London, 21[-22] September 1890 

Dear Sir, 

Your letter of the 3rd of this month was forwarded to me in Folke- 
stone; but since I did not have the book in question with me I was 
not able to reply to it. After arriving home on the 12th, I found such 
an accumulation of urgent work awaiting me that I have been unable 
until today to get round to writing you a line or two. This, merely by 
way of explanation for the delay which I trust you will be good 
enough to excuse. 

Ad I. First, on p. 19 of the Origin you will see that the process of 
growth of the punaluan family is shown as taking place so gradually 
that even in this century there have been marriages between brothers 
and sisters (born of one mother) in the Hawaian royal family. And 
throughout antiquity we find examples of intermarriage between sib- 
lings, e.g. amongst the Ptolemaeans. Here, however,— secondly — 
we must distinguish between siblings by the same mother and siblings 
merely by the same father; ’a5eX.90c, ’ader.—7 ° derive from 5&0. Q0¢ uterus, 
and hence originally denoted only siblings by the same mother. And 


a feeling has long persisted from the period of mother right that the 
children of one mother, even if by different fathers, are more closely 
related than the children of one father but by different mothers. The 
punaluan form of family precludes marriage only between the 
former, but not at all between the latter who, according to the above 
conception, are not related at all (since mother right is in force). 
Now, so far as I know, cases of sibling marriage in Greek antiquity 
are confined to those in which the pair either have different mothers 
or at any rate to those in which this is not known and is therefore not 
ruled out; hence it is by no means inconsistent with punaluan custom. 
What you have overlooked is the fact that, between the punaluan 
period and Greek monogamy, the change-over from matriarchy to 
patriarchy took place, which puts quite a different complexion on the 
matter. 

According to Wachsmuth’s Hellenische Alterthiimer there is, 
among the Greeks of the Heroic Period, 

‘no trace of reservations regarding unduly close kinship between married partners, 
aside from relations between parent and child’ (III, p. 157). ‘In Crete, marriage to 
a full sister was not considered an offence’ (ibid., p. 170). 

This last from Strabo, Book X; however, I cannot find the pas- 
sage at this moment because of the absence of proper chapter divi- 
sions.— Full sisters — failing proof to the contrary —I assume to be 
sisters by the same father. 

Ad I. 1 would qualify the first of your main propositions as follows: 
According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in 
history is, in the final analysis, the production and reproduction of 
actual life. More than that was never maintained either by Marx or my- 
self. Now if someone distorts this by declaring the economic moment to 
be the only determining factor, he changes that proposition into a mean- 
ingless, abstract, ridiculous piece of jargon. The economic situation 
is the basis, but the various factors of the superstructure — political 
forms of the class struggle and its consequences, namely constitutions 
set up by the ruling class after a victorious battle, etc., forms of law 
and, the reflections of all these real struggles in the minds of the parti- 
cipants, i.e. political, philosophical and legal theories, religious views 
and the expansion of the same into dogmatic systems — all these fac- 
tors also have a bearing on the course of the historical struggles of 


which, in many cases, they largely determine the form. It is in the 
interaction of all these factors and amidst an unending multitude of 
fortuities (i.e. of things and events whose intrinsic interconnections 
are so remote or so incapable of proof that we can regard them as 
non-existent and ignore them) that the economic trend ultimately as- 
serts itself as something inevitable. Otherwise the application of the 
theory to any particular period of history would, after all, be easier 
than solving a simple equation of the first degree. 

We make our history ourselves but, in the first place, under very 
definite premises and conditions. Of these, the economic are ulti- 
mately decisive. But the political, etc., and even the traditions still lin- 
gering in people’s minds, play some, if not a decisive, role. The Prus- 
sian state itself owes its origin and development to historical and, in 
the final analysis, economic circumstances. It could, however, hardly 
be maintained without pedantry that what caused Brandenburg, of 
all the many small principalities of North Germany, to become 
a great power, the embodiment of the economic, linguistic and — 
since the Reformation—also the religious, differences between 
North and South, was economic necessity irrespective of any other 
factors (above all its involvement, through its possession of Prussia, in 
Poland and hence in international political relations — which like- 
wise played a decisive role in the formation of the Austrian dynasty). 
Without making oneself'a laughing-stock, it would scarcely be possible 
to provide an economic explanation for the existence of every small 
German principality, past and present, or for the origin of the High 
German sound shift whereby the geographical partition formed by 
the mountains from the Sudetes to the Taunus became a veritable rift 
running right across Germany. 

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that 
the ultimate result is invariably produced by the clash of many indi- 
vidual wills of which each in turn has been made what it is by a wide 
variety of living conditions; there are thus innumerable conflicting 
forces, an infinite number of parallelograms of forces, productive of 
one result-—the historical event which itself may be seen as the 
product of a power operating unconsciously and involuntarily as 
a whole. For what each individual wants is obstructed by every other 
individual and the outcome is something that no one wanted. Thus, 
the course of history up till now has been like a natural process and 
has, indeed, been subject to much the same laws of motion. 
But the fact that individual wills -— each of which wants what it is driv- 

en to want by bodily constitution and extrinsic and, in the final anal- 
ysis, economic (whether personal or general social) circumstances — 
do not attain what they want but merge into an overall mean, a com- 
mon resultant — does not justify the conclusion that they are nonenti- 
ties. On the contrary, each one contributes to the resultant and is, to 
that extent, part and parcel of it. 

Another thing I would ask you to do is to study this theory in the 
original source books and not at second-hand; it is really far easier. 
While Marx wrote hardly anything in which it did not play some 
role, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a quite outstanding 
example of its application. There are also many allusions to the 
theory in Capital. I might further draw your attention to my works, 
Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the 
End of Classical German Philosophy in which the account I give of 
historical materialism is, so far as I know, the most exhaustive in 
existence. 

If some younger writers attribute more importance to the eco- 
nomic aspect than is its due, Marx and I are to some extent to blame. 
We had to stress this leading principle in the face of opponents who 
denied it, and we did not always have the time, space or opportunity 
to do justice to the other factors that interacted upon each other. But 
it was a different matter when it came to depicting a section of his- 
tory, i.e. to applying the theory in practice, and here there was no 
possibility of error. Unfortunately people all too frequently believe 
they have mastered a new theory and can do just what they like with it 
as soon as they have grasped—not always correctly —its main 
propositions. Nor can I exempt from this reproach many of the more 
recent ‘Marxists’ who have, indeed, been responsible for some pretty 
peculiar stuff. 

Ad I, I yesterday discovered (I am writing this on 22 September) in 
Schoemann’s Griechische Alterthiimer, Berlin, 1855, I, p. 52, the follow- 
ing vital passage which fully substantiates what I have said above. It 
runs: 

‘It is known, however, that marriage between half-brothers and sisters born of dif- 
ferent mothers was not subsequently regarded as incest in Greece.’ 

Trusting that you will not be too much put off by the appalling 
convolutions to which my pen has, for brevity’s sake, succumbed, 
I remain 

Yours faithfully, 
F. Engels