I admit this isn't a book I ever thought I'd read. It sat on the shelf along with its other Soviet-era 'Progress Publishing' bookmates, for the time when I retired and got around to reading anthropology, religion, linguistics, theories of the novel and all those other things I'll do when the class struggle is over.


"How's that anthropology coming?"
"I've decided to pack it in and start trainspotting instead!"

But honestly, it was worth it: The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is actually a very interesting book. Part journalism, part academic treatise, and part polemic, Origins is a brilliant example of what Marxist studies is best at: synthesis. In a short, readable, 175 pages, Engels brings ancient, legal and political history to bear on indigenous societies, the status of women and the origins of democracy. They're all huge topics, and Engels turns them into a seamless birth-story of capitalism.

Materialist history
Engels wants to figure out how human society progresses through three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Like Marx, he's researching changes in the mode of production, from pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer societies (savagery), to cultivating plants and animals (barbarism), to a complex division of labour and commodity production (civilization). But he's not demonstrating these changes; rather, Engels focuses on the social forms associated with them, in particular family relations. He wants to show how communal societies evolved from a matrilinear, or 'mother right' to a patriarchal, 'father right'. Membership in a clan was originally based on who your mother was. Since individuals mating for life didn't exist, no one really knew - or cared - who the father was. Men left their tribe, or gente, and joined their wives'.

All this meant that the family and marriage - as we know it today - didn't exist. Without private property to be protected, individual unions made no sense. Different systems of polygamy (one man, many wives) and polyandry (one woman, many husbands) existed in different societies, according to how the gente was organized. Engels draws on the work of anthropologist Lewis Morgan, who lived with indigenous societies in North America and showed the impact of mother right. These societies were egalitarian: women had equal rights to men in every political decision and could kick men out of their gente if they chose.


From patriarchal class society and bad marriages (First Day of Freedom)

Society only began to adopt restricted unions as it developed privately-controlled surplus wealth. Mother-right passed to father-right, because men worked in the fields and controlled the agricultural surplus. Group marriage passed into monogamy, as men gained more power over women and other men and needed to guarantee male heirs. Sex itself lost its character as a freely-enjoyed activity and became another form of labour, as women lost all access to the means of production. Prostitution is not the world's oldest profession: it began with class society.

Engels goes into incredible depth, surveying the literature on not only indigenous societies, but ancient Greece & Rome, Celtic and Germanic societies. I got lost trying to follow the intricate threads between uncles and nephews, fathers and sons, etc. But his overall point is clear: relations between the sexes used to be egalitarian. Class society destroyed them and created women's bondage. Most importantly, this wasn't just a byproduct of class society: it was the inevitable result, part and parcel of its development. The family could only arise when women had been subjugated and turned into property.

This is why Marxists say women's oppression can only be destroyed by ending capitalism: the two share the same root. Socialism isn't about 'workers', narrowly defined: it's about destroying the private property system that turns women into slaves, or as Engels puts it: "The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman." (74)


You can apparently enslave copies too (A Perfect Fake)

It's very hard to summarize Origins, since Engels is doing a summary himself. But Engels is tracing the origins of things we take for granted, the most cherished institutions of the bourgeoisie: the family, marriage, the law, democracy. By showing them to be tools for managing private property, Engels is showing how they're temporary, and they can be changed.

Eurocentric?
Modern readers will be shocked - and rightly so - at Engels' use of terms like "savages" and "barbarians", which are completely unacceptable today. What did Engels mean by those words? Was he really putting white men at the top and everyone else underneath? Was his acknowledgement of colonial suffering just sympathy for people he viewed as naturally inferior and thus doomed?

I'd argue this isn't true. Engels draws a strict line between historical event and moral progress. The terms he uses are indefensible, but they're not meant as value judgments. Engels sees social development as contradictory: this is the dialectic at the heart of Marxism. Listen to his description of the Iroquois:

the kind of men and women that produced by such a society is indicated by the admiration felt by all white men who came into contact with uncorrupted Indians, admiration of the personal dignity, straightforwardness, strength of character and bravery of these barbarians [sic].

History, not His Story - Public Enemy

Speaking of the Zulus, he writes,

This is what mankind and human society were like before class divisions arose. And if we compare their condition with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized people today, we will find an enormous gulf between the present-day proletarian and small peasant and the ancient free member of a gens.

I'm not using scare-quotes because I'd suggest that Engels, unlike his 19th century peers, isn't being Eurocentric. Engels is drawing a world-historical example. He uses European examples, and he's quick to point out where the gens exists to the present day (e.g. in Ireland.) He's saying world development proceeds in different ways, in different places. But his first premise is that capitalism - the system that began in, and was forcibly exported by, Europe - is degrading, humanly corrosive and needs to be destroyed, utterly.


(Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India)

This is the only position from which an understanding of colonized peoples based on solidarity, not paternalism, can start from. It's why Teiowi:Sonte Alfred Deer of the Haudenosaunee People writes (New Socialist magazine #58 - pdf):

The Haudenosaunee are a participatory constitutional democracy based upon socialist principles.

Both Karl Marx and Frederic Engels were fascinated by the political and economic organization of the Haudenosaunee. In fact, Marx wrote extensive notes on his study of Lewis H. Morgan’s treatment of the Haudenosaunee in Ancient Society (1877) and League of the Iroquois (1852), interested particularly in the Haudenosaunee’s democratic organization in relation to its economic structure.

After Marx, Engels wrote Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), which directly examined the political organization of the Haudenosaunee. In this sense, it can be suggested that the Haudenosaunee pioneered modern socialism, and that our society was in fact the original Socialist Paradise.

Capitalism has a lot to answer for (Doctor Who: The Next Doctor)

Engels is not romanticizing non-capitalist* societies. He says the division of labour developed in the face of

the almost complete domination of man by external nature, alien, opposed, incomprehensible to him... the tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a superior power, instituted by nature, to which the individual remained absolutely subject in feeling, thought and deed.

Marxists think the development of the means of production - social wealth - is a qualified good thing. It allows generalized prosperity for all; it certainly allows the computer and internet connection I'm writing this on. But this doesn't answer the more important question: what kind of development? What matters is the form, not the content. What Eurocentric anthropologists called 'savagery' were often societies organized around ecologically complex, steady-state subsistence societies. Capitalism, on the other hand, as a form of social development, is wholly reactionary. And Engels is absolutely clear what he condemns:

The lowest interests - base greed, brutal sensuality, sordid avarice, selfish plunder of common possessions - usher in the new, civilized society, class society; the most outrageous means - theft, rape, deceit and treachery - undermine and topple the old, classless, gentile society. And the new society, during all the 2500 years of its existence, has never been anything but the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed great majority; and it is so today more than ever before. (98)

I challenge anyone to read racism, colonialism or even apologetic Eurocentrism into that. Engels is clear that his moral - and more importantly, political - sensibilities lie with non-capitalist peoples.

(
La Commune)

Finally, there are parts that read like a saucy Victorian novel, particularly where he describes the development of sex in class society: "the young female captives become the objects of the sensual lust of the victors" (62), "beautiful young slaves who belong to the man with all they have" (63), "serious unnatural vices" and "the perversions of boylove" (65) - ooooh Mr. Engels, I feel all flushed, I must loosen the clasps on my bodice...

*I use the term 'non-capitalist' rather than 'pre-capitalist' to avoid the connotation of a value judgment. There are no non-capitalist societies today: indigenous nations join the ranks of those subject to imperial power in the underdeveloped world. And as Murray Bookchin points out, this process goes back centuries.

Labels: anthropology, capitalism, Engels, Eurocentrism, indigenous