The Iroquois natives and the Marxist utopia

Like so many other authors, Karl Marx used the philosophical developments that preceded him.

In particular, he spent years studying the social organization of the Indians of America and more particularly the Iroquois (as noted in Engels' work, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State").

In this work, this author, who was Karl Marx ideological partner  builds on Lewis Henry Morgan's studies “Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization” based on a previous work on the League of Iroquois written as a result of his experiences in the Seneca communities of the state of New York. This work was written jointly with a young Seneca (which is one of the original 5 iroquois nations) named Hasanoasda (whose English name was Ely Parker) who provided much of the information and his own point of view.

Marx's work on this subject remained unfinished due to his death. Engels himself points out in his preface to the 1884 edition: “The following pages come to be, in a sense, the execution of a will. Carlos Marx was preparing to personally expose the results of Morgan's investigations ... "and then pointed out:" Morgan's great merit consists in having found in the gentile unions of the North American Indians the key to decipher important riddles, not yet solved of the ancient history of Greece, Rome and Germany. ” As he begins “The origin of the family, private property and the State,” Engels continues: “Morgan was the first who, knowingly, tried to introduce a precise order in the prehistory of humanity, and his classification will remain undoubtedly in vigor until a much more considerable wealth of data does not force it to be modified. ”

Engels' approach divides the evolution of the human race into three stages:

1) savagery

In its first moment (lower stage) human beings had not yet completed their evolution as a species, at this time they fed on fruits, nuts and roots and did not use fire. In a second moment they learned to use fire and fish was incorporated into the diet. According to Engels, there were no exclusively hunting villages due to the problematic nature of this power supply. The upper stage of savagery begins with the invention of the bow and arrow that makes it possible to rely much more on hunting. The era of barbarism began with the introduction of pottery and the domestication of plants and animals. Always according to Engels, “the eastern continent, the so-called ancient world, possessed almost all the domesticable animals and all the own cereals for cultivation, except one; the western continent, America, had no more domesticable mammals than the flame, and still, nothing more than in a part of the South, and only one of the cultivable cereals, but the best, the corn. ” The middle and upper stages of barbarism correspond to an increase in social and technological complexity. The upper stage was the “period in which all civilized peoples spend their heroic era: the age of the iron sword, but also the plow and the iron ax. By putting this metal at his service, man became the owner of the last and most important of the raw materials that played a revolutionary role in history, the last one not counting the potato. Iron made agriculture possible in large areas, the clearing of the largest jungle regions ”

The culmination of barbarism is civilization. With the increase in production, cities appear, increasing the division of labor, differentiated trades of agriculture appear, the production and productivity of labor increases, and simultaneously the value of the labor force of man. This gave birth to a "civilized" system where the "auxiliary" of the work "gave" their place to the slaves appearing at the same time and gradually the commercial production and associated trade networks. “The difference between rich and poor was added to that between free and slaves; the new division of labor resulted in a new division of class society ... the common work of the land was ended ... Arable land was distributed among private families; at the beginning of a temporary way, and later forever; the step to complete private property was done little by little ... ” “Along with the wealth in merchandise and in slaves, along with the fortune in money, territorial wealth also appeared.” These riches became hereditary, and over time, all of them susceptible to being alienated (mortgaged, sold).

Engels' approach is clearly evolutionary: societies "naturally" advance from "wild" levels to "barbaric" levels, culminating in "civilizations." From a certain point of view this evolution is evaluated negatively.

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From "Amerrique, the orphans of paradise", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones