The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 17
"The Origin of the Family"
In the summer of 1884 Engels published his best-known book—The Origin of the Family, of Private Property and the State, and this is the last of his works with which we shall deal in any detail here.
With his characteristic modesty he opens his preface to the first edition thus:—"The following chapters are in a certain sense executing a bequest. It was no less a man than Karl Marx who had reserved to himself the privilege of displaying the results of Morgan's investigations in connection with his own materialistic conception of history—which I might call ours within certain limits. He wished thus to elucidate the full meaning of this conception. For in America, Morgan had, in a manner, discovered anew the materialistic conception of history originated by Marx forty years ago. In comparing barbarism and civilisation he had arrived in the main at the same results as Marx. And just as Capital was zealously plagiarised and persistently passed over in silence by professional economists in Germany, so Morgan's Ancient Society was treated in the same way by the spokesmen of prehistoric science in England.
"My work can offer only a meagre substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish. …"
Needless to say, in this short booklet we cannot give any adequate résumé of this work, but in view of its interest and importance we shall attempt to give as much as space will permit.
By filling in the gaps in Morgan's investigation, by working on the rich material in Ancient Society on the development of the gens and the family, and by applying to it the materialistic conception of history, Engels traces in this book the development of the family from the early group marriage through various stages corresponding with the economic development of society, to its present monogamic form.
Like every other existing institution of society hallowed by time and the convenience of the governing class, the present form of the family is looked upon as a divinely ordained institution, or as the most natural form of relation between the sexes without any relation to our particular form of society.
As a matter of fact, however, the family, like every other social institution, has had a long history, and has developed in accordance with the development of society and the growth of private property. The earliest form of the family corresponding to the state of savagery was that of group marriages. As society progressed to the state of society known as barbarism, we have the pairing family, in which each man has a principal wife, and to the wife this man is her principal husband. The marriage of near relations was more and more prohibited, but so long as society was organised in the form of gentes, the family in the modern sense did not exist. On the contrary, we have the communistic form of the household, in which most or all the women belonged to one and the same gens, while the husbands came from various gentes. In these households, the women naturally played a leading rôle and were anything but the slave of man. Thus, says Arthur Wright, quoted by Engels: "The female part generally ruled the house; the provisions were held in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too indolent or too clumsy to contribute his share to the common stock. No matter how many children, or how much private property he had in the house, he was liable at any moment to receive a hint to gather up his belongings and get out. And he could not venture to resist. The house was made too hot for him, and he had no other choice but to return to his own clan (gens), or, as was mostly the case, to look for another wife in some other clan. The women were the dominating power in the gentes (clans) and everywhere else. Occasionally they did not hesitate to dethrone a chief and degrade him to a common warrior." But the growth of wealth and of private property changed all this.
How great a rôle the question of property already played in later gentile society, is shown for instance by the fact, amongst many others, that although, generally speaking, marriage was not allowed between the various members of the gens, an exception was made in the case of an orphan heiress, who was allowed to marry within the gens, so that her property might remain within it. However much the laws of inheritance might change, property still had to remain within the gens. Speaking of the organisation of the gens, Engels says: "How wonderful is this gentile constitution in all its natural simplicity! No soldiers, gendarmes or policemen, no nobility, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no law suits—and still affairs run smoothly. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the entire community involved in them, either the gens or the tribe or the various gentes among themselves. Only in very rare cases is the blood revenge threatened as an extreme measure. Our capital punishment is simply a civilised form of it afflicted with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilisation. Not a vestige of our cumbersome and intricate system of administration is needed … the communistic household is shared by a number of families, the land belongs to the tribe, only the gardens are temporarily assigned to the households. The parties involved in a question settle it … there cannot be any poor and destitute—the communistic household and the gentes know their duties towards the aged sick and disabled. All are free and equal, including the women."
But these gentile institutions were such only within the tribe. Tribe and tribe were enemies to one another, and as private property increased so at first the laws of inheritance changed, there developed paternal law and the inheritance of property by the father's children, thus giving greater power to particular families; and as the means of production developed, that is, as the methods of creating wealth required more and more labour, slavery came into vogue, and the family, first in the patriarchal form and then in the more private form of the present day, gained greater importance and the gens institution became weaker and weaker, until it gave rise to the primitive form of present-day society in which the possessing classes live on the exploitation of the dispossessed classes, whether the position of the latter in society is that of body slave, serf, or wage slave. But in all these changes private property was the driving force, as Morgan says in speaking of the change of Grecian society from the gens organisation into that of political society. "Property was the element which was demanding the change. The development of municipal life and institutions, the aggregation of wealth in walled cities, and the great changes in the mode of life thereby produced, prepared the way for the overthrow of gentile institutions."