Karl Marx, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Nineteenth-Century European. Stadialism ...
of the historical stage theory, with theoretical kinship to Henry Lewis. Morgan's ...
borderlands e-journal
www.borderlands.net.au VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2 , 2012
SPECIAL ISSUE: COMMONS, CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE WORLD
Specter of the Commons Karl Marx, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Nineteenth-Century European Stadialism Manuel Yang Independent Scholar
Although Karl Marx and Lewis Henry Morgan have often been treated homologously for their ideas of historical evolution and primitive communism, there are radical differences between the two. Marx’s stadial conception of history was carefully circumscribed to West European, particularly British, developments while Morgan posited a universally applicable theory that assumed North American Indians as culturally and economically backward in comparison to the summit of European civilization. Marx’s view of communism was also contingent on historical circumstances and changed throughout his lifetime, shifting at the end of his life toward a critical appreciation of the Native American commons on their own terms. Morgan, on the other hand, was more rigid in defining this ‘primitive communism’ as a particular stage in human history that was doomed to obsolescence, a view that became part of orthodox Marxist doctrine. These differences prod us to fundamentally rethink the history of Marxism and the distortions it has brought to Marx’s own ideas, as well as to rescue the latter from the condescension of the post-Communist-Marxist world.
In the annals of both Marxist and non-Marxist scholarship, it has become long customary to invoke historical materialism as a species of the historical stage theory, with theoretical kinship to Henry Lewis Morgan’s stadial theory of civilization and other models of historical evolution within the genealogy of Western Enlightenment thought. 1 Although as a broad generalization, this is not entirely false, we should note that any form of genealogy is almost always constructed ideologically, concealing lines of illegitimacy and family scandals that have ended in rupture of kinship relations. Whatever shortcomings
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and gaps exist within Karl Marx’s work—and there are plenty—it is essential to keep in mind that he did not only leave an illegitimate heir in the physical form of Frederick Lewis Demuth, via his housekeeper Helene Demuth, but also did so in the seed of his non-stadialist, commonist ideas, long unacknowledged in this venerable genealogy. In reexamining Marx’s relationship to Morgan, primitive communism, and stadial theory of history, we might come close to apprehending what Yoshimoto Takaaki—who perhaps more than any other intellectual figure in contemporary Japanese history aspired to Marx’s role—termed the ‘less travelled road’ in Marx’s work. Apart from the road of ‘political economy’ evinced in the early Marx, Yoshimoto also observed in Marx’s works of 1843-44 the road of ‘natural philosophy’ and that of ‘communal illusion’, the critical investigation of religion and the state-form—it was this latter road that Yoshimoto walked and theorized on the basis of his working-class experience of Japanese nationalism during and after World War II. We might propose yet another road that stretches itself back into the historical imagination and practice of time immemorial, the obverse side of the statist, rulingclass reification of communitarian sensibility issuing originally from the material reality of the commons. In his signature work Last Shinran, published a few years before his conversation with Michel Foucault in 1978, Yoshimoto depicted the medieval Buddhist monk Shinran as the figure responsible for dissolving Buddhism from its religiosity, a privileged realm of elites requiring professional discipline and knowledge for adherence, by grounding his ideas in the commoners’ everyday experience. Elsewhere Yoshimoto acknowledged that Last Shiran was written as a means of ‘finishing off with Marxism’ while still being connected to Marx ‘by the skin of its tooth’—that is, doing away with the vanguardist, progressivist interpretation of Marx and reading him against the grain of commonist experiences that have made their way into his ideas. Those of us positioned at the crossroads of a rather different historical conjuncture today, when the neoliberal financial crisis is unwinding against the background of global insurrections that run the gamut of the Arab Spring, post-3/11 Japanese anti-nuclear struggles, U.S. Occupy movement, and European street protests, whose GrecoIberian expressions have been particularly striking, might see this as an opportune moment to start reconsidering the historical possibility of the revolutionary commons (as opposed to the state-power’s hegemonic recuperation of the commons, which Yoshimoto had made it his subject of study). This would require on our part some sort of fundamental confrontation with Marx’s necessarily unfinished legacy as concerning communism and historical stages. Marx on Communism and Stadialism As many commentators have correctly pointed out, Marx kept an almost ascetic silence over the concrete content of what a communist society might resemble in the future. Although there is an undoubtedly
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prophetic quality to some of Marx’s pronouncements (in his dialogue with Yoshimoto, Foucault identified this as one characteristic that puts Marx within the paradigm of nineteenth-century European thought— see Yoshimoto & Foucault 1988, pp. 226-30), the only noteworthy place where Marx went on to concretely elaborate an image of future communism is the oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology (1845). The German Ideology was an unfinished manuscript composed after Marx and Engels had made a visit to the Manchester Library and met with the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, while the Chartist firebrand Feargus O’Connor (whom Engels called the ‘main pillar of the great labour movement in England’ and ‘the virtual chief of the Irish Repealers’ seeking Irish Parliamentary autonomy) was initiating the Chartist Land Plan to purchase land and establish smallholders by lottery for its working-class subscribers. 1845 was also the year of the Battle of Ohaeawai in the North Island of New Zealand, when a British imperial army under the command of Colonel Henry Despard was bombarding Maori insurgents who sought to defend their traditional subsistence landholding and customs from British enclosure. The theory of historical materialism was thus born at a moment when the scheme to restore the rural commons was underway in England—alongside the attempt to forge an Europeanwide radical prefigurative political link that would help funnel the 1848 revolutions—and the indigenous commons was under assault in the outpost of the British Empire: [...] in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1998, p. 53)
If the orthodox view of Marx as an urbanist, a modernizer, and a statist has any merit, this quote makes that view implausible. For the image of communism painted here is one that is decidedly pastoral and agriculturalist, where division of labor is reversed to give ample opportunities for human beings to express themselves creatively without coercion—closer to a form of society that the Maori indigenous rebels were seeking to preserve than the image of state communism based on bureaucratically coordinated industrialization and correspondent proletarianization on a mass scale, as were the twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regimes. Marx also wrote in the Ideology that communism is ‘for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself’ but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, resulting ‘from the now existing premise’, which Marx identified in the marginalia of his manuscript as ‘estrangement’ (1998, p. 57). We can already hear future echoes of Marx’s critical remarks on the Paris Commune twenty-six years later, in which Marx defined the Commune as the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’—a phrase that
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would reappear in the Part VIII of Volume One of Capital—aimed at the ‘impossible communism’ of ‘transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor’— ‘impossible’ because the capitalist ruling class were already actively incorporating ‘co-operative production’ for the purpose of ‘continuing the present system’. In other words, the technology of organizing labor collectively, even if endowed with self-directive properties of free association—contemporary versions would range from the ‘team concept’ in so-called post-Fordist lean production to the ‘immaterial’ or ‘cognitive labor’ of the new information and postindustrial worker—will only project a dream of ‘impossible communism’ that capitalism would be more than happy to recuperate and re-instrumentalize into a new means of expropriation. In contrast, ‘possible communism’ was one in which ‘united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production’ (Marx 1996, p. 188). The orthodox Marxists have interpreted this to simply mean the mobilization of state power, with subsequent Orwellian inversion of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into the ‘state dictatorship over the proletariat’. But perhaps we need to take Marx’s Hegelian education seriously, whereby ‘society’ is viewed as primary, preceding the state-form. At the time of the composition of The German Ideology, Marx was seeking to rescue materialist reality of sociality from the ideological illusions of the state, which, in Prussia of his day, took explicitly religious forms. Hence his polemics against the ‘German ideology’ of the Young Hegelians, pointing out their philosophical criticism of religion as an estranged, objectified expression of human power and consciousness—as most eloquently demonstrated in Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity—to be inadequate, that this spiritual estrangement was, in fact, rooted in the social, historical estrangement of private property that divorced human beings from their means of production and exchange. In order to explain the historical development of private property, Marx outlined a crude sketch of three stages in the division of labor and form of property: tribal, ancient, and feudal. Tribal property was premised on hunting and fishing, cattle-raising or, at most, agriculture, presupposing ‘a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land’. Its division of labor was ‘still very elementary’, ‘confined to a further extension of the natural division of labor existing in the family’ (Marx & Engels 1970a, p. 44). Ancient communal and state property formed through the unification of ‘several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest’ and, though ‘moveable, and later also immovable, private property’ developed in this system, it was ‘as an abnormal subordinate form of communal property’ (e.g., the ‘laboring slaves’ who are ‘communal private property’ of the ‘active citizens, who, in
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relation to their slaves, are compelled to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association’). Citing ancient Rome as a prime example of a society based on ancient communal and state property, Marx viewed this system already developing a type of private property that would become the basis of its modern variant, with its widening division of labor between town and country and class relations between citizens and slaves, to say nothing of its incipient ‘transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat’ (1970a, p. 45). Feudal or estate property corresponded to the period of medieval European history, consisting of ‘landed property with serf labor chained to it’ on one hand and ‘personal labor of the individual who with his small capital commands the labor of journeyman’ on the other, with very little division of labor apart from the differentiation of estates into ‘princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual laborers in the towns’, the ‘feudal structure of landownership’ in the country mirroring the ‘corporative property’ and ‘feudal organization of trades’ in the towns (1970a, pp. 45-6). As we can see, this stadialist schema of history is a highly simplified one, evidently abstracted from European historical developments. Because Marx made no claim this to be a model of universal history or unilinear historical evolution, one cannot deduce more from this sketch than what appears to the eye, namely as working notes from his studies on history of production and property. One discernible trait that we can infer here and that was to be maintained as part of Marx's general methodology throughout his life is the care he took in not generalizing to universalize his claims but to generalize in such a way that allowed for ambiguity and openness to further empirical investigation. As Yoshimoto noted: Placing certain qualifications on what appears to be inevitability in natural history, clearly qualifying that ‘what one can say is only this much and nothing can be said beyond this,’ I think is the virtue and essence of Marx's natural-historical investigation, his materialist investigation. In contrast, everything is wrong with Engels. Engels’s Dialectic of Nature is also a bad book. Its materialist view only applies to classical science. The reason why it became that way was, you can say it was due to Engels’s thoroughness, he has a side to him that doesn’t get satisfied until he is complete and thorough, even thorough with illustrative examples. Nobody can ever know whether nature operates dialectically and, if you interpret it after the fact, that’s possible [to think this way], but that’s not the case, I think, and natural dialectic isn’t valid. He should’ve stopped right before becoming thorough but, because he did it thoroughly, he gets it wrong. There is no way nature changes just on the surface like that. I think it is valid only as an interpretive method but has no validity otherwise. (Yoshimoto Taka’aki Kenkyūkai 2001, pp. 50-51)
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In many ways, it was the driving purpose of The German Ideology to reject not only the idealist, universalized abstraction of ‘humanity’ that the Young Hegelians proposed in lieu of the idealist, universalized notion of ‘God’ but also to refuse reinventing the sins of Marx's predecessors by offering an idealist, universal model of historical, social evolution of production and property, a fault into which Engels sometimes inadvertently fell in his later years. Nowhere did Marx indicate this more clearly as when he wrote in his 1877 letter to the Editor of the Petersburg literary-political journal Otechstvennye Zapiski, which printed an article by Nicolai K. Mikhailovski, who treated the analysis found in Capital as iron-clad historical laws in non-European settings: He must by all means transform my historical sketch of the development of capitalism in Western Europe into a historicalphilosophical theory of universal development predetermined by fate for all nations, whatever their historic circumstances in which they find themselves may be, in order finally to achieve that economic formation which with the highest upswing of the productive forces of social work assures mankind its most universal development. But I beg his pardon. (That [view] does me at the same time too much honor and too much insult.) (Padover 1979, p. 321)
Marx then proceeded to take the example of ancient Rome, whose free peasants were expropriated from their land and separated from their means of production and subsistence. However, even as they were thrust into conditions very similar to those that confronted the post-enclosure English commoners and peasants, these Roman proletarians did not become ‘wage workers’ but ‘an idle mob, even more contemptible than the so-called “poor whites” of the Southern United States, and from them there did not develop a capitalist production system but one based on slave labor’. Therefore, [I]f one studies each of these developments by itself and then compares them with each other, one will easily find the key to each phenomenon, but one would never thereby attain a universal key to a general historical-philosophical theory, whose greatest advantage lies in its being beyond history (Padover 1979, pp. 321-2).
The reference to Southern ‘poor whites’ is telling because this was precisely the moment when the era of federal protection of black freedmen under Reconstruction had come to an end and the promise of African-American civil liberties, to say nothing of subsistence economy of ‘40 acres and a mule’, was being ground into dust by the white republic’s emergent Jim Crow laws that offered ‘poor whites’ the ‘wages of whiteness’ rationalizing racial hierarchy within the working class and anti-black, xenophobic terrorism. Historical evolution was guaranteed neither by fact nor theory.
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Unlike his contemporaries, Marxist stadialist conception of history refused to assume ‘a general historical-philosophical theory’ that placed itself beyond history in the same way that the religious notion of ‘God’ or the Feuerbachian ‘humanity’ did. For Marx, each sequence and content of stages were specific to the historical and geographic conditions of the region under study, hence never generalizable to other areas without a careful study of the conditions of those areas on their own terms and, even then, with considerable qualifications. Put it another way, Marx's ideas about historical stages were, as Terry Eagleton said of his philosophy, ‘finally self-abolishing’, acutely aware of them being product of their own history and not readily applicable elsewhere. In contrast, many of Marx's Western contemporaries assumed a rather rigid, more often than not ethnocentric ‘general philosophicalhistorical theory’. For example, Leopold von Ranke, whom Marx called ‘that little weed’ and ‘that capering little troll’ and who perhaps more than anybody else in the nineteenth century contributed to the establishing history as an academic, empirical discipline, posited an Eurocentric notion of ‘Universal History’ in which ‘power possessed a spiritual basis and war had an ethical element’, with the ‘victor in war represent(ing) the high moral energies and thus world history’ (Iggers & von Moltke 1973, p. iii). To understand the ‘internal movement’ of progress in this ‘Universal History’ from the starting point of ‘the Oriental nations’—whose ‘institutions [...] have been regarded as the germ from which all civilization sprung’—was ‘hopeless’ due to their ‘characteristic’ of ‘eternal repose’ (p. iii). A thorough reactionary in his staunch support of the monarchy and opposition to the 1848 Revolution (in response to which he advised Friedrich Wilhelm to dissolve the Prussian assembly, restrict suffrage, and issue a royalist constitution), Ranke shared with Hegel—even though he disapproved of the latter's dialectical theory of history—a teleological model of historical stages in which the summit of civilization was located in Western Europe, progressively culminating from the periods of ancient Rome, the Germanic invasion, and Charlemagne to those of papal unification, Protestant Reformation, and rise of five European powers (France, English Russia, Austria, and Prussia). If German stadialists conceived historical evolution ethnocentrically in a philosophically idealist manner, the Anglo-American counterparts did this with a decidedly empiricist bent. One of the prominent latter exemples was the North American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Both Marx and Engels acknowledged Morgan as pursuing intriguing parallels to their work. In the years 1880-1882, Marx kept a series of notebooks, known as The Ethnological Notebooks, excerpting and commenting on the works of various anthropological works of his day. He devoted a substantive section of these notebooks to Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), a book that contained the famous stadialist formula of ‘lower-middle-upper savagery, lower-middle-upper barbarism, and civilization’. There is no question that Engels found this stadialist model useful in his composition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), which was purportedly
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a text digesting some of Marx's findings in The Ethnological Notebooks. However, Marx showed far less interest in Morgan's stadialist model in his Notebooks than Engels did, focusing more on the empirical content of Native American social organizations and relationships. It is difficult to summarize the disorganized, digressive, multi-lingual series of notes in The Ethnological Notebooks, which were obviously never meant for publication, but certain orientations do come to the surface. One is the keen interest Marx took in the radically democratic, communist content of the indigenous commons in a comparatively trans-cultural context: ‘Communism in living seems to have originated in the necessities of the consanguine family, to have been continued in the punaluan, and transmitted to the syndyasmian unter d. American aborigenes, with whom it remained a practice down to the epoch of their discover — (and the South Slavonians? and even Russians to a certain degree?)’; All the members of the Iroquois gens personally free, bound to defend each other's freedom; equal in privileges u. personal rights. Sachem u. chiefs claiming no superiority; a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles der gens u. dies d. unit of a social u. governmental system, the foundation worf Indian society organized. Erklärt sense of independence u. personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character. (Krader 1972, pp. 115; 150).
It is striking that Marx not only free-associated American aboriginal communism with that of Slovenians and Russians—which is important because Marx, contra the Russian Marxists, rejected the need for bourgeois revolution in Russia, as we shall see—but also connected Iroquois governance to the three principles of French Revolution by invoking ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’, indicating a refusal to fit Native American political life into a tight and neat stage of historical development. Another noticeable characteristic of these notes is Marx’s emphasis on the role of women in indigenous society. Marx quoted ‘Rev. Sam. Gorman, Missionäre unter d. Laguna Pueblo Indians’ at length (Gorman was a Baptist missionary from Cincinnati, who arrived in Pueblo in 1851 and stayed there for ten years, causing dissension in a village that had been converted predominantly to Catholicism): The right of property belongs to the female part of the family, and descends in that line from mother to daughter. Their land is held in common, but after a person cultivates a lot he has personal claim to it, which he can sell to one of the community […] Their women, generally, have control of the granary, are more provident than their Spanish neighbours about the future. It is only when two years of scarcity succeed each other, that Pueblos, as a community, suffer hunger. (Krader 1972, p. 132)
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Elsewhere, in discussing the Iroquois tribal council, which was ‘[a]s a general rule […] open to any private individual desiring to address it on a public question’, Marx took note, ‘women allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election’ and ‘Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois’ (Krader 1972, p. 162). Commenting on these passages, Raya Dunayevskaya observed Marx's stress to be on ‘the duality in primitive communism’ (such as between ‘chief’ and the ‘masses’ as well as the ‘Man/Woman relations’) and ‘a critical attitude to both biologism and uncritical evolutionism’, concluding that ‘whether Marx focused on the equality of women during primitive communism or on Morgan's theory of the gens, his point of concentration always remained that revolutionary praxis through which humanity self-developed from primitive communism to the period in which he lived’ (Dunayevskaya 1991, pp. 184; 185). In other words, Marx read Morgan in the ‘Satanic light’ of history from below. Helen Jackson Hunt’s A Century of Dishonor, a classic account of U.S. government injustices against Native Americans, was published in 1881, when Marx was writing The Ethnological Notebooks, and in it she quoted mid-seventeenth-century Jesuits on the Iroquois commons: Hospitals for them would be useless among them, because there are no beggars; those who have are so liberal to those who are in want, that everything is enjoyed in common. The whole village must be in distress before any individual is left in necessity. (1889 [1881], p. 379)
This was no sentimental idealization of the ‘noble savage’, for the same missionaries referred to Iroquois’ ‘many faults caused by their blindness and barbarous education’ and Hunt herself described the Iroquois domination of the Delawares ‘arrogant’ and degrading, based on the threat ‘to make war or give up land at the pleasure of their masters’ (1889, pp. 379, 33). Hunt was prompted to write A Century of Dishonor in 1879 after hearing Ponca Chief Standing Bear’s public lecture. Standing Bear recounted the enclosure of his tribe from their ancestral land in Nebraska to the Quepaw Reservation in present-day Oklahoma, where 1/3 of his tribe had perished from starvation and malaria. The legal battle that Standing Bear then undertook became a historic one that forced the U.S. government to recognize the American Indian to be entitled to the writ of habeas corpus. This was a Pyrrhic victory, however: in 1880 Apache Chihenne Chief Victorio, who rode with Geronimo, and seventy-seven of his fellow warriors were hunted down and killed by the Mexican military in Tres Castillos Mountain, along the Rio Grande in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua; Geronimo himself would surrender six years later to the U.S. military expedition in pursuit of his band of Apache warriors; and the Indian
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Appropriation Acts of 1871, 1885, and 1889 withdrew U.S. government recognition of American Indians as independent nations and made them ‘wards’ of the government, privatized the Indian Territory, and permitted white settlers to expropriate indigenous lands en masse. The road to Wounded Knee Massacre and its corollary imperial military interventions of the 1890s in Asia, Caribbean, Hawaiian Kingdom, and Latin America was paved. By 1903, Geronimo—alongside of Oto Benga, the Congolese Mubuti pygmy whose family and villagers were massacred by King Leopold’s Force Publique—were on display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (‘St. Louis World’s Fair’), as specimens of the ‘savage’ stage of human history (Geronimo was dubbed the ‘Human Tyger’ and Benga ‘genuine African cannibal’). Public historical consciousness had caught up with Morganian stadialism. Engels tended to take stock in the ‘uncritical evolutionism’ of Morgan's stadialism, showing himself to be, in the words of the Notebooks' editor, ‘less deep and less precise than Marx’ (Krader 1972, p. 82). Indeed it was Engels who drew explicit parallels between Marx and Morgan's ideas that bordered on virtual identification: Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago [i.e., in The German Ideology], and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at. And just as Capital was for years both zealously plagiarized and persistently hushed up on the part of the official economists in Germany, so was Morgan's Ancient Society treated by the spokesmen of ‘prehistoric’ science in England. (Marx & Engels 1970b, p. 191)
The homage Engels paid to Ancient Society was quite lavish, no doubt helping to render Morgan's book a status of a proto-Marxist canon for the later generation of socialists and communists: Morgan's great merit lies in having discovered and reconstructed this prehistoric foundation of our written history in its main features, and in having found in the groups based on ties of sex of the North American Indians the key to the most important hitherto insoluble, riddles of the earliest Greek, Roman and German history. His book, however, was not the work of one day. He grappled with his material for nearly forty years until he completely mastered it. That is why his book is one of the few epoch-making works of our time. (1970b, p. 192)
Forty years had passed, according to Engels, for both Marx's formulation of the ‘materialist conception of history’ and Morgan's ‘grappl(ing) with his materials’ on North American Indians, putting the origination of both Marx's historical ideas and Morgan's ethnological investigation at approximately around the same time.
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Morgan's Stadialism and the American Indians By 1845, Henry Lewis Morgan had helped officially transform the Gordian Knot, a literary fraternity order made up of classmates from his hometown school Cayuga Lake Academy, into the Grand Order (the New Confederacy) of the Iroquois, a fraternal organization whose educated elite white members spent their time ‘playing Indian’: ‘Garbed in Indian costume, they called one another by Indian names and proffered nostalgic, metaphor-drenched poetry and prose as prototypes of a national literature’ (Deloria 1998, p. 73). By compiling factual information on the Six Nations of the Iroquois to accurately reproduce their rituals and kinship relations in organizing the group and devising its ceremonies, theirs was an ‘effort—firmly rooted in the consciousness of the Revolution and the early Republic—to define a literary national identity’ that ‘took on a modern, ethnographic character well suited to the American social elite of the late nineteenth century’ (Deloria 1998, p. 73). Morgan, who drafted the constitution of the Grand Order, took a lead in this empirically driven research and in 1845 promoted Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the eminent ethnographer and Indian policy administrator, as its honorary member, inviting him to give the annual address at the summer council held in Aurora. Schoolcraft, who at the time was writing a report on the Six Nations for the New York legislature, advised the Grand Order of the Iroquois to ‘give up its adolescent games and turn to a serious study of the Iroquois’ (Snow 1994, p. 172). With Schoolcraft's encouragement and aided immensely by his fortuitous meeting with Ely Samuel Parker—a Seneca who maintained traditional tie with his tribe and who became an invaluable intermediary and interpreter for Morgan—at an Albany bookstore in the spring of 1844, Morgan undertook numerous fact-gathering trips to collect ethnographic data on Iroquois kinship relations. The fruits of this scholarly labor and their publications resulted in Governor John Young requesting Morgan to collect Iroquois artifacts for the Cabinet of Natural History in Albany. This led Morgan to gather a sizeable collection for the state and compose detailed reports to the regents of the University of the State of New York which served as its commentary, which Elisabeth Tooker described as ‘essentially monographic studies of Iroquois material culture’ that reflected ‘the same kind of vision, the industry and insight’ that he brought ‘to his other, better-known researches’ (Tooker 1994b, p. xiv). This ‘vision, the industry and insight’ were those of scientific inquiry and organizational order, not collecting ‘isolated ethnographic facts’ or purchasing ‘objects for their aesthetic excellence or historical association’ but ‘obtaining examples of all the various types of Iroquois manufactures’ (p. xiv). Indeed it was this empiricist attribute of systematic data-collection that distinguished Morgan's work on the Iroquois, which were based on these field researches and published in 1851 as League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (dedicated to Parker, ‘a Seneca Indian, this work, the materials of which are the fruit of our joint researches’).
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It can be argued that Morgan's greatest influence was in the accumulation of data. He himself collected a great deal of ethnographic material by fieldwork and through questionnaires. He even invented a whole new category of data, kinship terminologies, and persuaded generations of anthropologists that they were the key to defining systems of kinships and marriage […] In the next generation the Bureau of American Ethnology was set up in the Smithsonian Institution essentially to carry out Morgan's program of ethnological research. (Kuper 1988, p. 74)
This is why contemporary anthropologists still accord Morgan's book on the Iroquois a classic status, with William N. Fenton calling it ‘still the best general book on this classic people’ and Tooker referring to it as a text that ‘remains yet the best single description of Iroquois society and culture, the work against which most subsequent ethnographic studies of these Indians has been measured’ (Fenton, p. v 1975; Tooker 1994b). Morgan's ethnographic work on the Iroquois thus laid the basis for the science of modern American anthropology, with its scientifically empiricist style of ethnographic data-gathering and classification, intimately tied to government-sponsored institutional apparatus of the museum and the university. The Smithsonian Institution did not only establish the Bureau of American Ethnology to continue Morgan's research program but, after its foundation in 1846, published a number of his writings, the most important of which was Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family in 1871, ‘the most expensive book which the Smithsonian had published up to that time’ (Kuper 1988, p. 61). Morgan's stadialist theory emerged out of his need to put order into these very ethnographic materials that he collected initially to streamline the organizational activities of the Grand Order of the Iroquois and later for scientific classification under institutional auspices. ‘For Morgan himself […] the stages at the basis of his theory’ had the purpose of ‘organiz(ing) some of the vast bulk of data about exotic societies that had come pouring in during the decades before he worked, and to add system and sense to further collection’ (Bohannan 1965, p. vi). Such a theoretical organizing and systembuilding were in marked contrast to the hard-core racist assumptions shared by Morgan's contemporaries. For example, having listened to Morgan's reading of his scientific papers, Dr. Chester Dewey, Morgan's friend and co-member of the Pundit Club—a ‘group of Rochester intellectuals’ that included in its membership Martin B. Anderson, the first University of Rochester president, and Joshua H. McIlavaine, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Rochester— ‘could see nothing in it [i.e., the Iroquoian system] but the total depravity and perversity of the Indian mind—that it could ever have thought of such absurd ways of characterizing relationships […]’ (cited in White 1959, p. 6). Morgan, on the other hand, extended visible sympathy to the Native American plight, indicating the purpose of the Grand Order to be not only ‘social enjoyment or literary advancement or historical knowledge’:
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No! No! No! But it is to—Befriend the Indian—. Commiserate the sad destiny of the unfortunate, but noble Indian […] when the last tribe shall slumber in the grass, it is to be feared that the stain of blood will be found on the escutcheon of the American republic. This nation must shield their declining day […] if it would escape an awful retribution for having appropriated the territory of a whole continent of Indians and consigned them to destitution, to misery and to death. (cited in Deloria 1998, p. 84)
However, this sympathy was circumscribed by Morgan's innate belief in the national interest and benevolence of the American Republic. This appeared clearly in the Grand Order's involvement in defending the right of the Tonawanda Senecas to their reservation against the threat of enclosure and privatization by the Ogden Land Company. The conflict between the Tonawanda Senecas and the Ogden Land Company is traceable to 1835 when the New York Legislature ratified leases of Allegany Reservation land to non-Indians, followed by the fraudulent 1838 Buffalo Creek Treaty that made the Iroquois give up all their remaining land holdings and move to Kansas. It was fraudulent because David Ogden, who brought the right to acquire Seneca land in 1810 from the Holland Land Company, ‘paid only $202,000 for this fraudulent purchase of land worth over $2 million’ and, additionally, ‘only 43 of the 81-91 chiefs signed the treaty; out of these, sixteen had been bribed and still others were coerced,’ some of the signatures being ‘simple forgeries’ (Snow 1994, pp. 164; 165). Although the Compromise Treaty of 1842 rescinded the 1838 treaty and allowed the Senecas to keep Allegany and Cattaraugus, the two reservations that received economic assistance from Quakers (who helped broker the Compromise Treaty), it allowed for the sale of the remaining two, Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda. Most of the Buffalo Creek reservation residents, with a handful of protests, acquiesced, many of them moving to Cattaraugus, but almost all the Tonawanda Senecas refused. With land arbitrators arriving at Tonawanda and the Senecas preventing them to make appraisals, the conflict became severe. As the Quakers had refused to hear the Tonawanda Senecas' appeal but advised them to accept the Compromise Treaty, the Senecas turned to other white supporters, and this was where Morgan and other members of the Grand Order entered into the fray of the struggle. Receiving permission from the Tonawanda Senecas to petition on their behalf in early 1846, the Grand Order circulated petitions and urged citizens to appeal to their congressmen. Morgan even traveled to Washington to make the case known in the Senate in April. However, the appeals failed and Morgan soon deceased from his protest activity, leaving Parker's more committed lobbying efforts and Tonawanda Senecas' increasingly litigious struggle to fend on their own (Tooker 1994a, pp. 24-26; 38). Whatever one may think of Morgan's brief interlude as a political activist on behalf of the Iroquois, Fenton was surely right in remarking that the,
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assistance Morgan gave as attorney to the unrelenting possessors of Tonawanda Reservation in defeating the Ogden Company's claim to their lands is easily overdone […] for his part was essentially that of a probing and recording scientist and sympathetic listener at a time when the Tonawanda leaders were trying to reestablish the power of the eight Federal Chiefs who traditionally represented the Seneca Nation in the League and who had been put out of office after the disastrous sale of Buffalo Creek Reservation. (Fenton 1975, p. xi)
Indeed it is very clear from Morgan's own journals that he maintained his role as ‘a probing and recording scientist’ even on trips ostensibly taken for the Tonawanda cause. Moreover, just as the Tonawanda Senecas were taking their case into the courts, Morgan withdrew his assistance altogether, as an attorney or in any other capacity, and ‘took no part in the long, drawn-out legal contest that made that resolution [1857 agreement in which Tonawanda Senecas were permitted to ‘buy back’ their own reservation] possible’ (Tooker 1994a, p. 38). It is true that Morgan's action was more humane than the more hard-core racist justifications that many of his contemporaries gave to Indian Removal and other forms of expropriation of Native American lands, of which the Ogden Land Company's action was one, and that it helped him gain adoption into the Seneca Nation. However, it was an action that kept itself very much within the accepted boundary of bourgeois democracy, with its essentially condescending assimilationist vantage point and reliance on letter-writing, petitioning, and lobbying activities, never stepping outside of the ideological perimeter of Morgan's statist faith in the American Republic. After all, apart from Abram La Fort, an Onondaga, and Ely Parker (who were utilized as either informant or intermediary to ethnographic researches in Iroquois life), the Grand Order of the Iroquois did not boast any Native American membership and its organizational purpose lay strictly in advancing the cultural curiosities and fraternal affinity among its white elite members. Morgan himself was a corporation lawyer who acquired the means to do his independent research on the Iroquois from his railroad business (in 1855 he became the director of the Iron Mountain Rail Road Co., his interests subsequently extending to other railway companies), serving between 1861 and 1869 as a Republican congressman, then senator, in the state assembly and as a chairman of the assembly's Indians affairs committee. As his membership in the Rochester Pundit Club, 1856 election to the Association for the Advancement of Science, and collegial relations of scholarly exchange and friendship with the leading establishment figures of U.S. intellectual culture of his day indicate,2 Morgan very much belonged to the nineteenth-century US ruling-class intelligentsia. His 1859-62 Indian Journals often exhibited considerable admiration for the Christian missions where he stayed during his research trips, approving their philanthropic Christianizing effort for the Indians, and it probably does Morgan the most justice to place his views of the Native Americans within the continuum of these philanthropic, paternalistically humane missionaries. As Morgan
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himself wrote in League of the Iroquois: ‘There are but two means of rescuing the Indian from his impending destiny; and these are education and Christianity’, adding that ‘(t)oo much cannot be said of the teachableness of the Indian, and of his aptitude to learn, when subjected to systematic discipline’ (Morgan 1901, pp. 111; 117). Both the virtue and limitation of Morgan's views are vividly illustrated in his July 1876 letter to The Nation after the Battle of Little Bighorn in which the Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse killed General George Armstrong Custer and his 210 soldiers. Calling the incident a ‘calamity to he Indians as well as to the nation’, Morgan thought it revealed ‘the fact that the intelligence of the government has not been equal to the management of these affairs [involving the Indians] […] from and including the Administration of General Jackson’. Objecting to the press's use of the word ‘massacre’ to describe the Sioux Nation's destruction of General Custer and his men, Morgan rightly pointed out that the Sioux were simply ‘defending themselves, their wives and children’ who were being ‘attacked in their own encampment and threatened with destruction’ by General Custer and his military expedition, whose intention was ‘to rout this encampment, men, women and children, and kill all who resisted without hesitation and without remorse’.3 He noted how the ‘discovery of gold in the Black Hills attracting white settlers, the construction of the Northern Pacific and the constant marching of military forces and of government exploring through their countries’ in the last ten years had endangered the Sioux subsistence economy based on buffalohunting and such disturbance had forced ‘their precarious means of living’ into a ‘matter of life and death’. Excoriating the U.S. government for its failure and corruption in dealing with ‘Indian affairs’, Morgan proposed the construction of a ‘factory system for the tribes on the reservations’ and a ‘pastoral system for the wild tribes of the plains’, including the Dakota Sioux tribes, concluding that ‘if the government thirty years ago had inaugurated a pastoral system among these tribes, the present disasters would not have occurred’ (Morgan 1950, pp. 75-79). As humane and philanthropic as Morgan's view was, it did not question the U.S. capitalist and military developments that accompanied gold mining in the Black Hills and Northern Pacific railroad construction, though it expressed lament for their effect on the subsistence life of the indigenous population. To propose the introduction of the factory system for the tribes on reservations and the pastoral system for the nomadic tribes under government guidance was tantamount to accepting, on one hand, the supposed neutrality of the state, which anyway did not contain tribal representation, and, on the other, the necessity of proletarianizing the indigenous population into a next ‘progressive’ stage of factory and pastoral life. Morgan's stadialism in Ancient Society appears here to underwrite the rationale for the ‘civilized’ state to bring the ‘backward’ sector of its society in line with its advanced capitalist sectors through state-sanctioned disruption and enclosure—albeit with more reliance on consent than force—of traditional customs and subsistence
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economy among the indigenous tribal nations. As a result, Morgan distorted the coeval notion of history. As Yoshimoto said, ‘The principle of concentrically layered classification, such as the one Morgan put forward, cannot be established in reality’, for ‘conditions of lower savagery are preserved as manners and customs among human beings in civilized condition as well and history always allows any condition of past moment to continue to exist’ (Yoshimoto 2006, pp. 66-67). Commonist and Indigenous Marx Marx, too, faced the issue of enclosure of traditional customs found in subsistence economy earlier in his career. In fact, it was what prompted him to his life lifelong study of political economy in the first place. As he wrote in the preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)—the year Morgan initiated his field trips to Kansas and Nebraska to collect data on Native American kinship systems—what initially prompted Marx to tackle his research into economics issues was the 1841 debate in the Prussian Diet on the criminalization of the Rhenish peasants' customary right to collect wood in the forest: In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and divisions of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsiden of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. (Marx 1970, pp. 19-20)
This Prussian legislative debate aimed to enclose this essential aspect of the peasants’ commons was part of the national move toward privatization under the country’s growing industrial capital. Seeking to combat this privatization policy through legal arguments, Marx found himself in a quandary because, as valiant as these discursive efforts were, they appealed to an abstract notion of universal law that failed to grapple with, let alone understand, the material social relations that were the actual source of class antagonism that was being fought out on the issue of the ‘theft of wood’. However, as inadequate as their analysis was, Marx's Rheinische Zeitung articles on the criminalization of peasant customs were also a ‘partial reflection’ of the class struggle that was brewing against capitalist developments in pre-1848 Rhineland: The real dangers in the forests before the revolution of 1848 were […] those that a mass movement for the appropriation of forest wealth placed upon capitalist accumulation. In 1836, of a total of 207,478 prosecutions brought forward in Prussia, a full 150,000 were against wood pilfering and other forest offenses. (Linebaugh 1973, p. 13)
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Hence it was the Rhineland commons and the enclosure it faced under the hands of Prussian landlords which constituted the point of departure for Marx’s economic work and its revolutionary critique of capitalism. After his resignation from the Zeitung, Marx became a political exile in Paris, proceeding to repair his ignorance of knowledge concerning political economy and, the positive content of its revolutionary critique, communism. In 1844 he was penning his so-called humanist conception of communism in The Economic and Philosophic Mss, defining it as: [T]he positive suppression of private property as human selfestrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution. (Marx 1975, p. 348)
Whatever these abstract words meant, its practical significance became manifest in August, the last month in which Marx worked on the Manuscripts, when he participated in a debate over the struggle of the Silesian weavers to resist the industrialization of their means of production. Friedrich Engels’s description of these machine-breaking weavers—so reminiscent of the Luddite workers in England a generation earlier—is dramatically charged, an exemplary piece of journalistic feuilleton Engels excelled in: The weavers assembled before the house of one of the most respectable manufacturers, of the name of Zwanziger, signing a song, in which the behaviour of this individual towards his workmen was animadverted upon, and which seems to have been manufactured for that occasion […] The people, in the meantime, entirely demolished the dwelling house of Mr. Zwanzinger, and proceeded then to the warehouse, where they destroyed all books, bills of exchange and other documents, and threw the cash they found, amounting to upwards of £1,000, upon the street, where it was picked up by a lot of Bohemian smugglers, who had passed the frontier to see whether they could not profit by the riots. The bales of cotton and bags, as well as all the manufactured yarn and goods, were, as far as possible, destroyed or made useless, and the machinery in the adjoining factory, entirely broke […] The causes of these affrays were the incredible sufferings of these weavers, produced by low wages, machinery, and the avarice and greediness of the manufacturers […] it was the factory system with all its consequences that pressed upon the Silesian weavers in the
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same manner as it has done, and now does, upon the English factory workers and hand-loom weavers and which has occasioned more dissatisfaction and riotous outbreaks within this country than anything else. It is to be noticed, that during all these disturbances, according to the statements of all German papers, not one single robbery has been committed by the starving weavers. They threw the money on the street; they did not covert it to their own use. They left the stealing and plunder to the Bohemian smugglers and poachers. (Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 532-534)
On the pages of Paris Vorwärts!, Marx's former comrade Arnold Ruge had written off the political significance of the Silesian weavers' uprising, for the latter’s inability to develop a political party to struggle within existing Prussian state mechanisms. Against this pro-statist socialist argument—incidentally, what orthodox Marxists would repeat ad nauseam in the next century in the context of state socialism as a justification for industrial modernization, from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and Cuba, albeit in their particular Marxist-Leninist jargon—Marx gave a combative retort in ‘Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform”’: Think first of the Weavers’ Song, that intrepid battle-cry which does not even mention hearth, factory or district but in which the proletariat at once proclaims its antagonism to the society of private property in the most decisive, aggressive, ruthless and forceful manner. The Silesian rebellion starts where the French and English workers' finish, namely with an understanding of the nature of the proletariat. This superiority stamps the whole episode. Not only were machines destroyed, those competitors of workers, but also the account books, the titles of ownership, and whereas all other movements had directed their attacks primarily at the visible enemy, namely the industrialists, the Silesian workers turned also against the hidden enemy, the bankers. Finally, not one English workers' uprising was carried out with such courage, foresight and endurance. (Marx and Engels 1975, p. 415)
We may take exception to Marx’s rather Germano-philliac comparative evaluation of the Silesian weavers’ struggle (it is not clear from the context whether Marx has in mind the Luddite struggles for ‘English workers’ uprising’) while realizing that it stemmed primarily from his irritation with Ruge’s contemporary condescension toward the Silesian weavers, whom Ruge viewed politically more backward than the French workers and economically more backward than the English. But the point was clear. The weavers’ machine-breaking and destruction of account books, the destruction of capitalist private property, for Marx constituted a revolutionary act of proletarian selforganization. Years later when Marx did write about the Luddite struggle in the Volume One of Capital, he was still discernibly sympathetic: The large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the
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power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the antiJacobin government, composed of such people as Sidmouth and Castlereagh, a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures. It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments. (Marx 1976, pp. 554-5)
Although the passage is too brief for it to warrant amplified interpretation, we can at least observe the following point: Marx did not object to Luddite machine-breaking per se but described its limitation as one of not extending its attack to the specific form of society that necessitated the use of those machines in the first place, that is, to not actively take up the task of ‘positive suppression of private property’. But still we may quibble at Marx’s generalization insofar as the Luddites’ actions embodied coeval practices and values of West Riding croppers, Nottinghamshire stockingers, and Lancashire cotton weavers, the destructive negation of private property and the creative affirmation of the English commons: ‘Certainly the Luddites combined both, a politics of revolutionary insurrection with clear influences from the revolutionary traditions of Ireland, France, and the 1790s, and a local defense of ancient right and custom which were threatened by privatization, machinery, and enclosure’. Moreover, they had contemporaneous global ramifications as well, for instance in the United States where ‘its enclosures were conquest of Indian lands and its Luddites were insurrectionary slaves’ (Linebaugh 2012, pp. 8, 18-19, 23). Kirpatrick Sale, who authored a book for general readership on the relevance of the Luddites for the cybernetic age, described E.P. Thompson as someone ‘who has written more comprehensively than anyone else about the historical context of the Luddites’ (Sale 1995, p. 287). Thompson characterized Luddism as ‘a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism, harking back to an obsolescent paternalist code, and sanctioned by traditions of the working community’ and, a quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives’, adding that, although it was not ‘a wholly conscious revolutionary movement […] it had a tendency towards becoming such a movement, and it is this tendency which is most often understated [in scholarship]. (Sale 1995, p. 287)
The first characterization shows the Luddites grounding themselves in the past, as they ‘looked backward to old customs and paternalist legislation which could never be revived’; the second characterization indicates that they were also creating something new in the shell of tradition toward the future, trying ‘to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents’. The new precedents led to the 10 Hour Movement:
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The Luddites were some of the last Guildsmen, and at the same time some of the first to launch the agitation which lead onto the 10 Hour Movement. In both directions lay an alternative political economy and morality to that of laissez faire…It was Marx who saw, in the passage of the 10 Hour Bill (1847), evidence that for the ‘first time […] in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.’ The men who attacked Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds were announcing this alternative political economy, albeit in a confused midnight encounter. (Thompson 1966, pp. 553; 550; 552)
Almost thirty years after writing these lines, Thompson would rename this ‘alternative political economy’ as ‘moral economy’—‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together’, grounded ‘a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc.’ (Thompson 1996, p. 188). On the surface this might seem a conservative definition rooted in traditional communal practice, but this was also Thompson’s point, namely that conservative feudal values and practices become ‘rebellious culture’ in defense of the commons against the aggressive incursion of the capitalist or state socialist development that ‘political economy’ sought to theorize and rationalize. It is important to remind ourselves that Marx's Capital is subtitled ‘A Critique of Political Economy’ and not the completion, or revision, of ‘Political Economy’. Thompson himself was emphatic on this score in his long-winding polemic against Louis Althusser, when he criticized Grundrisse as a work still mired in the logic of political economy, despite the attempt to be its antithesis. There are many within and outside the Marxist tradition who view Marx as the last political economist working within the genealogy of classical economics, as the last great political economist. However, as Harry Cleaver noted, ‘To read Marx as political economy can include elements of ideology—when the aim is to critique capitalism—but it can also, and more importantly, include elements of a strategic reading in the interests of capital’ (1979, p. 11). The latter danger is amply demonstrated in Soviet-style Communist Marxism wherein Stakhnovism substituted for Protestant work ethics, state collectivization for enclosure, and socialist realist jingles in praise of tractors for technophiliac optimism of industrialism. In fact, Marx's communism—the antithesis of both bourgeois and Soviet political economy—originated in the same year he had found the material embodiment of this communism in the song of the machine-breaking Silesian weavers. It is certainly possible to claim, as Althusser and other such Marxists do, that Marx’s earlier views on communism in the Eco. and Phil. Mss., and ‘Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia”’ belong to an earlier, Hegelian, ‘bourgeois’ Marx, to be superseded later by his ‘scientific’ period, as embodied in Capital. Such a view, however, is
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biographically untenable. For we find in the latter book a critically nuanced, though ultimately sympathetic, passage on the Luddites, as cited above, as well as a reconstituted notion of human alienation under capitalism preserved in the form of ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘exploitation’. We also find in this later period—and this is crucial for our purpose—Marx maintaining a parallel interest in various forms of ‘primitive communism’ and ‘communal property’ as he delved deeper into his investigation of political economy. Although the critique of political economy as a secular form of theology, with capital as the newly fetishized deity of modern economy, was unquestionably Marx’s lifework after 1844, his continuing research into ‘alternative political economy’ or ‘moral economy’ of indigenous population in Europe, Indian subcontinent, Russia, North Africa, and the Americas is sufficiently sustained and suggestively open-ended for us to declare that the commons was the specter that had haunted Marx’s work from beginning to end. It is true that, after his initial burst of research in the mid-1840s, at the request of the Communist League Marx penned the following lines in The Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of the rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. (Marx & Engels 1998, p. 59)
This infamous passage on ‘the idiocy of rural life’ is almost always invoked to posit the view of Marx as a sweeping modernizer, but such invocation is problematic at least on three counts. One is the propagandistic and strategic nature of the Manifesto, which was written as a highly condensed shorthand on the model of French revolutionary development. The document was composed on the eve of European revolutionary upheaval in which much of Western Europe still maintained some forms of monarchical and autocratic systems that made the bourgeoisie, particularly in light of the role they had played in the previous continent-wide, indeed trans-Atlantic, cycle of class struggle in the 1790s, appear as a revolutionary force that would help lay the foundation for more radically democratic struggles of the newly emergent industrial proletariat. All the poetically bristling rhetoric, schematically compressed sketch of capitalism, and polemic against the then dominant currents within the European socialist movement that appear in this seminal document prove that it was a necessarily topical political tract, and to treat it as, as some do, a manifest example of Marxist Holy Writ is utterly wrongheaded (the construction of such Holy Writ, of canonization, as it were, is anyway an invidious religious exercise that Marx expended so much energy and ink in demystifying and denouncing earlier in his career). Another reason for us to critically distance ourselves from The Manifesto is
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that Marx had not seriously undertaken his investigation of capitalism in 1848, apart from sporadic notes on English political economists and rough theoretical conjectures he had made in the preceding few years, and so, by definition, what Marx wrote at this period, cannot but be taken as provisional and incomplete at best. The final reason why we should be wary of taking what Marx wrote in The Manifesto as his last words on the peasantry, communism, and historical development is that in the 1872 preface for its German edition both Marx and Engels themselves cautioned that the political conclusions drawn in the document needed to be revised according to the historically specific conditions of the society one was looking at: The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. (Marx & Engels 1998, pp. 31-2)
With these qualifications in mind, The Manifesto did have an egregiously oversimplified bias against the peasantry and their communal life. The changes are quite noticeable, however, in the preface to the 1882 edition, where we find a passage that serves as an effective counterblast to the image of Marx as a modernist developer: …in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obschina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. (Marx & Engels 1998, p. 34)
What is said here was simply a public articulation of what Marx had been arguing in his letters to the Russian Narodniks in 1881—a period coinciding with the composition of The Ethnological Notebooks— defending the enduring, potentially revolutionary legacy of the Russian commons against the Russian Marxist modernizers who espoused the necessity of a bourgeois revolution in Tsarist Russia. Vera Zasulich, the second Russian translator of the Manifesto and at the time a Narodniki activist, asked Marx to intervene on the question of whether or not the insights in Volume One of Capital were applicable to Russia and whether Russia had to undergo capitalist development prior to a socialist revolution, as the Russian Marxists contended, or whether it could directly achieve a communist society on the basis of the Russian commons, or village commune, obschina.
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In response, Marx undertook the study of Russian language and documents dealing with Russian conditions in order to prepare a reply. His reply was a rejection of the Russian Marxist stance in favor of the Narodniks’ views: The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source-material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. (Shanin 1983, p. 124)
Marx, in short, rejected any idealist or materialist universal model of stadialism that his contemporaries, including Morgan and Ranke, to say nothing of his followers, accepted as self-evident. There are much more that can be said about Marx and Morgan’s relationship to stadialism and the commons, and I have only briefly touched on their skeletal points of intersections and differences. Their differences should be apparent to anybody who has bothered to read the works of the two men next to each other. Morgan had a fixed notion of stadialism that rationalized the enclosure of the Native American commons, offering a gradualist solution of capitalist development based primarily on education and missionary work, which betrayed a paternalist view of indigenous cultures that never doubted the necessity of assimilating them into the presumably higher capitalist civilization of white Christian American republic: The lands of the Iroquois are still held in common, the title being vested in the people. Their progress towards a higher agricultural life has rendered this ancient tenure a source of inconvenience; although they are not as yet prepared for their division among the people. Each individual can improve and enclose any portion of their common domain, and sell or retain such improvements, in the same manner as with personal property; but they have no power to transfer the title to the land to each other, or to strangers […] This would serve to prepare the way for other changes, until finally they could be restored, with safety to themselves, not only to the full possession of those rights of property which are common to ourselves, but also to the rights and privileges of citizens of the State. When this time arrives, they will cease to be Indians, except in name. (Morgan 1901, pp. 118-19)
Morgan’s view may appear philanthropic insofar as he believed it was possible for the Native Americans to be eventually acculturated into white society with institutional anchorage in private property, conjecturing that, after such an assimilation had occurred, ‘that specimens of the highest genius, and of the most conspicuous talent, hereafter destined to figure in the civil history of our Republic, may spring from the ranks of the Indian citizens’, whereas his hard-core racist contemporaries believed that the Indians were culturally and/or biologically incapable of ever undergoing such assimilation and, therefore, could only be targeted for removal or extermination; however, all of them shared an unshakeable faith in the progressive
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nature of private property, perceiving—in the words of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1859—the Indians’ ‘possession of too great an extent of country, held in common’ to be ‘the most mischievous and fatal’ cause that prevented them to be taught the ‘advantages and blessings’ of ‘civilization’ (cited in White 1959, p. 15). Moreover, to suggest that each individual indigenous member of the Iroquois ‘can improve and enclose any portion of their common domain, and sell or retain such improvements’ was to suggest that each commit ‘cultural genocide’ at his or her own hands—a highly unlikely scenario even by the standards of behavioral economics, unless prompted by the violence of cash and military nexus. They certainly would not have comprehended any consideration of how the indigenous commons could be ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration’ in the United States, possibly serving ‘as the starting point for a communist development’ in the country, for their definition of ‘civilization’ was rigged in the favor of capitalist enclosure and private property. But such ‘social regeneration’ was Marx’s concern and, even though he never had the opportunity to amplify his investigation into the Native American ‘commune’ as he did for the Russian one, we can observe the general trajectory of his thinking on the matter to be radically different from Morgan’s.4 Moreover, although Marx’s habits, tastes, and manners were unquestionably molded from his German bourgeois upbringing and his language infrequently indicates Eurocentric predisposition, his ideas were generally free from the obvious ethnocentric biases that we find in Morganian stadialism. Around the time of the composition of The Ethnological Notebooks, Marx visited Algeria for convalescence, befriending a French judge in the civil courts there who, according to Engels, had ‘made a close study of communal ownership among the Arabs and has offered to enlighten him on the subject’ (Marx & Engels 1992, p. 210). Marx was impressed by the egalitarian culture of the indigenous Muslims he encountered in Algeria, writing in his letter that, in no town ELSEWHERE, which is at the same the seat of the central government, is there such laisser faire, laisser passer; police reduced to a bare minimum; unprecedented public sans gene; the Moorish element is responsible for this. For Mussulman there is no such thing as subordination; they are neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘administrés’; no authority, save in politica, something which Europeans have totally failed to understand. (1992, p. 238)
In 1881 the French colonial regime had passed the Code de l'Indigénat, establishing discriminatory penalties against indigenous Algerians and facilitating the expropriation of their land. In another letter, Marx expounded further on his observation: Most striking is this spectacle: Some of these Maures were dressed pretentiously, even richly others in, for once I dare call it blouses, sometime of white woolen appearance, now in rags and tatters— but in the eyes of a true Mussulmen such accidents, good or bad
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luck, do not distinguish Mahomet’s children. Absolute equality in their social intercourse, not affected; on the contrary, only when demoralized, they become aware of it; as to the hatred against Christians and the hope an ultimate victory over these infidels, their politicians justly consider this same feeling and practice of absolute equality (not of wealth or position but of personality) a guarantee of keeping the one, of not giving up the latter. (Nevertheless they will go to rack and ruin WITHOUT A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT). (1992, p. 242)
Marx’s interest was in accurately gauging the historically specific conditions of a particular society for the self-organization of an indigenous ‘REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT’ that would be able to most effectively preserve and fructify such customary egalitarian practices as he had found among North African Muslims, not in a mechanical application of universal stadialist theory to secure a vantage point ‘beyond history’. In historical hindsight, the 1954-62 Algerian Revolution and the 2010-12 Arab Spring can be seen as indigenous attempts to seize back such egalitarian birthrights and reconstitute those whom the Western imperial imaginary had long condemned as undifferentiated products of ‘Oriental stagnation’ into historical agents abolishing Eurocentric stadialism in deed. Without the experience of revolutionary deed, what Marx at most could achieve was a critical interrogation of his own cultural makeup vis-à-vis the commons. Hence his views on the commons and stadialism changed over time, as his investigation broadened and advanced in empirical content. One such moment was in 1868 when Marx returned to the root of his studies, the German commons, and discovered the ‘judicial blindness’ that he and his immediate predecessors were guilty of in obliterating the commons from their own view: Owing to a certain judicial blindness even the best intelligences absolutely fail to see the things which lie in front of their noses. Later, when the moment has arrived, we are surprised to find traces everywhere of what we failed to find […] To show how much we are all implicated in this judicial blindness: right in my own neighbourhood, on the Hunsrüken, the old Germanic system survived up till the last few years. I now remember my father talking to me about it from a lawyer’s point of view. Another proof: Just as the geologists, even the best, like Cuvier, have expounded certain facts in a completely distorted way, so philologists of the force of a Grimm mistranslated the simplest Latin sentences because they were under the influence of Möser etc., (who, I remember, was enchanted that ‘liberty’ never existed among the Germans but that ‘Luft macht eigen’ [the air makes the serf]) and others. E.g. the well-known passage in Tacitus: ‘arva per annos mutant et superest ager,’ which means, ‘they exchange the fields, arva’ (by lot, hence also sortes [lot] in all the later law codes of the barbarians) ‘and the common land remains over’ (ager as public land contrasted with arva)—is translated by Grimm, etc.:
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‘they cultivate fresh fields every year and still there is always (uncultivated) land over!’ […] But what would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general [Allgemeine] in German and Norse means nothing but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular, Sundre, Besondere, nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of ‘our intercourse’ after all. (Marx 1965, pp. 140-42)
The critique of the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology has come full circle. What had been an embryonic historical materialist method, with a crude stadialist outline, twenty-three years later has become embedded with self-critical awareness extracting the historical memory of the commons from its conceptually constitutive elements. Marx expended the effort to overcome the ‘judicial blindness’ that made Grimm erase the commons in his translation of Tacitus and to rediscover its practice in the neighborhood where he grew up. The passage reminds us that the commons can never be enclosed entirely—its memory and rhythms reside in our very language, ideas, habitus, which can be rediscovered if only we acquire the presence of mind to critically relativize our own culture in the light of past and present reality of class struggle. There is no question that Marx’s understanding of the non-European commons was severely limited by his source materials and experiences, that his empirical researches into Native American culture and life are adumbrations predominantly based on Morgan’s work, but that is not his most important legacy in this area. The scandalous, heretical, and still relevant legacy is Marx’s persistent, open-ended attitude toward this thin red thread of the commons that runs throughout his work, which unravels the entire corpus of what we know generally as Marxism, with its Eurocentric, industrial, and developmentalist bias, as another version of capitalist ideology and, along with it, the policies of New Enclosure found in contemporary neoliberal capitalism. It also reminds us not to reify the ‘commons’ into an idea divorced from its specific social and historical content, to not reduce it into a singularly universal model, but to ceaselessly appreciate its concrete diversities as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. Yoshimoto Taka’aki abstracted this real movement, in terms of immanent spirituality and mentalité, as the only archetypal stage of the human race that can orient the future after capitalist modernity. Morgan’s such [stadialist] manner of thinking has something in common with Hegel and Marx, as well as Engels’s historical views, which relied comprehensively on Morgan, and they formed approximately the so-called absolutely modern view of history. They also indicated for the first time that human existence and its external environment can be singularized through their common aspects as the human species. If the differences within the
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immanent history of spirituality, sheltered in the shadow of civilizational history, are ignored and approximated, such formation was certainly possible. Today the concept of history that can give direction to the future can only be formed, it seems, by viewing savagery, barbarism, and primitive in the human past as the African stage that includes all the immanent bases of the archetype of the human species. (Yoshimoto 2006, p. 74)
Neither the late Marx nor the late Yoshimoto thought that history was simply reversible, that we could leap back into what Yoshimoto calls the ‘African stage’ of history and, by default, immerse ourselves into a non-capitalist mode of sociality in which the sensibility of immanent spirituality reigned supreme. But, as they both understood, this was also the case with the history of capitalist modernity itself, with its utopian universality and developmentalist telos, which were underwritten in ‘letters of blood and fire’. Whether the radical democratic process of ‘disaccumulation’ into the primitive and the commons—which of course will necessarily be different from their myriad historical forms—would require comparable ‘blood and fire’, or the capitalist mode of production shall be followed by something even more catastrophic, is a question that can only be determined in the court of human practice and struggle. Manuel Yang has taught history and humanities at Bowling Green State University, Monroe County Community College, Lourdes College, and University of Toledo. His writings have appeared in various English and Japanese publications. He currently resides in West Covina, writing a travelogue on the hydrangea revolution and comparative history of the New Left and co-translating Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts into Japanese.
Notes 1
For example, in a section entitled ‘Why Marx was a Morganist’, William H. Shaw notes: ‘One fundamental element of Morgan’s thought, which was clearly attractive from Marx’s point of view, was his evolutionism’ and ‘Advances in the realm of material production play a crucial and frequently accented role for Morgan; they are intimately connected with changes in society’s property system and other social relations. Marx’s bilingual extracts from Morgan display the consonance of their thought on this point’ (1984, pp. 216-17, 220). 2
A list of Morgan's acquaintances and correspondents, a veritable who’s who of nineteenth-century US intellectual life, include ‘Henry Adams, the historian; Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the history of art at Harvard University, co-editor of the North American Review, and founder and first president of the Archaeological Institute of America; Francis Parkman, historian; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; William Cullen Bryant; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; Eben Norton Horsford, chemist and inventor; Asa Gray, a distinguished botanist at Harvard; Jeffries Wyman, a zoologist and archeologist at Harvard; Wendell Phillips Garrison, editor of the The Nation,
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et al’. as well as founding figures of U.S. anthropology and museum: ‘Horatio Hale; Major J.W. Powell, first director of the Bureau of American Ethnology; F.W. Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University; O.T. Mason of the U.S. National Museum; A.S. Gatschet of the Bureau of American Ethnology; Adolph F. Bandelier’, to say nothing of leading European scientists and scholars such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Sir Henry Maine, and J.J. Bachofen (see White 1969, p. 12). 3
See, for example, Jennings (1993 p. 377): ‘The simple facts do not penetrate public consciousness: that Custer was killed while on the way to perpetrate another in the series of his own massacres already on record, that he was bullheadedly disregarding warnings and defying orders, that the Indians who wiped out his troop did so in defense of their families, and that if the roles had been reversed the defenders would have been eulogized as heroes’. 4
The accuracy of Marx’s intuition regarding the indigenous commons is corroborated by latest scholarship on Native American history. See, for instance, Cave (2006, pp. 247-8): ‘From the late eighteenth century until the reforms of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier in the mid-twentieth century, the consistent objective of white ‘friends of the Indians’ and their Native American supporters was the elimination of communal land ownership and of the social values that mode of economic organization represented […] It is not surprising that Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and Handsome Lake, much as they differed on other matters, agreed that hell was the eternal abode of the greedy. Restoration of the world that had been lost, the prophets held, required that Native peoples embrace a new mode of life radically incompatible with the plans of those who would transform Indians into capitalist farmers enamoured of profit and individual gain’.
References Bohannan, P 1965, ‘Introduction’, in LH Morgan, Houses and the house-life of the American aborigines, University of Chicago, Chicago. Cave, AA 2006, Prophets of the great spirit: Native American revitalization movements in Eastern North America, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London. Cleaver, H 1979, Reading capital politically, University of Texas Press, Austin. Deloria, PJ 1998, Playing Indian, Yale University Press, New Haven. Dunayevskaya, R 1991, Rosa Luxemburg, women's liberation and Marx's philosophy of revolution, Second Edition, University of Chicago Press, Urbana and Chicago. Fenton, WN 1975, ‘Introduction’, in League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, Citadel Press, New York.
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Iggers, GG & von Moltke, K (trans. & ed.) 1973, ‘Introduction’, in Leopold von Ranke, The theory and practice of history, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Jackson, HH 1889 [1881], A century of dishonor: a sketch of the United States governments dealing with some of the Indian tribes, Roberts Brothers, Boston. Jennings, F 1993, The founders of America, W.W. Norton & Co., New York. Krader, L (ed.) 1972, The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx, Van Gorcum Assen, Netherlands. Kuper, A 1988, The invention of primitive society: transformations of an illusion, Routledge: London and New York. Linebaugh, P 2012, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: machine-breaking, romanticism, and the several commons of 1811-12, PM Press, Oakland. ——1973, ‘Karl Marx, the theft of wood, and working class composition: a contribution to the current debate’, Crime and Social Justice, No. 6, Fall-Winter. Marx, K 1996, Later political writings, ed. T Carver, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. ——1976, Capital, volume one, trans. B Fowkes, Penguin Books, London. ——1975, Early writings, trans. R Livingstone & G Benton, Vintage Books, New York. ——1970, A contribution to the critique of political economy, M Dobb (ed.), International Publishers, New York. ——1965, Pre-capitalist economic formations, International Publishers, New York. Marx, K (with F Engels) 1998 [1845], The German ideology, Prometheus Books, New York. Marx, K & Engels, F 1998, The communist manifesto, Signet Classic, New York. ——1992, Collected works, volume 46, International Publishers, New York.
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——1975, ‘Further particulars of the Silesian Riots’, in Collected works, volume 3, International Publishers, New York. ——1970a, The German Ideology, ed. CJ Arthur, International Publishers, New York. ——1970b, Selected works, volume 3, Progress Publishers, New York. Morgan, LH 1950, Montezuma's dinner: an essay on the tribal society of the North American Indians, New York Labor News Company, New York. ——1901, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, Two Volumes in One, new edition, HM Lloyd (ed.), Burt Franklin, New York. Padover, SK (ed. & trans.) 1979, The letters of Karl Marx, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Sale, K 1995, Rebels against the future, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts. Shanin, T (ed.) 1983, Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and ‘the peripheries of capitalism’, Monthly Review Press. Shaw, WH 1984, ‘Marx and Morgan’, in History and Theory, vol. XXIII, no. 2 pp. 215-28. Snow, DR 1994, The Iroquois, Blackwell, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thompson, EP 1991, Customs in common: studies in traditional popular culture, New Press, New York. ——1966, The making of the English working class, Vintage Books, New York. Tooker, E 1994a, Lewis Henry Morgan on Iroquois material culture, University of Arizona Press, Tucson and London. ——1994b, ‘Lewis H. Morgan and his contemporaries’, in American Anthropologist, no. 94. Wheen, F 1999, Karl Marx: a life, W.W. Norton, New York. White, LA 1959, ‘Lewis Henry Morgan: his life and researches’, in LH Morgan, The Indian journals 1859-62, LA White (ed.), University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
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Yoshimoto, T 2006, Afurikateki dankai nit suite, Shunju-sha, Tokyo. Yoshimoto, T & Foucault, M 1988, Sekai-ninshiki no hōhō’ in Yoshimoto Taka'aki zen-taidan-shū, vol. 6, Seidosha, Tokyo. Yoshimoto Taka’aki Kenkyūkai (ed.) 2001, Yoshimoto Taka’aki ga kataru sengo 55-nen, vol. 4, Sankōsha, Tokyo.
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