The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx

This is a transcription of notebooks written by Karl Marx in the last three years of his life made from his study of works of 19th century ethnography. It includes a long introduction by the editor, Karl Krader. These notebooks are part of a larger project in the last decade of Marx's life, when he had studied both Turkish and Russian and had read all the major works on the Russian commune in Russian. Engels had used these books as inspiration for his own book on the *Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*, but he grievously misunderstood Marx's understanding and intent, which was underscored by Raya Dunayevskaya's statement that he had "betrayed Marx's bequest." Many elements and themes of Engels book take as their basis positions that Marx had ridiculed in his notebooks. For example, Engels built his thesis about the early family around Bachoven's idea of Mother Right and the overthrow of a hypothesized early matriarchy by subsequent patriarchy, whereas Marx saw in early society not the rule of one group over another but a more generalized egalitarianism that would fit well with current ethnographic understanding. Marx also saw what Maine described as feudalism in Indian society as rather a creation of British colonialism. It is my understanding from Teodor Shanin's book on the Late Marx that much of Marx's late work had been kept locked up by the Soviet regime in the USSR because it did not fit into the Soviet government's official canon of unilinear evolution towards some future communist utopia guided by the one-party state or its project of collectivization. Marx saw that indigenous societies such as the Iroquois Federation of North America, that is the Haudenosaunee or "People of the Longhouse," had perhaps a better grasp of what communism and equality means than those conceived by European thinkers. Because they are notebooks one has to glean what Marx was thinking from the comments that he was making intermixed with his notations on the texts.