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An article in the Soviet magazine Socialism: Theory and Practice from 1984 looking at the Engels classic The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 1984 was the 100th anniversary of its publication. This year, in October, will mark the 140th.
Article:
While going through Karl Marx’s manuscripts after his death (1883), Frederick Engels found a detailed synopsis of the then sensational book Ancient Society by eminent American ethnographer L. H. Morgan, who, for the first time shed light on many important aspects of the primitive communal system. Marx had made many notes on the margins of the synopsis which he wrote in 1880-1881 Reading the synopsis. Engels found that Morgan's discoveries confirmed his and Marx’s materialist concept of history and felt that he had to write a special study drawing widely on Marx's notes and also on some conclusions and factual material in Morgan’s book.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was published...in October 1884 and was a Marxist classic. The book is not only about the distant past. Engels also reflects at length on the future of humanity. The book scientifically analyses the history of humanity at the early stages of its development, describes the primitive communal system’s process of disintegration and the rise of a class society based on private property. Engels shows the general features of this society, elucidates the specific development of family relations in different socio-economic communities and explains the rise of the state and its essence, proving the historical inevitability of its demise in a classless communist society.
Some excerpts from the book are published below. (Subtitles given by the Editors).
THE HISTORY OF THE STATE
The state is... a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms. classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of “order“; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
As distinct from the old gentile order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory... Citizens were allowed to exercise their public rights and duties wherever they settled. irrespective of gens and tribe. This organization of citizens according to locality is a feature common to all states. That is why it seems natural to us...
The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power... It consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile (clan) society knew nothing.
Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful. economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves. as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital...
In most of the historical states. the rights of citizens are, besides, apportioned according to their wealth, thus directly expressing the fact that the state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class. It was so already in the Athenian and Roman classification according to property. It was so in the mediaeval feudal state, in which the alignment of political power was in conformity with the amount of land owned. It is seen in the electoral qualifications of the modern representative states. Yet this political recognition of property distinctions is by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage of state development. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which under our modern conditions of society is more and more becoming an inevitable necessity, and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic officially knows nothing any more of property distinctions. In it wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and Stock Exchange, which becomes the easier to achieve the more the public debt increases and the more joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, using the Stock Exchange as their centre... And lastly, the possessing class rules directly through the medium of universal suffrage As long as the oppressed class, in our case, therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible and politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme Left wing. To the extent, however, that this class matures for its self -emancipation, it constitutes itself as its own party and elects its own representatives, and not those of the capitalists. Thus, universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know what to do.
The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong in the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.
WILL FAMILY, MARRIAGE AND LOVE EXIST UNDER COMMUNISM?
We have. then, three chief forms of marriage, which, by and large, conform to the three main stages of human development. For savagery - group marriage; for barbarism - pairing marriage; for civilization – monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution...
We are now approaching a social revolution in which the hitherto existing economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as certainly as will those of its supplement - prostitution...The impending social revolution, however, by transforming at least the far greater part of permanent inheritable wealth – the means of production – into social property, will reduce all this anxiety about inheritance to a minimum. Since monogamy arose from economic causes, will it disappear when these causes disappear?
One might not unjustly answer, far from disappearing, it will only begin to be completely realized... Prostitution disappears, monogamy, instead of declining finally becomes a reality - for the men as well.
At all events the position of the men thus undergoes considerable change. But that of the women, of all women, also undergoes important alteration. With the passage of the means of production into common property, the individual family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public matter. Society takes care of all children equally irrespective of whether they are born in wedlock or not...
Thus, full freedom in marriage can become generally operative only when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it, has removed all those secondary economic considerations which still exert so powerful an influence on the choice of a partner. Then, no other motive remains than mutual affection...
Thus what we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending effacement of capitalist production is... limited mostly to what will vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences...Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual - and that's the end of it.
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