Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth

Evidence

The interest of Marx and Engels for Morgan and for studies of the institution of primitive communism was an ambiguous one: sometimes the fact of primitive communism was used simply to show that private property, as a legal category and a social institution, was not somehow eternal and thus natural. At other times, however, particularly in Engels’ hands, the fascination with primitive communal institutions results in a version of history which is unacceptable because it is, in disguise, simply the myth of the garden of Eden and the fall of man. Such a myth is untenable, if for no other reason than that if has at its disposal no means of accounting for the origins of history: it cannot show how out of such a positive, a negative could be made to evolve. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481

Categorization

• XREF: Jameson’s critique of the Eden myth recurs in his later work (notably Political Unconscious); here it anticipates the dialectical demand that the negative inhere in origins. — connects to: Reducing all ideology to immediate structural causes is primitive infantilism; Sartre’s scarcity-based starting point restores a nightmarish, myth-free reading of primitive history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481; The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s scarcity-based starting point restores a nightmarish, myth-free reading of primitive history #responds-to (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481
• The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176
• Reducing all ideology to immediate structural causes is primitive infantilism #complicates (0.70)