The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
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Frederick Engels The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Introduction by Pat Brewer 4 THE ORIGIN O F T HE FAMILY , PRIVA T E PR op ER T Y AND T HE ST A T E © Resistance Books 2004 ISBN 1876646357 Published by Resistance Books, 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Australia Printed by El Faro Printing, 79 King St, Newtown NSW 2042, Australia Contents IN T R O DUC T I O N by Pat Brewer .................................................................................7 PREFACE to T HE FIR st EDI T I O N 1884 By Frederick Engels ....................................25 PREFACE to T HE FO UR T H GERMAN EDI T I O N 1891 By Frederick Engels ................27 THE ORIGIN O F T HE FAMILY , PRIVA T E PR op ER T Y AND T HE ST A T E by Frederick Engels I. Prehistoric Stages of Culture .........................................................................39 1. Savagery ....................................................................................................39 2. Barbarism ..................................................................................................41 II. The Family ....................................................................................................45 III. The Iroquois Gens .........................................................................................88 IV. The Grecian Gens ........................................................................................100 V. The Rise of the Athenian State ....................................................................108 VI. The Gens and the State in Rome .................................................................117 VII. The Gens Among the Celts and Germans ...................................................126 VIII. The Formation of the State Among the Germans ........................................138 IX. Barbarism and Civilisation ..........................................................................148 Not E S ...................................................................................................................165 GL oss ARY .............................................................................................................171 Literary and mythological names ................................................................177 6 THE ORIGIN O F T HE FAMILY , PRIVA T E PR op ER T Y AND T HE ST A T E Frederick Engels in the 1870s. Introduction By Pat Brewer In 1884 Frederick Engels first publishedThe Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This work systematically set out to provide a social explanation for the emergence of women’s oppression with the development of the social institutions of the patriarchal family and private property at a particular historic period. Such an explanation stood as a direct challenge to the dominant religious view that women’s inferior status rested on God-ordained biological, physical, intellectual and moral inferiority. Even as science and scientific methodology gained credibility as the basis for the pursuit of knowledge during the 19th century, the explanation for gender difference and the inequality of women shifted from being based on religious to a very similar explanation that such inequality was based on natural difference. Nature, not God, determined this difference and this provided the rationale for inequality. Engels, like his co-worker Karl Marx, disputed this type of explanation, arguing that such views determined women’s oppression as timeless and unchangeable — something they refuted with their materialist analysis of the rise of exploitation and the development of class society and with it, the emergence of systematic oppression of women. Liberation from gender oppression, like liberation from class oppression, was possible. The alternative explanations of religion and immutable nature were revealed as part of the ideological justification for the maintenance of the existing system of exploitation. RELEVANCE to DAY Today we face a situation where these types of explanation have regained credibility. Religious fundamentalism is on the rise across the globe — in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. At the same time, with the development of genetic science, a new variant of biological determinism has emerged. So a new edition of Engels’ famous work is very timely. Pat Brewer is a longtime feminist activist; she is a member of the Socialist Alliance. 8 THE ORIGIN O F T HE FAMILY , PRIVA T E PR op ER T Y AND T HE ST A T E But it also takes place in the midst of a concerted ideological attack to distort the causes of systematic social inequality and to lay blame on the victims of this inequality — the ideology of neoliberalism. Social inequality is portrayed as natural. The way society is organised, the way that the goods necessary for the survival of the society are produced and distributed, and the social organisation to support and perpetuate this system are exonerated from blame. The fault lies with each individual as to their access to goods and their share of social wealth or lack of it. Systematic inequality and an accumulation of disadvantage are presented as the consequences of individual choice or a lack of diligence and application. Yet at the same time that individual choice is proclaimed as paramount, many of the benefits introduced to address the inequalities of gender won by the struggles of the women’s movement since the 1960s are under attack. This coincides with a war on the welfare rights won by the labour movement during the 20th century. A campaign is currently being waged by the capitalist class and its governments to reduce real wages, to cut back publicly funded social services and welfare, to attack youth, and enforce a user-pays approach to education, health care and aged care. This offensive needs the traditional unit, the family, to absorb the fallout. The family is the one major sphere of capitalist society in which labour replacement services can be absorbed without payment — women pick up the burden unpaid. Governments’ social engineering policies have facilitated a push back into the home. Child-care costs have increased while the range of child-care services has been reduced. Monetary concessions for the one-wage household have been put into place. The job market has been restructured such that full-time work (and its accompanying living wage) is being transformed into part-time and casual employment, predominantly filled by women. If these women have children, their wages barely cover their child- care costs and jeopardise any family allowances paid by the state. These measures are not aimed at driving all women permanently out of the work force. Rather, they make women more vulnerable to increased exploitation, by driving down their place in the work force (lower wages, fewer hours, less job security, fewer holidays, more piece work, less safety and less unionisation). Thus this attack is focused on a sector of the work force whose place in the work force has traditionally been seen as marginal, but its overall effect is to exert a downward pressure on the wages and conditions of all workers. The policies bolster the acceptance that women’s “natural” place is first or foremost in the family as the unpaid carers of husbands, children, the sick and aged and therefore their waged work is only secondary. This can be seen in government pressure to force single parents (predominantly women) back into the work force as Introduction 9 their youngest child reaches the age of 12 under the provision of “mutual obligation” for welfare. Women have to indicate and provide evidence of preparation of re-entry into the work force to ensure the delivery of single-parent pensions. At the same time there is an ideological line that divides women based on another theory of difference — women are either careerists or true mothers, or those who manage to handle part-time work and unpaid caring roles but who are only really committed to homemaking. Whether this is “natural” or a reflection of choice is immaterial to the theory. Either viewpoint deliberately ignores the social and economic disadvantage structured into class society. WO MEN ’S opp RE ss I O N I S N ot E T ERNAL Marxists reject any claims that women’s oppression is eternal. We argue that while women are oppressed today and have been in the past, they have not always been so. This oppression arose at a particular stage of social development and was institutionalised through the particular form of the patriarchal family characteristic of that stage of social development. In other words, women’s oppression is social, not biologically given, and has evolved over time. This dialectical and materialist explanation is based on Marx and Engels’ general thesis that the production and reproduction of immediate life is the determining element of social life. This includes both biological as well as economic production: the production of the means of existence — food, clothing, shelter, tools necessary for that production — and as well, the production of human beings themselves. Therefore the form taken by a society at any point in its historical development is “conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand, and of the family on the other”.1 From this understanding Engels developed his analysis of the development of society and, at a particular stage, the subjugation of women. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Engels built on the work of Morgan and the other 19th-century