Name: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Rating: 3.944444444444445 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141191119

Friedrich Engels

Tristram Hunt

Discusses private property and its relationship to the subjugation of women and analyzes the rise of the territorial state, in a new edition of a classic work of 19th-century socialist thought. Reissue.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

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In an article, ‘The true socialists’, he critiqued the act of prostitution as symbolic of the corruption of human relations brought about by the capitalist mode of production: ‘the most tangible exploitation – one directly attacking the physical body – of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, one of the more interesting developments of recent years has been the explicit use of an ideology of ‘women’s rights’ to justify ‘liberal interventionist’ actions by Western powers. From the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan onwards, part of the creed of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair was a battle for the liberation of women from the backward, feudal clutches of the ruling Taliban. All this, despite the obvious irony that what American and British forces were seeking to do was return Afghanistan to the policies of female education, literacy and enfranchisement previously adopted by the communist-inspired and Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party during the 1980s.

Whereas in the earlier forms of the family, men never lacked women but, on the contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of women – widespread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much deeper change that had occurred. These symptoms, mere methods of procuring wives, the pedantic Scot McLennan has transmogrified into special classes of families under the names of ‘marriage by capture’ and ‘marriage by purchase’.

Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women – the mothers – are held in high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honourable.

It was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed whether one liked it or not to gods, state, and one’s ancestors.

With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene – the wife’s attendant lover and the cuckold husband. The husbands had won the victory over the wives, but the vanquished magnanimously provided the crown. Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable social institution – denounced, severely penalized, but impossible to suppress.

The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.

And when, with the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal father right and monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase disappears; the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the woman but also the man acquires a price – not according to his personal qualities but according to his property. That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance – or among the oppressed classes, who did not count.

Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.

And yet all our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, which since the eighteenth century in particular has become inviolable, that the monogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is the core around which society and state have gradually crystallized.

And, finally, it proclaims the irreconcilable opposition between gentile society and the state; the first attempt at forming a state consists in breaking up the gentes by dividing their members into those with privileges and those with none, and by further separating the latter into two productive classes and thus setting them one against the other.

If the sale of the land did not cover the debt or if the debt had been contracted without any security, the debtor, in order to meet his creditor’s claims, had to sell his children into slavery abroad. Children sold by their father – such was the first fruit of father right and monogamy!

The Athenians then instituted a police force simultaneously with their state, a veritable gendarmerie of bowmen, foot and mounted Landjäger [the country’s hunters] as they call them in South Germany and Switzerland. But this gendarmerie consisted of slaves. The free Athenian considered police duty so degrading that he would rather be arrested by an armed slave than himself have any hand in such despicable work. That was still the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without police, but the state was still young and could not yet inspire enough moral respect to make honourable an occupation which to the older members of the gens necessarily appeared infamous.

How impossible it was to graft on to such a society either the Roman system of latifundia worked by slave labour or the newer large-scale agriculture worked by forced services is proved by Charlemagne’s experiments with the famous imperial country estates (villae). These experiments were gigantic in scope, but they left scarcely a trace. They were continued only by the monasteries, and only for them were they fruitful. But the monasteries were abnormal social bodies, founded on celibacy; they could produce exceptional results, but for that very reason necessarily continued to be exceptional themselves.

This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped class antagonisms and living in remote areas, as at times and in places in the United States of America. But it becomes stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger and more populous.

The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. 

We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity but becomes a   positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. 

At all earlier stages of society, production was essentially collective, just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communistic communities. This collective production was very limited; but inherent in it was the producers’ control over their process of production and their product. They knew what became of their product: they consumed it; it did not leave their hands.

“With commodity production, production no longer for use by the producers but for exchange, the products necessarily change hands. In exchanging his product, the producer surrenders it; he no longer knows what becomes of it. When money, and with money the merchant, steps in as intermediary between the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more complicated the final fate of the products still more uncertain. The merchants are numerous, and none of them knows what the other is doing.

Slavery is the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is succeeded by serfdom in the Middle Ages and wage labour in the more recent period. These are the three great forms of servitude characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and in recent times disguised, slavery always accompanies them.

"An eternal being created human society as it is today, and submission to ?superiors? and ?authority? is imposed on the ?lower? classes by divine will." This suggestion, coming from the pulpit, platform and press, has hypnotized the minds of men and proves to be one of the strongest pillars of exploitation. The history of the family dates from 1861, the year of the publication of Bachofen?s "Mutterrecht" (maternal law) Engles makes the following propositions: *That in the beginning people lived in unrestricted sexual intercourse, which he dubs, not very felicitously, hetarism. *That such an intercourse excludes any absolutely certain means of determining parentage; that consequently descent could only be traced by the female line in compliance with maternal law -- and that this was universally practiced by all the nations of antiquity. *That consequently women as mothers, being the only well known parents of younger generations, received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete woman?s rule (gynaicocracy), according to Bachofen?s idea. *That the transition to monogamy, reserving a certain woman exclusively to one man, implied the violation of the primeval religious law (i.e., practically a violation of the customary right of all other men to the same woman), which violation had to be atoned for its permission purchased by the surrender of the women to the public for a limited time.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

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