marx and religion: the ethnological notebooks of 1880–1882

REVIEW ARTICLEMARX AND RELIGIONThe ethnological notebooksof 1880-1882Adrian Cunningham

A major peculiarity of Marxism in relation to religion isthe paucity of Marx's own directly relevant arguments, des-pite the massive impact of work deriving from him in thecritique of religion .

This peculiarity forms part of thephenomenon to be studied and is not a reason for neglectingsuch study .

It does mean, however, that almost any newevidence is of importance, and that the student of religionhas a special interest in Krader's version of Marx's note-books, compiled between 1880 and 1882, and dealing withwritings of Maine, Morgan, Sir John Phear and JohnLubbock . (1)

Krader's task is important because, apartfrom the light thrown directly on Marx, these notes havelong been known of as inspiring Engel's influential TheOrigin of the Family, Private Property and the State(1884, revised 1891) .

It was in this closing period that Engels picked upsome of the pre-occupations of the earlier years of hiscollaboration with Marx, sifting through the unpublishedmanuscript of The German Ideology, going over their rela-tion to Feuerbach and Hegel, producing further shortcontributions to the critique of religion .

But in thisprocess the basic features of the position on religion offorty years earlier are scarcely modified .

It was anearly assumption of theirs that the fundamental critiqueof religion was complete and the decline of religionitself, no matter how long drawn-out, irreversible . Thebasic falsity of religion was for them an entirely unprob-lematical issue, and the intriguingly awkward question ofwhy, if false, it had persisted so long seemed to have beenresolved by Feuerbach .

It seemed that little more wasneeded to carry the analysis through than to give a socio-historical twist to Feuerbach's theory of religion as a system

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of, basically psychological, projections .

Their failureto follow this through systematically produced, I think,some of the severe difficulties in their more generalnotions of the relation between beliefs and social situa-tions ; the ensuing difficulties rather than prompting afresh analysis of religion, tended, if anything to reinforcetheir disdain for it .

For many purposes in the scientific study of religionan historian or sociologist's own basic attitudes towardsreligion may be of little or no interest in relation to theactual work he presents us .

The position is more compli-cated in the case of the marxist historian or sociologist,for it will tend to be formally part of his working assump-tions that to undertake a scientific account of religion isnecessarily a dissolution of the category 'religion' .

itis not only that the approach is critical - as any approachshould be - or that it operates as a critique of religionwhich is important, but also that the analytical toolsserve simultaneously as instruments in a polemic ; beingpart and parcel of an overall position which sees religionas essentially false it will be hard for the scholar tosee the religious as anything other than a disguise for,mystification of, or confusion about something else .

Suchnegative energy can be fruitful regardless of such assump-tions, and there is an enormous amount to be learned fromit, but perhaps just because of the certainty that theobject of study simply cannot in any way be what it claimsultimately to be, it still can escape notice that some ofthe key analytical tools turn out to be extraordinarily old-fashioned, clumsy, and as likely to injure their useras they are to further enquiry .

Indeed, it is probably the area of the study of reli-gion which has seen the least development of any in marxism:the economic, political, philosophical and aesthetic refle-xions of the founding fathers have been elaborated andimproved upon in innumerable ways and, especially in thelast decade, there has been some very lively work in anth-ropology, but, with very few exceptions, for quantity andquality of work almost nothing of comparable significancehas appeared in half a century . There has been a lot ofexegesis and some mixed theological response to Marx andEngels, but for original marxist work, at least in theEnglish-speaking world, whilst one can instance aspects ofGoldmann's study of Pascal and Racine, some of the work onthe English 17th century, and on millenarian movements,there is precious little else . Thus impatience is mixedwith relief when one finds a recent writer insisting,correctly, that the religious part of Islam is distinguish-able and not to be taken as a camouflage for social forces,


for the real question is why something takes a religiousform when other political forms are equally available . Heis further right to urge that 'autonomy does not necessarilymean independence : a neutral and autonomous religioussphere can be perfectly well dominated by politicalauthority . . . .'

But the problem of the specificity of thereligious sphere is let slip with the clich4, that it'constitutes a kind of imaginary projection, the phantasyof the commercial bourgeoisie' . (2)

In fact the lack of development in the subsequenttradition follows the very small development within theworks of Marx and Engels and the problem here is prior toany question of the kinds of ethnographical and other infor-mation available to them ; the difficulties are conceptualones .

An obvious example is the difficulty in maintaining aconsistent set of relations between the terms alienation,ideology and religion . Leaving aside the confusing senseof ideology to describe any systematization of ideas, theterm is most clearly understood in connexion with specifictypes of 'false consciousness' in relation to class society .Religion is often equated with ideology tout court .

Yetreligion occurs in societies prior to the division oflabour and development of private property which are themarks of social classes .

The problem here is mirrored inEngels' later modification, in the 1888 edition, of theopening of the Communist Manifesto, 'The history of allhitherto existing society is the history of class struggles',by the gloss 'that is all written history' - a modificationin part prompted by the study of Morgan as the preface tothe first edition of origin, four years before, suggests .Or, more cautiously still in 1886 he writes 'In modernhistory at least it is, therefore, proved that all politi-cal struggles are class struggles . . . .' (3)

In response to this one can set the distinction betweenman's alienation from nature and alienation from socialrelations, and the distinctive religious types accompanyingthem . - That is, it is hypothesised that in primitive con-ditions, among groups without division of labour, includingthe labour of religious specialists, there is a lack ofdifferentiation between natural, social and religiousrelations such that we can speak of natural religions, ormore precisely religions of nature .

There was analmost complete domination of man by externalnature, alien, opposed, incomprehensible to him,a domination reflected in his childish religiousideas . The tribe remained the boundary for man,in relation to himself as well as to outsiders :the tribe, the gens and their institutions were


sacred and inviolable, a superior power, institu-ted by nature, to which the individual remainedabsolutely subject in feeling, thought anddeed . (4)A further and distinct form of estrangement is consti-

tuted by man's domination by incomprehensible socialrelations : the opposition between man and nature partiallyovercome by division of labour, becomes, with the concomi-tant greater complexity of social arrangements, anopposition between man and society? the divinization ofthe forces of nature is joined by a divinization of theforces of society . Marx had noted something like this asearly as 1842 'the true religion of the peoples of antiquitywas the cult of their nationality, of their state' . (5)Forty years later he stresses Morgan's claim that among theGreek and Latin tribes the highest polytheistic form ofreligion which had then appeared 'seems to have sprung fromthe gentes in which religious rites were constantly main-tained' (6) and with reference to the Aztec and Iroquoisthe bolder generalization :

With the progress of mankind out of the Lower intothe Middle, and more especially out of the latterinto the Upper Status of barbarism, the gensbecame more the centre of religious influence andthe source of religious development . (7)

There are thus gods of phratries, tribes, cities, nations,empires, culminating in monotheism . We can thus see threemajor divisions of the religious traditions in Marx andEngels : the natural, the national, and universal-monothes-itic (for in the matter of non-monotheistic universalreligions they have nothing to say of any consequence) .

This twofold set of alienations to which religion is aresponse follows the distinct analyses of Feuerbach in TheEssence of Christianity and in The Essence of Religion, andis familiar enough, but discussion often stops short withthe allocation of the first to the archaic, and the latterto the more developed, in an evolutionary sequence .

Idoubt the consistency of a clear distinction between thesynchronic and the diachronic in Marx and Engels but,following Desroches (8) I find their account of religionrequires the transmission of the complex structure of thereligion of nature 'a travers et au-dessous de l'4volutionreligieuse ulterieure que son universalitg, au moins latente,dure 'd peu pres jusqu'$ nos jours .'

They assumed that atthe level of theory the conquest of nature, and hence of thebasis for religions of nature, was almost complete ; thefinal dissolution of the remaining social alienation wouldfollow the rendering transparent and rational of social rela-tions, still a long and arduous process .


At this level of generalization it is tempting indeedto read some of the major debates of the 19th century asexemplifying the completion of the conquest of religion bythe sciences of nature, and the major critiques of religionin the 20th century as exemplifying the initial stages ofthe conquest of the remaining areas by the social sciences .There is a certain rough and ready truth to this, but whatis often missed is that empirically the religious attitudedoes not fall into such neatly and externally juxtaposedconstituents ; even if it did, the rules of combination ofthese constituents would need to be investigated - somethingwe might have expected from marxist scholars . The com-plexion of the problems denominated as alienation vis ~[ visnature requires as much investigation as the awkward matterof how they are transmitted.

Crucial to the above argument as a whole is the questionof religious projection and, more especially, the universa-lity of the urge to personify as a necessary transitionalstage of social evolution, discussed by Engels in Anti-DUhring. (9)

Projection, it seems to me, is a concept thatraises as many problems as it offers to solve, whether thisbe in the hands of Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, Freud orBerger .

It is notable that there are very few attemptsindeed to discuss particular forms of projection of 'natural'and 'social' alienation in the combination required by thepreceding argument, and that, of those that have been attemp-ted, their interest lies in their bringing to bear othermethods to supplement marxist ones ; freudian, for instance,in the case of Fromm's Dogma of Christ .

What remains to be shown after 150 years of the per-suasive notion of religious projection is what Marx desi-derated as necessary - for the post hoc drawing of a thousandcorrelations will not in itself advance the conclusivenessof the projection theory an inch :

It is, in reality, much easier to discover byanalysis the earthly core of the misty creationsof religions, than, conversely, it is to developfrom the actual relations of life the correspond-ing celestialized forms of those relations .

Thelatter method is the only materialistic andtherefore the only scientific one . (10)It is then striking that in his study devoted to human

origins Engels has very little at all to say of the originsof the gods .

One might take a passing reference of his indiscussion of 'The Book of Revelation' to characterize theresponse to the needs of the 'only scientific method' :Christianity is born 'in a manner which totally escapesus' . (11)

This admission it seems to me is of a quitedifferent order from that, for instance, of Marx,


How and when the herds and flocks were convertedfrom common property of the tribe or gens intothe property of individual heads of families wedo not know to this day . (12)

for in this instance there is lacking the link, if any,between two known occurrences, whereas in the case of reli-gious projection it is precisely the origin which it isnecessary to demonstrate .

In the letter to Conrad Schmidt of 27 October 1890,where Engels clarifies his final views of ideology, opposingany simple unilateral determinism of thought by economicforces, he notes that

(The) various false conceptions of nature, ofman's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc .,have for the most part only a negative economicelement as their basis ; the low economic develop-ment of the prehistoric period is supplementedand also partly conditioned and even caused bythe false conceptions of nature . (13)When he continues, however, 'it would surely be pedantic

to try and find economic causes for all this primitive non-sense', (14) one should pause and consider whether he doesnot need pressing further on this fine disdain for pedantry .There are various points that may be involved here . Thereis the obvious difficulty of all investigations of remoteorigins, but the confidence which Marx and Engels have pre-viously displayed in generalising about the remote past makesit unlikely that Engels' disclaimer is to mark the necessarylimits of historical ignorance .

In part we are againinvolved in the problem of how to characterize pre-classsystems of ideas and their transmission into later periodsIn part, it seems to me, Engels shares the difficulty ofMorgan, when the latter wrote that,

The growth of religious ideas is environed withsuch intrinsic difficulties that it may neverreceive a perfectly satisfactory exposition .Religion deals so largely with the imaginativeand emotional nature, and consequently with suchuncertain elements of knowledge, that all primi-tive religions are grotesque and to some extentunintelligible. (15)

If the 'prehistoric stock . . . of what we should today callbunk' (16) resists investigation because of some radicalirrationality, then one needs a closer specification of justwhat falls into this area of non-ideological falsity ; onewould also need to ask whether the transmission of thisstock into the present is not wholly problematic : if it isirrational in its remote origins how far is it rational andopen to analysis in the present? What Engels does, I think,


is to say that the core of religion is a fundamentallyunexaminable falsity ; in time it attracts its owntheorizations and elaborations with a relative autonomy,and its own religious specialists ; in class situationsit also becomes the 'garb' of partial political interests,such that in a modern instance (the Reformation is theobvious example) it is only this latter aspect which needsexamination .

MARX, MORGAN AND THE SENSE OF STRUCTURE

References to the primitive occur as part of Marx's philoso-phical anthropology from the German Ideology onwards .Whilst disparaging the 18th-century fiction of 'natural men','feathered Papagenos', Marx allowed that 'such eccentrici-ties rested upon the correct idea, that crude conditions arenaive paintings, as it were in the Dutch manner, of trueconditions' . (17)

Such references recur with a sharperconceptual focus in the Grundrisse, and, for instance, draw-ing on Tylor, in Book II chapter 22 of Capital .

In theseinstances, however, the term specifies a category used as afoil to the detailed analysis of other economic forms, with-out much reference to particular primitive peoples . (18)

The historical sections of the Communist Manifestowere erected on a 'slender' basis (19) of materials fromclassical antiquity and Western and Central Europe .

Theseseemed to allow of only three forms of class society : theslave society of antiquity and feudalism were, it wouldseem, taken as alternative routes out of the state of primi-tive communalism, with the third form being modern bourgeoissociety .

By the late 1850s the picture is more complexwith the specification of three or four routes out ofcommunalism : following what are seen as distinctivepatterns of the social division of labour Marx outlines theoriental or Asiatic (deriving from intensive study of materialon India), the ancient, the Germanic, and the Slavonic forms .

After Capital (1867) however Marx's historical interestswere overwhelmingly concerned with the primitive communaliststage of social development .

He and Engels increasinglylooked to Russia for the opening of a European revolution andengaged in the controversy over the Russian village commu-nity, with Marx, it is worth stressing, taking the Narodnikside, opposing any determinism of historical stages andallowing the possibility of a transition to socialism withoutthe intermediary of capitalist development on the part ofcommunities with strong peasant institutions . Hobsbawmsuggests that Marx's preoccupation with the primitive mayderive from an increasing horror at the inhumanity of


capitalism, an inhumanity which had earlier seemed the neces-sary price of its historically innovative role . However, tosay that Marx's later views on 'archaic' social evolution,known via Engels' Origin, are 'in every way consistent' withthe positions sketched from the German Ideology onwards is tosimplify excessively, (20) and as it stands the notion of'primitive communalism', whilst preferable to that of 'primi-tive communism', is unwieldy .

It runs together 19th-centurypeasants, 19th-century primitives and archaic society in waysof which the historian of religion has good reasons to besuspicious .

All three are grouped among non-capitalistdevelopments in that very broad marxist distinction betweensocial formations in which property in land is dominant andthose in which capital is dominant . According to a familiarformula, in the former it is man's relation to nature that ispredominant, in the latter his relation to historically andsocially created phenomena, a distinction with an obviousbearing of the category of 'natural religions' .

Of the texts studied by Marx in 1880, Morgan's AncientSociety is clearly the most important .

Engels consideredthe book 'one of the few epoch-making works of our time' . (21)Marx is not as enthusiastic as that, but the lines of appealof distinctive positions in Morgan are clear .

Given theassumption of parallels between contemporary primitives andancient society, Morgan's study seemed to provide a scienti-fic basis for theories of archaic communalism as a foundingstage of human development . More especially, Morganstrengthened Bachofen's notions of a primeval system of'mother-right' . Marx, who had made the treatment of womena key index of the level of social morality, takes this forgranted without special emphasis, whereas Engels makes it acrucial point of his study,

The rediscovery of the original mother-right gensas the stage preliminary to the father-right gensof the civilized peoples has the same signifi-cance for the history of primitive society asDarwin's theory of evolution has for biology,and Marx's theory of surplus value for politicaleconomy . . . .

The mother-right gens has becomethe pivot around which this entire science [ofthe history of primitive society) turns : sinceits discovery we know in which direction to con-duct our researches, what to investigate and howto classify the results of our investiga-tions . (22)

In these matters, as in his more detailed studies of kinshipand the emergence of the state, Morgan's stress upon thecentral role of property provided 'the materialist premise',celebrated by Engels . Whilst Marx would have been sus-


picious of Morgan's occasional tendency towards a Darwinianorganicism in the process of development, it is strikingthat Morgan was one of the very few noted writers to use aview of evolution to criticise contemporary society . Withhis view of the 'reign of property' as merely an interlude(such a short one, notes Marx), Morgan had hoped that theexemplifying of ancient communalism would help the over-coming of the restrictiveness of the present order, a positionenthusiastically endorsed by Engels at the end of Origin .

Lastly, Morgan clearly puts the civilized and thearchaic on the same continuum of development, and, further,sees the human as part of the natural order .

This is animportant matter, for the variety of relations between non-class and class societies, between natural and historicalsocieties, has remained unclear in Marx's writings andbitterly controversial in the subsequent tradition .

Morgan'semphatic 'The history of the human race is one in source, onein experience, one in progress' (23) has a ready response ina theory that must balance the specificity of the determinantsof particular situations, which provides its demystifyingcritical leverage, with a unifying and universal history (ofmodes of production), which prevents a fragmentation intorelativism or nihilism (Stirner) . This unity is a necessarycorrelate of the rejection of the theory of human degradationassociated with Mosaic cosmogeny, to explain the existence ofsavages and barbarians . (24)

It also makes possible a co-ordination of historical and biological studies, of human andnatural sciences, desired by Marx since the 1840s .

At thesame time Morgan's work provided valuable ammunition againstthe 'struggle for life' school of social Darwinism .Kropotkin, for instance, makes substantial use of this inchapter 3 of Mutual Aid where, whilst rejecting the existenceof any period when woman was regarded as superior to man orwas the head of a clan, he supports Bachofen and Morgan'sview of the relatively late institution of the patriarchalfamily against Westermarck's criticisms in The History ofHuman Marriage ( 1891),

Of particular importance in this relativizing of thepatriarchal family is Morgan's pervasive argument that thegens and not the family is the basis of political organisa-tion .

A contemporary anthropologist, Meyer Fortes, findsthis the most notable feature of Ancient Society : thedemonstration that lineage organisation 'belongs to therealm of government and therefore of political institutions,and not - or, to be more accurate, as well as - to thedomestic sphere' . (25)

In the field of marxism itself therebuff to historians of the family as the basic unit ofsociety (for instance Morgan's criticism of Grote on Greeksociety (26)) takes a particular resonance from the power of


the ideological use of the family as the model of, and for,all social relations ; a model which conveniently runstogether natural roles in which authority is unavoidableyet alternating (every child can be a parent), with socialroles which are changeable yet predominantly closed (few ifany proletarians become lords) . (27)

The contemporary relevance of the relation between,Morgan's work and that of Marx and Engels can be underscoredfrom two different directions both of which invoke the term'structural' .

Following Fortes (28) we can take Morgan'sdiscovery that customs of designating relatives have scien-tific significance as crucial, and, by distinguishing theutility of his synchronic accounts from his erroneousdiachronic speculations, , how how he foreshadowed and stimu-lated the developments we primarily think of in connexionwith Radcliffe-Brown . Seeing the development of anthropo-logical theory in this way, we note that just as theinvestigation of religion becomes a major preoccupation ofnon-marxist sociology, so concern with religion tended tobulk largest in the tradition of cultural anthropology(Tylor, Frazer, Marret, Boas, Kroeber being obvious examples),whilst writers sympathetic to Marx concentrated on thedelineation of stages of development in the fields of pre-history and archaeology (V. Gordon Childe being anexample (29)) .

What was lacking in the tradition centredupon the analysis of culture was the idea of social system .It was this which, it can be argued, Maine was on the trackof through his study of the logical and analytical apparatusof Roman jurisprudence, and Morgan through the regularitieshe found in kinship terminologies an insight picked up byRivers, Lowie and Radcliffe-Brown .

Looking at the matterfrom the point of view of the study of religion we can,thus, distinguish three strands at least : cultural, struc-tural, and marxist-evolutionary, each with a specificinterest or lack of interest in religion .

Such simple schemes are of limited use, but I thinkthis one is helpful in trying to understand the burst of newactivity in the last decade, largely of French origin, whichalso uses the term 'structural', but with quite differentconnotations from those indicated above .

A key instancefor our purposes is Emmanuel Terray's argument that Morganis in fact as much concerned with constructing a consistentseries of analytical categories as describing an actualhistory, much as Marx's work is fundamentally the delinea-tion of structural features of socio-economic formationsrather than a descriptive reportage of contemporary develop-ments . (30)

Terray's persuasive attempt to recast Morganas a materialist and structuralist offers some very conven-ient benefits : the inherited tradition of Morgan-Marx-Engels


is maintained, but in such a way as to extricate marxismfrom procrustean forms of evolutionary study, and at thesame time to reject all non-marxist 'structural-functional'approaches .

The implications of this debate for futuremarxist studies of religion are unclear .

Either Morgan'sexclusion of religion as an approachable subject can bemaintained and the distance from cultural anthropologyincreased, or the shaking up of familiar marxist categoriesmight allow a further degree of 'relative autonomy' forreligious systems .

However, one of the most brilliantmembers of the French school, Maurice Godelier, can, on thequestion of myth for instance, be at root merely dull andout-datedly rationalistic . (31)

Among the ASA Decennialpapers on marxism in anthropology (32) from a similar posi-tion, Stephan Feuchtwang contests the excessive charity ofmuch current anthropology of religion which 'endows ideas ofgods with an explanatory force which is but the pale agnos-tic substitute for the gods themselves' .

He urges that ifwe include the subject's view of reality in our definitionof religion then we tend also to include the believed-inreality of superhuman beings .

Thus, such beings will, invarious guises, be postulated in social science until wefind a means of dealing with subjectivity itself as anobject .

The model for such an enterprise is taken fromAlthusser's sense of ideology where 'ideologies constitutethe social relations of existence as subjects', and Feuch-twang offers a sketch of religion in late imperial China asillustration of 'ideologies which are specific to a certainsocial formation and cannot be abstracted from it into adiscipline of comparative religion' .

The breadth of thisclaim is offset by his concluding disclaimer, 'I have notshown what is peculiar to religion as an ideology' - inwhich respect we have not got beyond Engels' form of'agnosticism' .

Many, probably most, marxists have taken the positionto involve something like an evolutionary sequence of worldhistory, but the Althusserian critics are right in demon-strating that many features of Marx's work will just not fitthis pattern .

Nonetheless, I do not find anything like theconsistent, or chronologically clear-cut distinction between'historical' and 'structural' method in Marx which is thestock in trade of much current discussion .

The inconclu-siveness of the Sartre/L4vi-Strauss controversy, whichbordered on this area, has not been greatly reduced in thesubsequent decade : the differences, and especially theirfailure to be as clear-cut as they are insistent, seem to goto an extraordinary depth of our current intellectual assump-tions .

The new approaches have yielded a lot, and inretrospect confirmed just how moribund orthodox marxist


history was . But it may be that the kind of re-working Ihave noted in anthropology can produce a more distinctivecriterion of orthodoxy only at the price of its being athinner one, and may come to stress its distinctiveness tothe point of yet again trying to generate out of the largebut still finite oeuvre of Marx the functional equivalent ofwhat resists simple rejection in other methods . What, upto sixty years ago, gave a relevant edge to marxist analysesof religion - the penetrating novelty of the historical andsociolog-cal critique piecing out the banality of the philo-sophical ones - has been so largely and usefully assimilated,that to redefine the ideological nature of religion whilstleaving unchanged the muddled views of religion which .shapedthe now revised sense of ideology, is not to have advancedthe critique of religion in any substantial way .

At some key points then, one cannot avoid sticking toissues that remain unanswered, albeit that they are unfash-ionable .

In the wider matter of Marx's interest in ethno-logy, emphasis continues to fall upon the point that,negatively, Morgan's work provided a material base fordemonstrating the impermanence of private property, themonogamous family and the state; whilst positively,'together with the related studies of peasant communitiesit provided Marx with a model of what that society which wasnot based on the pursuit of personal and private wealth, butwhich developed instead collective institutions of ownership,could be' . (33)

I would suggest that this approach was not only of useto Marx, but that something like it became crucial to hisoverall endeavour at the fundamental level of the criteriaby which developments are assessed in relation to desiredgoals, and the desirability of those goals demonstrated, forhe has rejected, or critically shaken, most of the positionsto which we might appeal . (34)

He has obviously rejectedany religiously given criteria ; he has severely criticizedphilosophical notions of the state of nature ; he is deeplysuspicious of talking of 'human nature' for this has sooften made alterable conditions of life into eternal ones ;he has resisted the temptation to see an inevitable processof evolution at work in history .

Similarly, it was 'theopposite of a teleological, directed law of nature and manattracted Marx to the conceptions of Darwin' ; Darwin'swork had given the death blow to teleology . (35)

Yet, itis important to be clear that by teleology Marx is taken tomean a 'formative process which is wholly external to anatural object, whether animate or inanimate, or to natureas a whole' (36) and that in Darwin is to be found the'rational meaning of teleology', which is the aggregateaction and product of many natural laws, the sequence of


events as ascertained by us . (37)

But it is a fair questionwhether to see form as determined by function is not merelyto restate the problem of teleology in more sophisticatedterms .

The difficulty comes out, I think, in contexts whereit might be a matter of seeing the savage beneath thecivilized European facade : 'This was taken by Marx as anindex that modern man was not without an archaic communalcomponent, which includes a democratic and equalitarianformation, in his social being' . (38)

Marx can certainlydemonstrate the impermanence of taken for granted social formsby recourse to the primitive : but I cannot see how he woulddistinguish talk of 'human needs', 'rational teleology', or'archaic components in social being', from the human natureformulations he has rejected .

In this difficulty, thedemonstration of an empirical communal state that may bepicked up again at a higher stage is obviously compelling,even if finally unsatisfactory .

Krader's transcription of the notebooks could seem tobe very much a monument of editorial scholarship, for, in therendering of the notebooks, whilst there are innumerablemarginal emphases, underlinings, dashes, and the occasionalinterpolation of corroborative material the great bulk of theactual text is made up of excerpts from the authors studied .Yet, against this one weighs the fact that Marx is soobviously one of the twelve or so writers of whom everypossible scrap that is left will eventually have to bepublished .

Thus the jibe that Marx's notebooks on geologywould not make him a geologist is not wholly on target : inthe end we shall probably have to have them too, and whetherthey can be made to yield anything at all original will notbe the whole issue ; even if they do not, in such an extra-ordinarily difficult field, the closing off of certain linesof chase or escape is of clear benefit .

The prodigious editorial effort here, and the prodi-gious printing task, should be stressed - for it is a matterof producing a text with as many words in italics as not,with many marginalia, underlinings, idiosyncratic abbrevia-tions and macaronic vocabulary, many sentences start inGerman, switch to English paraphrases, incorporate bits ofGreek, go back to German and finish in English .

To havesuch a text beneath one's eyes - and fingers too are needed!- gives a useful insight into Marx's working methods, whetherthe impressive ability to worry at a text, bringing in agreat range of annotation to bear upon it, or morepuzzlingly, the degree of apparently unselective immersionin the detail of the text : it could even be thought tohave a manic quality .

It is remarkable the use to which Krader has put hismaterials .

For his 90 pages of introduction, and his


supporting articles (39) apply years of study of the note-books and their sources, in the light of Marx's other work,to a full reconstruction of Marx's position . In the partsof this reconstruction which I have been able to check thereis much that is brilliant and convincing .

It is, though, agreat effort to get at it . The already complex task is onoccasion made impenetrable by the editor's cramming in of amass of other lines of enquiry on the widest range ofmarxian topics . The oddity of some of the English construc-tions is an additional barrier ; it can be overcome, but inseveral instances, a new crux has resulted .

NOTES

1 The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, transcribed andedited with an introduction by Lawrence Krader, Assen1972 .

2 F . Colonna, 'Cultural Resistance and Religious Legiti-macy in Colonial Algeria' in Economy and Society IV1973 .

3 'Ludwig Feuerbach', Marx and Engels, On Religion, Moscow1957, p . 257 .

4 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,Moscow n .d., p . 160 .

5 'The Leading Article of No . 179 of Kolnische Zeitung,On Religion, p . 23 .

6 Lewis H . Morgan, Ancient Society or Researches in theLines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarismto Civilization, Chicago n .d ., p . 81 .

7 Ancient Society, p . 82 ; cf . Origin, p . 149f .8 Henri Desroche, Marxisme et Religions, Paris 1962, p . 36 .9 cf. On Religion, p . 149f .

10 Capital Bk 1, ch . 13 ; p . 392 n . 2 in the Everymanedition ; On Religion, p . 136 .

11 'The Book of Revelation', 1883, On Religion, p . 206 ; cf .Desroche, p . 42 .

12 Marx and Engels, Selected Writings II, Moscow 1962,p . 281 .

13 On Religion, p . 281 .14 Ibid ., p . 282 .15 Ancient Society, p . 5 .16 On Religion, p . 281 .17 'The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of

Law', 1842 ; C .D. Easton and K .H. Guddat, Writings of theYoung Marx, New York 1967 .

18 Krader ed ., p . 5 .19 E .J . Hobsbawm, introd. to Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist

Economic Formations, London 1964, p . 31 .


20 Ibid ., p . 52 ; cp . for instance, Krader's comments on thevarious and finally distinct positions of Marx and Engelson the unity of natural and historical principles, 'TheWork of Marx and Engels in Ethnology Compared'

of Social Historyin Inter-

XVIII, 1973, esp .national Reviewp . 230ff .

21 Origin, p . 8 .22 Ibid ., p . 26f .

The fortunes of the mother-right theoryare intriguing .

It enjoyed great currency amongstsocialists in the 1890s, and remote echoes can be foundin George Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens, 1966 ; it wasalso drawn upon by conservative traditionalists, depthpsychologists like Jung, and freudian marxists of theFrankfurt School .

Among the earlier writers, it isstrange that there is no mention of Bachofen in E .S .Hartland's substantial survey, Primitive Paternity 2vols, 1909 .

Ernest Jones's discussion, 'Mother-Rightand the Sexual Ignorance of Savages' (1924) in Essays inApplied Psyco-Analysis vol . II, 1951, was taken up byMalinowski in Sex and Repression in Savage Society,1927 .

The strictly anthropological work on 'matriarchy'is surveyed by D .F . Aberle in D .M . Schneider and E .K .Gough (eds), Matrilineal Kinship, California 1961 .Although drawn on occasionally by current historians ofancient religion, the weight of recent opinion seemsagainst anything like Bachofen's formulation, althoughFromm retains it as an indispensible psychological model,'The Theory of Mother-Right and Social Psychology' (1934),The Crisis of Psycho-Analysis 1971 .

23 Ancient Society, p . vi .24 Ibid ., p . 7 and p . 513ff .25 Meyer Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order : The Legacy

of Lewis Henry Morgan, 1969, p . 37f.26 Ancient Society, p . 233ff .27 Cf . A . Cunningham, 'Reflexions on projections' in R .N .

Berki and B . Parekh (eds), Knowledge and Human Interests,The Problem of Ideology, London 1973 .

28 Op . cit ., p . 12 .29 See also, Leo S . Klejn, 'Marxism, the Systematic Approach,

and Archaeology' in Colin Renfrew (ed .), The Explanationof Culture Change : Models in Prehistory, 1973 .

30 Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and 'primitive' Societies, NewYork 1972 .

See also, Raymond Firth, 'The ScepticalAnthropologist? Social Anthropology and Marxist Views onSociety' in Proceedings of the British Academy, LVIII,1972 .

31 Maurice Godelier, 'Mythe et Histoire' in Annales May-August 1971, English translation 'Myth and History' in NewLeft Review no . 69 September-October 1971 .


32 Maurice Bloch (ed.), Marxist Analyses and Social Anthro-pology, 1975 .

These studies appeared too late for amore extensive consideration here, but I would note thatJonathan Friedman's 'Tribes, States and Transformations'seems to offer a definitely fruitful use of Althusser .

33 Krader, p . 6 .34 Cf . A . Cunningham, 'Objectivity and Human Needs' in New

Blackfriars, vol . 55, March 1974 .35 Krader, p . 2 .36 Ibid ., p . 352 .37 Darwin cit . Krader p . 355 .38 Ibid ., p . 3 .39 Cf . n . 20 supra, and 'Marxist Anthropology' in Inter-

national Review of Sbcial History, XX, 2 and XX, 3, 1975 .

marx and religion: the ethnological notebooks of 1880–1882

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