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Vol. 80/No. 12 March 28, 2016
(Books of the Month column)
‘Women’s oppression, like the state, is not eternal’
Below are excerpts from the introduction to The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State by Frederick Engels, one of Pathfinder’s
Books of the Month in March. It was written by Evelyn Reed, a leader of
the Socialist Workers Party and participant in the women’s liberation
movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Reed wrote extensively on the origins of
women’s oppression and the fight for their emancipation, building on
Engels’ work. Engels, along with Karl Marx, a founder of the modern
revolutionary workers movement, shows how women’s oppression is neither
“natural” nor everlasting, and how the development of the modern working
class creates the basis to end that oppression. Copyright © 1972 by
Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY EVELYN REED
Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
published almost a hundred years ago, is today enjoying a resurgence of
popularity. This came about with the emergence of the women’s liberation
movement in the United States and Canada during the late 1960s. Along
with organizing and acting to end the deep-rooted discrimination against
the female sex, women today want to know how their oppression originated
and whether it has always existed. That is why so many feminists are
turning to Engels’s classic work, a book that can not only arm the
movement theoretically but inspire it with confidence that liberation
can be won.
This study was based upon the findings set forth by Lewis H. Morgan,
founder of American anthropology, in his Ancient Society, published in
1877. Engels’s book appeared in 1884 in Zurich in an edition of 5,000
copies. For its fourth printing in 1891 he prepared a revised version
with a new preface which took into account additional data on the subject.
This work has gone through many editions in many languages. It is one of
the most widely read and influential contributions to historical
materialism, analyzing the transition from primitive to class society
with the same method that Marx employed to investigate the capitalist
system. As Lenin appraised it in his lecture “The State,” delivered at
the Sverdlov University, July 11, 1919, “This is one of the fundamental
works of modern socialism, every sentence of which can be accepted with
confidence, in the assurance that it has not been said at random but is
based on immense historical and political material” (Collected Works,
vol. 29, p. 473).
Although the book was not published until after Marx’s death, it was, as
Engels said, a joint project born from the constant interchange of views
over decades between the two men on the origins of civilization and its
institutions. Maxim Kovalevsky, the Russian ethnologist, had brought a
copy of Morgan’s book from the United States to England for Marx to
read. Marx immediately began making notes on it to spell out his own
conclusions. Utilizing these fragmentary materials, Engels carried out
the assignment that his collaborator had initiated, as he had done for
the unfinished second and third volumes of Capital.
Both men were struck by the fact that Morgan had in his own way taken a
materialist approach to the study of primitive society. Through his
careful research, pursued over forty years, Morgan unwittingly
spotlighted the fact that the key institutions of civilized society —
the family, private property, and the state — were nonexistent in
prehistoric life. These topics became the title of Engels’s book.
Morgan’s data confirmed the Marxist principle that social institutions
are not unchanging or eternal but come into existence at certain periods
of history as a result of specific socioeconomic conditions. Engels gave
unstinting praise to Morgan’s thesis that the maternal gens or clan
preceded the father-family in history, proving that even the family
institution is no exception to that rule. This discovery, he said, held
the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution had
for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.
“Since its discovery,” he wrote, “we know in which direction to conduct
our researches, what to investigate, and how to classify the results of
our investigations.”…
Side by side with the rise of state power to maintain the rule of the
rich over the poor, there also developed the coercive patriarchal family
institution. This brought about the dispersal and isolation of women.
The new branches of labor were taken over by the men, while women, who
had formerly played a leading role in production, were relegated to
domestic servitude for individual husband, home, and family. Where
formerly women had played the most influential role in community affairs
corresponding to their place in production, they were now removed from
public life and cloistered in the home. The patriarchal family arose to
control and subjugate women in the very same process whereby the state
arose to subjugate and control laboring men. As Engels demonstrates,
class exploitation and sexual oppression of women were born together to
serve the interests of the private-property system. And they work
together for the same ends to the present day.
The state has been the major instrument for the perpetuation of
sovereignty by the wealthy classes through all three stages of civilized
class society, from slavery through feudalism to capitalism. However
much its forms of domination have varied, from autocracy to democracy,
the state has served to keep social power in the hands of the exploiting
class. As Engels wrote, “The cohesive force of civilized society is the
state, which in all typical periods is exclusively the state of the
ruling class, and in all cases remains essentially a machine for keeping
down the oppressed, exploited class.”
To those who believe that the state is eternal, Engels emphasizes that
it is a late arrival in history which did not exist before the rise of
the private-property system. He gives three examples of the growth of
the state out of the ruins of the gens or clan commune; the Athenian,
the Roman, and the Germanic states. Although today the capitalist state,
serving the giant monopolies and their imperialist designs, towers over
the rest of society, it will survive only so long as the conditions that
produced it continue to exist. He predicted that this coercive agent of
the ruling powers would begin to wither away once the private property
system that required it was abolished through a social revolution. A
stateless society existed before class society appeared and will again
come to be after capitalism disappears.
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