is no alternative for us other than the choice between the involuntary and voluntary paths of social change; we assume the necessity of either. The m o t t o o f the conservatives, "Always the same," which was the

device of the Cardinal Ottaviani, seems like a curio today. The relationship between social evolution and revolution in the work of Karl Marx is a dialectical relationship of processes that pass from one into the other, each transforming the other, its opposite. Marx, however, took up the terms evolution and revolution not in the order in which they appeared historically, and in which they are listed here, but in their logical order, the inverse of the historical. He chose the logical order for analytical reasons, arguing that the anatomy of a more highly developed form o f society is the key to the anatomy of less highly developed forms; the hints in the simpler organization of society can only be understood when the more complex organization is known. First, he set forth a program for social revolution and the critique of capital as the weapon against capitalist society; he then proceeded to study the peasant communities o f Europe and Asia, and, at the end of his life, to study primitive communities, the clan and the gens, and the social evolution of humanity, the program which he had undertaken in his youth. The relationship between the historical order and the logical order of the categories of study is complicated, and particularly complex in the works of Marx, because it is related to the theory and practice of revolution on the one side, and to a general theory of social evolution on the other. Complex though these relationships may appear, they can now be taken up in an orderly way because of the recent publication of Marx's ethnological materials, in which the two sides are related. These ethnological materials are not in themselves a book. They are in the literal sense the materials for a book, and it is our task to discover the nature of that book. They were left among Marx's literary remains in the form of lengthy excerpts from the published works of Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir J.B. Phear, Sir H.S. Maine, and Sir John Lubbock, together

111 with Marx's interspersed critical commentaries) These authors were without exception evolutionists. They represented ethnology to Marx, who thereby set the others - nonevolutionists, anti-evolutionists, such as Adolph Bastian, professor of ethnology at Berlin in the same period, whose work Marx knew - to one side. The authors from whose works on social evolution Marx excerpted did not form a school of thought; indeed, they are a mixed bag when viewed from without, a century later. Some of them had a close familiarity with cultures outside their own: Phear provided an account o f Indian villages in deltaic Bengal; Morgan's account of the Iroquois stands as a.classic of ethnography; Maine served in India as a member of the Council of India, acting toward Indian legal institutions as an overseer from on high. Lubbock had no etbaaographic experience at all; he was a disciple and friend o f Darwin and wrote for popular consumption on biological and geological, as well as cultural, evolution? The members of this group were of unequal scientific status. The most original and boldest thinker was Morgan; the most influential in his time was Maine. They all set forth in their evolutionism the general line of development of mankind from the primitive to the civilized condition. The line was progressive, but the progression was not smooth; it went at different rates of speed, remained without significant changes for long periods, then burst forth, until a new stage was constituted for and by human development. The various stages were set forth in different ways: Morgan alone wrote of different lines of. development, differentiating between the progression in the New World and the Old (although he did not pay much attention to this differentiation). Bachofen and Morgan proceeded from the promiscuous horde through the stage of mother-right to that of father-right, while Maine did not agree that the stage of motherright preceded that of father-right. Maine's chief contribution, for which he is known down to the present, was his legal theory of

the advancement of mankind from relations of personal status to impersonal contract. Morgan propounded the theory that, once the family was established in the form we now have it, mankind moved through three stages of development, from savagery to barbarism to civilization? He t o o k the idea of the gens - the primordial social institution composed of kin descended from a common ancestor and related to each other exclusively in the male line - from the history of ancient Rome and made it into the bearer of the transition to civilization. It was not the constitution of the gens, however, but its decline that was the cause of the t r a n s i t i o n : Morgan held the gens to be universal to all societies that had made the transition to form political society and the state. Morgan, a lawyer for railroad interests in upstate New York, was sufficiently objective about the society around him to be critical of the effects of property upon the human mind, which, in his words, stands bewildered before its unmanageable power. The acquisition of property and the formation of a privileged class is but a recent historical event and the mind fits ill with their short-lived effects, for its pattern was laid down over great geological eras. The class of privilege - but not of property - had been abolished in America, and Morgan anticipated the day when all mankind would cast off the acquisition of property as a career, society would move to the next higher plane, and the equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes would be revived in a higher form. He was the only member of this group of evolutionists who was in any way critical of the fundamental institution of capitalist society, which he identified as property. Maine, on the contrary, held that Indian society was at a stage prior to that which had been achieved by English society, that the Indian forms of the family, the village community, law, and government were at a lower stage than that of England in his day, and that the evolution of landed property in india, which was communal in form, would

112 proceed to the next higher stage, that of private property, a stage which had been established in England for centuries. The study of Phear has relevance to the problem of landed property, which he set forth much as Maine did in general outline, but with some differences, holding that the communal institutions had already been outlived, s Both Maine and Phear held that through the agency of English legislation India would proceed to the stage of English institutions of property. Marx's study of Phear and Maine is relevant not only to the theory of social evolution in general, but also to a particular section of it, the Asiatic mode of production. After working on a formulation for more than a decade, Marx brought out as a general law, in 1859, the progression of mankind from the primitive to the historical stage. The history o f mankind, the stage o f class struggle, is divided into four great periods. In each of these a particular mode of production is dominant: the first and earliest is the Asiatic mode of production, the next is the mode o f production of classical antiquity, followed by feudalism, and finally the modern capitalist mode of production. Marx had referred in Capital to the traditional employment, the division of labor, the types of landholding, the characteristics of production and exchange, and to usury and moneylending in the Indian villages; Phear's account provided concrete material which was relevant to these subjects. Above all, Marx drew from his reading of Phear the difference between the European and the Asiatic epochs of social formation. He sharply distinguished the mode of production and the social relations of classical antiquity and o f feudalism in Europe from the Asiatic mode o f production. The decisive characteristic of each mode of production is the relation o f labor to the soil, to the means o f production, for the majority of producers were engaged in agriculture in these periods. In classical antiquity, the dominant if not exclusive form of labor was slave labor; in feudalism it was serfdom.

Neither form is dominant in traditional Asia. Marx thrust sarcastically every time these matters were raised. It is under the Asiatic mode of production that mankind makes the transition from the primitive to the civilized or historical stage. This was the general conclusion Marx had reached in the period between 1857 and 1867 when he wrote the Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, the short Critique of Political Economy, the three volumes of Capital, and the Theories of Surplus Value. Marx's method was evolutionist in the sense that he posited a general advance of mankind from the primitive to the civilized state. This advance proceeded by means of the division of society~"into.mutually antagonistic social classes and tile formation of the state. Unlike the evolutionists, however, Marx did not treat societies'as total entities but analyzed particular relations of production, in this case the production of a surplus and the reversion o f a part of that surplus to the state in the form of a tax. The cru'd~t and earliest form of tax was a tax in the form of labor, and the involuntary supply of surplus labor to the state was the form of the tax in the Asiatic mode of production. The ancient, feudal, and capitalist modes of production developed in Europe, while in Asia the Asiatic mode was maintained until the colonial era in the nineteenth century. Under the mode o f production in the classical period of Greek and Roman antiquity, the laborer was bound to the soil in a slave relation. In the medieval period the laborer was bound to the soil as servile labor. Both the slave and the serf were unfree. Under the Asiatic mode of production, the laborer was also unfree, but was bound to the soil as part of a collectivity; it was a communal unfreedom. The decisive factors of the development are the relations of labor, the development of the productive forces and production relations of society. The social whole is broken down into its effective relations, it is not taken as a whole. Marx's reading o f the work by Morgan

113 brought parts of his own argument into a new focus. The social institutions within which these factors were carried through became, in Marx's conception, the clan or gens. The traditional, primitive relations which are the collective ties of consanguinity and neighborhood had hitherto formed the social bond; these give way to the relations of slaveowner to slave, or master to servant, of patron to client, of the state to the communities within the power of the sovereignty. Marx developed his thought further in his critique of Maine. Here we must understand the dual relation of Marx to Rousseau on the one side and to Maine on the other. Rousseau had written that humans are born free and are everywhere in chains, meaning that primitive humans, or those in the state of nature, are free and that they are enchained by civiliza-' tion, 6 the bonds of which, Marx agreed, were despotic, dissatisfying and discomforting. Maine, however, wrote that the chains of the primitive community are real and despotic, that only humans in the civilized state are free, or can be so, and are in fact free under the regime of law (which he identified as the English regime).* Marx proposed that the individual is indeed bound to the community in the early stages of social development, that the savage is unfree, but that the form o f bondage in the primitive condition, which is the condition of community life under the traditional Asiatic mode o f production, maintains the individual in a bondage that is comforting, satisfying, and nondependent. The individual is torn forth (Marx's term: Losreissung) from the communal life by the changing relations of production, by the forced provision of labor, by involuntary taxation in its crudest form in the form of labor - and b y the provision of surplus labor and surplus value to the state. 7

At this point a new factor is introduced, class differentiation. Individuals are torn forth from collective bondage, but these are not the ordinary cultivators of the soil; they maintained the communal life for thousands of years after the earliest division of society into classes. It is those who seized state power, the ruling class, the princes and their henchmen, who were torn loose. Marx developed this point no further, but it has bearing upon the most profound historical problem, which was posed by Hegel as the problem of mastery and bondage, Herrschaft und Knechtschaft. ~ The mastery-bondage relation is a dual one, between two partners. The initial determiner of the relation is the master, who conquers and binds the conquered; but the slave wills his submission and forces his unfree condition upon the master. The unfree first acquiesce in their unfree state and then acknowledge it; they proceed from a passive recognition to an active relation to their masters. The master is at first active, conquering and enchaining his slave; in his new capacity as slaveowner he then passively slips into the relationship imposed upon him by the slave. To the free man, who is neither slave-taker nor taken as slave, both sides of the relationship are equally reprehensible. Hegel proposed here a caricature of the social contract, in which both sides come as equal partners to the bargaining table; the master and the bound are equal, but neither is free. They are equal in their miserable condition, which is the state of unfreedom; equality and freedom are separated from each other as human conditions. The equality that is taken up here is a minus-valued equality, a negative equality, the negation of equality on both sides, the freedom is the negation of freedom on both sides. Marx implied, although he did not develop

*Marx referred to Maine as a "blockhead" for holding this opinion; referring to the positive bonds of the primitive community and the historically consequent "one-side elaboration of individuality." He did this in the course of contradicting Maine's notion of the supreme existence of the State which Marx considered an "excrescence" of society, arising at a certain point, and disappearing "again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained." (See EthnologicalNotebooks, p. 39).

114 it further, that historically the relation of mastery and bondage is not a relation of parity. Those who are torn from the primitive community and from the village community of the Asiatic mode of production are torn free. They are individuated, socially freed from village bonds. Economically they are freed from the imposts collected from the villages. The villagers, the cultivators, remain in the state of collective bondage. The dialectical relation of mastery and bondage is now shifted; the new relation developed by Marx is that of collectivity and individuality. The village remains a collective form of life. The individualities, the new men who are formally free, are actually bound in a personal bond to the throne and collected around the court of the monarch. The monarch is a despot who has absolute power over his courtiers, clients, retainers, slaves; he regards them as his property; he enriches and confiscates, holding all the properties of his kingdom in his power. But his reach does not extend very far, and, historically, the villages have their own lives. Once the tax has been collected from them, they utterly ignore the gestes of the court, the wars and dynastic changes, and are in turn ignored by the sovereignty. The sovereign power and the villages are related by formal membershii~ in the same realm, the Oriental monarchy. But.in their content, the lives of monarch and village are unrelated. Out of the new relations of community below, i n t h e villages, and of individuality above, in the court of the despot, a disparity evolves. This is no longer a primitive tribe or community; it is an Oriental monarchy. The mastery is not made the matter o f the individual, but neither is the bondage. The bondage of the villages is collectively unfree; the state of freedom of the master is not directly related to the state of unfreedom of the villages; the state of freedom of the master is derived from the individuation, the Losreissung, of the monarch and the courtiers; this state is in turn directly 1-elated to the

collective unfreedom of the villages. Hegel looked back upon the relationship between master and slave, patron and client, in ancient Greece and Rome with the eyes of a free contracting agent of capitalism, of a free laborer engaged in wage labor, capable of bargaining his labor time to this or that employer, this or that capitalist. He held that the Oriental monarch alone was free, but he knew no relation other than that of masterslave, no category for the Oriental villages. He understood the difference between the Oriental master and the Greek or Roman master, but he did not understand the difference between Oriental bondage and the bondage of classical antiquity. Only the latter was a relation between individuals. Marx, on the contrary, made the dialectical relationship not that of Orient and Occident, or of master and bondman, but of collectivity and individuality, the collectivity of the cultivators in the village communities and the individuality of the ruling class. The new dialectic was a relationship established on the basis of class differentiations. The village community acted as a collectivity in relation to the land its members cultivated, protecting it in common against those who would seize it from them or would shift the boundary marks of the village lands by stealth; the taxes imposed upon the villages were collected from each village as a unity. The purpose of these Marxian categories was to place the capitalist mode of production, in particular the relation of wage labor under capitalism, in its historical context. Wage labor is formally free, b u t in order to understand this new relation of labor, Marx had to understand what it was not: it was not unfree. Once mankind has entered into civilized society, into class-divided society, labor relations become unfree. Instead of being bound by village custom, or by clan or gens practice, the civilized human being, dwelling in political society, ruled over by agencies of the state, enters into a new form of unfreedom, the tax-

115 imposts of Oriental despotism, the slave relation of the Greek slavemaster, or the servile relation to the lord of the manor under European feudalism. Having followed the development of mankind from the primitive condition to civilized society, to the formation of socially opposed classes and of the state, Marx then made one great generalized advancement. He put the capitalist mode of production on one side and the Asiatic, ancient-classical, and feudal-medieval modes on the other. The difference between them was the relation of labor to the means of production. Under capitalism, the laborer is free; he is separated from the instruments of labor, from capital, from the means o f production; he enters into the labor relation as a free agent, an equal to the bargainer for his labor time, the capitalist. The freedom that we are speaking of is a formal, legal freedom; the equality is of the sort that has the fixity of a popular prejudice. Marx thus had two intentions. Let us consider them not in the order in which they appear historically, but in their logical order, the order in which Marx t o o k them up. The first aim was to lay bare capitalist relations of production and the modern capitalist mode of production, to conduct a critique o f the relations of labor in production and the formation of the productive forces of capital. The second was to trace the historical course whereby these relations and formulations developed. Equality and freedom then become derivative categories; they follow from the changed relations o f production. Marx expressed himself very rarely on the socialist future, on freedom in society, devoting only a few lines here and there to the subject. In a draft of a letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, Marx wrote about the revival of the ancient gentes on a higher plane of society, and copied out phrases by Morgan (without naming him); but he sent off the letter without these thoughts. The point is that once the capitalist relations o f production

are stripped away, the present concern with freedom and equality ceases to be a social problem. 9 The problem o f the development of humidity was posed by Marx early in his writings, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and in the chapter of the German Ideology devoted to the critique of Ludwig Feuerbach (1845). The same problems were differently formulated in Marx's late writings, such as his critique of Adolph Wagner ( 1 8 7 9 - 1 8 8 0 ) . Here human beings became human by labor in society. At first humans are alienated from nature, their worktools standing between, separating them from direct relations with the natural surroundings. This formulation forms a common ground between Hegel - the young Hegel - and the young Marx. (We are here in accord with the interpretation of Georg Lukfics.) But Marx developed this thought further: humanity is not in a fixed evolutionary place, humanity will become one with nature, the alienation will be overcome, there will be one realm of nature and one of science, the science of humanity which is at one with nature. There is an unresolved tension, an incomp!ete dialectic in Marx's theory of the humanization of mankind. On the one hand he wrote that the process is carried out by virtue of the human being's relations to nature, through the intervention of culture and the alienation from nature. The human being's relation to nature, Marx wrote, is indirect, mediated b y the instruments of culture, which are in the literal sense the first instruments o f cultivation, the early instalments of hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants. But humanity also becomes humanized by another process, at the first entry o f mankind into social relations. Does mankind become human by virtue of the changed relations to nature, or by virtue of the changed relations in society? This incomplete dialectic is found in Marx's early ,writings and was never resolved? ° Late in his life, when he took up the study of ethnology and wrote long connected texts on the subject in the form of

116 notes and comments, he posed still another unresolved dialectical problem: mankind has made the transition to civilized society, according to the theory of the Asiatic mode of production, by virtue of the transformation of the primitive community into the village community, as detected in the early history of China and India and still observable in Marx's day in a ruined, travestied form in India. Yet, according to Morgan's theory, the transition to civilization is accomplished by the dismemberment of the ancient gens. The importance of Morgan's theory for Marx's theory of society and humanity lies in its empirical evidence of the collective being of mankind. Marx's enemy was the philosophy of rugged individualism, of the Robinson Crusoe, isolated, independent, alone; this is not the figure of a human being but its caricature, for a human being is a social animal. For long ages, in the geological sense, mankind lived in close communities whose density was a social density, as measured by the closeness o f the kinship ties of its members, the closeness of neighborhood, of mutual dependence and aid. The communities were closed corporations, closed to outsiders. The social character of the human being was laid down in these long periods of communal life; the tearing loose of the individual under capitalism made possible the freedom to amass wealth through means uncontrolled by the society. The capitalist ideology of individualism was expressed in this uncontrolled freedom which became license, and which had as its forerunner the practice of the Oriental despot, the basileus and slave-taker of ancient Greece, the rex and imperator of ancient Rome, the feudal lord of medieval Europe, none of whom yet achieved the clear expression of an ideology to justify and excuse this anti-human and anti-social conduct, this pro-individual and anti-social ideology and morality, this morality of immorality, this ethic of unethical conduct. The village community of the Asiatic mode of production and the gens of Morgan's theory

were two different confirmations of the collective being of humanity in the geological period of human prehistory. The communal being becomes the model o f the socialist being. This means for reaching the higher plane o f humanity was known: it is the social revolution. The content of the higher plane of social life cannot be discussed objectively, it can only be privately dreamed or imagined. The two different approaches not only point backward to the first appearance of civilized, historical, class-divided, political society and the state; they also point forward to the revolutionary transition to socialism and communism. The tension between the two approaches remains as yet unresolved, and was not resolved in a dialectical form by Marx. 11 This tension can, however, be resolved in theory. Marx's major resolution was between the theory and practice of revolution and the theory of social evolution. The social revolution is the next great step forward on the general path of evolution he had outfined. The place of capitalism, of the capitalist mode of production, was defined, fixed, and limited. On the one hand, it was defined both by what it was and what it was not. On the other, although we can know nothing of the life of mankind under the next stage of social evolution, we can know something of the life of mankind in general and this knowledge will define the limits, the form, and in a general way the content of life - not life under the dehumanized and inhuman conditions of capitalism, but life as human, if only in the most general sort of way. That is the formal meaning of The Ethnological No t eboo ks. In their content, the meaning of the Notebooks is this: Marx devoted long and intensive study to capitalism, both its mode of production and its society. He had a sound knowledge, from his early training and from his constant study of the epochs of economic formation in Europe, of both the classical and the medieval periods. He had a less extensive but considerable knowledge of the epochs of

117 economic formation of Asian societies, in particular of the Chinese and Indian empires. Yet when we compare his grasp of the civilizations that lay outside the sequence from ancient Greece and Rome down to the capitalist period in Europe, and of ethnography, with that of his forerunners, Adam Smith and Hegel, we find that it was greater in both subjects, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This was in part because he stood on the shoulders of his great predecessors, and in part because ethnographic and Oriental studies, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, made great advances. In his ethnological research, Marx was able to go beyond a knowledge of the literate civilizations of Eurasia and their colonies that had limited his forerunners, and which had limited his own research until he had access to the British Museum.

Words axe wise men's counters, they do not reckon by them; they are the money of fools. Hobbes, Of Speech

We have thus far outlined the dialectics o f evolution and revolution in the writings of Marx, and defined the problems they pose. If that were all there is to the problem of Marx's dialectic, we could now simply continue to compare the texts on ethnology, on the theory and practice of revolution, and on the critique Of the political economy of capitalism to each other, setting down the areas of agreement and disagreement. But texts are not the historical constants that they appear to be; they change their meaning frequently and radically. The theory of evolution formulated by Charles Darwin was studied and espoused by Marx on its publication. The word "evolution" soon became jargon, both to Darwin's followers and to his antagonists, and to the directors of military exercises; it then became fool's gold in the disagreements about Marx's works soon after his death. The texts became political slogans and, like slogans, they were captured. Evolution was a heavy cannon that was taken and turned about.

Not only do texts become weapons in these wordy battles, but people and their reputations are overrun and wasted. Eduard Bernstein has remained alive in our minds only as a caricature, as revisionism personified. Karl Kautsky has been thrust aside, a historical object, a renegade, the butt of a well-known pamphlet b y Lenin. Now Frederick Engels is the target of a campaign to put him down, to separate him from Marx, a coin thrown into play first by Georg Lukfics, then by Jean-Paul Sartre. Engels is to remain only as Marx's shadow, sent to oblivion as a thinker, as were Bernstein, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Karl Kautsky, socialists and nonsocialist socialists o f the past. During Marx's late years, at his death in 1883, and thereafter, the neo-Kantians t o o k up a position on socialism which they related directly to a subjective variety of idealism, as the basis of individual and personal morality, and to the philosophy of history as the progress Of mankind toward world community, to the critical philosophy of Immanual Kant. Socialism was captured by the followers of Kant and taken away from any sort of materialism, whether that of the eighteenth century or that of the nineteenth century, of the Hegelian anti-Hegelians or o f Marx himself. The socialism of Kant was discovered and promulgated by Friedrich Albert Lange and Hermann Cohen of Marburg. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the ranks of German and Austrian social democracy were depleted, as were the ranks of French socialism; the teachers of evolutionary socialism, the revisionists, together with the professors of socialism holding university chairs, were the Kantians: Eduard Bernstein, Conrad Schmidt, Franz Staudinger, Joseph Bloch, Karl Vorl~inder, Max Adler, Charles Rappoport. Their slogans were: "Back to Kant," and "Kant against cant." Bernstein, whose critical philosophy was something less than transparent in its link to socialism, did not really mean back to Kant. He meant "Back to Lange," or, as his adversaries in the socialist camp then said, back but not forward. F o r critical philosophies' link to socialism was the

118 opposite of apparent; the enlistment o f Bernstein in the ranks of Kant is a tour de force? ~ The capture o f evolution by the neo-Kantians for the side o f revisionist socialism was all that there was to the practical side, for Bernstein was an activist. Political struggle separated the revolutionists from the evolutionists, first within the Second International and then in successive splits - between revisionists and socialists, between Leninists and the older socialists, and of Luxemburg. Evolutionism in the nineteenth-century socialist camp had yet another side, which was Social Darwinism. Marx's negative judgment of Darwin, deploring Darwin's adoption of Thomas Malthus as his spiritual father, finding that Darwin recognized English society among the beasts and plants, was matched b y his positive judgment that Darwin provided the basis in the science of nature for the class struggle in history, that the death-blow had been dealt to teleology in the natural sciences. Marx sought to dedicate the second edition o f Das Capital to Darwin. Darwin formulated the law of the survival of the fittest by natural selection; his doctrine brought out the favorable effect of individual competition. Marx traced this doctrine back to Hobbes' war of each against all and to Hegel's likening o f civil : society to the "spiritual animal kingdom." But Social Darwinism also came to be a slogan to be captured and twisted: nationalists talked not of the survival o f the fittest individual but of the fittest nation; socialists talked of the survival of the fittest social class. Darwin's supporter, Thomas Henry Huxley, separated himself from the extreme law of the jungle, in his phrase, red in t o o t h and claw. Darwin's colleague, Karl Pearson, wrote in the pages of the official organ of the German Social Democracy, Die Neue Zeit; E. Ray Lankester and Emile Vandervelde, both socialists, developed one side of biological Darwinism; E. BelfotBax, Edward Aveling, and Ludwig Woltmann sought to bring Darwinism and Marxism together; Ludwig Gumplowicz pursued a similar

line in the journal of the revisionists, Der Soc&listische A kademiker. Their common basis was the theory of society as an organism, subject to the same laws of organic evolution as all living matter. This view is to be found in the works of Herbert Spencer and L.H. Morgan, in one formulation or another. Marx's favorable view o f the writings of both these men is known. The socialist branch of the Darwinists and the revisionists were both political evolutionaries; the account of human society as a biological organism was shared by the academic anthropologists and sociologists on the one side and the revisionists and political evolutionaries on the other. Although Marx worked out the dialectical interrelation o f social evolution and social revolution, we can see only an outline of his development of these fateful questions at the beginning of his public life. Lines later written for the New- York Daily Tribune in 1853 occaSionally touched the subject, but the longest connected text we have is a sketch for a chapter on the "Epochs of the Economic Formation o f Society," written late in 1857.13 Phrases from this text, which was never intended for publication, later appear in the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and in Capital. But while these are in finished form, with all schematism and formalism overcome, the compass of human society beyond the limits of capitalism, and the scope of human social evolution, is dealt with only briefly. Marx's main concern in this period o f his greatest creativity and publication was with the critique of the political economy of capitalism. The rest of his writing must be taken as relating to this predominant concern. Yet the context of the critique of capitalism, as the basis of its overthrow, had to be given, and in his extensive excerpts from, and commentaries upon, the works of M.M. Kovalevsky, L.H. Morgan, J.B. Phear, H.S. Maine, and John Lubbock, the capitalist mode of production is placed in the general system of human society

!19 and evolution. Work on this subject took place at the very end of Marx's life, when he returned to problems he had publicly posed thirty and forty years earlier. We now come to the incomplete dialectic, the unresolved tension between theory and practice. In political practice, the socialist movement on the death of Marx went in two directions: the evolutionary socialists evolved into revisionists, with close relations to neo-Kantianism, critical philosophy, and Social Darwinism. The revolutionists in Lenin's camp worked out the principle of dialectical and historical materialism, along the line advanced by Engels. The practical sides have remained separated down to the present and will remain so into the foreseeable future. The theoretical link between evolution and revolution was severed at the same time, since those who were engaged in the practice of politics developed the theories needed for their parties, thereby seeking to establish the ideological fences, the superstructure with which to defend themselves. The academic science of anthropology, as developed in the universities, museums, and in the laboratories of research institutes, has come in the past century to shore up the evolutionary side of political practice, because that is in fact what research and teaching has chiefly occupied itself with, insofar as it has discussed the problem of evolution at all. On the other hand, anthropology in the universities has had no relation to revolution whatever. The unity of theory and practice, of evolutionary theory with the theory and practice of revolution and the critique of capitalism, which lay in the background and was briefly brought forward into the light by Marx, was dismantled in subsequent political practice, and the evolutionary academics, the Darwinians, Kantians, and Hegelians, those with no philosophy or conscious theory, with no commitment save to ordinary academic practice, were either left in isolation or in a relationship with the evolutionary socialists

for want of anything other or better. Of late students have been seeking to work out their own theories by themselves, both in the revolutionary camps and as evolutionists, but the passage back to the great body of theory has been long severed, lost in the ideological battles at the end of the nineteenth century. Anthropology has been impoverished by the severing of the link to the great theories and to the agencies at work in society in the past. Those who seek a theoretical orientation or guidance have been left a body of texts to use, to study, and to work on. NOTES The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Transcribed and edited, with an introduction, by Lawrence Krader (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972). The volume contains Marx's excerpts and notes from the following works: L.H. Morgan, Ancient Society (1877); Sir J.B. Phear, The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon (1880); Sir H.S. Maine, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875); Sir John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870). The works of Morgan, Phear, and Maine were excerpted in 1880-1881. They are deposited in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Notebook B-146. The work of Lubbock was excerpted in November 1887, Notebook B-150. Morgan also stood close to Darwin, whose works he cited, and he was cited in turn by Darwin. They differed on the existence of the promiscuous horde as the stage of evolution prior to the appearance of human family life. Darwin was sceptical of the speculative reconstructions on which the promiscuous horde was founded; Morgan postulated the existence at some past time of such a horde, but without any empirical grounds whatever. This was the going fashion in the nineteenth century. See J.J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861); J.F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage (1865). On Kovalevsky, see below. Charles Darwin, The Descent o f Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), expressed his scepticism on promiscuous hordes at the beginning of human evolution by analogy to the social life of the great apes (see Chapter 20, near the beginning). Maine was the founder of the English school of historical jurisprudence; his best-known work in this field is Ancient Law (1861). Phear adhered to Maine's interpretation of law and history in India. Maine was opposed by Morgan regarding the priority of mother-right (Morgan's view) over father-right. On the early development of the stage-theory and of motherright, see: Lawrence Krader, "The Anthropology of T. Hohbes," International Society of the History of Ideas, Third Conference, Temple University, June 1972. Also, Revue de M~taphysique et de Morale (1973; in press).

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Both Morgan and Lubbock made contributions to the biological sciences, as well as to evolutionary thinking. 3 The same pattern of thought and the same terminology is expressed by Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Marx made use of Ferguson's work in Capital. The vectors o f Ferguson and Morgan in Marx remain to be drawn. These ideas are taken up again in V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (1951 ). 4 Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 4th ed. (1891), wrote that Morgan's "rediscovery of the matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin's theory has for biology and Marx's theory of surplus value for political economy." We cannot argue with this judgment, foi it was Engels' personal estimation. It is necessary to point out, however, that the gens, matriarchal or patriarchal, is not an institution of civilized peoples, but survives only in vestigial form among the latter. The Romans were able to compose their code of the gentes, thejus gentilicium, only when the gens had disappeared, save for those traces whose detection was the delight o f antiquarian amateurs, such as Cicero. The matriarchal gens is today called the clan; this is a matter of words. There is no work in the socialist literature that is better known than Engels' Origin o f the Family. Engels based his small book on Morgan's researches - not directly, but through Marx's notes, which Engels worked through in the winter of 1883. Engels' work, which has served as the canon of the socialist theory of social evolution, is simple and clear. Since its first publication in 1884 many complications in the origin of the state have been brought out, while contemporary research on the study of the family does not move in the direction taken by Engels. He attempted to assimilate mankind in the state of nature to the primitive condition of mankind that is reported in the ethnographic accounts from the seventeenth century on. He distinguished between economic reproduction in civilized, historical society and reproduction of the sexual as well as economic in primitive society, bringing economic and sexual reproduction together in the latter. As to his theory of the state in civilized society, both the socialist tradition and the science of anthropology would have been richer if he had read further in Marx's ethnological notebooks and had not stopped at the comments Marx made on Morgan. 5 Phear had served as a high judge in Bengal and Ceylon: His ethnographic account, however, has little to do with legal issues. It is a work o f great detail, giving lists of

6 7 8 9

10

11

12 13

household objects, together with their names and uses, lists of village employments and of types of landholdings. Yet the work is not ethnography in any modem sense, for Phear presented it as a " t y p e specimen" of the Bengal village. It is not an account of a particular village, located in a particular place at a given time; as a generalized account it cannot be verified, or its data checked on. On the other hand, some useful material is offered, coupled with vague speculations on the origin of the Indian village, etc. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract (1762). At the beginning. Maine, Lectures on the Early History o f Institutions, p. 359; Ethnological Notebooks, p. 329. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology o f Mind (1807); Chapter IV A, part 3. Karl Marx, correspondence with Vera Zasulich. D. Rjazanov, Marx-Engels-Arehiv (1926), vol. I. See The Russian Menace to Europe, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, P. Blaekstock and B. Hoselitz, eds. (1952), pp. 218-226. There is the unresolved dialectic of human beings as social animals and as toolmakers, both theories having been formulated by Marx. See my "Critique dialectique de la nature humaine," L 'Homme et la Socidtd, no. I0 (October 1968). Marx chose the term "Asiatic mode of production" in 1859, after trying out other formulations, such as "Oriental society," in 1853 and 1857-1858. Marx did n o t limit the place of the Asiatic mode of production in history to Asia, although he first identified it there. The mode of production is the first transition by humanity to political society and the state; the life of the cultivators is still maintained in village communities; the form of taxation is crude, as levies of involuntary labor service to ttte state. The most extensive discussion b y Marx of the Asiatic mode o f production in his late works was in the form of excerpts and comments on the work of M.M. Kovalevsky, Obshchinnoe Zemlevladenie (Communal Possession of the Land), 1879. The excerpts and notes on Kovalevsky's work are now being prepared for publication, under my editorship, b y Hanser-Verlag, Munich, and should appear shortly. The manuscript notebook from which they are taken is International Institute o f Social History, B-140. They were excerpted by Marx in the year of publication. These issues are discussed by Bo Gustaffson, Marxismus und Revisionismus (Frankfurt: Europ~iischer Verlag, 1972). Pre.Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

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