109
SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Lawrence Krader
The concept of advancing society through
the combined agencies o f evolution and revo-
lution was at one time related in a single over-
arching 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 con-
scious adjustments, as the slow growth of man-
kind. 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 out-
side 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 poten-
tiality 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, further-
Lawrence Krader is the Director of the Institute of Ethnology,
Free University of Berlin.
more, expounds the objective working of in-
voluntary 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 advance-
ment 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 sub-
ject 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 sub-
jective 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 sub-
jective inner will become objective, liable to
contradiction by historical action. The contra-
diction of the evolutionists is a verbal contra-
diction, wordy utopias nullified by great un-
willed 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 revolu-
tionary 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 evolu-
tionist 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 con-
servatives, "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 com-
plex 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 under-
taken in his youth.
The relationship between the historical
order and the logical order of the categories
of study is complicated, and particularly com-
plex 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 them-
selves a book. They are in the literal sense the
materials for a book, and it is our task to dis-
cover 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

with Marx's interspersed critical commentaries)
These authors were without exception evolu-
tionists. 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 out-
side 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 mem-
ber 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 bio-
logical 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 in-
fluential 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 progres-
sive, but the progression was not smooth; it
went at different rates of speed, remained with-
out 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 mother-
right preceded that of father-right. Maine's
chief contribution, for which he is known
down to the present, was his legal theory of
111
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 com-
posed 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 tran-
sition to civilization. It was not the constitu-
tion 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 man-
kind 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 out-
lived, s Both Maine and Phear held that
through the agency of English legislation India
would proceed to the stage of English institu-
tions 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 par-
ticular section of it, the Asiatic mode of pro-
duction. After working on a formulation for
more than a decade, Marx brought out as a
general law, in 1859, the progression of man-
kind 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 agri-
culture 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 produc-
tion 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 sup-
ply 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 unfree-
dom. 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

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 tra-
ditional, primitive relations which are the col-
lective 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 Eng-
lish regime).*
Marx proposed that the individual is indeed
bound to the community in the early stages
of social development, that the savage is un-
free, 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
*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 dis-
appearing "again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained." (See EthnologicalNotebooks, p. 39).
113
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 histor-
ical 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 un-
free 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
114
it further, that historically the relation of
mastery and bondage is not a relation of parity.
Those who are torn from the primitive com-
munity 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 re-
mains a collective form of life. The individual-
ities, 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 prop-
erties 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 com-
munity below, i n t h e villages, and of individ-
uality above, in the court of the despot, a dis-
parity 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 Los-
reissung, 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 master-
slave, 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 rela-
tion 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 under-
stand 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-

imposts of Oriental despotism, the slave rela-
tion of the Greek slavemaster, or the servile
relation to the lord of the manor under
European feudalism.
Having followed the development of man-
kind 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-medi-
eval modes on the other. The difference be-
tween them was the relation of labor to the
means of production. Under capitalism, the
laborer is free; he is separated from the in-
struments of labor, from capital, from the
means o f production; he enters into the labor
relation as a free agent, an equal to the bar-
gainer 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 con-
sider 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 rela-
tions 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 rela-
tions 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 revolution-
ary 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
115
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 incom-
p!ete dialectic in Marx's theory of the human-
ization 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 dismem-
berment 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 carica-
ture, 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 collec-
tive 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 can-
not be discussed objectively, it can only be
privately dreamed or imagined. The two dif-
ferent 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 produc-
tion, 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 con-
tent 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 Eth-
nological No t eboo ks.
In their content, the meaning of the Note-
books is this: Marx devoted long and intensive
study to capitalism, both its mode of produc-
tion 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 medi-
eval periods. He had a less extensive but
considerable knowledge of the epochs of

economic formation of Asian societies, in par-
ticular of the Chinese and Indian empires.
Yet when we compare his grasp of the civiliza-
tions that lay outside the sequence from an-
cient 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.
117
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 cam-
paign 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 non-
socialist 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. Social-
ism 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 social-
ism 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, to-
gether 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 Bern-
stein 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 Democ-
racy, Die Neue Zeit; E. Ray Lankester and
Emile Vandervelde, both socialists, developed
one side of biological Darwinism; E. Belfot-
Bax, Edward Aveling, and Ludwig Woltmann
sought to bring Darwinism and Marxism to-
gether; 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 anthro-
pologists 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 com-
mentaries 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

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 revi-
sionists, 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 material-
ism, along the line advanced by Engels. The
practical sides have remained separated down
to the present and will remain so into the fore-
seeable 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 ideo-
logical 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, anthro-
pology 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 back-
ground and was briefly brought forward into
the light by Marx, was dismantled in subsequent
political practice, and the evolutionary academ-
ics, 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
!19
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 Inter-
national 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 evolu-
tion 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 with-
out 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 mother-
right, 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).
120
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 direct-
ly, 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 note-
books 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
DialectiealAnthropology 1 (1976) 1 0 9 - 1 2 0
© Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands
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.
6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract (1762). At the
beginning.
7 Maine, Lectures on the Early History o f Institutions,
p. 359; Ethnological Notebooks, p. 329.
8 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology o f Mind (1807); Chapter
IV A, part 3.
9 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.
10 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).
11 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 editor-
ship, 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.
12 These issues are discussed by Bo Gustaffson, Marxismus
und Revisionismus (Frankfurt: Europ~iischer Verlag, 1972).
13 Pre.Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1964).