‘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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