Anthropological Notebooks

Also known as Ethnological Notebooks and Notebooks on the History of Ancient Society. Joint name for the five notebooks formed by Marx’s research and excerpts from his reading of anthropological works. Written between 1879 and 1882, published in 1972 by the American anthropologist Lawrence Krader under the title The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. The Chinese translations of four of the notebooks were included in Volume 45 of the first edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, and the other notebook was included in the Materials for the Study of Marxism, No. 1–4, 1987. In 1996, the Renmin Publishing House published a single edition under the title Marx’s Notebooks on the History of Ancient Society.

Before the 1870s, there were relatively few materials and empirical studies on the origin of mankind, etc. After the 1870s, a great deal of empirical anthropological findings came out one after another. In this case, in order to further study the early human society, Marx successively read Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Landownership: The Causes, Course, and Consequences of Its Decline, Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, Henry Sumner Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, Sir John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, and Sir John Phear’s The Aryan Village Society in India and Ceylon and other works, and the excerpts from these readings formed the Anthropological Notebooks. The Anthropological Notebooks deals with the history, reality and development prospects of the countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas. The main contents are as follows: First, Marx perfected the theory of two kinds of production. Before his later years, Marx’s chief entry point for interpreting human society was the production of material materials. Through the analysis of the ancient and prehistoric societies, Marx held that the production of human beings themselves, like the production of material means of life, had a specific role to play. They were inseparable and played a common role in the history of development of man, only that they played relatively dominant roles at different historical stages. In primitive society, the further we go back, the more fundamental is the reproduction of human beings themselves based on blood ties. With the development of the productive forces of society, the production of material means played an increasingly important role in social development and eventually become the decisive force in historical development. The perfection of the theory of two kinds of production laid the methodological foundation for the study and analysis of the history of prehistoric societies, as well as of all underdeveloped social formations, and constituted a major development of the materialist conception of history. Second, it developed the theory of social formations. In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx interpreted the social structure in the classical expression of the materialist conception of history, but at that time, more emphasis was placed on the productive forces and relations of production as the material foundation as well as the political and idealistic superstructure that arises on top of it. Of course, although this theory of social structure is true, there were some limitations in its analysis of prehistoric and Oriental societies. In the Anthropological Notes, Marx, on the basis of the theory of two kinds of production, further perfected the theory of social structure by studying the particular structural composition of prehistoric and Oriental societies, such as the essence of the clan, the evolution of the family, and the origin of the state. It has enabled it to rationally explain all social formations, thus answering more accurately the question of the path of development of the Oriental society. Third, scientific judgment on the nature of the rural commune and the development prospects of non-capitalist countries. Marx found the essential difference between the rural commune and the primitive commune on the basis of his recognition of the fact that Kovalevsky found “traces of both of possession of land in common as well as of the rise of private property at the same time”, thus put forth the inherent dualism of the Russian rural commune. “Communal property and all the resulting social relations provide [the commune] with a solid foundation, while the privately owned houses, fragmented tillage of the arable land and private appropriation of its fruits all permit a development of individuality incompatible with conditions in the more primitive communities.” This dualism is not only the source of the existence and development of the rural commune, but also the source of its gradual disintegration. On this basis, Marx also studied the internal structure of non-capitalist countries and pointed out the particular path of social development of them. In particular, Marx deeply analyzed the particular social and historical circumstances of Russia at that time and pointed out the possibility for Russia “to incorporate the positive achievements developed by the capitalist system, without having to pass under its harsh tribute”. But, the inherent dualism of the Russian rural commune made it necessary for this possibility to be based on a Russian revolution, a revolution that would not only make the rural commune a factor in the revival of Russian society, but also motivate Russian rural communal property to become the starting point for the development of communism.

The Anthropological Notebooks are an important achievement of Marx’s theoretical exploration in his later years, and also an important component of Marxist thought. From the content, it has greatly improved and developed the materialist conception of history in the study of two kinds of social production, social structure and the doctrine of the state; from the methodological point of view, it contains the unity of empirical analysis and logical reasoning, the unity of social development and the diversity of historical methods of inquiry and thinking. From the perspective of the history of the international communist movement, it scientifically deconstructed the nature and structure of the Oriental society, broke through “Eurocentrism”, and pointed out the direction for the development of backward Oriental countries.