Friedrich Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels wrote “The origin of the Family, the Private Property and the State” in 1884. In this anthropological work, he exposed the material basis and the economic structures underlying women´s oppression. Engels knew that social institutions like family, marriage and kinship depends on historical evolution of the productive relationships. Contrary to the opinion of the most, the different ways in which human collectivities have organized themselves to regulate life in common, are nor eternal or timeless, but are linked to the development of productive forces. The division of society into classes based on the principle of private property accumulation, shaped our view on the roles and functions that women and men must perform in daily life.
In chapter 1, Engels described what some anthropologists of his time said about the origins, development, and history of the family as a social institution. For example, he quoted the Johan Jacob Bachofen´s work about the primitive matriarchy. Bachofen declared that motherhood emerged when women rebelled against brute force and male promiscuity. Gynecocracy played a valuable role in appeasing the weapons and brutality of men. However, Engels argued that Bachofen´s analysis lacked a materialistic methodology. For that reason, Engels took the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Broadly speaking, Morgan divided human history into three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. These are also divided into upper, middle, and lower stages.
Engels said about the early stage of savagery: “Men remained in the tropical or subtropical forests and lived, at least partially, in the trees; This is the only explanation why they could continue to exist among great wild beasts. The fruits, nuts and roots served as food; The main progress of this era is the formation of articulate language” (1). The main characteristic of the upper stage of savagery is the use of the bow and arrow and, with it, the improvement of hunting.
The term “savagery” is no longer used. Nowadays we can identify this stage of human evolution with the paleolithic era. During this time, the tools used for hunting and gathering were just stone and carved bones. The earliest tools made of bones and stones date back to 3.3 million years ago. 300.000 years ago, Homo Sapiens appeared, marking a turning point in history. Neil Faulkner expresses: “Homo sapiens had this unique characteristic: unlike all other animals, including other hominids, they were not restricted by biology to a limited range of environments. Thinking it through, talking it over, working together, Homo sapiens could adapt to life almost anywhere. Biological evolution was therefore superseded by cultural evolution” (2).
Engels traced the evolutionary succession from savagery to barbarism. He said: “The characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants” (3). The hordes of hunters and gathers started settling down around neolithic gardens. Agricultural Revolution facilitated the organization of sophisticated political models. Neil Faulkneer gives us a very interesting example of this transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic: “El-Beidha near Petra in modern Jordan, for example, was home to a community of Early Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers in c. 6500 bc. They lived in communal ‘corridor’ houses made of stone, timber, and mud, ground grain to make flour on saddle querns (grinding stones in the shape of a horse’s saddle), and manufactured many and varied flint-flake tools, including arrowheads, knives, and scrapers” (4).
During Neolithic era, the advances of agriculture allowed the creation of surpluses and the accumulation of material good in few hands. People were not living on the edge anymore. The natural consequence of this was the increasing number of populations. As Neil Faulkner states: “The problem was rooted in the very success of the Early Neolithic economy, for the population kept growing, but the land was finite. As the nutrients were taken from the soil and not replenished, new fields had to be hacked from the wilderness. As populations grew, existing villages could not feed everyone, and groups of pioneers headed off to found new settlements” (5). It was matter of time that the different groups of neolithic farmers started fighting each other to look for new lands. The plough-based agriculture, with animals used for traction and transportation, replaced the hoe-based horticulture of the Neolithic gardens. Farmers organized themselves to construct irrigation schemes that carried water from distant territories, compensating the lack of regularity in the rainfalls. The edification of dams, channels and sluices needed a more complex social division of work. Land transport was transformed by the invention of the wheel and the breeding and rearing of pack animals (oxen, asses, horses, and camels).
The increasing of the populations linked with the metallurgical work were the main causes of the dawn of urban revolution. The cities were born after the process of concentration of wealth. In Mesopotamia, at the beginning of the third millennium before Christ, the earliest copper villages turned into bronze cities that monopolized the sacred power of the priesthood and the brute force of the military.
Porkrovsky says about this: “The first class societies were formed in the countries of the ancient East in Anterior, Eastern and Southern Asia, and in the northeastern part of Africa. Already at the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. AD, as a result of the disintegration of the regime of primitive communism and the division of society into classes — into slaveholders and slaves — the oldest slave states began to form: Egypt, Babylon, India, China and others” (6).
The lands of the State and the temples became practically individual property, although nominally they were — as were also the slaves in part — the common property of the slaveholders. The task of organizing irrigation work, in which immense masses of slaves participated, was necessarily conditioned to political centralization and the creation of organized, relatively large monarchies, with bureaucratic forms.
Engels identifies the upper stage of barbarism with the metallurgical work. We can read the following in his book: “The upper stage of barbarism begins with the smelting of iron ore, and moves to the stage of civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary notation. To this stage belong the Greeks of the heroic era, the Italian tribes shortly before the founding of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus, the Normans of the time of the Vikings. First of all, we find here for the first time the iron plow drawn by domestic animals, which makes possible the plowing of the land on a large scale — agriculture — and produces, under the conditions of that time, a practically almost unlimited increase in the means of existence; In relation to this, we also observe the felling of forests and their transformation into arable land and meadows, something impossible on a large scale without the ax and the iron shovel. All of this led to a rapid increase in the population, which settled densely in small areas” (7).
In chapter 2, Engels exposed the four main stages of evolution of the human kinship. The division was proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan. According to the webpage “socialist revolution”, development of the family as an institution consisted in these stages: the Consanguine family, the Punaluan family, the Pairing family, and finally, the Monogamous family. The first 3 are seen as evolutionary developments — forms of natural selection that banned incest piece by piece, resulting in a more intelligent and healthy species. Only the last stage, monogamy, was an economic development, spurred by the development of private property. It is with the emergence of monogamy, Engels claims, that patriarchy emerges. As Neil Faulkner stated: “Private property, class division, and state power came into being simultaneously, the one dependent on the others. Sharing and a rough equality were intrinsic to communal property. But the division of land into private farms, or of cattle into separate herds, allowed some to grow rich at the expense of others. The resulting tensions called for some sort of control if society was not to fragment. The state — armed bodies of men — evolved to defend the new property-based status quo. And now it was men who had power. For it was men, not women, who herded the stock and ploughed the fields. When stock and fields were held in common, everyone benefited. When they were in private hands, they enriched and empowered only those who worked them. What Frederich Engels called ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’ was represented in myth and ritual. The old mother-goddesses were cast from their thrones, replaced by a new generation of male power-deities. The Greek heaven was ruled by Zeus, the Roman by Jupiter, the Jewish by Yahweh, the Arab by Dushara, and so on, across the world” (8).
REFERENCES
1. F, Engels. El origen de la Familia, la Propiedad Privada y el Estado”. Archivo Marx-Engels de la Sección en Español del Marxists Internet Archive, 2017, p. 2.
2. N. Faulkner. “A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals”. Pluto Press, 2013, p. 5.
3. F. Engels. “El origen…”, p. 3.
4. N. Faulkner. “A Marxist History…”, p. 8.
5. N. Faulkner. “A Marxist History…”, p. 9.
6. V. S. Porkovski. “Historia de las ideas políticas”. Editorial Grijalbo, 1966, p.27.
7. F. Engels. “El origen…”, p. 5.
8. N. Faulkner. “A Marxist History…”, p. 21.
