Marx with Morgan

The Mexican Road Toward the Commune

Abstract

Karl Marx's reading of Lewis H. Morgan not only produces a paradigm shift from a progressive and linear view of history towards a multilinear perspective in which there is room for uneven development, leaps and returns from the "archaic" past into the future of communism. It also enables Marx Marx, based on the profound history of ancient Mexico, to anticipate the possibility of the revolutionary uprising of the community as a commune, just as it would in fact occur in Morelos. Marx in his final stage was approaching a new understanding of the link between the community as a form of reproduction of collective life and the commune as an expansive political form that cannot be limited exclusively to its best-known version, associated with the Paris Commune of 1871. In Mexico, this understanding places Marx in the company of famous historians of the Mexican Revolution such as Jesús Sotelo Inclán or Adolfo Gilly, who--already in the twentieth century but without explicitly referring to each other--will contribute new chapters to the history of that other commune, the Mexica or Mexican one on whose tracks the American ethnologist in our opinion had already put Marx.