Relações de parentesco em sociedades sem Estado: as críticas de Marx a Morgan e a Maine

Abstract

In 1972, Lawrence Krader published a compilation of some of Marx's notes from the last years of his life, under the title “Ethnological Notebooks”, including, among others, Marx's studies of Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) and Henry S. Maine's Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (1875). In this Thesis, we bring to light the Marxian notes on these authors, still largely neglected by the Marxist tradition, through the lens of a theme common to both: kinship relations in stateless societies. Starting from an immanent analysis of the texts, the aim is to show how Marx has an authentic position on the subject, opposing his own view of history to that of Morgan and Maine, although in different ways. It presents a Marx interested in studying the role of kinship as a form of organization in stateless societies, understanding the historicity of politics, consanguinity, the family, and gender relations themselves. To do this, an earlier text by Marx, Forms that precede capitalist production (1857-8), is revisited in order to investigate what continues and what changes in his thinking about kinship as the foundation of stateless societies. In addition, his understanding of the transition from kinship to politics in Iroquois, Greek, and Roman societies, based on Morgan, and the forms of organization through kinship in Celtic and Hindu societies, based on Maine, are examined. It is thus shown that, for the author of Capital, both Morgan and Maine start from “stories à la Robinson” to analyse stateless societies, that is, in general terms, they transfer elements of civil-bourgeois society to them, naturalizing modern relations; the former in a more elaborate way, and the latter as an apologist for the English colonial bourgeoisie. The conclusion is that, for the “last” Marx, the (non-political) forms of social organization based on kinship relations, called “gentile societies”, play a role that he did not yet recognize in the 1850s, differing from mere family relations, even though these are also historical and changeable. This demonstrates that, for Marx, although it is possible to trace relationships between the history of different peoples, each society must be analyzed from its own perspective, highlighting the link between the productive whole, i.e., all the elements of the production and reproduction of human life, and the social relationships connected to them. By reconstructing the so-called “Ethnological Notebooks”, Marx is therefore presented as a critical thinker who not only keeps up to date with the new discoveries of his time, but is also capable of overcoming them.