Rev Left Radio - Reflecting on Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, & The State" (pt. 3)

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Alyson and Breht finish their series on Friedrich Engels' text "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State", and reflect on the text as a whole. Together, they wrestle with questions, like: What is family abolition? How do rich people buy extended, communal family? What happens to the family and romantic relationships under communism? Should people ever be treated like commodities? How does the title of the text reflect historical and dialectical materialism? and much more!    Get access to multiple bonus episodes a month here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Red Menace. So on today's episode, Allison and I are finishing up our three-episode series on Frederick Engels' famous text, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the St. date. And the way we're going to tackle this one is that we're going to briefly, especially in comparison to other episodes in the past, kind of go over some of the main points in the last chapter. We're not going to hyper-summarize everything because in a lot of ways it's like using other societies to re-entrench the point being made. And then in the last chapter, it's really a summation of his entire argument. And that's going to lead well into a reflection

on the text as a whole. So we're going to do a little bit of covering some of the main points of the last few chapters. Then we're going to focus on that last chapter and the text as a whole and then we're going to just see where the conversation takes us. But this will be our last episode on Engels's origin of the family private property in the state. And as we've said in the previous episode, at least for the time being, at least for the next few months, we're going to shift a little bit focused more on Allison and I discussing current events and things that are happening politically, geopolitically, as opposed to reading and teaching text. And So we're just going to take a break.

It's not going to be a permanent thing necessarily. A lot of it on my end is just being incredibly busy with a bunch of kids and a bunch of stuff and family life and all this other stuff. So it's kind of hard for me to find the time at this moment, especially trying to go back to school, to, you know, read these texts in a way that would be in depth enough to help explain it to others. So for the time being, but I think that's a good change of pace. I think people get a lot out of those episodes and when we cover current events. I think our theoretical episodes are a great backdrop to our real-world analysis of ongoing real-time problems. So that sort of relationship back and forth between like understanding deep theory and then trying to apply it in our own time and to our own issues, I think is worthwhile. And something we've always done on Red Menace.

So it's really nothing new in that regard. But I just wanted to make people aware of that if they weren't already. And so, yeah, let's go ahead and finish off this text. and let's go ahead and move into the segment of the conversation where we're just going to kind of more or less quickly catch you up on the last few chapters of Engels's text. And for that, I'll toss it over to Allison. Awesome.

Yeah, so with that said, we're going to go ahead and dive into these three chapters. Like Brett just said, we're going to focus more on main points and kind of big picture things here. And there's a couple reasons for that. These chapters, to a large degree, really focus on a lot of ideas that have already been presented. One of the things that Ingalls does in this text that's really interesting is he looks at the gens in different historical contexts.

We see it in the Iroquois. We see it with the Greeks and with the Romans. And in these last three chapters, he turns to looking at the development of the Jens among the Celts and the Germans, and then how the Jens fell and the state eventually replaced it among the Germans. And so this is really a story that fits a lot of the themes that we have seen before. In the exploration of the Jens, you know, among the Celts and the Germans, we see a couple things play out that we should already expect, right? We have a society which is governed by what Ingalls calls the Gentile Constitution, which begins to develop economically in such a way that private ownership and wealth accumulation become possible.

And this then begins to undermine the Jens itself, first by undermining the mother right and the power of women within the household. And this eventually actually ends up subverting the entire principle in which the Jinn is found. while outside the gins there's a move towards the tribe and then the Confederacy and then eventually to something much less organic, which is the state, which takes on in many ways, the functions of the gens. We'll get into a lot of details about that emergence of the state here because Ingalls is very focused. But in these cases, as in all the ones that we've seen before, at some point, the gens no longer functions as a actual organizing principle for society and it is there that we see the state emerge to kind of take over those functions. We could get

into the details a little bit, Ingalls like in all these chapters make some nice lists of kind of the organizing principles of the gens among the Celts and the Germans. But the more important thing is that, again, in these kind of cross-historical and cross-cultural context, we see this same economic development occur over and over again, and the state emerge from the same kind of shifts in relations of property. And that is really crucial, you know, I think, as you know, for the Marxist theory of the state that undermines this text and all of Marxism on the whole. So the important the thing you take away, at least for the first two of these chapters, is that when we look into Northern Europe in particular, we see this process playing out again in shockingly

identical ways to which we saw it play out among the Iroquois and among the Greeks and among the Romans. Any thoughts on kind of that development that Ingalls talks about, Brett? Okay, yeah, I think that that's good enough as far as just covering the Celts and the Germans, because again, it's this reiteration of previous things that Engels have been saying and that we've covered in previous episodes. But I do think this shift over to talking about the state is of particular interest. And this also pushes us into the last chapter of the text where he explicitly sort of summarizes some of the arguments made throughout the book. And so let me read a quote from Engels and see what we can extract from it about the state. So this is in the last

chapter, Barbarism and Civilization, page 212 in my copy, Engel says, quote, The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or of state power, at a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once rose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes

production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong into the Museum of Antiquities next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. And the very end here he says civilization is therefore according to the above analysis the stage of development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange between individuals that arises from it and the commodity production which combines them both come to their full growth and revolutionize the whole of previous society. So I think this is really getting into a really important aspect of the emergence of the state, which of course Lenin and State and Revolution would continue to carry even further, which is this idea that the state arises out of a

necessity based on the division of society into classes. and he is very, very clear here when he says that, you know, in socialism and eventually communism through that process, you know, this revolutionizing of productions will result in the end of the state and it will be placed in, you know, the museum of human history next to things that are no longer useful like the spinning wheel and the bronze axe, which I found very, very interesting. and he even says or makes clear throughout this text that the state's role has shifted in different epochs of class society so during ancient slave societies it was a state of slaveholders more or less holding down the slaves during feudalism he talks about it as a state of nobility holding down the peasant serves and under capitalism of course a state of capitalist holding down the working class

but also interestingly he makes a point that it also serves to manage the inevitable contradictions in class conflict that arises here. And he says what a capitalist society tends to do is the very real class struggle, isolate it into the economic realm, right? Union struggle, and then buffer it with the legal code. So, you know, some forms of strikes are illegal. Private property is still always protected legally. So they allow like almost a release valve in the economic realm for class struggle to take place without it buckling all of society. which I think is very interesting and he directly puts his conception of the state

in stark contrast to the Hegelian notion of the state which of course they're kind of basing some of this analysis on or you know we all know the history of Hegel into Marx and Haigle turning him or Marx turning Hegel on his head etc. But you know in juxtaposition to Hegel's idea of the state being the image and reality of reason you know Engel says quote rather it's a product of society at a given

point of development. Society is immersed in irresolvable contradiction. The state rises to manage these contradictions and moderate the conflict. But interestingly, by placing itself above society, it also becomes alienated from society. And that alienation point, I think, is interesting as well. I think it comes in the form of, you know, us, like even today, we can use our own current period of time. Like, we feel very alienated from the state as such. The state is operating, in ways that are not commensurate with the interests or the desires of the people. It feels as if it is being run by people who are not us outside of our control for the interest of the few.

And in reality, it absolutely is. But that alienation is always present in all these different phases of development, I think, is very interesting. And the idea that the state is there to sort of manage these contradictions, not as a neutral arbiter of you know of moderation between the owning class and the working class it's always on the always on the side of the ruling class and is a part of the ruling class but there's a interest for the ruling class to try to keep a lid on the most explosive elements of this class struggle and the state does precisely that so i thought some of those points that he made about the state were very interesting and and do in a lot of ways help make sense of the state today and and you know

its problems, but also this very hardcore confidence that Engels has that, you know, with different forces of production and with the evolution of the forces of production, the state will come to an end. And I think, of course, he's talking about communism, not socialism, but he is very, very clear that that's where it will go one day. Yeah, there's a few things in that quote that you pulled that I think are really worth diving into and really interesting. And I, you know, as always the thing that I come back to in Marxism is that what Marxism really has going for it is its ability to denistify things, right? The state is one of those things that I think all of us grow up just taking it for granted, right? Like there is a government, there are police, there is a military, there is this

system of law that exists around us. And we're told throughout much of our lives that these things are necessary, right? Like the whole mythos of liberalism is that absent the state, there's chaos and anarchy, and that that in and of itself is a problem. And one of the fascinating things that Ingalls is doing in this text is saying, actually, there was a time before the state, right? The state is not an eternal thing. It hasn't been here since the world came into existence. There was a time before it and there will be a time after it as well in a way that I think is really important. And one of the things that to me like really stands out in terms of how Ingalls looks at the transition from the Gens to the state is the extent to which Engels like

almost sees the state as like a pale imitation of what the gens was able to accomplish before it, right? So Ingalls ends one of these chapters kind of bemoaning that, yes, now we have the state that can provide these social functions, but what's so sad is that the gens could provide those social functions without force, right? Here, structures of kinship and loyalty were actually sufficient to create social cohesion once upon a time, and now the state to accomplish those things that were taken for granted in the pre-state society has to use violence and has to use force to do it. And in this sense, the state is almost kind of like a sad imitation of what we had before. And I think you can see that with this idea that the state gets in the way, actually, of a

rational society developing, just as class gets in the way of a rational society developing. It's a poor substitution for another alternative that is possible. And what's really cool is that Ingalls does the important historical work here of showing, look, there were societies that did not have a state, right? actually existed, we have the evidence of it, and that proves the possibility for a future without it as well. Because oftentimes with Marxism, I think, when we make this argument that the state will go away, our argument is, well, if we get rid of class, then the state will go away because the function of the state is to mediate class conflict and intervene on behalf of the

ruling class, which is kind of like an inferred argument for the state going away, like we can infer it'll go away if we get rid of the reason for it. But here Ingalls makes a historical argument too, right? Which is actually, no, there were historically existed powerful forms of kinship that preceded the state and that proved the possibility as well. And I think that does so much for this text giving us the ability as Marxists to defend our position, because one of the difficult things we do have to defend is that, yeah, we do believe there will be a stateless society someday, right? And that sounds crazy to many people who we say it to, and Ingalls gives us the historical reference points that we need to say, actually, it's crazier to believe that this thing will exist forever once we know

that it emerged from a specific moment. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's like a really important part of this text, too, just for strengthening our ability to respond to critics of this vision of communism that we're putting forward. Absolutely. And you made a great point, too, about how the state really does feel normal. Of course, we're born into it. It's just a hallmark of any functioning society and all over the world. And so it is this way in which is taken for granted in the exact same way that capitalism is often, And it feels already natural because when you're born out of nothing and all of a sudden you grow up in a society with these things, you do take them for granted. And it takes an extra turn of critical thought and analysis and engagement with something that you once took to be just an assumption and a basic bedrock premise of society.

It takes that extra turn. And of course, the educational system in these societies aren't going to urge you to take that particular turn. But another thing that feels very normal is the way that the family has been structured so far. I think in modern times, things have certainly been changing even from Engels time, but still the idea that the father is the head of the household and these various patriarchal values and structures and premises that we fully accept. The idea that some people should own businesses and other people should work for bosses, right? That some people should have private ownership over the means of production, not even like a conscious thought in our heads that we say like linguistically people, some people have the control of the means of production. but we just accept it as normal. Like we accept, you know, harvest time for the crops or the seasons coming and going.

This in and of itself is not something that has always existed. And in a lot of ways, if we are to survive as a species and allow ourselves to evolve in a proper way, it's going to be something that we have to confront. The first step to that is, of course, being very critical of it and then analyzing where it came from so we can better understand it. Another thing I really wanted to say, and this is a sort of, you could talk about this text, but just broadly it really this is very obvious on one level but I think it's something that people

really could have some interesting use of when they're talking with friends or family who may be on the fence about some things which is just the basic idea that you know should society be split into classes you know should should some people own everything and make most other people work for them so that they can live lives

of extreme comfort extreme luxury extreme wealth and extreme power why everybody else has to live lives of precarity and toil. That is inherently unjust, and it's always been that way. He talks about, you know, slavery and feudalism, these things that all modern people will look back on with horror and disgust, right? He also says, interestingly, that wherever there's class society, slavery continues to exist, disguised or undisguised. And you say, well, in modern America, it's all about freedom. You know, where's the slavery?

It's in the prison system. You could even also, of course you could talk about wage labor, getting paid $7 an hour in America to do anything as a form of slavery, absolutely, but literal slavery also exists. And not just in the prison system in the United States, but in various parts all over the world. I mean, open-air slave markets took hold again after the U.S. completely destabilized and destroyed Libya, who had the highest quality of living in all of Africa. of slavery came right back and so we transcending class society pointing out to people how it's inherently unjust almost nobody today believes that the people with all the money and power are good or worked harder than us or smarter than us or deserves it more than us use that as a starting point and i've i've just say that because i've gotten a lot of ground lately with people in my

family and friends circles kind of zooming out from capitalism and talking about class society and like, you know, the splitting up of people into classes is inherently unjust and make people have to sort of deal that that argument. But I do have a question for you, Allison. Given all of this stuff about the state, you know, it's obviously something that in some sense is like a natural occurrence of class society, of course, but also something that angles is excited to evolve beyond, as are we, right? We want to get beyond the state. We understand it as a mechanism of the class society and particularly of the ruling class itself. Our anarchist friends are very adamant about placing the state as the centerpiece of what we should attack, right? We are much more

focused on class and class struggle. And of course, many anarchists are as well. But they'll really emphasize this need to confront and attack the state. And there's a level in which Marxism can fully understand and go along with this, fighting the police in the streets when they're trying to impose, you know, negative policies or ruling class policies on the working class, right? You can even see this in France with people rising up whenever they try to up their retirement age or anything like that. So certainly there's a place to confront the state in Marxism. Right. But I think there, and I would like to get your thoughts on this, Alison, the anarchist emphasis on the state, often outside of discussion about how it arose and how it's inherently attached to class society, I think,

is ultimately an error that we can understand as an error by reading this text in particular. And of course, Lenin's work building off of Angles' work on the state. So what are your thoughts on centering the state as the object of our ire and the thing that we need to be confronting first and foremost in the anarchist tradition and how Marxists should kind of think about that? Yeah, I think this text is useful for kind of answering that question in a couple of ways. So if we want to think about what it would take to bring about the end of the state, right? It is useful to think about what it took to bring about the emergence of the state. It would make sense that the corollary there would be useful for us. And one of the things I think we can see in this text that is useful in this discussion that we can have with anarchism

is the fact that the state itself did not have a very quick or instantaneous emergence, right? In all of these instances that we see throughout the text, the state emerged quite gradually, Actually, changes at the level of economics, particularly at the level of private accumulation of wealth and the ability to accumulate property privately and pass it down within paternal lines within families, led to the development of the state over time. It was not quick, and in fact there were instances that Ingalls talks about throughout the text where the gins and the state exist side by side, each holding a certain level of power, right? It is not one immediately replaces the other. And even in these instances in which the state is established through particularly revolutionary means, it's not like that revolution did away with the gins immediately and instantly instituted a state. The example from this text that I think that stands out is the example of Rome, right?

Particularly Ingalls talks about the plebeian revolutions which occurred in Rome and how those helped to establish the Roman state, but even those revolutions did not immediately do away with the Gentile order and establish the state as we know it. it, they were one part of a broader step. So one thing that we can think about is if Ingalls is correct here, that the state itself is really a reflection of economic realities, and those economic realities shift gradually over time, it would make sense that to get rid of the state, that would not be an immediate thing that happens, right? That would be a gradual process, which would only become possible as we adjust the economic realities, which have made the state necessary. I think it is, you know, I don't want to be rude, but I think it's ridiculous to believe that the

capitalist mode of production could be destroyed and replaced overnight, right? That is the HUD, the kind of thing that happens. And if that mode of production cannot be immediately replaced overnight, then the state itself can't be destroyed overnight either. Changing a mode of production takes time, and the social forms which accompany it, including the state, will shift over time as well. So an over-emphasis on the state can cause us to miss the fact that the primary question is relations of production and property, and that the state is downstream from those. And it can also cause us to miss the fact that the state plays an important function in socialist transition, right? Class does not disappear immediately upon a socialist revolution occurring. It would be so

nice if it were that simple. But history has showed us time and time again that, in fact, class struggles intensify. The antagonisms get stronger when a revolution occurs. Civil wars break out. Foreign invasions happen, right? And given those realities, the state still has a function to play, at least in early socialist societies. And the anarchists, I think, lose sight of that because they see the state as primary rather than the mode of production and relations property as primary. And I think if, you know, that is a position that you want to hold, you have to answer the historiographic work that's being done in this text, which I think very clearly demonstrates that no, the state is downstream of those other realities and is not, in fact, primary in and of itself. I think Ingalls does a very good job of providing historical. warrants for that and those obviously then necessitate an answer. Yeah, very well said. And I would just add to that, the basic analogy that I would use in this context is, you know, symptoms versus disease. The state is one of the symptoms of the underlying disease of class society and private property, et cetera. And it's a nasty symptom at times, for sure. But just by attacking

the symptom and never, ever addressing the underlying disease, the symptoms are going to keep reappearing over and over and over again. And that's a very basic analogy, but it's a helpful way, I think, to think about it. And that leads well into this other thing I wanted to mention in the last chapter. I have another quote I wanted to read and would always love to get Allison's thoughts on this as well. This is actually very interesting because it talks about the possibility of elections. It makes some sense of the state. It talks about universal suffrage, which is, you know, the universal right of people to vote,

which is, you know, on its face, something interesting that we should deal with because if the state is a mechanism of ruling class rule, why would they allow everybody to vote in the first place? But, you know, one argument that I might have immediately would just be, if you could run the dictatorship with the bourgeoisie and give it the facade, even convince its own people of the democratic nature of this dictatorship, right? People actually feel that this is the product of their real interest and will. I think that's dying these days, but at times in American history, it's certainly been true.

I think that's the best and most efficient way to entrench a dictatorship, right? The facade of democratic input, which, as we've seen with literal studies and scientific studies by academia, the interests and the needs and the wants of the voters have literally zero impact on actual U.S. policy. But the spectacle of the elections are magnificent, and every American tunes in, and we get enraptured by it. And so, yeah, it works very well. But let me read this quote in the last chapter and see what thoughts we can pull out of this. So he says, quote, the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class, in our case, therefore the proletariat, is not yet ripe for its self-liberation. So long will it in its majority recognize the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class its extreme left wing?

So let's stop right there saying when we're not yet right for our self liberation, the majority of the working people will still recognize the existing order as the only possible one, right? and therefore accept it as natural and fine and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class comma its extreme left wing. So that would be, you know, left wing governments that give the illusion that they're working, fighting for the working class. Think Democrats before Clinton.

You know, always and everywhere still a mechanism of class rule but allowed some room for working class people to come in. But still it was concessionary. It was a class collaboration. It was never truly a working class party in any real sense, right? And this is a product, again, of the proletariat not yet being ripe for its self-liberation and being confined to this left wing of the capitalist class and identifying their interest with that wing. But the quote goes on, in the measure in which it matures towards its self-mancipation,

in the same measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists. universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class it cannot never will be anything more in the modern state but that is enough for now end quote so i think that's very interesting again though he tells us incredibly clearly that the process of self maturation among the proletariat becoming conscious of ourselves as the proletariat of our exploitation etc it results in the moving away from merely being you know in tune with the left-wing party of capital and as we mature so too does our ability to construct our own party our own politicians right still in the realm of bourgeois electoralism but now much more self-consciously working class and and that is like

that that can be seen as like a stage of development of the proletariat like even within our own society right when more and more working people see the need for an explicitly working class party, sees both parties as not in any way representing the interest of working people, right? This is actually a positive step, something that can garner for us in so far as it's happening or will happen in the near future, some confidence and some optimism even for the working class because it does signify this step of maturation in our understanding of who we are, in our understanding of the mechanisms of exploitation and importantly in our understanding of how capitalism operates and what its bourgeois Democratic parties actually can offer.

So in this telling, you know, it makes it very clear that no, if you're a communist, Marxist, a member of the working class, it's not about voting for Democrats in an attempt to reduce harm. The goal should be to begin to constitute our own party. And I think that that begins with a with centering a critique of both parties and showing how they are ultimately fail working people, that will always fail working people, et cetera. And I think, especially among the younger people in this society who have not had decades of hardcore indoctrination quite yet and have lived through terrible material conditions, I think this fact is becoming more and more true. And that does give me some heart. Yeah, I think there's a couple interesting things to get up there. So one thing that, like, stands out to me as immediately interesting is that in Engel's formulation, right, elections are almost downstream from the development of consciousness, not the other way around.

So one of the arguments that we often hear for doing electoral work is that it's a way to get a platform out there publicly and raise consciousness. And this is an argument that's worth considering. Lennon makes similar arguments. But what's interesting is there's like a certain threshold of consciousness that the proletariat has to achieve first before that electoral conception even seems meaningful in Ingalls formulation here, right? And I think that's kind of interesting. It's the opposite of how we often think about it when we just think about the question of elections, for example, through the lens of left-wing communism and infantile disorder, which is very focused on why elections are useful for raising consciousness. So there's one interesting thing there.

And then I think, yeah, to think about the U.S. today, right? One of the frustrations that we have is that if this is a litmus test for where the consciousness of the proletariat in the United States is, then we're not doing great, right? Unfortunately, historically, the labor movements in the United States and even some socialist movements have been tied to the Democratic Party. And I think it puts, you know, this idea really puts at the forefront why it's necessary for a division to be driven there, right? Why the labor movement, why the socialist movement needs to break from the Democratic Party. You know, where this debate is happening very largely at the moment that I see right now is within the DSA, right? And whatever our opinions are about the DSA, they are having these conversations. Ought there be another party outside of the Democratic Party or ought the DSA exist as a sort of parapolitical extension of the Democratic Party. And I think, here with Ingalls, we see that's a question that has weight, right? That's a question that has

meaning, because so long as the socialist movement, the labor movement that intends to operate for the proletariat is an extension of the bourgeois electoral mechanisms, then we don't even have the very kind of lowest bar for consciousness that is being developed, and it shows why it's necessary to make that break. I also think it shows really distinctly why there's a risk of this kind of move to embrace social conservatism within certain communist trends, right? To push and break from the dims and then pull us right back into

the Trump wing of the Republican Party. It's just another way of pulling the left into another faction of mutual politics. And what we need is a break from both parties completely to represent that they fundamentally cannot represent proletarian interests and that something else is needed. So, you know, this is a debate that's happening right now.

It's a debate that's relevant within organizing in the United States. today, and it's a debate that's relevant, I think, broadly within kind of these strategic questions of how we relate to elections. So I think Ingalls gives us a useful kind of test here to say, like, man, if we are the ones guiding the working class into, you know, promoting democratic politics, then we're the ones responsible for making them the tale of the left of capital, right? And that is something that we need to recognize and take seriously as a reason for a break completely from the Democratic Party and also from all.

all of the Bichois political parties within the United States, of which there's two. Yeah, well, I would also, I was going to say, and maybe you disagree with this, but thus far, would you also count the Green Party under which Cornel West is running for the nomination to be at least heretofore of a bourgeois party ultimately, even though it's even further left than the Dems? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. The Green Party is hard to assess because the extent to which it has anything that looks like real programmatic unity is kind of, you know, lacking Green Party candidates are all. over the place. So to understand, like, what the politics of the Green Party are, I think, is just kind of hard to pin down. I know there are many people on the left who think that that is a avenue through which a working class party could be created. I think that probably the Green Party has a lot of entrenched and calcified internal bureaucracy already. That might make that difficult. But certainly there are people who are trying it there. Those are tactical questions that I will

leave to the people who are trying to actually do that, I think. But to me, I think it would be hard to say, well, the Green Party could be that to a certain extent, because what the Green Party is in the United States is hard to say. It's sort of, and I don't use this as a pejorative, really, but it's almost politically opportunist, right? It'll latch itself to candidates from varying political perspectives that are generally outside of the two-party orthodoxy, and that makes it hard to pin it down what its political and class standing is. Yeah, I agree with that. And yeah, you said also that we're sort of stuck in the situation about, you know, having the Democrats and the Republicans and even the Greens not being ideal. And I would say that's

very true. The thing that I would say that gives me heart and optimism is this, there is a shift happening. Most like now in polls, you know, for the first time, most Americans reject both parties. You know, both candidates have less than 50% favorability rating amongst the people. Most polls come out saying a majority of Americans want other options. And this by no mean means that a communist socialist or even a labor working class party is what they have in mind or what's coming next. But it does show a general disdain for the current situation, recognition that both parties don't serve working people. And more and more people across the political spectrum in the U.S. and mainstream politics are talking about and centering class, seeing with anybody that

has anything like clarity, seeing the devastation of working people, how high hard of this to survive. I look at my fucking budget. I have three kids, of course, you know, and I just don't know how we make it, you know, and I don't know how anybody below us makes it. Like me and my wife probably make after taxes 60K a year and we don't live in a super expensive place or anything like that. It is so hard to make ends meet. We're relying on a credit card month in and month out. Like what about people making 40,000 a year with two kids? 30,000 a year with one kid, 20,000 a year with no kids. You can't fucking survive in this country. And I feel like a shift has to happen when the majority of people are being daily

emiserated in new and undignified ways. And especially with the newer crop of young people coming up who I always remind people. I don't have faith in them because young people are inherently more progressive or their bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and open to new ideas. It's simply the material conditions that millennials and Gen Z have lived through. The complete lack of opportunity is pushing more and more young people to the left, many of whom are getting. very and seriously interested in either political education or actual on-the-ground organizing. And those shifts are new as somebody who's been following politics since the Bush era very closely and consciously. Those shifts are very new.

And I think that they're reason for optimism, but they mean nothing ultimately if we don't go out there and make something of them, right? And so it's just, yeah, some optimism, but of course it's always cautious and skeptical. Yeah, no, I agree. And I think the real reason for optimism, too, in addition to that, is that I think that the bourgeois political institution senses that and is worried about it, right? I think that is why we see co-optation. It's why we see, you know, like I said, I think that ultimately RFK may be an attempt to co-opt some of that momentum and pull it into a direction that could ultimately be harmful as we're discovering an

explicitly Zionist direction, unfortunately. God damn. Right. And so there is this move to try to co-op that frustration. into, you know, a politics that doesn't threaten capitalism, that doesn't threaten imperialism, and doesn't start from a working class perspective. And seeing that mobilization occur, I think, actually, as you're getting at, is a reason for hope, right? It indicates that there is a concern within the political establishment of the Boutoisy that is mobilizing a response,

and that means that there are ships that are actually taking place kind of under those currents. You know, the vehicle that might be the party of the working class is this new and exciting, a no labels party that was a joke my friends not at all this is a corporate fucking proxy disgusting fucking absurd thing like what Americans really want

is like another corrupt corporate party in between the Democrats and the Republicans very funny stuff all right let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit and talk about the text as a whole one thing I really want to touch on and this has been going around I mean maybe not so much as of recent because you know Twitter is this a

femoral thing and one week to the next we're talking about different things but a few weeks back I do remember some people on the left discussing family abolition um debating what angles was saying in this text people having very different positions and going hard at each other over their interpretations of what angles is actually trying to say et cetera and I thought like as this is our final episode on this text as a whole you know we should probably get into that get into what he's actually talking about ultimately when he when he's talking about the family and understanding it's through historical materialism, it's development over time. And we're definitely going to get to that. Some things I want to say really quickly, I just want to talk about the title

for a second, because I think the title in and of itself is kind of interesting and tells you what angles is doing. You know, origins, when he says the origins of, he is talking about a historical materialist analysis of these things. His attempt to find the origins of things is to apply this historical materialist method and what are the things he applies it to, family, private property, and the state. On the face of it, those three things seem like three discrete different things. Is he going to have different chapters dedicated to each one or how is this going to work? But, of course, we're talking about angles. He's a dilettician. All of these things are dialectically connected. So it's the historical materialist analysis of the dialectically connected phenomena

of the family, private property, and the state, which rise and evolve together. So I think just Just by that analysis of the title, you can see both dialectical and historical materialism come to the forefront and get an idea about what he's doing here. With that said, let's go ahead and move into this broader discussion. I have a little quote that I wanted to read from the principles of communism about the family, but before I do, is there anything you want to say as like a preface to getting into this discussion about monogamy and the family in particular? Yeah, so the family question is tricky. The language of the abolition of the family or a family abolition, I think, is inherently kind of polemical in nature. It makes people upset. You know, this is the common or the little kind of jab from the communist manifesto when Mark says abolition of the family, even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal. There's something to it that just really has an intensity to it. So I think it's a question that needs to be treated seriously. And with and importance. One thing I will preface is I will say, if you want more in-depth thoughts on this, I have a very long article that I wrote for Cosmonaut back in 2020 on the question of family abolition. That is just a deep dive into commune's theory on this. So check that out if you want more.

But I do think this is a question we need to be very careful on, because it is a question where many people fall into kind of social conservative errors and then others fall into kind of almost like libertarian ultra-left errors. And it's necessary for us to kind of walk a fine line here. Try to pay attention to what Marx, Ingalls, and other communists are actually saying when they're talking about the abolition of the family and then do some exegesis on the text there. So that's kind of a preface that I want to lead in with. And if you want to jump to the quote, I think that would be a good opening. Okay. Yeah. And in fact, if it's cool with you, I think it'd be really fun if you're okay with it. If I read your article from Cosmonaut as a

Patreon exclusive. Yeah, totally. Okay. Because I think, yeah, that is going to be so helpful with thinking through these issues and we're not going to be able just because of time and memory to hit on every single aspect of that. So I'll read that on both Revelefs and Red Menace's Patreon in the next week or so. So if you're so interested, you can check that out. But yeah, so let's go ahead and read this quote. First thing I'll say is that I was actually pretty ignorant for longer than I'd like to admit about what family abolition meant. It was, it sort of like struck me as discordant at times and some of the more vociferous ways in which it was articulated as I was developing politically. I was sort of put off by it a little bit. But I was

actually, after reading this text, my whole idea was like, okay, radically transformed. This is way different than I initially thought. And so, you know, the phrase of family abolition, as Allison was saying, can be a little jarring for sure. But it's interesting to dive in to it. But I, this is, this quote is actually from something outside of this text. As I said, this is from the principles of communism, which is actually an interview with Angles, talking about core ideas about communism, and it's actually a very interesting read. In fact, I think I'm going on the podcast, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism in September to do a whole episode on this text, because it's a very fast read, and there's so much here to talk about. But in

the 21st question or whatever, the question is to Angles, what will be the influence of communist society on the family. So just stepping back, this is not saying how did the family come about, how is the family tied to slavery or feudalism or anything. In the future, which you don't really hear Marx and Engels

get too into the specifics about what's coming under communism, right? There's a general thrust, but it's unknowable by definition. So this is what will be the influence of communist society on the family? And this is Engels' two or three sentence response. Quote,

It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter, which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage, the dependence rooted in private property, of the woman on the man, and of the children on the parents. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral Philistines against the community of women, quote unquote. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society, in which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and will fall with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact, abolishes it, end quote. So that's kind of interesting because, you know, this community of women is like this idea of like people, you know, how we have. have people today that don't understand communism, but we'll talk about it as if they do.

Well, that was true in his time as well. And that's what he called them highly moral Philistines, saying that, like, communism means the communizing of women, that we're going to communally share women or whatever. And just like various other things that Engels has pointed out, prostitution itself, women as commodities will absolutely, without a doubt, end with the end of class society and the private property upon which it is premised. So I thought that was very interesting, but also like monogamy, you know, me and Allison were talking about this before we recorded.

Engels talks about monogamy, and he's not against monogamy, right? His critique of it is very interesting. My friend, Kristen Gottzi, did the book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and really brought to bear facts from the Soviet Union about women being emancipated in those conditions, at least relative to what was present beforehand. And I thought that, you know, highly recommend that. But monogamy itself under Engels his understanding is not necessarily going to die with the end of capitalism and with class society. It will simply be fully and completely liberated from the economic coercion inherent in class society and in particular

the capitalist mode of production. And so what will happen afterwards, there's no limits being placed on it. He's not saying monogamy is going to be the only way people can interact romantically and sexually. But he's saying monogamy will probably still be a thing, as will maybe other things, but it will no longer be confined by the economic coercion of class society. And so people can really freely, genuinely freely, outside of any constraints, any limitations imposed on them from the outside economic and political order, be able to choose. And that's what I think is really being stressed here. And maybe, you know, Allison, I'd love to get your thoughts, whether it's your relationship structure, your family structure, anything like that is going to be opened up and become much more free, free from all forms of economic coercion. And that's going to come with massive social investments in aspects of life that were, you know, previously and to this day, very private. So, you know, communal education of children, communal childcare. So I can't tell you how hard parenting is. And I have a wife and we do it together and we're

both at home every day with the kids. It is the most difficult, thankless, exhausting job I've ever fucking done. And I cannot imagine not only how single parents have ever did it, but how, you know, before like goddamn 1960 women had to do all of it all the time. You know, the husband, I mean, up until today even in most places at most times, the brunt of the burden falls on women in the household. and I literally don't know how they do it. It is insane.

But, yeah, I thought that quote in the principles of communism touched on a few aspects of the family and how Engels sees it developing outside of class society. And so, yeah, Alison, do you have any thoughts on any of that? Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I think are useful here on this question, monogamy first, which is important. So one move that Ingalls makes here and that Marx makes elsewhere and that, you know, figures like Colentai also make, is to see. like monogamy under capitalism is kind of a lie to begin with, right? So one of the arguments

that Ingalls makes here is, well, this community of women, what is, you know, prostitution, if not the proof of the way that the economics of capitalism destroys monogamy, right? And turns sex and women's bodies into commodities which can be traded on a market, right? And so already Ingalls is saying the idea that monogamy is this thing that we have, which is enshrined and respected, should be called into question. And we can also think more broadly, about how marriage functions within class society as an economic system for passing down wealth for legitimization in the eyes of the state. And we can ask whether or not marriage and monogamy, as we understand them today, are voluntary, are liberated and are free, right? People enter monogamous

marriage relationships for economic reasons. They injure them because of coercion in many ways. And so the idea of a true free monogamy that exists now is something that angles and Marx, and again, and especially Colentai, I think really do a good job of calling into question, right? And saying, we don't actually have that ideal right now. And what's important, rather than the development of communism abolishing monogamy per se, it creates the conditions for it to be liberated, right? So thinking here, Colentai has this very, very strange book, or short text, rather, called Winged Eros, which is worth a read if you want some interesting early Soviet kind of theorizing about what sex and love would look like under socialism. But in this, she makes a

statement about monogamy that I think builds off angles here that I'll quote real quick. She says the bourgeoisie took monogamous marital love as its ideal. The working class derives its ideal from the labor cooperation and inner solidarity that binds the men and women of the proletariat together. The form and content of this ideal naturally differs from the conception of love that existed in other cultural epochs. The advocacy of love comradeship no way implies that in the militant atmosphere the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class has adopted a straightjacket ideology that is mercilessly trying to remove all traces of tender emotions for relations between the sexes, right? And so here, Colentai is saying, yes, we are shaking

things up. We are transforming society. But that's not the abolition of love that exists within these relations, right? It's not the abolition of the core thing that's important there. It's the abolition of a particular economic form that has taken aim here. And so I think we can see that really clearly, and she goes on to kind of outline that actually monogamy will be liberated from marriage as a social function, perhaps, but that doesn't mean that monogamy ceases to exist. And if anything, the working class will be free to take the forms of relations that it wants among itself. So it's important to emphasize that this is an opening up a possibility rather than a constraining a possibility. I think her language is saying this isn't a straight

jacket ideology, right? It is very much aimed at kind of dealing with some of the fears that people have around this when they start to hear this language. So if you want kind of a deep dive here, her work winged arrows does a lot of focus on this. While she does kind of argue for non-monogamy in many ways, she also is saying we're not just outlawing love in the forms that it has taken before. That's not what this is about. This isn't about constraining things. So I think that that can serve to kind of give some insight to the question at least. Yeah. And for for even more insight, of course, I actually did an episode with Kristen Godsey on Collentai specifically. And in that episode, we talked about her essay, Winged Aros. And Kristen went into great length

about Collin Thai's various ideas on the subject. So that's another resource that people can use. It's over at Rev Left, easy to find, totally free as always. You can check out. But the marriage thing is interesting because, and correct me if I am wrong here, but marriage is understood in this context to be the sort of legal bourgeois structure around the patriarchal handing down of property through the lines. And so under communism, while monogamy is still a live option that certainly many people will probably choose, marriage as we've known it, will almost certainly just not exist, not be necessary, right? Yes, I think that's very much what she's trying to to get out there.

Cool. And then with the community of women and, you know, sex work in general, of course, and this doesn't need to be said, but I'll say it over and over again. By no means is critiquing the sex trade industry or showing how prostitution arises historically. By no means is that in even a slight way an attack on people who have to do that for a living or who even choose to do that under these conditions for a living. I have nothing, and I'm sure I speak for Allison as well, but.

love and solidarity and support for sex workers. And I think one of the most disingenuous things is when you talk about stuff like this, you will get accused of being a sex worker, you know, exclusive, radical feminist, or you hate sex workers or whatever. And what I always say to that is like, that's like if I got on here and I was criticizing Jeff Bezos and Amazon's, you know, policies towards their workers. And somebody came to me and said that I was an Amazon worker exclusive, whatever, you know, communist, Marxist, whatever. It was a business. It was a business. It was a make no sense. We'd all point at that person and laugh. Criticizing Amazon as a company and Jeff Bezos is in no way criticizing the workers of Amazon quite the contrary. And in the

exact same way, I feel that way about sex work and sex workers. So I just wanted to say that. It should be common fucking sense, but you'll still find people who try to launch that epith toward people. But I do want to say this about being a commodity. You know, he's talking here about the community of women, finds its expression, private property, all of this. And it's, it's about the commodification of human beings. Let me read a quote from the last chapter of the origin of the family by angles. He says, we saw above at a fairly early stage in the development of production, human labor power obtains the capacity of producing a considerably greater product than is required for the maintenance of the producers, a surplus. And how this stage

of development was in the main the same as that in which division of labor and exchange between individuals arises. This is the important part. He says, quote, it was not long then before the great, quote, unquote, truth was discovered that man also can be a commodity, that human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making a man into a slave. Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being exchanged. The active became the passive, whether the men liked it or not. So he's talking about the shift to class society, the first shift of which is slave society and how almost immediately the human once commodities and commodity exchange was online humans already and immediately became the commodity as well a commodity as well and in the same exact way it is not

at all controversial for a communist to state with its full chest that no human being is a commodity and after we get past capitalism in class society no human being will ever again be treated as a commodity that also includes women right and i think like this is a This is a baseline idea of communism, of socialism, of anarchism, of Marxism, that human beings are not commodities and should not be treated as such. And that applies to everybody. And in this case, sex work is just one example. Again, people shouldn't be working for $7 an hour, but people are doing it because of the conditions we live in. Children shouldn't be dying in factories.

But here we are, 2023 in fucking America. And children are being brought on to dangerous low-wage jobs being maimed and killed once. again, like it was a fucking century ago, all because the capitalist class doesn't want to raise wages for adults. They would rather bring back child labor than raise wages for adults. And me criticizing that is not me shitting on children, right? It is me angry that children are forced into that situation. And so, yeah, that's just what I would say on that. And it just allowed me to make this broader point about human beings, not being a commodity, but under class society and every iteration of it, they absolutely are. Right.

So one thing actually to kind of pivot directions slightly from that that I think is interesting is this discussion of children in factories gets us to another part of the family abolition question I think is really important to look at, which is, you know, does the family actually exist for the working class, right? This is a question that we need to wrestle with and is important. So I'm going to pivot us back slightly to your previous question. I'm going to tie it in here, which is in addition to monogamy, what do we do with this talk of abolish? abolishing the family, right? Like, this crops up on Twitter every year or so. People decide they need to discourse about this. And I actually think you hit at one of the really key Marxist insights here. So real quick, I'm just going to read briefly from the communist manifesto here, where Marx and Ingalls distill these ideas a little bit more before talking about what we can learn from Ingalls in this text on the question. So again, the section on family abolition and the Communist Manifesto opens with what I think is kind of a cheeky line. of the family even the most radical flare up at the infamous proposal of the communists.

On what foundation is the present family the bourgeois family based on capital, on private gain? It is completely, in its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie, but this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of of course, when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the banishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime, we plead guilty. But you say, we destroy the most hallowed relations when we replace home education by social.

And your education, is it not that also social and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by intervention direct or indirect of society, by means of schools, etc. the communists have not invented the intervention of society and education, they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention and to rescue education from the influences of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hollowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting. The more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple, of commerce and instruments of labor.

And I think this is crucial, right? So when Marx and Ingalls are posed the question, do you want to abolish the family? On the one hand, they say yes, but they also say it's already being fucking abolished, right? The capitalist class has already initiated a economic system which has destroyed any meaning of family for the proletariat. When your child is working in a meat factory at 12 years old,

what fucking family are we talking about? when that becomes an economic necessity, or even more, when you can't afford to raise your child adequately and have to use social services, already the family has been abolished in some way and socialized to various degrees. And Marx said it here, the creation of public education, which is a fantastic thing, is also a socialization of the family, right? It's the destruction of that educational co-relation that he talks about. So when we get to this question of family abolition. What's very, very, very important for us to understand is that Marx and Ingalls are saying this is a process which is occurring regardless of what we think about it, right? And this makes sense.

If we tie this back into this text with Ingalls, the family precedes capitalism. It precedes capitalism significantly. There are multiple modes of production in between the emergence of capitalists are the emergence of the family and the emergence of capitalism. And so by the time we get to our capitalist epoch, the family is almost this leftover relevant. that exists within capitalist society. The bourgeoisie have access to family's sentimentalist ideologies because they can afford to, right? But the working class does not. So there's this kind of interesting thing here. And yet at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that Marxist feminists have interjected an important criticism here as well. And I said, well, the family does

often exist in proletarian society to a certain extent. And as much as women often still do domestic labor at home, right? Women still often have. to do more educational labor, more domestic labor, more reproductive labor, as some of this theory will refer to it as, than men who go out to work. And while there are families where both parents work within the proletariat, we also see families where only one does and the other raises children. And to an extent, a family structure thus persists under capitalism for the working class. And here we see the inverse of the bourgeoisie having access to the family and the proletariat lacking, because what's fascinating is the bourgeoisie can buy out of that aspect of the family.

The bourgeoisie can pay for private tutors to handle the education outside of school. They can pay for nannies. They can pay for house cleaners. They can pay for surrogates to birth their children for them, right? The bourgeoisie has the ability to buy out of the labor relations of the family and lean back on the ideological sentimentalism of the family, whereas the proletariat has the inverse. None of the ideological sentimentalism.

All of that has been torn asunder by ruthless capitalist exploitation, while they are still burdened with the reproductive labor and domestic labor of the family form that particularly impacts working class women. And so if we ask this question of, what does family abolition mean that? It means, well, one, the proletariat families should get access to what the bourgeois families get, which is socialized labor to take care of the house and to take care of their children, through public education and through socialized upbringing, but also they should get access to something that the bourgeois family gets access to,

which they don't, which is for their children not to be turned into commodities and set to workhouses, right? And this is kind of this complicated idea that comes out here, where the family is being abolished by capitalism already. What we as communists advocate is abolishing the labor relations of the family through socialization and universalizing, you know, what Colentai calls a great proletarian family, not getting rid of the idea of the family, but perhaps transforming it into a working-class proletariat notion of the family. So some thoughts there that I think tie into this text quite usefully, because Ingalls shows us, again, that the family is in many ways this artifact that operates in these very complicated ways within capitalism. I think that was absolutely

powerful, so incredibly well said and argued. One of the points you made is the way in which today's wealthy can buy extended communal family. And I think I think about that all the time. Like, you know, as me and my wife are, you know, struggling and just exhausted and never have time to ourselves or whatever. I see like on TV these rich celebrities who have like four or five, six kids and you're like, I wonder how they do it. Well, they don't. They have an army of nannies and, you know, various workers and they buy their own private chefs so they don't have to cook dinner and they have their house cleaner so they don't have to do the domestic labor around the house. They've bought themselves out of all these things that we have to deal with. And in so many ways in society at large, zooming out from the family, rich people more and more are buying themselves out of all public spheres of our society.

You know, just here in Nebraska, we just signed a petition, a local petition here in Nebraska because they're trying to take upwards of $100 million and shift it from public school funding to private school vouchers, taking money and resources out of the public school system and shifting it to private, often for-profit school. systems that only the wealthy can buy into in the first place, you know, depriving regular working people of even a basic education, which for many years in the American society was seen as like, that's one of the good things we have. We have public schools. Every kid in America can get a good education. They're changing that. I mean, so gated communities, private airplanes, they are extracting themselves from public

society and taking their resources with them. And this also gives rise to the delusion. in many of their heads that they're going to be able to continue to live high on the hog, as it were, and watch society collapse all around them, but somehow be able to extract themselves from the consequences of the thing that they are contributing to. Because if you have a gated community, if you have a private police force, if you have a private school, if you have a nanny and a cook and a house washer, you get this sense in your head that you really are sort of independent from the rest of society and the rest of society as it collapses and deteriorates

looks more and more scary which exacerbates this rush to extract yourself from it and that is creating a multitude of contradictions in our society that will at some point in some way can come to a head and the thing that's really scary is looking forward at a technology like the ability to edit genes in vitro CRISPR, right? Gene editing. This is a technology that has been bubbling for quite some time, is more and more coming on a line in society, but of course is stratified by income and who can afford it. So we're staring down the barrel of a very real situation over the next couple of decades where new godlike technology to decipher and determine your child's everything from their height to their athletic prowess to their IQ points.

can be now bought by the rich. And imagine what's going to happen. If that technology is implemented in a society like the one we live in fucking today, what do you think that's going to do to wealth and equality? When the children of the rich are now these fucking superhumans almost, right? And the rest of us, the poor, you know, we don't get the ability to make our kids super good looking and athletic and be able to get scholarships and have a high IQ. We just got to kind of roll the fucking dice like we have. have forever and they now get to determine which part of that dice comes up and that's that's a

horrifying dystopian possibility that is on the horizon right now and that's just one of the many ways that that i am thinking about these situations and one of the many things that just triples down on the need to you know actively confront this shit as soon as we fucking can because it is not going in a pretty direction no absolutely and you know it's funny it's one thing to talk about like, oh, the rich opting out of the family labor structure by having tutors and all of those things, but they're getting to, like, opting out of biological lineage. It's like such a next level thought there as well. Because back in the day, they would inbreed so much that they'd have like these weird chins

and shit. Now they get the fucking have the best chins. That's not fair. Yeah, so I don't know, lots to think about, but it also just shows the scope and the continued relevance of this work by Frederick Engels and why it is so important. And not only for Marxists, but anyone interested in any of these issues, even if you don't agree with communism, to wrestle with this text and try to understand what he's saying, where he's right, where he's wrong, and what the implications are. I don't care what you believe currently. It will be a useful text for you to wrestle with.

Yeah, it is absolutely worth the worth that we read. It is an interesting historical work. It's interesting. Again, I keep coming back to this. It's one of those cool things where Marxists are looking at something beyond just economics, right? They're looking at anthropology, and I think that's a good muscle to flex as Marxists, right, applying dialectical materialism to other fields. And that's one huge thing here. And the other thing that we got at in some previous episodes, right, is oftentimes we skip to the later Marxist theorist Mao, Ingalls, Stalin, right?

Or Mao Lenin and Stalin. But what we can really see here is that those thinkers are drawing on earlier texts like this, right? These foundations are important. You don't get the state and revolution without this book. Like, it just doesn't happen. This is where the foundations of that. text are late. So I think there is so much to gain from taking the time to work through this text. You can connect it to the issues that we're facing it today, but you can also connect it to the historical development of Marxism as a school of thought and as a revolutionary movement, right? And it's very, very important in that leadage. Yes, absolutely. All right, well, that wraps out the notes that I have. Is there anything else that you wanted to say, Alison, before we wrap this up? No, I think that covers pretty much everything. Again, really, I think is a text worth reading.

it's not that long, is the other nice thing about it. Like, it is dense in some points, but I think this is a text that anyone who's familiar with the work of Ingalls can pick up, make their way through. So I would highly encourage listeners to take the time to work through it themselves, check what we're saying against what the text says. And, you know, there's obviously always room for different interpretations. And I would just encourage you to engage seriously with it. Definitely.

And at a very minimum, I think reading that last chapter can be very helpful in and of itself. So if you happen to have the text, you don't have time to read the whole book, read barbarism and civilization. and you'll get a lot of the main points for sure, especially in relation to or in addition to something like this, which helps explain the rest of it. So all right. Well, that's going to be it for our three episode series on Frederick Engels is the origin of the family, private property in the state. I hope people out there found it useful. And we are going to shift for the time being, not forever, towards more current events, especially as current events pick up.

There's so many things in the news today that Allison and I would love to talk about. and we're going to get the chance to in the coming months. So definitely stay tuned. Thank you to everybody who supports us in any way, shape, or form. Share this episode with anybody you think that might find it interesting or worthwhile. Leave a positive review on your favorite podcast app. It really does help extend our reach to new people. And with that, love and solidarity to everybody out there.

Stay safe, up there. You know, Yeah,