Dear friends,
I'm writing to call your attention to a newly pending publication which
is, I think of considerable relevance for many of the issues debated by
list members. This is the English-language edition of Marx's so-called
"ethnological notebooks," which will appear next year (or perhaps 1998)
under the title Patriarchy and Property: The Ethnological Notebooks of
Karl Marx. These notebooks -- systematic annotations of major works by
Morgan, Maine, Phear, and Lubbock -- formed the basis for Engels' famed
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but go far beyond
Engels in terms of the richness of what they say about Afroeurasian and
American cultures, both in premodern times and in the non-Western world
of the late nineteenth century.
I'll say more about the substance of this book in a moment, but first,
I'd like to ask list members who are interested in Marx's notebooks to
let me know. As editor, I'm in the midst of delicate negotiations with
the publisher over a variety of issues (the press run, total pages, the
font size, etc.) and it would help me greatly to be able to report that
there is lively interest among potential readers, reviewers, and so on.
Hence, if you'd seriously consider reading or reviewing Patriarchy and
Property, or perhaps assigning it to your students, I would greatly ap-
preciate hearing from you. Just send me a private reply to this note,
okay? (With your name, position, affiliation, address, and any other
pertinent data, e.g. friends who should hear about this, courses you
may assign this to, etc.) Many thanks, in advance, for your support!
Marx's views, of course, are not the last word on any of the subjects
of interest to list members, but they are also richer and quite a bit
more complex than many people suppose. The ethnological notebooks in
particular are valuable for the light they shed on Marx's understand-
ing of African, Asian, American and ancient European cultures, which
interested Marx, in the twilight of his life, in connection with his
continuing work on Capital. When Marx wrote his voluminous notes on
Morgan, Maine et al. in the years 1879-1882, he was steeped in work
on the concluding section of what we now know as Vol. 2 of Capital,
where, for the first time, Marx began to systematically inspect the
question of the global spread and sway of capital (under the rubric
of the "expanded" accumulation and reproduction of capital). This
led Marx to consider carefully the character of the cultures that
capital was encountering. An epochal collision was underway --
between capitalist Europe & North America and a world of cultures
that antedated and, to varying degrees, posed obstacles to capital.
Marx *could* have simply posited the "solvent" power of money, and
left it at that. But by 1879 he was well aware that cultures have
powers of resistance that cannot be discounted. To grasp the spe-
cificity of these powers, Marx needed to put capital in context on
a world scale. That, briefly, is what he began to do in the ethno-
logical notebooks. And the result is a cornucopia of valuable data
on Marx's views on many relevant issues, including, e.g., the tran-
sition from the Mughals to the British in Bengal, the nature of the
village commune in India, clan culture and structure in Africa and
the Americas, matriliny and marriage, totem and taboo, etc.
Marx's notebooks don't mark a fundamental departure from classical
Marxian themes (capital, class, value) but they do represent the
start of an effort to extend and contextualize these notions.
(Rosa Luxemburg made a similar effort, also on the basis of
Capital Vol. 2, in her Accumulation of Capital.)
Many of the most interesting recent WSN debates have pivoted around
related themes -- the possibility of going beyond "endogenist" theories
of the rise of capitalism, the clash of "world-systems" (hyphenated) and
"world systems" (unhyphenated), the degree to which capitalism is the
"totality" posited by Marx (and Weber), and so on. Closer attention to
Marx's notebooks won't resolve any of these debates, but will, I think,
help to see them in a slightly different light. Much of what Marx has
to say in these notebooks is unfamiliar (partly because Engels gave the
notebooks a very skewed and selective reading, stressing the ancient
European past at the expense of Marx's far greater concern, the non-
Western world in his own day). Together with related works, e.g., his
notes on Kovalevsky's study of empire and land tenure (1879), which are
appended to Lawrence Krader's Asiatic Mode of Production, Marx's ethnol-
ogical notebooks have something genuine to offer. My hope is that the
English-language edition of these notebooks will make this clear.
Thanks, and I'll look forward to hearing from anyone with a further
interest in this project.
David Smith
David N. Smith
Department of Sociology
University of Kansas
Lawrence KS 66045
emerald@lark.cc.ukans.edu
PH (913) 864-4111
FAX (9913) 864-5280