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The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and State
By Frederick Engels
Extracts
from the 1891 edition in
Marx-Engels Selected Works, volume three, Progress Publishers, Moscow,
1970.
[Shortly
after Marx’s death in 1883, Engels took over one more project on
which his friend had been working, an analytic critique of Ancient
Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery
Through Barbarism to Civilisation by Lewis H. Morgan, published in New
York in 1877. Marx and Engels saw in Morgan support for their
‘materialistic conception, the determining factory in history is, in
the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life’
(p. 191). They had seen in Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859.
Marvin
Harris argues that Engels, ‘By omitting all reference to ‘germ
thoughts’ and by skillful editing … succeeded in bringing forth a
suitably materialistic Morgan. But it is Engels and not Morgan who
presents the first clear-cut periodisation of prehistory, based on the
mode of production . The moral of this part of our story is not the
Engels at Marx’s institution distorted Morgan’s view of history.
That is probably true, but it is insignificant. Moreover, the
modifications which Engels introduced were on the whole quite sound
and imparted to Morgan’s scheme a logical coherence that it lacked
in the original. The Rise of Anthropological Theory, A History of
Theories of Culture, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1968, pp.
246-8.
Vast
amounts of information have been added in the intervening 120 years.
As ever, Engels had underlined that his explanations of each point had
to remain provisional. No one did more the stress the gap between
relative knowledge and absolute truth.]
Until
the beginning of the sixties [1860s] there was no such thing as a
history of the family. In this sphere, historical science was still
completely under the influence of the Five Books of Moses. 193
The
patriarchal form of the family, described there in greater detail than
anywhere else, was not only implicitly accepted as the oldest form of
the family, but also – after excluding polygamy – identified with
the present-day bourgeois family, as if the family had really undergone
no historical development at all. 194
[Engels
surveys a handful of writers. He accepts a pattern of progress from
savagery through barbarism to civilization, with layers in each stage.
He regularly refers to the current state of knowledge, indicating that
every conclusion remains provisional.]
It
has become the fashion of late to deny the existence of this initial
stage [promiscuous intercourse] in the sexual life of mankind. The aim
is to spare humanity this ‘shame’.
212
And
if strict monogamy is to be regarded as the acme of all virtue, then the
palm must be given to the tapeworm, which possess a complete male and
female sexual apparatus in every one of its 50 to 200 prolottids or
segments of the body, and passes the whole of its life in cohabiting
with itself in every one of these segments.
212-3.
If,
however, we limit ourselves to mammals, we find all forms of sexual life
among them: promiscuity, suggestions of group marriage, polygamy and
monogamy. Only polyandry is absent. This could be achieved only by
humans. 213
If
anything is certain, it is that jealousy is an emotion of comparatively
late development. The same applies to the conception of incest. 215
To
me it rather seems that all understanding of primitive conditions
remains impossible so long as we regard them through brothel spectacles.
216
In
one of several mentions of indigenous Australians, Engels remarks:
…
so that here also group marriage is gradually dying out, the only
question being which will first disappear from the scene as a result
of European influence – group marriage or the Australian Negroes who
indulge in it. 224.
This
fact alone shows little individual sex love, in the modern sense of the
word, had to do with the origins of monogamy. 225
The
communistic household, in which most of the women or even all the women
belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various other
gentes, is the material foundation of that predominancy of women which
generally obtain in primitive times; and Bachofen’s discovery of this
constitutes the third great service he has rendered.
I
may add, furthermore, that the reports of travellers and missionaries
about women among savages and barbarians being burdened with excessive
toil in no way conflict with what has been said above. The idiom of
labour between the two sexes is determined by causes entirely different
from those that determine the status of women in society. Peoples whose
women have to work much harder than we would consider proper often have
far more real respect for women than our Europeans have for theirs. The
social status of the lady of civilisation, surrounded by sham homage and
estranged from all real work, is infinitely lower than that of the
hard-working woman of barbarism, who was regarded among her people as a
real lady and was such by the nature of her position. 226-7
Only
after the transition to pairing marriage had been effect by the women
could the men introduce strict monogamy – for the women only, of
course. 229
To
which Marx adds: ‘the modern family contains in embryo not only
slavery but serfdom also, since from the very beginning it is connected
with agricultural services. It contains within itself in miniature all
the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within society and
its state.’ 234
It
is the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy, the existence of
beautiful young slaves who belong to the man with all they have, that
form the very beginning stamped on monogamy’s specific character as
monogamy only for the women, but not for the man. And it remains this
character to this day. 238
The
Spartan women and the elite of the Athenian hetaerae [prostitutes] are
the only Greek women of whom the ancients speak with respect, and whose
remarks they consider as being worthy of record.
238
That
one had first to become a hetaera in order to become a woman is the
strongest indictment of the Athenian family.
239
Monogamy
was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated,
along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today,
in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the
well-being and development of the one group are attained by the misery
and repression of the other. 240
Although,
in reality, it [prostitution] is not only tolerated but even practiced
with gusto, particularly by the ruling classes, it is condemned in
words. In reality, however, this condemnation by no means hits the men
who indulge in it, it hits only the women: they are ostracised and cast
out in order to proclaim once again the absolute domination of the male
over the female sex as the fundamental law of society.
241
Thus,
in the monogamian family, in those cases that faithfully reflect its
historical origin and that clearly bring out the sharp conflict between
man and woman resulting from the exclusive domination of the male, we
have a picture in miniature of the very antagonisms and contradictions
in which society, split up into classes since the commencement of
civilization, moves, without being able to resolve and overcome them.
Naturally, I refer here only to those cases of monogamy where
matrimonial life really takes its course according to the rules
governing the original character of the whole institution, but where the
wife rebels against the domination of the husband. That this is not the
case with all marriages no one knows better than the German Philistine,
who is no more capable of ruling in the home than in the state, and
whose wife, therefore, with full justification, wears the breeches of
which he is unworthy. But in consolation, he images himself to be far
superior to his French companion in misfortune, who, more often he,
fares far worse. 242
This,
for the fist time, created the possibility for the greatest moral
advance which we derive from and owe to monogamy – a development
taking place within it, parallel with it, or in opposition to it, as the
case might be, namely, modern individual sex love, previously unknown to
the whole world. 243
Since,
in every kind of marriage, however, people remain what they were before
they married, and since the citizens of Protestant countries are mostly
Philistines, this Protestant monogamy leads merely, if we take the
average of the best cases, to a wedded life of leaden boredom, which is
described as domestic bliss. The best mirror of these two ways of
marriage is the novel; the French novel for the Catholic style, and the
German novel for the Protestant. In both cases, ‘he gets it’: in the
German novel the young man gets the girl; in the French, the husband
gets the Cuckold’s horns. Which of the two is in the worse plight is
not always easy to make out. For the dullness of the German novel
excites the same horror in the French bourgeois as the ‘immorality’
of the French novel excites in the German Philistine, although lately,
since ‘Berlin is becoming a metropolis’, the German novel has begun
to deal a little less timidly with hetaerism (prostitution] and
adultery, long known to exist there.
244-5 [e.g., Theodor Fontane began his Berlin sequence with
L’Adultera in 1882.]
In
both cases, this marriage of convenience often enough turns into the
crassest prostitution – sometimes on both sides, but much more
generally on the apart of the wife, who differs from the ordinary
courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a
wage-worker, on piece-work, but sells it into slavery once for all. And
Fourier’s words hold good for all marriages of convenience:
Just
as in grammar two negatives make a positive, so in the morals of
marriage, two prostitutions make one virtue. 245
Here,
there is complete absence of all property, for the safeguarding and
inheritance of which monogamy and male domination were established.
245
In
short, proletarian marriage is monogamian in the etymological sense of
the word, but by no means in the historical sense.
245
Our
jurists, to be sure, hold that the progress of legislation to an
increasing degree removes all cause for complaint on the part of the
woman. Modern civilized systems of law are recognising more and more,
first, that, in order to be effective, marriage must be an agreement
voluntarily entered into by both parties; and secondly, that during
marriage, too, both parties must be on an equal footing in respect to
rights and obligations. If, however, these two demands were consistently
carried into effect, women would have all that they could ask for.
This
typical lawyer’s reasoning is exactly the same as that with which the
radical republican bourgeois dismisses the proletarian. The labour
contract is supposed to be voluntarily entered into by both parties. But
it is taken to be voluntarily entered into as soon as the law has put
both parties on an equal footing on paper. The power given to one party
by its different class position, the pressure it exercises on the other
– the real economic position of both – all this is no concern of the
law. 246
What
happens behind the legal curtains, where real life is enacted, how this
voluntary agreement [to marry] is arrived at – is no concern of the
law and the jurist. 246
It
is clear, therefore, that despite this, or rather just because of this,
among those classes which have something to inherit, freedom to marry is
not one whit greater in England and America than in France or Germany.
246
The
democratic republic does not abolish the antagonism between the two
classes; on the contrary, it provides the field on which it is fought
out. And, similarly, the peculiar character of man’s domination over
woman in the modern family, and the necessity, as well as the manner, of
establishing real social equality between the two, will be brought out
into full relief only when both are completely equal before the law. It
will then become evident that the first premise for the emancipation of
women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public
industry; and that this again demands that the quality possessed by the
individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished.
247
Thus,
in nine cases out of ten, a long engagement is practically a preparatory
school for conjugal infidelity. 248
What
will most definitely disappear from monogamy, however, in all the
characteristics stamped on it in consequence of its having arisen out of
property relationships. These are, first, the dominance of the man, and
secondly, the indissolubility of marriage. The predominance of the man
in marriage is simply a consequence of his economic predominance and
will vanish with it automatically. The indissolubility of marriage is
partly the result of the economic conditions under which monogamy arose,
and partly a tradition from the time when the connection between these
economic conditions and monogamy was not yet correctly understood and
was exaggerated by religion. Today it has been breached a thousandfold.
254
If
only marriages that are based on love are moral, then, also, only those
are moral in which love continues. The duration of the urge of
individual sex love differs very much according to the individual,
particularly among men; and a definite cessation of affection, or its
displacement by a new passionate love, makes separation a blessing for
both parties as well as for society. People will only be spared the
experience of wadding through the useless mire of divorce proceedings.
254
Thus,
what we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex
relationship after the impeding effacement of capitalist production is,
in the main, of a negative character, 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,
comfortable therewith, on the practice of each individual – and
that’s the end to it. 255
Engels
as homophobe
But the degradation of the women recoiled on the men
themselves and degraded them too, until they sank into the perversion of
boy-love, degrading both themselves and their gods by the myth of
Ganymede. 239
On
the contrary, the Germans, in their migrations, particularly South-East,
to the nomads of the steppes on the Black Sea, suffered considerable
moral degeneration and, apart form their horsemanship, acquired serious
unnatural vices from them, as is attested to explicitly by Ammianus
about the Taifali, and by Procopius about the Heruli.
243
And
sex love in our sense of the term was so immaterial to that classical
love power of antiquity, old Anacreon, that even the sex of the beloved
one was a matter of complete indifference to him. 250
There
is no skating around the fact that on the question of same-sex love,
Engels was as much a product of his time as he accused the German
Philistines of being in regard to all sexual matters. The best we can
say is that had he left eh closet door ajar for those brought up in
different times:
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, comfortable therewith, on the practice of each
individual – and that’s the end to it. 255
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