We have now traced the dissolution of the gentile order in the 
three great individual examples: Greek, Roman, and German. We 
shall investigate, in conclusion, the general economic conditions 
that had already undermined the gentile organisation of society in 
the upper stage of barbarism and completely abolished it with the 
advent of civilisation. For this, Marx’s Capital will be as necessary 
as Morgan’s book. 

Having germinated in the middle stage and developed further 
in the upper stage of savagery, the gens reached its prime, as far 
as our sources enable us to judge, in the lower stage of barbarism. 
With this stage of development, then, we shall begin our 
investigation. 

We find here, where the American Redskins must serve as our 
example, the gentile system fully developed. A tribe was divided 
up into several, in most cases two,* gentes; with the increase in the 
population, each of these original gentes again divided into several 
daughter gentes, in relation to which the mother gens appeared as 
the phratry; the tribe itself split up into several tribes, in each of 
which, in most cases, we again find the old gentes. In some cases, 
at least, a confederacy embraced the kindred tribes. This simple 
organisation was fully adequate for the social conditions from 
which it sprang. It was nothing more than a peculiar naturally 
evolved grouping, capable of smoothing out all internal conflicts 
that might arise in a society organised on these lines. Externally, 
conflicts were settled by war, which could end in the annihilation 
of a tribe, but never in its subjugation. The magnificence, and at 
the same time the limitation, of the gentile order was that it left no 
room for domination and servitude. Internally, there was as yet no 
distinction between rights and duties; the question of whether 
participation in public affairs, blood revenge or atonement for 

4 The words “in most cases two” were added by Engels in the 1891 
edition. — Ed. 

Per Urlprung 

Der 

Familie, des Privateigenthuns 

wind 

des Staats. 

need 

Sm Anfhluk an Lewis H. Morgan’s Forfdungen 
pon 

SFrivedrid: Engels. 

ete 

Bierte Uuflage. 

SedSstes und fiebentes Taujend. 

Stuttgart 
Perlag von J. B. DW. Diehl 
1892. 

Title page of the fourth edition 
of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 259 

injuries was a right or a duty never confronted the Indian; it 
would have appeared as absurd to him as the question of whether 
eating, sleeping or hunting was a right or a duty. Nor could any 
tribe or gens split up into different classes. This leads us to the 
investigation of the economic basis of those conditions. 

The population was very sparse. It was dense only in the habitat 
of the tribe, surrounded by its extensive hunting grounds and 
beyond these the neutral protective forest whith separated it from 
other tribes. Division of labour was purely and simply that which 
had naturally evolved; it existed only between the two sexes. The 
men went to war, hunted, fished, provided the raw material for 
food and the implements necessary for these pursuits. The women 
cared for the house, and prepared food and clothing; they 
cooked, wove, and sewed. Each of them was master in his or her 
own field of activity: the men in the forest, the women in the 
house. Each owned the implements he or she made and used: the 
men, the weapons and the hunting and fishing tackle, the women, 
the household utensils. The household was communistic, compris- 
ing several, and often many, families.* Whatever was produced 
and used in common was common property; the house, the 
garden, the longboat. Here, and only here, then, does the “earned 
property” exist which jurists and economists have attributed to 
civilised society—the last mendacious legal pretext on which 
modern capitalist property still rests. 

But man did not remain in this stage everywhere. In Asia he 
found animals that could be domesticated and bred in captivity. 
The wild buffalo cow had to be hunted down; the domesticated 
one gave birth to a calf once a year, and provided milk into the 
bargain. A number of the most advanced tribes— Aryans, Semites, 
perhaps also the Turanians—made first the domestication, and 
later the breeding and tending, of cattle, their principal occupa- 
tion. Pastoral tribes separated themselves from the remaining mass 
of the barbarians: the first great social division of labour. The pas- 
toral tribes not only produced more means of subsistence, but also a 
greater variety than the rest of the barbarians. They not only had 
milk, milk products and meat in greater abundance than the 
others, but also skins, wool, goat’s hair, and more spun and woven 
fabrics with the increasing quantities of raw material. This, for the 
first time, made regular exchange possible. In the preceding 

* Especially on the north-west coast of America; see Bancroft. Among the 
Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands some households gathered as many as seven 
hundred members under one roof. Among the Nootkas, whole tribes lived under 
one roof. 

stages, exchange could only take place occasionally; exceptional 
ability in the making of weapons and implements may have led to 
a temporary division of labour. Thus, unquestionable remains of 
workshops for stone implements of the Neolithic period have been 
found in many places. The artificers who developed their skills in 
those workshops most probably worked for the community, as 
the permanent handicraftsmen of the gentile communities in India 
still do. No other exchange than that within the tribe could 
arise in that stage, and even that was an exception. After the 
separation of the pastoral tribes, however, we find here all the 
conditions ready for exchange between members of different 
tribes, and for its further development and consolidation as a 
regular institution. Originally, tribe exchanged with tribe through 
their respective gentile chiefs. When, however, the herds began to 
be converted into separate property,’ exchange between individu- 
als predominated more and more, until eventually it became the 
sole form. The principal article which the pastoral tribes offered 
their neighbours for exchange was livestock; livestock became the 
commodity by which all other commodities were appraised, and 
was everywhere readily taken in exchange for other com- 
modities—in short, livestock assumed the function of money and _ 
served as money already at this stage. Such was the necessity and 
rapidity with which the demand for a money commodity 
developed right at the very beginning of commodity exchange. 

Horticulture, probably unknown to the Asiatic barbarians of the 
lower stage, arose, among them, no later than at the middle stage, 
as the forerunner of field agriculture. The climate of the 
Turanian plateau does not admit of a pastoral life without a 
supply of fodder for the long and severe winter. Hence, the 
sowing of meadows and cultivation of grain was indispensable 
here. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. Once 
grown for livestock, grain soon became human food. The 
cultivated land still remained tribal property and was assigned first 
to the gens, which, later, in its turn distributed it for use to the 
household communities, and finally” to individuals; these may 
have had certain rights of possession, but no more. 

Of the industrial achievements of this stage two are particularly 
important. The first is the weaving loom, the second, the smelting 
of metal ores and metalworking. Copper, tin, and their alloy, 

@ The 1884 edition has “private property” instead of “separate property”.— Ed. 
b The words “to the household communities, and finally” were added by 
Engels in the 1891 edition.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 261 

bronze, were by far the most important; bronze provided useful 
implements and weapons, but could not oust stone implements. 
Only iron could do that, but its production was as yet unknown. 
Gold and silver began to be used for ornaments and decorations, 
and must already have been of far higher value than copper and 
bronze. 

The increase of production in all branches—livestock breeding, 
agriculture, domestic handicrafts—enabled human labour power 
to produce more than was necessary for its maintenance. It 
simultaneously increased the amount of work that daily fell to 
every member of the gens or household community or single 
family. The attraction of more labour power became desirable. 
This was provided by war; captives were made slaves. Under the 
given overall historical conditions, the first great social division of 
labour, by increasing the productivity of labour, that is, wealth, - 
and enlarging the field of production, necessarily carried slavery 
in its wake. Out of the first great social division of labour arose the 
first great division of society into two classes: masters and slaves, 
exploiters and exploited. 

How and when the herds were converted from the com- 
mon property of the tribe or gens into the property of the in- 
dividual heads of families we do not know to this day; but it 
must have occurred, in the main, at this stage. The herds and the 
other new objects of wealth brought about a revolution in the 
family. Gaining a livelihood had always been the business of the 
man; he produced and owned the means to that end. The herds 
were the new means of gaining a livelihood, and their initial 
domestication and subsequent tending were his work. Hence, he 
owned the livestock, and the commodities and slaves obtained in 
exchange for them. All the surplus now resulting from the task of 
gaining a livelihood fell to the man; the woman shared in 
consuming it, but she had no share in owning it. The “savage” 
warrior and hunter had been content to occupy second place in 
the house, after the woman. The “gentler” shepherd, insisting on 
his wealth, pushed forward to first place and forced the woman 
into second place. And she could not complain. Division of labour 
in the family had regulated the distribution of property between 
man and wife. This division of labour remained unchanged, and 
yet it now turned the former domestic relationship upside down 
simply because the division of labour outside the family had 
changed. The very cause that had formerly ensured the woman 
supremacy in the house, namely, her being confined to domestic 
work, now ensured supremacy in the house for the man: the 

19* 

woman’s housework lost its significance compared with the man’s 
work in obtaining a livelihood; the latter was everything, the 
former an insignificant addition. Here we see already that the 
emancipation of women and their equality with men are impossi- 
ble and must remain so as long as women are excluded from 
socially productive work and remain restricted to private domestic 
duties. The emancipation of women becomes possible only when 
women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social 
scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a 
minor degree. And this has become possible only as a result of 
modern large-scale industry, which not only permits of the 
participation of women in production in large numbers, but 
actually calls for it and, moreover, strives more and more to 
reduce private domestic duties to a public industry. 

His achievement of actual supremacy in the house threw down 
the last barrier to the man’s autocracy. This autocracy was 
confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of mother right, the 
introduction of father right and the gradual transition from 
pairing marriage to monogamy. But this made a breach in the old 
gentile order: the individual family became a power and rose 
threateningly against the gens. 

The next step brings us to the upper stage of barbarism, the 
period in which all civilised peoples passed through their Heroic 
Age: it is the period of the iron sword, but also of the iron 
ploughshare and axe. Iron came to be utilised by man, the last 
and most important of all raw materials to play a revolutionary 
role in history, the last—-if we exclude the potato. Iron made 
possible field agriculture on a larger area and the clearing of 
extensive forest tracts for cultivation; it gave the craftsman 
implements of hardness and sharpness that no stone, no other 
known metal, could withstand. All this came about grad- 
ually; the first iron produced was often softer than bronze. 
Thus, stone weapons disappeared but slowly; stone axes were still 
used in battle not only in the Hildebrand Song, but also in the 
Battle of Hastings, in 1066.'°’ But progress was now irresistible, 
less interrupted and more rapid. The town, enclosing houses of 
stone or brick within its turreted and crenellated stone walls, 
became the headquarters of the tribe or confederacy of tribes. It 
marked an enormous advance in the art of building; but it was 
also a sign of increased danger and need for protection. Wealth 
increased rapidly, but it was the wealth of single individuals. 
Weaving, metalworking and the other crafts that were becoming 
more and more specialised displayed growing diversity and skill in 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 263 

their products; agriculture now provided not only cereals, pulse 
and fruit, but also oil and wine, which people had now learned to 
make. Such diverse activities could no longer be conducted by any 
single individual; the second great division of labour took place: 
handicrafts separated from agriculture. The continuing increase in 
production, and with it the increased productivity of labour, raised 
the value of human labour power. Slavery, which had been 
nascent and sporadic in the preceding stage, now became an 
essential part of the social system. The slaves ceased to be simple 
assistants; they were now driven in scores to work in the fields and 
workshops. The division of production into two large main 
branches, agriculture and handicrafts, gave rise to production 
directly for exchange, the production of commodities; and with it 
came trade, not only in the interior and on the tribal boundaries, 
but also overseas. But all this was still very undeveloped; the 
precious metals started to become the predominant and universal 
money commodity, but they were not yet minted and were 
exchanged merely by bare weight. 

The distinction between rich and poor was added to that 
between freemen and slaves—with the new division of labour 
came a new division of society into classes. The differences in the 
property of the individual heads of families caused the old 
communistic household communities to break up wherever they 
had survived until then; and this put an end to the common 
cultivation of the soil for the account of this community. The 
arable land was assigned for use to the separate families, first 
for a limited time and later in perpetuity; the transition to 
complete private ownership took place gradually and parallel to 
the transition from pairing marriage to monogamy. The 
individual family started to become the economic unit of society. 

The increased population density necessitated firmer cohesion 
internally and externally. Everywhere the confederacy of kindred 
tribes became a necessity, and soon after, their amalgamation, and 
thus the amalgamation of the separate tribal territories into a 
single territory of the people. The military commander of the 
people— rex, basileus, thiudans—became an indispensable and 
permanent official. The popular assembly was instituted wherever 
it did not yet exist. The military commander, the council and the 
popular assembly formed the organs of the gentile society which 
had developed into a military democracy. Military—because war 
and organisation for war were now regular functions of the life of 
the people. The wealth of their neighbours excited the greed of 
the peoples to whom the acquisition of wealth appeared one of the 

main purposes in life. They were barbarians: plunder appeared to 
them easier and even more honourable than productive work. 
War, previously waged simply to avenge aggression or as a means 
of enlarging territory that had become inadequate, was now waged 
for the sake of plunder alone, and became a regular source of 
living. It was not for nothing that formidable walls were reared 
around the new fortified towns: their yawning moats were the 
graves of the gentile constitution, and their turrets already 
reached up into civilisation. Internal affairs underwent a similar 
change. The predatory wars increased the power of the supreme 
military commander as well as the subcommanders. The custom- 
ary election of successors from the same families, especially after 
the introduction of father right, was gradually transformed into 
hereditary succession, first tolerated, then claimed and finally 
usurped; the foundation of hereditary royalty and hereditary 
nobility was laid. In this manner the organs of the gentile 
constitution were gradually torn away from their roots in the 
people, in gens, phratry and tribe, and the whole gentile order 
was transformed into its opposite: from being an organisation of 
tribes for the free administration of their own affairs, it became an 
organisation for plundering and oppressing their neighbours; and 
correspondingly its organs were transformed from instruments of 
the will of the people into independent organs for ruling and 
oppressing their own people. But this could not have happened 
had not the greed for wealth divided the members of the gentes 
into rich and poor; had not “property differences in the same 
gens changed the community of interests into antagonism between 
its members” (Marx)*; and had not the growth of slavery already 
begun to brand working for a living as an activity worthy only of 
slaves and more ignominious than engaging in plunder. 

This brings us to the threshold of civilisation. This stage is 
inaugurated by another advance in the division of labour. In the 
lowest stage men produced only for their own immediate needs; any 
possible exchange was confined to sporadic cases when a surplus 
was obtained by chance. In the middle stage of barbarism we find 
that the pastoral peoples had in their livestock a form of property 
which, if herds and flocks were of a certain size, regularly 

a “Marx’s Excerpts...”, op. cit., p. 213.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 265 

provided a surplus over and above their needs; and we also find a 
division of labour between the pastoral peoples and backward 
tribes without herds, so that there were two different stages of 
production side by side, and therefore the conditions for regular 
exchange. The upper stage of barbarism introduced a further 
division of labour between agriculture and handicrafts, resulting in 
the production of a continually increasing portion of products of 
labour directly for exchange, so that exchange between in- 
dividual producers reached the point where it became a vital 
necessity for society. Civilisation consolidated and magnified all 
these established divisions of labour, particularly by intensifying 
the contrast between town and country (either the town exercising 
economic supremacy over the country, as in antiquity, or the 
country over the town, as in the Middle Ages) and added a third 
division of labour, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it 
created a class that was no longer engaged in production, but 
exclusively in exchanging products—the merchants. All previous 
inchoative class formations were exclusively connected with 
production; they divided those engaged in production into 
managers and executors, or else into producers on a large scale 
and producers on a small scale. Here a class appears for the first 
time which, without taking any part in production, captures the 
management of production as a whole and economically subordi- 
nates the producers to itself; a class that makes itself the 
indispensable intermediary between any two producers and 
exploits them both. On the pretext of saving the producers the 
trouble and risk of exchange, of extending the sale of their 
products to distant markets, and of thus becoming the most useful 
class among the population, a class of parasites arises, of genuine 
social bloodsuckers, which, as a reward for very insignificant real 
services, skims the cream off production both at home and abroad, 
rapidly acquires enormous wealth and corresponding social 
influence, and for this very reason is destined to reap ever new 
honours and gain increasing control over production during the 
period of civilisation, until it at last creates a product of its 
own— periodic commercial crises. 

At the stage of development we are discussing, the young 
merchant class, however, had no inkling as yet of the big things 
that were in store for it. But it took shape and made itself 
indispensable, and that was sufficient. With it, however, metal 
money, minted coins, emerged, and with this a new means by which 
the non-producer could rule the producer and his production. 
The commodity of commodities, which conceals within itself all 

other commodities, was discovered; the magic potion that can 
transform itself at will into anything desirable and desired. 
Whoever possessed it ruled the world of production; and who had 
it above all others? The merchant. In his hands the cult of money 
was safe. He took care to make it plain that all commodities, and 
hence all commodity producers, must grovel in the dust before 
money. He proved in practice that all other forms of wealth were 
mere semblances compared with this incarnation of wealth as such. 
Never again has the power of money revealed itself with such 
primitive crudity and violence as it did in this period, its youth. 
After the purchase of commodities for money came the lending of 
money, entailing interest and usury. And no legislation of any 
later period throws the debtor so pitilessly and helplessly at the 
feet of the usurious creditor as that of ancient Athens and 
Rome—both sets of law arose spontaneously, as common law, 
without other than economic compulsion. 

Besides wealth in commodities and slaves, besides money wealth, 
there now came into being wealth in landed property. The 
entitlement of individuals to own parcels of land originally 
assigned to them by the gens or tribe had now become so well 
established that these parcels became their hereditary property. 
What they had most aspired to just before that time was liberation 
from the claim of the gentile community to their parcels of land, a 
claim which had become a fetter for them. They were freed from 
this fetter—but soon after also from their new landed property. 
The full, free ownership of land implied not only the possibility of 
unrestricted and uncurtailed possession, but also the possibility of 
alienating it. As long as the land belonged to the gens there was 
no such possibility. But when the new landowner definitively shook 
off the chains of the paramount title of the gens and tribe, he also 
tore the bond that had until then tied him inseverably to the soil. 
What that meant was made plain to him by the money invented 
simultaneously with the advent of private property. Land could 
now become a commodity to be sold and mortgaged. Hardly had 
the private ownership of land been introduced when mortgage 
was discovered (see Athens). Just as hetaerism and prostitution 
clung to the heels of monogamy, so from now on mortgage clung 
to the ownership of land. You wanted full, free, alienable 

ownership of land. Well, here you have it—tu las voulu,* George 
Dandin! 

2 “You wanted it.” This expression is taken from Moliere’s comedy George 
Dandin, ou le mari confondu, I, 9.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 267 

Commercial expansion, money and usury, landed property and 
mortgage were thus accompanied by the rapid concentration and 
centralisation of wealth in the hands of a small class, on the one 
hand, and by the increasing impoverishment of the masses and a 
growing mass of paupers, on the other. The new aristocracy of 
wealth, unless it coincided from the outset with the old tribal nobility, 
forced the latter definitively into the background (in Athens, in 
Rome, among the Germans). And this division of freemen into 
classes according to their wealth was accompanied, especially in 
Greece, by an enormous increase in the number of slaves,* whose 
forced labour formed the basis on which the superstructure of the 
entire society was reared. . 

Let us now see what became of the gentile constitution as a 
result of this social revolution. It stood powerless in the face of 
the new elements that had grown up without its aid. Its 
precondition was that the members of a gens, or else of a tribe, 
should live together in the same territory, be its sole inhabitants. 
This had long ceased to be the case. Gentes and tribes were 
everywhere intermingled; everywhere slaves, wards and outsiders 
lived among the citizens. The sedentary state, which had been 
acquired only towards the end of the middle stage of barbarism, 
was time and again interrupted by the mobility and changes of 
abode brought about by commerce, changes of occupation and the 
transfer of land. The members of the gentile bodies could no 
longer meet for the purpose of attending to their own common 
affairs; only matters of minor importance, such as religious 
ceremonies, were still observed in a rough-and-ready way. Beside 
the requirements and interests which the gentile bodies were 
appointed and empowered to take care of, new requirements and 
interests had arisen from the revolution in the conditions of 
earning a livelihood and the resulting change in social structure. 
These new requirements and interests were not only alien to the 
old gentile order, but thwarted it in every way. The interests of 
the groups of craftsmen which arose through division of labour, 
and the special needs of the town as opposed to the country, 
required new organs; but each of these groups was composed of 
people from different gentes, phratries and tribes; they even 
included outsiders. Hence, the new organs necessarily had to take 
shape outside the gentile constitution, alongside it, and that meant 

* For the number of slaves in Athens, see above, p. 117 [this volume, p. 222]. In 
Corinth, at the city’s zenith, it was 460,000, and in Aegina 470,000; in both, ten 
times the number of free citizens. 

against it—And again, in every gentile body the conflict of 
interests made itself felt and reached its apex by combining rich 
and poor, usurers and debtors, in the same gens and tribe.— Then 
there was the mass of new inhabitants, strangers to the gentile 
associations, which, as in Rome, became a power in the land, and 
was too numerous to be gradually absorbed by the consanguine 
gentes and tribes. The gentile associations confronted these masses 
as exclusive, privileged bodies; what had originally been a 
naturally evolved democracy was transformed into a_ hateful 
aristocracy. Lastly, the gentile constitution had grown out of a 
society that knew no internal antagonisms, and was suited only to 
such a society. It had no means of coercion except public opinion. 
But now a society had come into being that by virtue of all its 
economic conditions of existence had to split up into freemen and 
slaves, into exploiting rich and exploited poor; a society that was 
not only incapable of reconciling these antagonisms, but had to 
carry them to extremes. Such a society could only exist either ina 
state of continuous, open struggle of these classes against one 
another or under the rule of a third power which, while ostensibly 
standing above the conflicting classes, suppressed their open 
conflict and permitted a class struggle at most in the economic 
field, in a so-called legal form. The gentile constitution had 
outlived itself. It was burst asunder by the division of labour and 
by its result, the division of society into classes. Its place was taken 
by the state. 

* * OF 

Above we discussed in detail each of the three main forms in 
which the state raised itself up on the ruins of the gentile 
constitution. Athens represented the purest, most classical form. 
Here the state derived directly and mainly from the class 
antagonisms that developed within gentile society. In Rome gentile 
society became an exclusive aristocracy amidst numerous plebs, 
standing outside of it, having no rights but only duties. The 
victory of the plebs burst the old gentile constitution asunder and 
erected on its ruins the state, into which both the gentile 
aristocracy and the plebs were soon wholly absorbed. Finally, 
among the German vanquishers of the Roman Empire, the state 
derived directly from the conquest of large foreign territories, 
which the gentile constitution had no means of ruling. As this 
conquest did not entail either a serious struggle with the old 
population or a more advanced division of labour, and as 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 269 

conquered and conquerors were almost at the same stage of 
economic development and thus the economic basis of society 
remained the same as before, the gentile constitution was able to 
continue for many centuries in a changed, territorial shape as a 
Mark constitution, and even rejuvenate itself for a time in 
enfeebled form in the noble and patrician families of later years, 
and even in peasant families, as in Dithmarschen.* 

The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society 
from without; just as little is it “the reality of the ethical idea”, 
“the image and reality of reason”, as Hegel maintains.* Rather, it 
is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the 
admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble 
contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable 
opposites which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these 
opposites, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not 
consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became 
necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society which 
would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 
“order”; and this power, having arisen out of society but placing 
itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the 
state. 

As distinct from the old gentile order, the state, first, divides its 
subjects according to territory. As we have seen, the old gentile 
associations, built upon and held together by ties of blood, became 
inadequate, largely because they were conditional on the members 
being bound to a given territory, a bond which had long ceased to 
exist. The territory remained, but the people had become mobile. 
Hence, division according to territory was taken as the point of 
departure, and citizens were allowed to exercise their public rights 
and duties wherever they settled, irrespective of gens and tribe. 
This organisation ‘of citizens according to locality is a feature 
common to all states. That is why it seems natural to us; but we 
have seen what long and arduous struggles were needed before it 
replaced, in Athens and Rome, the old organisation according to 
gentes. 

The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a 
public authority which no longer directly coincides with the 
population organising itself as an armed force. This special public 

* The first historian to have at least an approximate idea of the nature of the 
gens was Niebuhr, thanks to his knowledge of the Dithmarschen families— 
to which, however, he also owes the errors he mechanically copied from there.!58 

aG. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§ 257, 360.— Ed 

authority is necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of 
the population has become impossible since the split into classes. 
The slaves also belong to the population; the 90,000 citizens of 
Athens formed only a privileged class as against the 365,000 
slaves. The people’s army of the Athenian democracy was an 
aristocratic public authority vis-a-vis the slaves, whom it kept in 
check; however, a gendarmerie also became necessary to keep the 
citizens in check, as we related above. This public authority exists 
in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of 
material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds, 
of which gentile society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, 
almost infinitesimal, in societies where class antagonisms are still 
undeveloped and in remote territories as was the case at certain 
times and in certain regions in the United States of America. It 
[the public authority] grows stronger, however, to the extent that 
class antagonisms within the state become exacerbated and 
adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only 
to look at our present-day Europe, where class struggle and 
competition for conquests have raised the public power to such a 
level that it threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the 
state. 

In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the 
citizens are necessary— taxes. These were absolutely unknown in 
gentile society; but we know enough about them today. As 
civilisation advances, these taxes become inadequate too; the state 
makes drafts on the future, contracts loans, public debts. Old 
Europe can tell a tale about these, too. 

Having public authority and the right to levy taxes, the officials 
now stand, as organs of society, above society. The free, voluntary 
respect that was accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution 
does not satisfy them, even if they could gain it; being the vehicles 
of a power that is becoming alien to society, respect for them must 
be enforced by means of exceptional laws by virtue of which they 
enjoy special sanctity and inviolability. The shabbiest police servant 
in the civilised state has more “authority” than all the organs of 
gentile society put together; but the most powerful prince and the 
greatest statesman, or commander, of civilisation may well envy 
the humblest gentile chief for the unforced and undisputed respect 
that is paid to him. The one stands in the midst of society, the 
other is forced to attempt to represent something outside and 
above it. 

Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms 
in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 271 

conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most 
powerful, economically dominant class, which, ,through the 
medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, 
and thus acquires new means of keeping down and exploiting the 
oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state 
of the slave owners for keeping down the slaves, as the feudal 
state was the organ of the nobility for keeping down the peasant 
serfs and villeins, and the modern representative state is an 
instrument for the exploitation of wage labour by capital. By way 
of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes 
balance each other so closely that the state authority, as ostensible 
mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independ- 
ence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, which held the balance between the 
nobility and burghers; such was the Bonapartism of the First, and 
especially of the Second French Empire, which played off the 
proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the 
proletariat. The latest performance of this kind, in which ruler 
and ruled appear equally ridiculous, is the new German Empire of 
the Bismarck nation: here capitalists and workers are balanced 
against each other and equally cheated for the benefit of the 
impoverished Prussian backwoods Junkers. 

In most historical states, the rights granted to citizens are, 
besides, apportioned according to their wealth, thus directly 
expressing the fact that the state is an organisation of the 
possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class. 
It was so already in the Athenian and Roman classification 
according to property. It was so in the medieval feudal state, in 
which political power was in conformity with the amount of land 
owned. It is seen in the electoral qualifications of the modern 
representative states. Yet this political recognition of property 
distinctions is by no means inherent. On the contrary, it marks a 
low stage of state development. The highest form of the state, the 
democratic republic, which under our modern conditions of 
society is more and more becoming an inevitable necessity, and is 
the only form of state in which the last decisive struggle between 
proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out—the democratic 
republic officially knows no more of property distinctions. In it 
wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On 
the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of 
which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, 
in the form of an alliance between government and _ stock 
exchange, which becomes the easier to achieve the more the 

national debt increases and the more joint-stock companies 
concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production 
itself, using the stock exchange as their centre. Besides America, 
the latest French republic is a striking example of this; and even 
good old Switzerland has contributed its share in this field. But 
that a democratic republic is not essential for this fraternal alliance 
between government and stock exchange is proved by England 
and also by the new German Empire, where one cannot tell who 
was elevated more by universal suffrage, Bismarck or Bleichréder. 
And lastly, the possessing class rules directly through the medium 
of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class, in our case, 
therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will 
in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one 
possible and, politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its 
extreme Left wing. To the extent, however, that this class matures 
for its self-emancipation, it constitutes itself as a party of its own 
and elects its own representatives, not those of the capitalists. 
Thus, universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the 
working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the 
present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermome- 
ter of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the work- 
ers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand. 

The state, then, has not existed from eternity. There have been 
societies that managed without it, that had no idea of the state and 
state authority. At a certain stage of economic development, which 
was recessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the 
state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly 
approaching a stage in the development of production at which 
the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a 
necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. 
They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along 
with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will 
reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association 
of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it 
will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the 
spinning-wheel and the bronze axe. 

Pe 

Thus, from the foregoing, civilisation is that stage of develop- 
ment of society at which division of labour, the resulting exchange 
between individuals, and commodity production, which combines 
the two, reach their full development and revolutionise the whole 
of hitherto existing society. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 273 

Production at all previous stages of society was essentially 
common production and, likewise, consumption took place by the 
direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller 
communistic communities. This production in common. was 
carried on within the narrowest limits, but concomitantly the 
producers were masters of their process of production and of 
their product. They knew what became of the product: they 
consumed it, it did not leave their hands; and as long as 
production was carried on on this basis, it could not grow beyond 
the control of the producers, and it could not conjure up any 
alien, phantom powers against them, as is the case regularly and 
inevitably under civilisation. 

But, slowly, division of labour crept into this process of 
production. It undermined the communality of production and 
appropriation, it made appropriation by individuals the predomi- 
nant rule, and thus gave rise to exchange between individuals — 
how, we examined above. Gradually, the production of com- 
modities became the dominant form. 

With the production of commodities, production no longer for 
one’s own consumption but for exchange, the products necessarily 
change hands. The producer parts with his product in the course 
of exchange; he no longer knows what becomes of it. As soon as 
money, and with it the merchant, steps in as a mediator between 
the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more 
complicated, the ultimate fate of the products still more uncertain. 
The merchants are numerous and none of them knows what the 
other is doing. Commodities now pass not only from hand to 
hand, but also from market to market. The producers have lost 
control of the total production of their life cycle, and the mer- 
chants have not acquired it. Products and production fall victim to 
chance. 

But chance is only one pole of an interrelation, the other pole of 
which is called necessity. In nature, where chance, too, seems to 
reign, we have long since demonstrated in each particular field the 
inherent necessity and regularity that asserts itself in this chance. 
What is true of nature holds good also for society. The more a 
social activity, a series of social processes, becomes too powerful 
for conscious human control, grows beyond human reach, the 
more it seems to have been left to pure chance, the more do its 
peculiar and innate laws assert themselves in this chance, as if by 
natural necessity. Such laws also control the fortuities of the 
production and exchange of commodities; these laws confront the 
individual producer and exchanger as strange and, in the 

beginning, even as unknown powers, the nature of which must 
first be laboriously investigated and ascertained. These economic 
laws of commodity production are modified at the different stages 
of development of this form of production; on the whole, 
however, the entire period of civilisation has been dominated by 
these laws. To this day, the product is master of the producer; to 
this day, the total production of society is regulated, not by a plan 
thought out in common, but by blind laws, which operate with 
elemental force, in the last resort in the storms of periodic 
commercial crises. 

We saw above how human labour power became able, at a 
rather early stage of development of production, to deliver 
considerably more products than were needed for the producer’s 
maintenance, and how this stage, in the main, coincided with that 
where the division of labour and exchange appeared between 
individuals. Now, it was not long before the great “truth” was 
discovered that man, too, may be a commodity; that human 
power* may be exchanged and utilised by converting man into a 
slave. Men had barely started to engage in exchange when they 
themselves were exchanged. The active became a passive, whether 
man wanted it or not. 

With slavery, which reached its fullest development under 
civilisation, came the first great split of society into an exploiting 
and an exploited class. This split has continued during the whole 
period of civilisation. Slavery was the first form of exploitation, 
peculiar to the world of antiquity; it was followed by serfdom in 
the Middle Ages, and by wage labour in modern times. These are 
the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great 
epochs of civilisation; overt, and, latterly, covert slavery, are its 
constant companions. 

The stage of commodity production, with which civilisation 
began, is marked economically by the introduction of 1) metal 
money and, thus, of money capital, interest and usury; 2) the 
merchants acting as mediating class between producers; 3) private 
ownership of land and mortgage; 4) slave labour as the prevailing 
form of production. The form of the family corresponding to 
civilisation and under it becoming the definitively prevailing form is 
monogamy, the supremacy of the man over the woman, and the 
individual family as the economic unit of society. The cohesive 
force of civilised society is the state, which in all typical periods is 
exclusively the state of the ruling class, and in all cases remains 

4 The 1884 edition has “human labour power”.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 275 

essentially a machine for keeping down the oppressed, exploited 
class. Other marks of civilisation are: on the one hand, fixation of 
the antithesis between town and country as the basis of the entire 
social division of labour; on the other hand, the introduction of 
testaments, by which the property holder is able to dispose of his 
property even after his death. This institution, which was a direct 
blow in the face of the old gentile constitution, was unknown in 
Athens until the time of Solon; in Rome it was introduced very 
early, but we do not know when.* Among the Germans it was 
introduced by the priests in order that the good honest German 
might without hindrance bequeath his property to the Church. 

With this constitution as its foundation civilisation has accom- 
plished things of which the old gentile society was not remotely 
capable. But it accomplished them by setting in motion the most 
sordid instincts and passions of man, and by developing them at 
the expense of all his other faculties. Naked greed has been the 
moving spirit of civilisation from its first day to the present time; 
wealth, wealth and wealth again; wealth, not of society, but of this 
shabby individual was its sole determining aim. If, in the pursuit 
of this aim, the increasing development of science and repeated 
periods of the fullest blooming of art fell into its lap, it was only 
because without them the ample present-day achievements in the 
accumulation of wealth would have been impossible. 

Since the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of 
civilisation, its whole development moves in a continuous con- 
tradiction. Every advance in production is at the same time a 
retrogression in the condition of the oppressed class, that is, of the 
great majority. What is a boon for the one is necessarily a bane for 
the other; each new emancipation of one class means a new 
oppression of another class. The most striking proof of this is 
furnished by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which 
are today known throughout the world. And while among 
barbarians, as we have seen, hardly any distinction could be made 

* Lassalle’s Das System der erworbenen Rechte turns, in its second part, mainly on 
the proposition that the Roman testament is as old as Rome itself, that in Roman 
history there was never “a time when testaments did not exist”; that the testament 
arose rather in pre-Roman times out of the cult of the dead. As a confirmed 
Hegelian of the old school, Lassalle derived the provisions of the Roman law not 
from the social relations of the Romans, but from the “speculative conception” of 
the will, and thus arrived at this totally unhistoric assertion. This is not to be 
wondered at in a book which from the same speculative conception draws the 
conclusion that the transfer of property was purely a secondary matter in Roman 
inheritance. Lassalle not only believes in the illusions of Roman jurists, especially of 
the earlier period, but he even excels them. 

between rights and duties, civilisation makes the difference and 
antithesis between these two plain even to the dullest mind by 
assigning to one class pretty nearly all the rights, and to the other 
class pretty nearly all the duties. 

But this is not as it ought to be. What is good for the ruling 
class should be good for the whole of the society with which the 
ruling class identifies itseH. Therefore, the more civilisation 
advances, the more it is compelled to cover the ills it necessarily 
creates with the cloak of love, to embellish them, or to deny their 
existence; in short, to introduce conventional hypocrisy— 
unknown either in previous forms of society or even in the earliest 
stages of civilisation—that eventually culminates in the declara- 
tion: The exploiting class exploits the oppressed class solely and 
exclusively in the interest of the exploited class itself; and if the 
latter fails to appreciate this, and even becomes rebellious, it 
thereby shows the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the 
exploiters.* 

And now, in conclusion, Morgan’s verdict on civilisation: 

“Since the advent of civilisation, the outgrowth of property has been so 
immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so 
intelligent in the interests of its owners that it has become, on the part of the people, 
an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own 
creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the 
mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it 
protects, as well as [...] the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society 
are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and 
harmonious relation. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if 
progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which 
has passed away since civilisation began is but a fragment of the past duration of 
man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of 
society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end 
and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. 
Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights [...], and 
universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which 
experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a 
higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.” (Morgan, Ancient 
Society, p. 552.) 

* I had intended at the outset to place the brilliant critique of civilisation, 
scattered through the works of Charles Fourier, by the side of Morgan’s and my own. 
Unfortunately, I cannot spare the time. I only wish to remark that Fourier already 
considered monogamy and property in land as the main distinguishing features of 
civilisation, and that he described it as a war of the rich against the poor. We also 
find already in his works the deep appreciation of the fact that in all imperfect 
societies, those torn by antagonisms, the individual families (les familles incohérentes) 
are the economic units. 

4 Italics by Engels. See also ‘“Marx’s Excerpts...”, op. cit., p. 139.— Ed. 

277