The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Engels reviews his findings, beginning with a summary of the “middle stage of savagery” (195), where the gens manages its own affairs and there is “no place for ruler and ruled” (195). All of humanity enjoyed this condition at one point or another but moved out of it at various stages based on the domestication of animals, the development of tools, and advancements in agriculture. It is not always clear how the transition from common possession among the gens to private ownership among families occurred, but occur it did. Once marriage became a means of organizing property, men became ascendant and women themselves became a kind of property, kept within the home to attend to domestic labor. The rule of men within the house then paved the way for tyranny over society as a whole, with iron serving as a far more effective weapon of conquest than the stone used by earlier peoples. Conquest and expansion led to larger populations, which then exacerbated differences between rich and poor, and those who were once temporary military leaders became hereditary monarchs as a way to preserve their privileges against the potentially restive masses. They then engaged in wars of conquest to enrich themselves further, even as these led to even greater social instability requiring even greater concentrations of wealth and power.

This process precedes the rise of what Engels, following Morgan’s taxonomy, calls “civilization,” the chief characteristic of which is the division of labor (202). In addition to differences between rich and poor, town and country, civilization “creates a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products—the merchants” (203). These people enrich themselves despite having nothing at all to do with production, introducing money as the key variable of exchange and with it the relationship between debtor and creditor. The gentile constitution could not long survive this state of affairs and was gradually relegated to the private sphere. In its place came the state, and while traces of the old gentile constitution remained, class antagonism became the main feature of society, which the state handled by organizing power on a territorial basis, organizing a public force of agents for maintaining order, especially against a large enslaved population, and extracting taxes from citizens. This creates organs of power “standing above society” (209), interested mainly in preserving rights of property. Modern democracies continue this trend by formalizing class conflict within legislative assemblies, while the real power is in the “alliance between the government and the stock exchange” (211). Once goods become commodities, they separate the producer from their product, which is symbolic of a broader alienation between human beings and their natural environment. By developing “things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable,” civilization set “in motion the lowest instincts and passions of men” who turned on each other to satisfy limitless greed (215). The development of civilization has been the death of genuine society.

A recent meeting of the Anthropological Section of the Society of the Friends of Natural Science found a case of group marriage among the Gilyaks (or Nivkh, an Indigenous group inhabiting parts of coastal Siberia) who still practice it in the present day. They were able to sustain this arrangement by maintaining a strictly hunting and gathering lifestyle, with no industry or agriculture. Social life takes place entirely within the rules of the gens, and there are neither rich nor poor. Engels characterizes the Gilyak people as kind, hospitable, and free of greed. There is good reason to fear that as they develop contacts with Russia and China, their “changes in fortune” will destroy “more and more that primitive equality” which the modern world destroys with utter ruthlessness (222).