... Marx, towards the end of his life, was keeping 'ethnographic notebooks' that contained his reflections on reading ethnographies of indigenous peoples, including those in the US at the time. He seemed to be considering the possibility that there is *not* a single trajectory to history; that various routes are possible, and that some indigenous groups had established a (largely) socialist kind of organization without any of the infrastructure that standard Marxist theory insists is necessary.
I do think (and I have argued in print) that LSV took from Marx and Hegel a specific view of history that led him into difficulties in seeing that indigenous people are not psychologically primitive.