SOURCE: “Engels' Origin of the Family as a Contribution to Marx's Social Economy,” in Review of Social Economy, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, December, 1979, pp. 345-369.

[In the following essay, Wiltgen provides an interpretation of Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and maintains that through such anthropological studies, Engels succeeded in offering “a detailed exposition of the socioeconomic development of pre-capitalist societies.”]

Marx's method was largely historical. As a consequence, a proper understanding of Marx's social economy requires a good grasp of what he termed “the materialist conception of history.” Marx's and Engels' most extensive treatment of their approach to history was in their German Ideology, an unpublished manuscript which they completed in 1846 and “abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice” after failing to secure a publisher for it. [Marx, 1970, p. 22] Nonetheless, Marx's preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) is most frequently cited as the definitive statement of the Marxian interpretation of historical processes. In the latter work, Marx stated:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. [Marx, 1970, pp. 20-21]

Since it was the first clear, yet concise, statement of the materialist conception of history to be published by either Marx or Engels,¹ it is not surprising that it has also become the most widely quoted. What is more important, however, is that it is the most explicit expression of the importance Marx attached to economics in his study of history. In fact, on the basis of this preface Marx's ideas have been frequently characterized as exemplifying “the economic interpretation of history.” His statement certainly lends itself to this interpretation. To the extent that this view of Marx accurately reflects his notion of historical development, it leaves his economics with a limited and very rigid structure which fails to sufficiently account for the complexities of social change. Such is the case even though in Marx's conception of history, the prime mover, man the producer, is constantly acting on his environment, thereby changing the circumstances of his existence and his own nature.

Nevertheless, without engaging in an extended discussion of the relative importance of the base and superstructure in Marx's analysis,² it is possible to partly remedy this deficiency by developing a latent aspect of his and Engels' conception of history which has received little attention. Only once during their lifetime did Marx or Engels publish a statement of this feature of their approach to history. The occasion was in 1884, the year following Marx's death, when Engels published his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In the preface to the first edition of this work Engels described production as having a dual dimension. His statement dealing with this matter is so important that it is worth quoting in its entirety:

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.³ [Engels, 1942, p. 5]

In summary, Engels not only found there to be a “twofold character” to production, but he also laid considerable stress on the role of population as a determinant of social development.

Most Marxists have either ignored this passage or referred to it as a “misstatement.” [Leacock, “Introduction” to Engels, 1973, p. 28] The posture adopted by the Soviets is exemplary of this general attitude. They contend that Engels was

guilty of inexactitude by citing the propagation of the species alongside the production of the means of subsistence as causes determining the development of society and of social institutions. In the text proper of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels himself demonstrated by an analysis of concrete material that the mode of material production is the principal factor conditioning the development of society and social institutions.⁴ [Cited in Petrović, 1967, pp. 96-97]

The use of the term “inexactitude” is peculiar, and the argument itself appears to be ill-founded. The primary inspiration for Engels' study, which he termed “the execution of a bequest” for Marx⁵ [p. 5], was Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization. Marx's notes, which Engels employed in writing The Origin of the Family, revolved around Morgan's work;⁶ indeed, Engels' entire book is also centered upon Morgan.⁷ The two aspects of Morgan's book which apparently concerned them most were: (a) Morgan's “rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of patriarchal gens of the civilized peoples,” which in Engels' opinion had “the same importance for anthropology as Darwin's theory of evolution has for biology and Marx's theory of surplus value for political economy;” and (b) that this rediscovery “enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which … the classic stages of development in their main outlines are … determined.” [p. 16] According to Engels, “Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present the results of Morgan's researches in the light of the conclusions of his own—within certain limits, I may say our—materialistic conception of history and thus make clear their full significance” (my emphasis). [p. 5] The essential purpose of Engels' research was thus reasonably well defined, and he appears to have had adequate background and information to carry it out. Engels obviously did not view his conclusions as diverging from those of Marx.

Furthermore, Marx's and Engels' other writings seem to be consistent with The Origin of the Family. In early 1857, when Marx was writing about pre-capitalist economic formations in the fifth notebook of his Grundrisse, he reached the following conclusion:

The survival of the commune as such in the old mode requires the reproduction of its members in the presupposed objective conditions. Production itself, the advance of population (this too belongs with production), necessarily suspends these conditions little by little; destroys them instead of reproducing them …, and with that, the communal system declines and falls together with the property relations on which it is based. [Marx, 1973, p. 486]

More than a decade earlier, Marx and Engels, in their first truly joint work, clearly stated that a

circumstance which, from the very first, enters into historical development is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between men and wife, parents and children, the FAMILY. The family which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs, a subordinate one …, and must then be treated and analyzed according to the existing empirical data, not according to “the concept of the family” …

The production of life, both of one's own in labor and of fresh life in procreation … appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship … It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation, or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a productive force.⁸ [Marx and Engels, 1947, pp. 17-18]

Immediately following his controversial comment in The Origin of the Family, Engels reiterated this same basic argument:

The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of the products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences in wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor powers of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old order to the new conditions, until at least their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the family is completely dominated by the system of private property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.⁹ [Engels, 1942, pp. 5-6]

This passage is important for three reasons: first, it shows a consistency between the earlier and later writings of Marx and Engels; secondly, it explains the role that Engels envisioned the propagation of the species to play in historical development; finally, the fact that it represents an attempt on the part of Engels to summarize the results of his entire study, seems to indicate that there is no contradiction between the preface of the first edition and subsequent material in the book.¹⁰ Engels therefore apparently grasped the essence of the Marxian relationship between demographic and social developments.

Marx's Paris manuscripts of 1844 marked an attempt to develop what one might call a philosophical anthropology. [Cf. Marx, 1974a, pp. 97-98] It was nonetheless Engels rather than Marx who developed the anthropological-demographic facet of their materialist conception of history. In his analysis of early demographic development in The Origin of the Family Engels made use of the categories formulated by Morgan and thus did not follow closely the perspective which he and Marx had devised for the study of political-economic development.¹¹ Yet there appeared a substantial correspondence and interdependence between the two approaches. The movement from primitive communism via slave economy to feudalism according to Marx-Engels, and the movement from savagery via barbarism to civilization à la Morgan, as interpreted by Engels, both explained the rise of class conflict and exploitation in the context of increasing division of labor and growing commodity production. The former was expressed in political-economic and the latter in anthropological-demographic dimension.

The confusion pertaining to Engels' preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family would not exist had he developed greater continuity between it and the text proper. The connection becomes much more apparent, however, when one interprets the entire work within the context of two unfinished manuscripts which were included as part of his Dialectics of Nature. The first of these, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition of Ape to Man,” [Engels, 1964, pp. 172-186] details Engels' conception of the gradual evolution of the society of hominids to that of Homo sapiens. The second is a fragmentary note in which Engels presents a critique of Darwin.¹² [Engels, 1964, pp. 310-314] In the latter piece Engels contended that

Darwin's mistake lies precisely in lumping together in “natural selection: or the “survival of the fittest” two absolutely separate things:

1. Selection by the pressure of overpopulation, where the strongest survive in the first place, but can also be the weakest in many respects.

2. Selection by greater capacity of adaption to altered circumstances, where the survivors are better suited to these circumstances, but where this adaption as a whole can mean progress …

The main thing: that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding the possibility of evolution in many other directions. [Engels, 1964, p. 312]

This critique allows one to draw some interesting inferences pertaining to Marxian demography.¹³ But what is important for the present argument is that these two manuscripts provide one with the necessary evolutionary perspective to interpret Engels' Origin of the Family. In what follows I have adopted this approach as the basis for explaining Engels' stages of anthropological development in conjunction with their economic, demographic and social features. The only deviation from the Engels-Morgan format is a discussion of the evolution of man as a species where it will become apparent that there is indeed a close correspondence between Engels' preface and the remainder of his work.

MAN'S EMERGENCE AS A UNIQUE SPECIES

In Marx's and Engels' conception of history, man's development proceeds in two basic stages: (a) the transition from ape to the attainment of basic human faculties, and (b) man's attempts to realize the full potential of his nature. From a purely theoretical standpoint, the specific characteristics of each stage are well defined and easily separated, but in empirical investigations—such as Engels' Origin of the Family—they may overlap to a considerable extent and may be difficult to distinguish.

The “decisive step in the transition from ape to man,” stated Engels, was when apes no longer relied on their hands while walking across level terrain. [Engels, 1964, p. 172] After the hand became free to be utilized for other tasks, the prospect of a laboring animal became a reality. The increased use of the hand added to the dexterity of these uses. “Thus the hand is not only the organ of labor, it is also the product of labor.” [Engels, 1964, p. 174] Apes, however, were unable to manipulate nature.

the ape herd was satisfied to browse over the feeding area determined for it by geographical conditions or the resistance of neighboring herds; it undertook migrations and struggles to win new feeding grounds, but it was incapable of extracting from them more than they offered in their natural state, except that it unconsciously fertilized the soil with its own excrement. As soon as all possible feeding grounds were occupied, there could be no further increase in the ape population; the number of animals could at best remain stationary. [Engels, 1974, p. 177]

It was these developments which Engels, in his discussion of Darwin, subsumed under the categories “selection by pressure of overpopulation” and “selection by greater capacity of adaption to altered circumstances.”

Man, because of his ability to labor, has the capacity to deal with such circumstances, for this unique ability allows him to work toward a mastery over nature.¹⁴ Even though in the earlier stages of his development man largely lacked control over the results of his activity, he still made significant advances beyond those of the apes. This progress included a certain amount of manipulation of the propagation of his own kind (the emergence of advanced familial institutions) [Engels, 1942, pp. 30-31], and the conditions of his existence (the development of hunting and fishing instruments, building and altering shelters to accommodate different climates, etc.). [Engels, 1964, pp. 177-179]

But man in the making did not escape the processes of selection by overpopulation or selection by adaption. It was only when he became species man that he could approach these phenomena in a meaningful manner, and even then, as Engels pointed out in The Origin of the Family, man was plagued by analogous conditions.

SAVAGERY

Following Morgan, The Origin of the Family divided human history into three basic epochs: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Savagery Engels defined as “the period in which man's appropriation of products in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation.” [Engels, 1942, p. 24] In its earlier time period savagery was characterized by tree dwelling and the consumption of fruit, nuts and roots. Although Engels conceded that “we have no direct evidence to prove its existence,” he concluded that “once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.” [p. 19] As savage society developed, man was able to use fish as a source of food and fire as a means of cooking. The discovery and utilization of fire gave him a certain degree of independence from the climate and other regional factors which previously impaired his mobility. In addition to man's discovery of new roots and other like sources of food, his invention of the club and the spear enabled him to hunt for game. [p. 20] However, “owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now onwards for a long time.” [p. 20]

Engels identified the most mature or “upper stage” of savagery with the invention of the bow and arrow, which allowed the regularization of game as a source of food. According to Engels, the complexity of the bow and arrow seemed to indicate man's familiarity with other items of similar significance. [p. 20] It was for this reason that he concluded that under the advanced form of savagery man “gained some control over the production of the means of subsistence.” [p. 20] Citing particular examples, Engels stated:

we find wooden vessels and utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with the filaments of bark; plaited baskets of baest or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools. With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become common; beams and planks are also sometimes used for building houses. [p. 20]

It may therefore be concluded that Engels' conception of savagery allowed for both selection by overpopulation (as evidenced by his remark pertaining to cannibalism) and selection by adaption (because of the fact that man could not yet deal completely with the multitude of environmental factors confronting him). Nevertheless, historically by far the most important characteristic of savagery was man's general inability to increase the amount of natural products through his activity. This latter fact allows for the possibility that during savagery something other than the production of the means of existence may have been the primary determinant of social organization. The following statement from Capital indicates that Marx clearly saw this as the probable course of events in early human history.

… [A]ncient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellow men in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labor has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. [Marx, I, 1967, p. 79]

Engels found this determining element to lie in procreation, which was in turn reflected in the state of familial organization. In The Origin of the Family he spoke of the “decisive part played by consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples,” [Engels, 1942, p. 26] yet he concluded that by itself consanguinity did not explain social change. Instead, to accurately comprehend the dynamics of early societies one had to study the unique manifestation of this activity in family relations. Quoting the following passage from Morgan, Engels explained the essential character of the association between consanguinity and the level of familial development:

The Family represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advanced from a lower to a higher condition … Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed. [pp. 26-27]

A complete understanding of consanguinity therefore necessitates that it is viewed in the broader context of social evolution.

The relative abundance of land under savagery, combined with man's recently acquired mobility, considerably increased the supply of natural products available to him. Such developments, in addition to his ability to hunt, enabled man to increase his numbers beyond the limitations to which lower forms of life were subjected. Given this state of man's existence, it was probably quite reasonable for Engels to infer that, since man's ability to propagate exceeded his ability to produce the means of subsistence, the production of people must have played an important role in determining social organization. After all, as Engels noted, he and Marx had pointed out in The German Ideology that “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” [p. 58] In addition to providing the essential continuity for man's existence (i.e., to ensure the propagation of the species), the family furnished those heading the family household with security. Obviously, however, the extent of human procreation was subject to a minimal ratio of those capable of procuring the means of subsistence to the number of dependents (primarily the very young and the very old).

Although Engels envisioned the size of the family as having been determined basically by the manner in which mankind reproduced, he also considered environmental factors to have been important in establishing locational limits to family size.¹⁵ Such parameters in no way impaired the role played by procreation in directing man's appropriation of products through the organization of the primitive household. It was the evolution of sexual relations with its impact on the family which first determined changes in man's manner of allocating natural products.¹⁶

Only later, as Engels stated in the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, did man's ability to reproduce himself become subservient to his production of the means of subsistence.¹⁷

The dominant form of family under savagery was that of group marriage. Whereas “the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family—polygyny or separate couples,” man is uniquely capable of polyandry. Because of the jealousy of males in subhuman animal life, polyandry as a family form was diametrically opposed to more all-inclusive groups such as the herd. [p. 30] This reasoning was responsible for the following assessment made by Engels:

This alone is sufficient proof that animal families and primitive human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that does not occur among animals. In small numbers, an animal so defenseless as evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of isolation, with no higher grouping than the single male and the female pair … For man's development beyond the level of the animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed: the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made by the united strength and cooperation of the herd. [p. 30]

Therefore, the fact that the group family was premised on an absence of male jealousy provided the basis for man's collective defense. The stage of human development was then set.

In its earliest stage, human procreation took the form of what Engels somewhat facetiously dubbed “promiscuous sexual intercourse.” As he pointed out, it was promiscuous only “insofar as the restrictions later established by custom did not yet exist.” [p. 32] Engels was nevertheless careful to note that this type of relationship did not preclude “temporary pairings of one man with one woman.” [p. 32]

Familial development under savagery became more refined with the progression of time. Following Morgan, Engels' discussion of this advancement revolved around two family forms. First, there was the consanguine family. It was very similar to the cruder form of family previously described except that it disallowed sexual intercourse between parents and children. [pp. 32-33] Engels conceded that history provided “no demonstrable instance of it.” [p. 33] On the other hand, he stated

… that it must have existed, we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage. [p. 33]

The second stage in the advancement of familial organization which was cited by Morgan was the punaluan family, which excluded brother and sister from sexual intercourse. Because of the greater nearness in age, Engels described this second advancement as “infinitely more important, but also more difficult” than the exclusion of parents and children from participating in relationships with each other. [p. 33] Although it at first banned brothers and sisters of the same mother from engaging in sexual intercourse, it gradually extended to first, second, and third cousins. [pp. 33-34] Concurring with Morgan, Engels quoted the former as concluding that the emergence of the punaluan family was “a good illustration of the operation of the principle of natural selection.” [p. 34] Here we have Engels' Darwinian concept of selection by adaption as applied to the development of mankind.

There can be no question that the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted by this advance were bound to develop more quickly and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters remained the rule and the law. How powerfully the influence of this advance made itself felt is seen in the institution which arose directly out of it and went far beyond it—the gens, which forms the basis of the social order of most, if not all, barbarian peoples of the earth and from which in Greece and Rome we step directly into civilization. [p. 34]

It was Engels' belief that Morgan through no fault of his own had oversimplified his analysis of group marriage. According to Engels, Morgan's work placed an inordinate amount of emphasis on the punaluan family. In reality, Engels claimed, there were other forms of group marriage which had been uncovered by more recent research. The Australian experience showed that group marriage could be based on marriage between groups rather than between individuals as was the case in the punaluan family. More specifically, Australian group marriage allowed members of different groups to engage in sexual intercourse, but it did not allow such relationships within each group. Engels contended that the Australian variant was group marriage in its lower and the punaluan family in its highest stage of development. [pp. 37-40]

Yet Engels found certain elements which were common to both Morgan's work and more current research. Particularly significant was “how the urge toward the prevention of inbreeding asserts itself again and again, feeling the way, however, quite instinctively, without clear consciousness of its aim” [p. 39]—the case of natural selection or selection by adaption. Also of great importance, according to Engels, was the dominance of the mother in determining family lineage. Thus, the female played a prominent role in group marriage. Although he admitted that it did not accurately describe the matter, he termed this role “mother-right.” [p. 36]

To summarize, Engels considered the production of people to have been an important determinant of social organization under savagery. The evolution of this production, as registered in the development and reorganization of the family, was the touchstone to the mobilization of man's material welfare. Engels' reference to the existence of cannibalism, a vent for overpopulation during this period, indicates that he envisioned the state of man's demographic development as suboptimal. Foremost as a manifestation of imperfections in man's procreation, however, was the process of natural selection, which resulted in a narrowing of the family circle. Both natural selection and mother-right were important factors in Engels' explanation of the family structure under savagery.

BARBARISM

Barbarism, the second major epoch in human history, was characterized by Engels as “the period during which man learns to breed animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.” [p. 24] In its earliest phase, barbarism was subject to geographical variation in natural endowments.

Now, the Eastern Hemisphere, the so-called Old World, possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to domestication, and all the varieties of cultivable cereals except one; the Western Hemisphere, America, had no animals that could be domesticated except the llama, which, moreover, was only found in one part of South America, and of all the cultivable cereals only one, though that was the best, namely maize. [p. 21]

The “middle stage” of barbarism in the Western Hemisphere began with the development of man's ability to cultivate plants through irrigation as a source of food, and the utilization of adobe bricks and stone for building shelters. The same stage of development in the Eastern Hemisphere commenced “with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have been unknown far into this period.” [p. 22] This domestication of animals. Engels concluded, was what led to the emergence of pastoral life amongst the Aryans and Semites. Engels further speculated that the much greater availability of meat and milk may have accounted for the superior development of these same peoples relative to their largely vegetarian counterparts in the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, Engels held that, because of the increase in the food supply, this middle stage was generally characterized by a marked decline in cannibalism. [pp. 21-22]

Only the Eastern Hemisphere independently experienced the most advanced phase of barbarism.¹⁸ This stage, which began with the smelting of iron ore and eventually evolved into civilization “with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records,” was “richer in advances in production than all the preceding stages together.” [p. 23] Relative to the previous periods, the invention of the iron plow made possible a tremendous expansion in the food supply, thereby allowing vast increases in the size and density of the population. “Prior to field agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they had allowed half a million people to be united under a central planning organization; probably such a thing never occurred.” [p. 23] In other words, with the upper stage of barbarism for the first time came conditions which were conducive to considerable increases in population density and structural changes in the organization of society.

The continuity of demographic developments from savagery to barbarism was evidenced by Engels' citation of certain features which were common to both stages. Quite significant was the dominance of “mother-right” up through the lower stage of barbarism. [p. 36] In fact, this characteristic played an integral part in Engels' discussion of the gens, the family form which he believed “almost certainly existed among all peoples among whom the presence of gentile institutions can be proved—that is, practically all barbarians and civilized peoples.” [p. 37] Assuming a punaluan family with a

line of own and collateral sisters (that is, own sisters' children in the first, second or third degree), together with their children and their own collateral brothers on the mother's side (who, according to our assumption, are not their husbands), we have the exact circle of persons whom we later find as members of a gens, in the original form of that institution. [pp. 36-37]

The most essential characteristic of this group is that it is based on “mother-right”: family lineage or blood relations are determined solely from the mother's side. This, combined with the prohibition of incest between brother and sister, assures that husband and wife cannot be related in terms of blood. Thus, the matriarchal gens, a consanguine group, must exclude husbands from membership.

A second major feature which was common to both savagery and barbarism was natural selection. Indeed, this process was instrumental in the development of the gens:

As soon as the ban had been established on sexual intercourse between all brothers and sisters, including the most remote collateral relatives on the mother's side, this group transformed itself into a gens—that is, it constituted itself a firm circle of blood relations in the female line, between whom marriage was prohibited … [p. 37]

In addition to its role in the emergence of the gens, natural selection was largely responsible for the eventual dissolution of the primitive communistic household, yet another characteristic shared by both stages until late in the middle stage of barbarism.

However, by far the most significant impact of natural selection was that it involved a definite narrowing of the family, resulting in the appearance of the pairing family, the form most characteristic of barbarism. According to Engels, the essentials of the pairing family emerged sometime during the period encompassed by the upper stage of savagery and the lower stage of barbarism. It is this time in human development which signified the termination of natural selection as an important factor; once the family form had been narrowed to the pair, there was no other contribution natural selection could make in this respect. [p. 47]

But the mere existence of the pairing family did not exclude polygamy and “occasional infidelity” on the part of men; on the contrary, this form of family involved very loose relationships. [pp. 41 and 72] This was further evidenced by the fact that the pairing family, “itself too weak and unstable to make an independent household necessary or even desirable, in no way destroys the communistic household inherited from earlier times.” [p. 42]

Particularly important was that the pairing family, historically, was the last family form characterized by mother-right. According to Engels,

The communistic household in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general in primitive times … [p. 43]

Although Engels acknowledged reports of missionaries and travelers “to the effect that women among savages and barbarians are overburdened with work,” he concluded that such observations were not inconsistent with the existence of female dominance in the communistic household. [p. 43] On the contrary, the distribution of the work load merely indicated that “The division of labor between the two sexes is determined by quite other causes than by the position of women in society.” [p. 43] In other words, Engels was merely restating his more general thesis that, in the infancy of human development, changes in the organization of society were independent of man's activity in producing the means of subsistence; instead, social development was principally a function of the relationship of men and women in procreation. Therefore, even the disproportionate share of the work allocated to women, in addition to the evolution of natural selection with its termination in the pairing family, was not sufficient to impair the dominant position of women within the family circle.

The eventual degradation of the position of women in society, as Engels envisioned it, was due to unprecedented increases in wealth which resulted in totally new social relations. Engels attributed the beginnings of this development to man's ability acquired under barbarism to domesticate animals and breed herds. [p. 47] The separation to pastoral tribes from the remainder of the barbarians was designated by Engels as “the first great social division of labor.” [p. 145] He found that impact of this development on family relations to be comprehensible only when viewed against the emergence of pairing marriage.

Pairing marriage had brought a new element into the family. By the side of the natural mother of the child it placed its natural and attested father, with a better warrant of paternity, probably, than that of many a “father” today. According to the division of labor within the family at that time, it was the man's part to obtain food and the instruments of labor necessary for the purpose. He therefore also owned the instruments of labor, and in the event of husband and wife separating, he took them with him, just as she retained her household goods. Therefore, according to the social custom of the time, the man was also the owner of the new source of subsistence … [p. 48]

Thus, as wealth began to augment, there was a decline in the position of the wife in family relations; those assets over which she could claim ownership diminished in relative importance. As Engels put it,

The division of labor within the family … regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. The division of labor … turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house—that her activity was confined to domestic labor—this same cause now ensured the man's supremacy in the house; the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra. [pp. 147-148]

Engels reasoned that slavery was a conditioning factor which had guaranteed this “world historical defeat of the female sex.” Once barbarism had reached its middle stage, slavery had become profitable, for labor-power produced a surplus over and above the requirements of its own subsistence.¹⁹ [pp. 48 and 146-147] Considering the vast improvements in productivity which were cited by Engels, his conclusion seems only logical. More than allowing for the introduction of slavery, the advances in the productive forces of society necessitated that such an institution arise:

The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this purpose use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could be bred just as easily as the cattle themselves. [p. 48]

In other words, an imbalance (contradiction) had developed between the production of people and the production of things other than people. This, in turn, rendered unavoidable a change in the family, the dominant social structure of the time. Given that slavery further enhanced the expansion of the family's material base, slavery, like any other instrument of labor, passed under the control of the husband and reinforced his position with respect to his wife.²⁰ [pp. 48-49]

Still another factor which strengthened the male's dominance in the family was a complete revision of the system of inheritance. This and similar alterations in the legal structure were necessary if the overthrow of mother-right was to be fully realized. Changes of this sort were obviously incompatible with the matriarchal gens or any other family grouping where descent was based on female lineage. As Engels viewed the matter, a definite inducement to such modifications was a general advancement in familial wealth with its consequent augmentation of the male's relative role in the family. In the following passage, Engels discussed the origin and importance of these changes in the code of law:

A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father … As to how and when this revolution took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. But that it did take place is more than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces of mother-right which have been collected … [pp. 49-50]

His statement that only a “simple decree” was necessary to alter the line of descent unequivocally indicates that he did not envision alterations in the order of inheritance or like modifications in the legal structure as playing a determining role in the transition from mother-right to father-right.

Engels' discussion of the degradation of the female in her family and other social relationships also included some mention of the patriarchal family or the patriarchal household community, which he termed a transitional form between the matriarchal family and the single family “among civilized and other peoples of the Old World.” [p. 50] Its most important feature was a quality which it shared with other forms of family that were ruled by the father: “the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.” [p. 50] That is to say, the female, like any other instrument of production, came under the ownership and control of her husband.

In any case, the patriarchal household community, as was the case with other communal households, was largely broken up by the time mankind had achieved the upper stage of barbarism. Engels attributed the dissolution of household communities during this period to the establishment of the “second great division of labor,” the separation of handicraft production from agriculture. [p. 149] This development, he claimed, gave rise to concentrations of wealth in the hands of heads of family (family is here defined in the narrower sense of the term, i.e., pairing marriage) within the communal household; the end result was that economic power was wrested from the overlord of the larger family community. [p. 149] Pairing marriage was thus developing into a new family form which was to become the economic barbaristic unit of society.

Engels' discussion of demographic developments under barbarism may be summarized in the following fashion. In its earlier phase, social structure was principally determined by procreation. It was during this same time period that natural selection fulfilled most of its role in human history, narrowing the family circle to the point where its basic unit was the married pair. Gradually the production of people (the basis for the first division of labor) became less important as a social determinant. Engels traced the basis for this decline in the significance of procreation to the combined influence of the pairing family and the emergence of a division of labor between pastoral and nonpastoral barbarian tribes, the first major division of labor to arise outside the family. The coexistence of both human and nonhuman production as determining elements resulted in a conflict which could only be resolved through attempts to regulate the growth in population so that it might meet mankind's increased ability to produce (this was evidenced by Engels' argument concerning the emergence of slavery). These developments brought the husband to the forefront in family relations, resulting in the wife merely becoming an object for his exploitation and an instrument for the purpose of propagation. The second major division of labor to emerge outside the sphere of family relations, which involved the distinction between agriculture and handicraft production, was responsible for the dissolution of the communal household. This, in turn, allowed the pairing family to provide the basis of a new economic order. From Engels' argument it may therefore be concluded that, due to mankind's ability to procure the means of existence with its consequent impact on the augmentation of social wealth, there were marked changes under barbarism which sharply distinguished it from the demographic structure which had existed during savagery.

CIVILIZATION

Engels described civilization, the third major epoch in human history, as “the stage of development of society at which the division of labor, the exchange between individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which combines them both, come to their full growth and revolutionize the whole previous society.” [pp. 158-159] That is to say, the surplus produced by labor became so substantial as to allow the existence of a merchant class which concerned itself with the exchange of products. With this development of production for exchange rather than use, the producer lost control of his product. Therefore there exists the basis for capitalist production.

Gradually, man, too, became a commodity. It was not long … before the great “truth” was discovered that man also can be a commodity; that human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making man into a slave. Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being exchanged. The active became the passive whether man liked it or not.

With slavery, which attained its fullest development under civilization, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. This cleavage persisted during the whole civilized period. Slavery is the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is succeeded by serfdom in the middle ages, and wage-labor in the more recent period. [p. 160]

Increased population density, which had begun to emerge as an important factor during the upper stage of barbarism, necessitated a governing institution with a broader base than that of the tribe or groups centered on blood relations. This, plus the simultaneous development of class antagonisms, gave rise to the establishment of the state. In this role, the state was an essential instrument of the ruling classes of civilized society in their attempts to preserve their status. [pp. 149 and 155-156]

The form of family characteristic of civilization was monogamy. According to Engels, monogamy, a direct descendant of the pairing family, became especially prominent when Greek society was at its zenith. Although a primary trait of monogamy was male supremacy, it was also distinguished from pairing marriage by the increased inability of the woman to play an active role in the dissolution of the marriage tie. [pp. 54-55] Engels explained how in this respect slavery had an impact on monogamous relationships:

It is the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young beautiful slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has today. [p. 56]

Also of related importance was the emergence of prostitution:

With the rise of the inequality of property—already at the upper stage of barbarism, therefore—wage-labor appears sporadically side by side with slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to civilization is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself, contradictory: here monogamy, there hetaerism, its most extreme form, prostitution.²¹ [p. 59]

Monogamy was marked by a major separation from the basis of all previous forms of marriage. Unlike earlier marriage types, it was premised “not on natural, but on economic relations—on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.” [p. 57] The Greeks, Engels claimed, were the most explicit about the matter: “the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own.” [pp. 57-58]

The combination of these factors was responsible for the emergence of two primary contradictions in monogamous relationships. First, there existed a “class” conflict between man and woman. Commented Engels,

The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male … [Monogamy] is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be readily studied. [p. 58]

The second major contradiction involved the lack of attention accorded the wife. Engels attributed this to the relative sexual freedom allowed the husband under monogamous marriage, the natural result being wife neglect. [p. 59] Consequently, “With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene—the wife's attendant lover and the cuckold husband.” [p. 60]

CONCLUSION

For Engels, earlier stages of development and capitalism are teeming with contradictions. Most important among these contradictions in early human history was the process of natural selection, which resulted in a narrowing of the family circle. Natural selection, combined with the increased productivity of labor, eventually gave rise to the dissolution of the primitive household, thereby necessitating the establishment of a new institutional system to appropriate the products of nature. Due to the advancement in labor productivity with its consequent augmentation of wealth accumulation, the dominant role in the family shifted from the female to the male. In addition, the purpose of propagation changed from a more natural to an economic orientation as economic factors become more prevalent. Under capitalism, the proletarian family expands to meet the requirements of the industrial system, yet this society is unable to provide for these additions to the labor force, thereby increasing the ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed.²² It is here where Marx commences a detailed analysis of social-economic variables in his Contribution to the Critique of Political and Capital.

It was Marx who developed a mature analysis of the social economy of capitalism. On the other hand, it was Engels, in his anthropological studies, who provided a detailed exposition of the socioeconomic development of pre-capitalist societies. Only by starting with Engels' discussion of the early evolution of man as a species is one able to gain considerable insight into the Marxian conception of history and social economy in what Engels termed “widest sense” (i.e., as a transystemic phenomena). [Engels, 1947, p. 177] Perhaps Marx failed to develop this aspect of their argument because in his later years he was preoccupied with the political- and social-economic critiques of capitalism. In 1890, Engels wrote to Bloch that

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that younger writers sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize this main principle in opposition to our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights. But when it was a case of presenting a section of history, that is, of a practical application, the thing was different and there no error was possible. [Marx and Engels, 1965, p. 418]

Whatever the reason for Marx's neglect, Engels did far more than polemicize their theory of history by introducing the concept of “historical materialism” as has so frequently been alleged.

Notes

1. In a letter to Bloch (1890), Engels referred to Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as “a most excellent example” of the “application” of the Marxian theory of history. [Marx and Engels, 1965, p. 418] Although Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire seven years prior to the publication of his Critique, the latter work was the first published statement where Marx clearly specified the basic features of the theory itself.

2. Engels' letter to Bloch is one of the crucial documents in this regard. Also of great importance are Engels' letters to Schmidt (1890) and Starkenburg (1894). [Marx and Engels, 1965, pp. 419-425 and 466-468]

3. Hereafter, unless otherwise specified, all unidentified page references are drawn from the 1942 International Publishers edition of The Origin of the Family.

4. The quotation is from the editors of the Soviet edition of Engels' Origin of the Family and is quoted by Gajo Petrović. [Petrović, 1967, pp. 96-97] A similar argument can be found in the now classic Soviet article “Teaching of Economics in the Soviet Union,” American Economic Review, 1944, pp. 505-506. It is interesting to note that the most recent Soviet edition of Engels' Origin of the Family has no editorial preface. [Engels, 1972]

5. In the preface, Engels also noted that in writing the book he had placed as much emphasis as possible on Marx's notes dealing with the subject. In addition, it is reasonable to infer that he and Marx had discussed the material covered in the book. One therefore would not expect to find marked differences of opinion—especially on such a major issue.

   Furthermore, since The Origin of the Family went through four editions, it is highly unlikely that Engels would not have corrected any really blatant errors in the first edition, given his close relationship with Marx and the fact that he seems to have been the most well versed student of Marxism during his time. Indeed, Engels made the following remark in the preface to the fourth edition:

   Since the appearance of the first edition seven years have elapsed, during which our knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made important advances. There was, therefore, plenty to do in the way of improvements and additions; all the more so as the proposed stereotyping of the present text will make any further alterations impossible for some time.

   I have accordingly submitted the entire text to a careful revision and made a number of additions … [p. 7]

6. Marx's ethnological notebooks also had excerpts from Phear, Maine and Lubbock. However, the largest portion of them is devoted to Morgan. [Marx, 1974b]

7. In fact, Engels subtitled his book In the Light of the Researches of Lewis Morgan.

8. The capitalization is theirs; all other emphasis is mine. This statement is a good example of what Bertell Ollman was referring to when he commented that “Marx manipulates the size of his factors, alters his classificational boundaries, to suit his changing purposes.” As Ollman observed, no other apparent explanation can be offered for statements of this type, such as when Marx termed the family a “particular” form of production. [Ollman, 1971, p. 10]

   Consistent with Martin Milligan's translation of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (the one also used in the present study), Ollman quoted Marx as referring to a “particular mode of production.” [Marx, 1964, p. 156] The term actually used by Marx was the German “Weisen.” [Marx and Engels, 1932, p. 115] In the context in which Marx used the word it is probably best translated as “forms” rather than “modes.” In Marxian terminology the former has a more specific meaning than the latter; consequently, the manner of translation is of considerable importance. Both Marx and Engels, in any case, seem to have felt that the family was far more than just a passive element in the fabric of society. I am indebted to Peter Schran for his assistance on this point.

9. The word “written” was emphasized by Engels; the remaining emphasis is mine.

10. Petrović made this same observation. [Petrović, p. 97]

11. The Origin of the Family is more closely related to their German Ideology than their strictly economic works. In fact, Engels referred to the latter manuscript when he wrote The Origin of the Family .

12. In the speech which Engels gave at Marx's funeral he stated that whereas “Darwin discovered the law of motion in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” [Foner, 1973, p. 39] It has been argued that it was in fact Engels rather than Marx who introduced the Darwinian perspective into the Marxian analysis of history. [C. F. Lichtheim, 1965, pp. 234-258]

13. I have developed this aspect of Marx's conceptual framework in another paper. [Wiltgen, 1979]

14. “Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labor, and widened man's horizon at every new advance.” [Engels, 1964, p. 175] Engels set forth a similar argument in the introduction to his Dialectics of Nature. [pp. 34-35]

15. Note, for example, the following statement which Engels made pertaining to early German development:

    … the population being scanty, there was always enough waste left over to make any disputes about land unnecessary. Only in the course of centuries, when the number of members in the household communities had increased so much that a common economy was no longer possible under the existing conditions of production did the communities dissolve. The arable and meadow lands which had hitherto been common were divided into the manner familiar to us, first temporarily and then permanently, among the single households which were now coming into being, whole forest pasture land, and water remained in common. [p. 128]

    Engels clarified the relationships between the family and the household with his conclusions that

    The practice of living together in a primitive communistic household, which prevailed without exception till late in the middle stage of barbarism, set a limit, varying with the conditions but fairly definite in each locality, to the maximum size of the family community. [p. 34]

    As is explained below, Engels found environmental factors to be quite important in distinguishing between the barbarian periods in the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

16. Two statements made by Marx are quite interesting in this regard:

    The further back we trace the course of history, the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing individual, appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole. At first, the individual in a still quite natural manner is part of the family and the tribe which evolves from the family; later he is part of a community of one of the different forms of the community which arise from the conflict and the merging of tribes.

    “Introduction to a Critique.” [Marx, 1970, p. 189]

    Under the rural patriarchal system of production the product of labor bore the specific social imprint of the family relationships with its naturally evolved division of labor. [Marx, 1970, p. 33]

17. “It [monogamy] was the first form of the family to be based not on natural, but on economic conditions—on the victory of private property over primitive natural communal property.” [p. 57]

18. According to Engels, the Spanish conquest in the Western Hemisphere “cut short any further independent development.” [p. 22]

19. Engels claimed that the basis for this master-slave relationship was directly derivative from the “first great social division of labor.”

20. Engels cited the following statement by Marx which appears most consistent with his reasoning: “The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.” [p. 51]

21. Employing Morgan's description, Engels defined hetaerism as a practice “co-existent with monogamous marriage,” and consisting of “sexual intercourse between men and unmarried women outside the marriage .” [p. 59]

22. I have explored the implications of this elsewhere. [Wiltgen, 1979]

References

Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1947.

———. The Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, 1964.

———. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York, 1942.

———. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Moscow, 1972.

———. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York, 1973.

Foner, Philip, Editor. When Karl Marx Died, New York, 1973.

Lichtheim, George. Marxism: American Historical and Critical Study, New York, 1965.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1, New York, 1967.

———. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow, 1970.

———. Early Economic Writings, New York, 1964.

———. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Moscow, 1974(a).

———. Ethnological Notebooks, Amsterdam, 1974(b).

———. Grundrisse, New York, 1973.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology, New York, 1947.

———. Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, Bd. 3, Berlin, 1932.

———. Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965.

Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Concept of Man in Capitalist Society, London, 1971.

Petrović, Gajo. Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century, New York, 1967.

———. “Teaching Economics in the Soviet Union,” American Economic Review, 3, September, 1944.

Wiltgen, Richard. “Marxism and Population: A Reconsideration of Marx's and Engels' Critique of Malthus,” unpublished paper presented at the Eastern Economic Association, May 1979.