Ethnological notebooks

In my chapter, I aim to focus on the method and content of late Marx’s ethnological notebooks in terms of a laboratory of limits and conditions of the dialectics, as Marx defines it in 1873: i.e., as a science ‘in its essence critical and revolutionary’. First of all, his veiled critique of nineteenth-century anthropological thought found in the notes involves Marx’s critique of any positivistic attempt to glorify ‘the existing state of things’. Secondly, the societies under examination - which are different from the Western bourgeois society in time or space - act as a ‘litmus test’ for the understanding of capitalism as a historically (and geographically) developed social form. By helping to recognize the ‘transient nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, the topics of the excerpts are material neither for historiography nor for philosophy of history. They rather call into question - even if not directly and explicitly - the conditions of possibility for the revolution at the global level.