At 12:14 30/10/97 -0600, John Exdell wrote:
>In the last two years of his life Marx was engaged in an intensive study
>of pre-industrial cultures coming under colonial rule. The first
>comprehensive collection of his so-called "ethnological notebooks" will be
>published next year by Yale, under the title "Property and Patriarchy."
>The editor is David Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas.
>Smith, who recently lectured here about this, finds that Marx frequently
>expressed his dismay at the social destruction underway, and his sense
>that something valuable was being wiped out by European civilization.
>According to Smith, Marx was especially impressed by the gender equality
>he found in tribal societies. This text will represent Marx's most mature
>thinking on colonialism. Smith's editing project is huge, since
>apparently Marx composed these notes rather chaotically in six languages.
>I think this may be a very important resource from an historical and
>political standpoint, and may require us to revise our thinking about what
>a "marxist" position is on this subject.
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This is a great news! My best wishes to David Smith. This supports my
general position that Marx's thought went through a serious change from
1861-63 onwards. There is a shift from the old dialectical kind of thinking
to a more structuralist kind of thinking. My critique, of course, was
specific to Marx's essays on India in New York Tribune, and not Marx in
general. Cheers, ajit sinha
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