The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

By Friedrich Engels

"Since civilisation is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction. Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backward in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority."

First published in 1884, The Origin of the Family is one of the most important works of Marxist theory. Basing himself on the research of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels builds on his revolutionary discovery that the family structure has passed through multiple stages throughout history. He shows that, ultimately, the determining factor in these changes is the economic mode of production.

Using the method of historical materialism, Engels also demonstrates that the oppression of women has not always existed, and is not the product of inherent traits. Rather, it emerged historically with the production of a surplus and the division of society into classes. He also shows that the state, far from being a neutral arbiter in society, arose with the emergence of class society. It is ultimately "armed bodies of men" in defence of the ruling class.

To commemorate 200 years since Engels' birth, we are proud to republish this extraordinarily relevant work of scientific socialism. This new edition includes an introduction by Rob Sewell, placing the text in its historical context and defending the fundamental ideas and method of Marxism, which has stood the test of time. This book is a must-read for all socialists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wellred
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005427986

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was, like Karl Marx, a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Unlike Marx, Engels was born to a wealthy family, but he used his family's money to spread his philosophy of empowering workers, exposing what he saw as the bourgeoisie's sinister motives and encouraging the working class to rise up and demand their rights. He wrote several works in collaboration with Marx - most famously "The Communist Manifesto" - and supported Marx financially after he was forced to relocate to London. Following Marx's death, Engels compiled the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, ensuring that this seminal document would live on. He continued writing for the rest of his life and died in London in 1894.

Book preview

Introduction by Rob Sewell

The great antiquity of mankind upon the earth has been conclusively established, wrote the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in the opening preface of his pioneering work Ancient Society, published in 1877. It was subtitled Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. The revolutionary ideas contained in this book represented a complete departure in this field of human development and served to found a materialist, evolutionary school of anthropology. It was on the basis of this work that Friedrich Engels wrote his masterpiece, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Today, there have been numerous attempts to discredit the work of both Engels and Morgan, alleging that the evidence on which they developed their theories was either unreliable, outdated or even false. There is no evidence, they say, for their ‘outlandish schema’ in establishing stages in the evolution of the family linked to the development of society. They point to the research done on present-day hunter-gatherer societies as proof of the errors of the Engels-Morgan thesis.

Although evidence from hunter-gatherer societies is obviously extremely important in understanding the early period of humanity, it certainly does not exhaust the question and is only one of a variety of sources that needs to be taken into consideration. While these societies contain characteristics of primitive social relations, they have also evolved and come into contact with other more developed cultures, which have affected them to one degree or another. To piece together life in primitive society requires other evidence from a wide range of sources, not least from mythology and classical literature.

Astonishingly, modern anthropologists seem to dismiss these sources as ‘unreliable’ and even ‘unscientific’. While there needs to be a certain degree of caution in analysing such material, these do contain important glimpses and fragments of extinct ancient cultures. To ignore this evidence is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Those who base themselves on a narrow orthodox conception of anthropology are not able to appreciate the important wealth of material that exists in other areas, which, if treated with due respect, can illuminate the pathways to our distant ancestry. This was understood by both Morgan and Engels, and provided them with a far greater understanding of prehistoric society than many modern anthropologists.

Morgan came very close to Marx’s conception of historical materialism in his investigations into early human society.

Inventions and discoveries stand in serial relations along the lines of human progress, and register its successive stages, while social and civil institutions, in virtue of their connection with perpetual human wants, have been developed from a few primary germs of thought. They exhibit a similar register of progress. These institutions, inventions and discoveries have embodied and preserved the principal facts now remaining illustrative of this experience. When collated and compared they tend to show the unity of origin of mankind, the similarity of human wants in the same stage of advancement, and the uniformity of operations of the human mind in similar conditions of society. (L. Morgan, Ancient Society, Henry Holt and Co., 1877, p. VI.)

For the first time, a revolutionary materialist outlook embraced the new field of social anthropology, which regarded human evolution as a series of separate but interlocking stages: savagery, barbarism and civilisation, each of which had its own characteristic modes of production and superstructure. In drawing conclusions about the state of society in these separate stages, Morgan broke from the narrow empirical outlook and pragmatism of his contemporaries and unconsciously applied the method of dialectical materialism to the understanding of early human development.

Morgan’s research and scientific outlook constituted as much a revolution in anthropology as Darwin’s work in evolutionary biology.

Regarding the origins of the family – as with property relations in general – Morgan linked their evolution to the various stages of human society. The family has passed through successive forms, and created great systems of consanguinity and affinity which have remained to the present time, he wrote. However, he was careful not to fall into oversimplified conclusions and vulgar ‘unilinealism’ – allegations that were falsely made against him. As Morgan explains:

In speaking thus positively of the several forms of the family in their relative order, there is a danger of being misunderstood. I do not mean to imply that one form rises complete in a certain status of society, flourishes universally and exclusively wherever tribes are found in the same status, and then disappears in another, which is the next higher form… (Ibid., pp. 461-462.)

Morgan realised that while there were different stages through which social forms evolved, historical development was very contradictory – containing both combined and uneven elements. His approach represented a profound break with the old nineteenth century outlook and launched anthropological study on a radically different basis.

This radical approach also opened up a new understanding about women’s oppression and how it arose historically with the end of the primitive communist communities and the development of private property. Such a conception challenged the whole edifice of the so-called eternal patriarchal family and the ‘natural’ inferiority and subordination of women.

Science allows us to understand the world in which we live. It has allowed us to build up a picture of the past, and even permitted us to understand the origins of our own species. However, as in all fields of scientific study, there is a continuing conflict of outlook and method among the schools of anthropology about how the past should be interpreted. One is broadly based upon a materialist, evolutionary approach, while the other attempts to approach the past through the narrow prejudices of present-day class society, helping to reinforce the notions of ‘natural’ inequality, male domination and class rule. The latter are linked to the socio-biologists, who regard human beings as the ‘naked ape’, whose instincts are determined genetically, and where culture plays a very limited role in determining what qualities makes us human. This reactionary, anti-evolutionary school of thought – which is false to the core – is also represented by modern day ‘functionalism’, and epitomised by the writings of Talcott Parsons, Bronislaw Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.

Marxism, with its own scientific world outlook, has a special interest in this field of human development. In fact, both Marx and Engels acquired a profound personal interest in the latest discoveries of science, which confirmed their own philosophical materialist outlook. Only dialectical materialism can explain the laws of change, which sees the world not as a state of ready-made things, but made up of complex processes, which go through an uninterrupted transformation of coming into being and passing away. With this method, they were also able to explain and deepen the advances of scientific research, not only in history but also in nature, as can be seen from Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.

The discoveries of Charles Darwin, despite some of his crude formulations, were heralded by Marx and Engels as a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of biology and evolution. Marx himself wanted to dedicate his book Capital to Darwin, but the latter turned down the offer, fearing too close an association with the German revolutionary and his ideas. Nevertheless, while criticising any regressive ideas, Marx and Engels trumpeted the advances of modern science at every stage.

Engels wrote:

According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a two-fold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of the development of labour, on the one hand, and the family, on the other. (F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Wellred Books, 2020, p. XXXII.)

In other words, how people live is determined by the stage of development of the productive forces on the one hand and the organisation of the family on the other.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Marx and Engels saw the confirmation of their materialist outlook in the striking discoveries, not only of Charles Darwin, but also the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Engels states:

For Morgan in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilisation it had led him, in the main points, to the same conclusions as Marx. (Ibid., p. XXXI.)

So impressed was he with the work of the American anthropologist, that between 1880 and 1881 Marx had copied and summarised lengthy extracts of Morgan’s Ancient Society in his notebooks, later published as his Ethnological Notebooks. Marx had intended to write about Morgan’s discoveries, bringing out their full significance, but with ill-health and then his death in 1883, he was not able to fulfil this ambition. This task was left to his friend and collaborator Engels, which he managed to complete within a year of Marx’s death with the publication of his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

While Marx had reached his own conclusions about the evolution of society from the historical evidence of class society, namely slavery, feudalism and capitalism, Engels based himself on Morgan’s work (as important as Darwin is in biology) to elaborate the materialist view on humankind’s earliest period of existence – the epoch of primitive communism and the later emergence of class society. In his work Engels took over Morgan’s historical classifications of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, which were also divided into lower and upper stages. It is within the first two social classifications, primarily the epoch of pre-class society, that Origin of the Family is concerned, tracing the break-up of primitive communism, the emergence of private property and the state, as well as the victory of the patriarchal family over ‘mother right’.

According to the famous materialist archaeologist Professor Gordon Childe:

The latter (Morgan) had collected data of just the kind suited for illustrating the materialist conception of history. The criteria he used for distinguishing between savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, if not precisely ‘forces of production’ – still less ‘modes of production’ – at least approximated more closely thereto than the criteria expounded by any other school at that time. (G. Childe, Social Evolution, Watts and Co., 1952, p.10.)

Childe concludes: In the end Engels succeeded brilliantly in correlating the transition from one ‘status’ to the next in Morgan’s scheme with changes in the productive forces at the disposal of society. (Ibid., p.10.)

The earliest epoch described by Morgan, savagery, is based upon a food-gathering economy. This provided for some 98% of human existence on the planet, and covers the whole of what archaeologists call the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, and geologists classify as the Pleistocene.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, some societies around the ‘Fertile Crescent’, where the climate and resources were favourable, increased their food supply through plant cultivation and the breeding of animals, opening up a new stage in social development. This represented the birth of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the emergence of stable village communities. This new food-producing economy was identified by Morgan as the stage of barbarism, and is presented by archaeologists as the Neolithic or New Stone Age. With the emergence of agriculture, the nomadic life of hunting and gathering, which had dominated existence for more than two million years, rapidly went into decline. Although these are generalisations and need to be qualified, they are important classifications that allow us to understand the evolution of society.

The next stage outlined by Morgan was that of civilisation, born in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus, with the development of surplus foodstuffs used to support the growing urban life. The first 2,000 years of civilisation coincide with what archaeologists call the Bronze Age. It represented the economic basis of what Marx called the Asiatic mode of production (in Egypt, China and Mesopotamia), as well as slavery (in Greece and Rome), and heralded the emergence of class society. It was a revolutionary transformation, in so far as it freed a tiny privileged proportion of the population from the burdens of work, allowing them time to develop culture, science and art to the full.

With regard to our own human origins, the transition from ape to man may have occurred as long ago as six million years, with the emergence of the first hominids. This was the beginning of savagery, and the infancy of the humanity. Engels was able to explain our origins in his brilliant essay, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, written in 1876, five years after the appearance of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and only twenty years after the discovery of the first ever Neanderthal remains. Amazingly, Engels, using the method of dialectical materialism, was able to explain the evolutionary process despite very limited fossil evidence. As he wrote in the opening lines:

Labour is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself. (F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Lawrence and Wishart, 1946, p. 279.)

Engels recognised that the erect posture in walking represented the decisive step in the transition from ape to man. This allowed the hand to be free and could attain ever greater dexterity and skill. Thus, states Engels, the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. He then went on to explain that this had further revolutionary consequences. But the hand did not exist by itself. It was only one member of an entire, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served. He explained how the first upright posture freed the hand for using tools, which in turn increased intelligence (brain size) and later developed speech. Tools were first made two-and-half million years ago, while Homo sapiens evolved some 100,000 years ago.

While these elements in human evolution were mentioned by Darwin, Engels changed their order of appearance in a decisive way. Darwin assumed that the brain, and therefore intellect, had grown up prior to bipedalism and the use of the hands in tool-making, whereas Engels saw the development correctly in reverse order. The idealism of Darwin was placed on its materialist head.

How these humans lived is extremely difficult to piece together. Scientists from various fields – zoology, anthropology, palaeontology, and archaeology – are involved in such a reconstruction. Man is a social animal. Early humans banded together for protection and survival. Co-operation was therefore an essential ingredient in the shaping of human society. I should regard the social instinct as one of the most essential factors in the evolution of humans from apes, explained Engels. (K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 45, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, p. 109.) While life in this early human band can only be guessed at, given the scarcity of evidence, palaeontologists and anthropologists have provided us with important clues. And yet, how this information is interpreted is vital in understanding the lives of early humans.

It is clear that the period of savagery – which accounts for the vast majority of our existence on the planet – was dominated by a hunter-gatherer way of life. There is evidence of hominid campsites, which reveal that our ancestors lived in social groups. Stone tools were manufactured and used to dig roots, scrape skins, and hunt with. Scavenging was also an important element in our early development. At this stage, there were no such things as private property, classes, money or the state. In fact, it was, to use Marxist terminology, a period of primitive communism, an egalitarian society where everything was produced and consumed in common and where women were held in high esteem. Up to the present time, this notion was vigorously opposed by every leading school of anthropology. The very idea of a communistic way of life was ruled out. Such a view conflicted with the prejudices of class society, which reflected the outlook of present-day anthropology.

Despite their limitations and shortcomings, the nineteenth century anthropologists, Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States and Edward Tylor in England, pioneered a materialist view of anthropology and made a profound contribution to this field of human knowledge. This was recognised by Marx and Engels. However, rather than build upon their achievements, there has been a deliberate attempt to discredit them. In the same way as the modern bourgeois economists have sought to discredit the classical economists for basing themselves upon a labour theory of value, today’s orthodox anthropologists have turned their backs on Morgan and Tylor. That is why it is important to come to their defence as genuine scientists in this field and oppose the reactionary tendencies represented by the functionalist school, who have an abstract unhistorical view of ‘culture’.

Nevertheless, given the overwhelming evidence from hunter-gatherer societies, this notion of primitive communism is now increasingly accepted by a growing number of anthropologists. Richard Lee states:

Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small scale kin based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations. (R. Lee, ‘Reflections on Primitive Communism’, in T. Ingold et al., Hunters and Gatherers, Vol. 1, Berg, 1991, p. 253.)

The orthodox anthropological view of this period not only rejected the concept of ‘primitive communism’, but put forward the image of a primitive, brutal, violent, male-dominated society. Man is man, and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of evolving years we killed for a living, states Robert Ardrey. (R. Ardrey, The hunting Hypothesis, Atheneum, 1976, p. 10.) Raymond Dart, after discovering the first Australopithecine remains, described it as the predatory transition from ape to man. (R. Dart, ‘The predatory transition from ape to man’, in International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, Vol. 1, Issue 4.) Yet this view has been challenged and discredited by recent evidence from hunter-gatherer peoples. Basing themselves on observation of the !Kung San of northern Botswana and other peoples, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, came to the conclusion that the current evidence points to such co-operation between large groups of hunters as a key element in the emergence of human characteristics… Co-operation must be a very basic motivation in human nature. (R. Leakey and R. Lewin, People of the Lake, pp. 110-111.)

Egalitarian relationship

In a separate study, Patricia Draper shows the co-operation and equality that exists between the sexes. She states that !Kung women impress one as self-contained people with a high sense of self-esteem. They are vivacious and self-confident. (P. Draper, in R. Reiter, Towards an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, 1977, p. 83.) !Kung women contribute equally, if not more than men to the food supply. They also retain control over the food they have gathered. Gathering is considered women’s work, as in most hunter-gatherer societies, while men hunt. However, men also gather at certain times, and collect water as well.

The network that holds these societies together, both within the clans and between them, is kinship. Both Morgan and Engels recognise not only co-operation in these early hunter-gatherer societies, but as all food, the basis of such life, was communally collected, shared, and consumed, there was also an equality of relations between men and women.

Many of the basic organising features of this hunting and gathering group contribute to a relaxed and egalitarian relationship between men and women, states Draper. (Ibid., p. 94.) Morgan fiercely challenged the assumption that these early societies were patriarchal or male dominated, which was the orthodox view at the time. He felt, on the contrary, a view also endorsed by Engels, that primitive society had a high regard for women. This observation was based upon Morgan’s close study of the North American Iroquois, where women had a powerful position within the tribe. This is confirmed by ample contemporary studies. As the above description of the !Kung illustrates, the status of women is equal to men, and their communal economy is based upon production for use. The land is ‘owned’ by the group and passed from one generation to the next. While there is a division of labour, there exists no exploitation, no surplus value, no domination or class-based relations. Consequently, there is no competitive zeal as in capitalist society, and no ‘dog-eat-dog’ mentality. In its place is co-operation, sharing and general reciprocity.

As Heckewelder says:

The Indians think that the Great Spirit has made the earth, and all that it contains, for the common good of mankind; when he stocked the country and gave them plenty of game, it was not for the good of the few, but of all. Everything is given in common to the sons of men. Whatever liveth on the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters, was given jointly to all, and everyone is entitled to his share. (Quoted in P. Lafargue, The Evolution of Property, Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1880, p. 18.)

During the state of original promiscuity, to use Engels’ phrase, where within the tribe every woman belonged to every man, and every man to every woman, some kind of mother right inevitably existed. As all certainty of paternity was excluded in this situation, descent or lineage could only be reckoned through the female line. This must have been universal. Given that mothers were the only ascertainable parents of the children, women were treated with a high degree of respect, and even reverence. This revolutionary view originated in a study of the family by the German historian Bachofen in his book entitled Mother Right (Das Mutterrecht) in 1861, which Engels described as a "complete