Rev Left Radio - "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State" by Friedrich Engels (Pt. 2)

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In this second installment of our three-part series on Friedrich Engels' famous work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State", Alyson and Breht discuss chapters 4, 5, and 6 titled "The Greek Gens", "The Rise of the Athenian State", and "the Gens and the State in Rome" respectively. Together they summarize the chapters, and then launch into a discussion on the main themes and lessons from this section of the text! 00:15 Intro 1:08 Summary 33:50 Discussion   Check out Red Menace's first installment on this text here: https://redmenace.libsyn.com/the-origin-of-the-family   Support Rev Left, and get up to three bonus episodes a month, here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello, and welcome to Brad Minus. My name is Allison. I am here, as always, with my co-host, Brett, and today you are coming in for our second episode on Friedrich Engel's Origins of the Family. And this is a text that we've broken up in. multiple different episodes like we've done with a couple past X, just because there's such a level of depth to it that we felt it's really worth kind of getting into the nanny gritty and wrestling with the details here. So in our previous episode, we talked about chapters one through three. We'll have a link in the bio to that episode. But today we're going to go ahead and jump right into chapters four, five, and six, where Ingalls goes beyond just discussing

the family and the gens and the structures of kinship and actually to theorizing about the state itself. So some exciting topics to get into here. And with that, we'll go ahead and just jump right over to our summary section. Let's do it. All right. So we'll go ahead and just kind jump straight into chapter four. And here, Ingalls begins by kind of seeing what his attention of this chapter is, which is to trace the history of the gens in ancient Greek society, along with some of the conditions which led to its decline. So we get both a kind of outline of its structure. and then also what happened historically over the course of Greek history that led to the fall of the gens ultimately. And Engel states that the Greek gens is in many ways a mirror to the Iroquois

gen within its structures. It has the gens itself, the fratry, the tribe, and the Confederacy. These things still exist, albeit with some slight differences. And by the time that we have a record of the Greek gens, however, there had already been changes that put it several steps ahead, according to Ingalls, of the Iroquois gens in terms of development. And again, here we are seeing some of that kind of linear approach to progress that Ingle's has in this text. Most important among these changes is a shift from the mother right to father right that has, as Ingalls has argued, allowed for greater private accumulation of wealth within the gins. Ingalls writes that, quote, after the introduction of father right,

the property of a rich heiress would have passed on to her husband and thus into another gins on her marriage. but the foundation of all Gentile law was now violated, and in such a case, the girl was not only committed, but ordered to marry within the Jens, in order that her property should be retained by the Jens, end quote. And so here we see that development, which Ingle says comes later in the Jens, where Father Wright becomes asserted, and again, that foundation for private property begins to emerge. And Ingle's and Orr's kind of get into the structure of the Jens a little bit. Looks to his story in George Grote, when he presents sort of the governing principles of the Jens, which are presented in the form of a short list that we'll just quote

in its entirety here. So you have, quote, first, the common religious rights and the exclusive privileges of priesthood in honor of a particular God, the supposed ancestral father of the Jens, who in this attribute was designated by a special surname. Second, a common burial place. Third, mutual right of inheritance. Four, mutual obligations of help, protection, and assistance in case of violence. Five, mutual rights and obligation to marry within the Jens in certain cases, especially for orphan girls and heiresses. And six, possession, at least in some cases, of common property with his special

archon, headman or president, and treasurer, end quote. So again, you know, we're seeing some similarities to the principles which govern the Jens in the situation of the Iroquois. And of course, as we saw in America, the Jens wasn't the highest level of social formation that there was, multiple gins could form into a fratry, and in the case of the Greeks, we see something interesting, which is that the frattery was kind of less formally unified than in the case of the Iroquois, while still maintaining, quote, mutual rights and obligations of a similar kind, particularly the common celebration of religious ceremonies and their right

to avenge the death of the fratour, end quote. So Ingle's next kind of outlines what he sees as three other aspects of the Greek gins where there's a little bit more detail here and again we start to see how the gins is taking a different shape than the iroquois gens and is becoming distinct in its own way so again to look at the list that angles lays out quote the next is the dissent in the mail line then prohibition of marriage within the gins except in the case of erases this exception and its formulation as an ordinance proves the old rule to be valid this is further substantiated by the universally accepted principle that at her marriage, the woman renounced the religious rights of her gins and went over to those of her husbands, being also inscribed

in his spratry. This custom and a famous passage in Decarcass both show that marriage outside the gins was the rule, and Becker and Charlyle's direct assumes that nobody might marry within their own gins. And then finally, the right of adoption into the gins. This was exercised through the adoption into the family, but required public formalities and was accepted. end quote. So of particular interest there is those rules of brown marriage, right? Where in the case of an heiress, marriage within the gins was a requirement. And this again begins to reveal how the accumulation of wealth and private property was beginning to exist within the Greek gins at this time. Of particular interest to angles is the fact that the gins, despite its immense size,

form the coherent genealogy, which is more than just kind of the groups of individual families which made it up. That's a view which Ingle says is a mistake that other scholars of his time fell into. The Jens rather supplanted the role of the family as a unit of social formation in the first place. Pingles writes that, quote, under the Gentile constitution, the family was never an organizational unit and could not be so, for man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gents. The whole Jens was incorporated within the fratry and the whole fratry within the tribe, but the family belonged half to the gins of the man and half to the chins of the woman. In public law, the state also does not recognize the family up to this day.

The family only exists in private law. And yet all our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, which since the 18th century in particular, has become inviolable, that the monogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is the core around rich society and the state have gradually crystallized. And so here, Ambles insists on historicizing, the family and the nuclear family in particular as an emergent and relatively recent phenomenon. Although families in the very abstract sense existed within the Greek society at the time of the

gins, they were a basis of social formation or of social governance. The gins supplanted them in terms of primacy there. So having outlined the details of the gins in more depth, Angles next turns to an analysis of the Greek fratry. The fratry in the Greek context, was made up of various brothers gins who can be seen in Greek literature such as Homer as primarily military arrangements. So within the works of Homer, we have these references to the fratry in terms of military formations that went into battle. Ingalls explains that, quote, the fratry has further the right and the duty of prosecuting for blood guilt incurred against a freighter. Hence, in early times, it also had the obligation of blood revenge. Further, it had common shrines

and festivals. In fact, the elaboration of the whole Greek mythology out of the traditional old Aryan nature cult was essentially conditioned by the fratries and gents and took place within them. So again, we see similar roles to the fratry where there's this guilt and avenging system that comes into play there, but also some specifics in the religious context of Greek society. And as we saw in the Americas, above the fratry, there was an even higher level of organization which existed, which was the tribe. Ingalls writes that, quote, several related fratries form a tribe.

In Attica, where four tribes each consisted of three fratries, each fratry numbering 30 gents. Such a rounded symmetry of group presupposes conscious, purposeful interference with the naturally developed order. As to how, when, and why this occurred, Greek history is silent. The historical memory of the Greeks only went back to the heroic age, as the Greeks were crowded together in a relatively small territory.

Differences of dialect were less developed than in the wide American forests. Yet in Greece, also, it was only tribes of the same main dialect that united a larger organization. And even Attica, small as it was, had a dialect of its own, which later, through its general use of language and prose, became the dominant dialect. So the tribe here, Ingalls, hints at something interesting, which is that it seems to have some level of intentionality in how it was built out as a level of organization. So the Greek tribe, you know, gets this special attention here, and we can see again how dialect became a organizing principle for that tribe. So there were a couple other principles which bound the tribe together, which is quite important to wrestle with. So the permanent authority within the tribe, according to Ingalls, was quote, the council probably composed

originally of all the chiefs of the gents. Later, when their number became too large of a selection whose choice provided an opportunity of extending and strengthening the aristocratic element. Dionysius actually speaks at the council in the heroic age as composed of nobles. Then, according to Ingalls, we have, quote, the assembly of the people or the Agora. We saw among the Iroquois how men and women stood round the council when it was holding its meeting, intervening an orly manner, and its deliberations, and thus influencing decisions, end quote. So again, similar to the council that we saw here that exists within the Iroquois, Gens, we also see something similar in the Greek context. And then most importantly here,

because Ingalls is really interesting in wrestling with misreads of this, there's, quote, the leader of the army or the Basilius, end quote. And Engels quotes marks on this to point out that the Basilius was not a king or a tyrant, as European scholars have depicted him, but was rather very likely elected or confirmed by the people. Furthermore, to reduce the Basilius to a king would be to mistake his function inasmuch as the Basilius had more roles than just decision-making. Ingalls writes that, quote, in addition to his military functions, the Basilius also held those a priest and judge. The leader got clearly defined the former exercised in its capacity as the supreme representative of the tribe or confederacy of tribes, end quote. So again, parallels exist

here to the Iroquois gen that we've seen already and will exist to the Roman gens that we're going to look at a little bit more. So having outlined all of this, Ingalls gives us a ending where he kind of focuses on why the Jens went away and what actually led to the development of the state. And here we are going to just quote him at length from this one sizable paragraph that he has that I think gets at this very concisely. So, quote, thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age, we see the old Gentile order as a still living force, but we also see the beginnings of its disintegration. Father right, with transmission of the property to the children, by which accumulation of wealth within the family was favored, and the family itself became a power

as against the gens. Reaction of the inequality of wealth on the constitution by the formation of first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy. Slavery, at first only of prisoners of war, but already preparing the way for enslavement of fellow members of the tribe and even of the Jens. Old wars between the tribes and tribes already degenerating into systematic pillages of land in sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves, and treasure, and becoming a regular source of wealth. In short, riches praised and respected as the highest good and the old Gentile order misused to justify the violent seizure of riches. Only one thing was wanting. An institution, which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individual gains against the communistic tradition,

of the Gentile Order, which not only sanctioned the private formerly so little valued and declared the sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society, but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property, and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed, an institution which perpetuated not only this growing cleavage of society into class, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing and the role of the former over the leader. End quote. So here, Ingalls, that's us up to gesture towards what is coming in the next chapter,

which is the emergence of the state. But what is so important in that we have to be very attentive to here is that the state emerged because of contradictions which were already existing within the gens, because of changes in the Greek gins due to father right, the accumulation of wealth, that led to class differences, which would necessitate the state, ultimately. And so as we look at a gens, which Engels would say is in a later stage one that is closer to its collapse, we can see how these changes have gutted out the kind of core functioning premises of the gens and allowed for it to be replaced by something like the state.

All right. In the next chapter, Angles turns his attention to the development of the Athenian state, which he sees as a crucial example of the evolution of human social organization. He suggests that Athens began as a primitive communist society in which land and resources were owned collectively and there were no class distinctions. However, as the society grew and became more complex, private property and class divisions eventually emerged. Angles argues that the rise of private property in Athens was linked to the emergence of slavery as a mode of production. As wealthy landowners began to accumulate land and property, they needed labor to work the land. Slaves were brought in from other parts of Greece and beyond, and their labor became the basis

of the Athenian economy. This led to the formation of a wealthy aristocracy, which controlled most of the land and resources and a growing population of landless peasants and slaves. Engel says, The rise of private property and herds and articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals to the transformation of products into commodities.

And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed to their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they lost control of it. They no longer knew what became of it. The possibility was there that one day it would be used against the producer to exploit and oppress him. For this reason, no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production and the control over the social effects of its process of production unless it abolishes exchange between

individuals. But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and products have been transformed into commodities. With the coming of commodity production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which soon led to individual ownership of land. Money followed, the general commodity with which all others were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power before which the whole of society must bow. And it was this new power, suddenly sprung to life without knowledge or will of its creators, which now, in all the brutality of its youth, gave the Athenians the first taste

of its might. End quote. So here we see angles describing, in perfect historical materialist articulation, the rise of private property, which led to class stratification and exchange between individuals, which in turn gave rise to commodity production or the production of goods for their exchange value instead of their use value. This led to the emergence of individual ownership of land and the creation of money which simplifies and standardizes commodity exchange. This in turn produced the division of labor and the division of Athenian society into occupation groups, agricultural workers or peasants, handicraftsmen, workers in the shipping industry, etc., which solidified into classes with their own distinct interests.

The Athenian state emerged as a result of these changes, with a complex system of government and law designed to manage the growing social and economic complexities of Athenian society. For example, Engels notes how the state arose naturally to manage the interests of the new upper classes while also curbing their worst excesses. He says, quote, In order to place at least some check on the nobles' ravenous hunger for the land of the peasants, a maximum limit was fixed for the amount of land that could be owned by one individual.

Then changes were made in the Constitution, of which the most important for us are the following. The council was raised to 400 members, 100 for each tribe. Here, therefore, the tribe was still taken as a basis, but that was the one and only feature of the new state incorporating anything from the old constitution. For all other purposes, Salon is a Athenian leader eventually that comes along. For all other purposes, Salon divided the citizens into four classes, according to their property and land, and the amount of its yield. 500, 300, and 150 bushels of grain were the minimum yields for the first three classes.

Those who owned less land, or none at all, were placed in the fourth class. All offices could be filled only from the three upper classes, and the highest offices only from the first. The fourth class only had the right to speak and, vote in the Assembly of the People, but it was in this Assembly that all officers were elected. Here they had to render their account. Here all laws were made. And here the fourth class formed the majority. The privileges of the aristocracy were partially renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, but the people retained the decisive power. Further, the four classes

formed the basis of a new military organization. The first two classes provided the cavalry. The third had to serve as heavy infantry. The fourth served either as light infantry without armor or in the fleet, for which they probably received something like wages. A completely new element is thus introduced into the Constitution, private ownership. According to the size of their property in land, the rights and duties of the citizens of the state are now assessed, and in the same degree to which the class is based on property gain influence, the old groups of blood relationship lose it end quote so here we see the rise of the state as both the codifier of class division and the dictatorship of the owning classes even in a democratic republic fully equipped with more

political rights and power while also balancing competing interests and enacting policies to curb flagrant excesses from any one class or segment of the owning classes angles describes the athenian state as a democratic republic in which all-male citizens had a voice in government, but he notes that this democracy was limited to a small minority of the population. Women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded from political participation, and again, the government was controlled by the wealthy aristocracy. Engels also notes that the rise of the state in Athens created immediately both a police force, which interestingly was made up of slaves, as most other citizens with property considered it degrading work that was beneath them, and a standing army

that was no longer merely the mass of people in arms but a separate professional entity under control of the state itself. Angles suggests that the Athenian state represented a significant advance in human history as it was the first true city state and the beginnings of a more advanced form of social organization. However, he also notes that the rise of the Athenian state was accompanied by significant social and economic inequalities and brutalities,

which ultimately contributed eventually to its downfall. The wealthy aristocracy controlled most of the land and resources, while the majority of the population lived in poverty and struggled to make a living. This led to social unrest and conflict with, which eventually weakened the Athenian state and contributed to its eventual decline. He ends the chapter by summarizing the situation. Quote, now complete in its main features, the state was perfectly adapted to the new social conditions of the Athenians,

as is shown by the rapid growth of wealth, commerce, and industry. The class opposition on which the social and political institution rested was no longer that of nobility and common people, but of slaves and free men, of protected persons and citizens. At the time of their greatest prosperity, the entire free citizen population of Athens, women and children included, numbered about 90,000. Besides them, there were 365,000 slaves of both sexes,

and 45,000 protected persons, foreign immigrants and freed slaves. There were therefore at least 18 slaves and more than two protected persons for every one adult male citizen. The reason for the large number of slaves was that many of them worked together in manufactories, in large rooms, under overseers. But with the development of commerce and industry, wealth was accumulated and concentrated into a few hands, and the mass of the free citizens were impoverished. Their only alternatives were to compete against slave labor with their own labor as handicraftsmen, which was considered base and vulgar, and also offered very little prospect of success or to become social scrap. Necessarily, in the circumstances, they did the latter, and, as they formed the majority,

they thereby brought about the downfall of the whole Athenian state. The downfall of Athens was not caused by democracy, as the European licks-spittal historians assert to flatter their princes, but by slavery, which banned the labor of free citizens. The rise of the state among the Athenians is a particularly typical example of the formation of a state. First, the process takes place in a pure form without any interference through use of violent force, either from without or from within. Second, it shows a very highly developed form of state, the Democratic Republic, arising directly out of a genteel society.

End quote. In conclusion, Engels his chapter on the rise of the Athenian, state provides a historical materialist analysis of the development of Athenian society, highlighting the role of property relations and class struggle in shaping social and economic structures over time, including the rise of the state. By examining the rise and fall of the Athenian state, Angles provides an essential framework and concrete example for understanding the evolution of human societies and how the emergence of class societies equipped with private property, class exploitation,

commodity production, and more, organically give rise to the state apparatus, which always takes the form of the dictatorship of the owning classes. All right. So, moving into chapter six, Engle sets out to present an overview of the state and the gens within Rome. And unsurprisingly, he argues that the gens in Rome is rather similar to and shares fundamental features

with the gens that we've seen among the Greek and the Iroquois. He writes that, quote, the Roman gens is recognized by the same institution as the Greek gens, and since the Greek gens is a further development of the social unit whose original form was found among American Indians, this of course holds true the Roman gens also. Here, therefore, we can be more brief, and Ingalls presents most of this chapter as a set of lists where he lays out some of the traditions of the gens and the principles which govern it. And again, we'll quote the main list here at length before getting into some of the details and

breaking that down. So, Ingalls writes, quote, first mutual right of inheritance. among Gentile members. The property remained within the Jens, since Father Right already prevailed in the Roman Jens and in the Creek, the descendants in the female line were excluded. According to the law of the 12 tables, the oldest Roman written law known to us, the children as natural heirs, have the first title to an estate, in default of children, then the Agnitz, descendants in the male line, in default of Agniz, the Gentiles, in all cases the property remained within the Jens. Here we see Gentile custom gradually being penetrated by the new legal provisions springing from the increased wealth and monogamy. Jumping ahead a little bit, we get to the second principle, the possession

of a common burial place. On their immigration to Rome from Mergilly, the patrician gins of the Claudia received a piece of land of their own use and also a common burial place in the town. Skipping ahead, number three, we have common religious rights. These, the sacra gentilia, are well known. obligation not to marry within the Jens. This seems never to have become written in law and Rome, but the custom persisted of all the countless Roman married couples whose names have been preserved. There's not one where husband and wife have the same Gentile name. Skipping ahead to the next one, five. Common land.

In primitive times, the Jens always owned common land ever since the tribal land began to be divided up. Among the Latin tribes, we find the land partly in the possession of the tribe, partly of the Jens, and partly of the households, which at that time can hardly have been single families. Skipping ahead to number six, the obligation of mutual protection and help among members of the Jens. Only vestiges remain in written history from the very start of the Roman state made its superior power so manifest that the right of production against injury passed into its hands. Skipping ahead a little bit more, we have number seven, the right to bear the Gentile name. Number eight, the right to adopt strangers into the Jens through adoption into the family.

And number nine, the right to elect the chief to depose him in nowhere mentioned. But since in the earliest days of Rome, all offices were filled by election or nomination, the elected king downward, and since the priests of the Curiae were also elected by the Curia themselves, we may assume the same procedure for the presidents of the Jens. End quote. So we have this long list, and there's a couple of things at the end of it that we should note. So the first is that in many ways it's quite identical to the Iroquois system and even to the Greek system that we've looked at so far. According to Ingalls, the real noticeable difference between the Roman system and the Iroquois system is actually the same difference between the Iroquois system and the Greek system,

which is that father right has become the principle rather than mother right. And we see this here in the first point that Ingalls lays out where wealth is passed down within families primarily rather than within the Jens itself, which is leading to this prize. accumulation within the Roman gens that in many ways mirrors what we saw in Greece. The Roman gens managed to survive for quite some time after Rome was founded, with Ingalls tracing its persistence to over 300 years. And within this system, the gents formed a fratry, which was referred to as a curia, and this curia was significant and distinct from the great fratry in a few ways. Ingalls writes that, quote, as we have said, ten gents formed a fratry, which among the Romans was called a curia, and had more influential.

important public rights shrines and priests. The leader, as a body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges. Tin Currier formed a tribe, which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected president, military leader, and high priest. And the three tribes together formed the Roman people, the populace Romanus. So it follows from this definition that Ingalls has laid out that to be a part of the Roman people of the populace Romanus, required that one also be a part of the Jens because, again, the populist Romanus was derived from the three tribes themselves derived from the Jens. And so the Jens thus began to take on a sort of role of nobility as they consolidated political power within themselves. Ingalls writes that, quote,

here again, the custom of electing always from the same family in the Jens, brought into being the first hereditary nobility. These families called themselves patricians and claimed for themselves exclusive right of entry into the Senate and tenure of all other offices. The acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story of Romulus conferred the patriciate privileges on the first senators and their descendants, end quote. Within the Roman society, there was also, as reference there, a Senate which had some judicial power as well as some basic legislative power.

It existed alongside the Curia, which had the ability to approve or disapprove of laws, along with the Rex, who is very similar in role to the Greek Basilius, playing again a religious and a military role, not just the role of King, as it is often translated. And while this system was very advanced, it was ultimately doomed due to the expansion of Roman territory, and the way of this expansion of Roman territory created a population which existed outside of the gens. Engel summarizes this simply when he writes that, quote, meanwhile, Rome and the Roman territory, which had been enlarged by conquest, increased in population, partially through immigration, partially through the addition of inhabitants of subjugated chiefly Latin districts. All of these new citizens of the state stood outside the old gents, Curia tribes, and therefore formed no part of the populace, Romanus, the real Roman people. They were personally free.

they could own property and land and had to pay taxes and do military service. But they could not hold any office nor take part in the assembly of the curia, nor share in the allotment of conquered states' lands. They formed the class that was excluded from all public rights, the plebes. Owing to their continually increasing numbers, their military training, and their possession of arms, they became a powerful threat to the old populace, which now rigidly barred any addition to its own ranks from outside.

Further, landed property seems to have been fairly equally divided between populace and plebs, with the commercial and industrial wealth, though not as much developed, was probably for the most part in the hands of plebs, end quote. So this is really interesting. What's happening here exactly? The emergence of this plebeian class ultimately undermines the gins because it creates two groups. You have the gins, which again operates as a sort of hereditary nobility. here in many ways, but then those who also exist with the ability to own land, with the ability

to exist in public and as free non-inslate people, but who are excluded from the political institutions of the gens. And this becomes a contradiction, which ultimately leads to the fall of the Roman gens and would lead to a revolution in Rome. It was, according to Ingalls, class struggle between the pleads and the populace, i.e. the Roman people and the gens, which was, in a sense, a struggle between the gens and those outside of it, which would do away with the gens as the organizational principle of Roman society. And in response to a literal plebeian revolution, we see the emergence of the Roman state. A new constitution was created, which established an assembly of the people

that included both the populace and the plebes, and class distinctions were created within Roman society, now on the basis of property, rather than on the basis of inclusion within the nobility. This replaced the function of the gens completely, and Ingalls wraps up this chapter by writing that, quote, this new assembly of the centuries now took over all political rights of the former assembly of the curie, with the exception of a few nominal privileges. The curie and the gents of which they were composed were thus degraded, as in Athens, to mere private and religious associations, and continued to vegetate as such for a long period, while the assembly of the curie soon became complete.

dormant. In order that the three old tribes of kinship should also be slewed from the state, four local tribes are instituted, each of which inhabited one quarter of the city and possessed a number of political rights, end quote. And so, the transformation of the gens into something akin to a nobility, a hereditary nobility at that, the shift of bother rights, the emergence of private property within the gens, allowed for the creation of contradictions, which ultimately resulted in the downfall of the gens. And the gens, again, as Ingalls puts it, being merely a private affair here rather than a political or public one. A state was created as a result of the class conflict that emerged here. And we see, therefore, a downfall of the

Roman gens and an emergence of the state that falls in line with the broader theory that Ingalls has presented throughout this text. So that's where we're going to wrap up with our summary of this text for this week. Next month, we're going to go ahead and jump a little bit more into So the final three chapters where Ingls traces these developments among the German and Irish peoples. But I think this is a good stopping place. We can see where the state comes from and we can now have a little bit of discussion about the historical work that Ingalls is doing here. All right. So that wraps up the first segment where we're summarizing the three chapters we're covering today.

And now we're going to move into the question and answer segment. This might be a little bit of a shorter episode because, you know, we're just covering three. chapters of a broader text and we will definitely after the next week's summary we'll try to make sure we add a segment where we kind of had our concluding thoughts on the text as a whole but let's go ahead and move into that first question and I will ask Allison which is this there is a way to read angles as lamenting the loss of the gens and development of the state likewise one could read angles deterministically as simply explaining an inevitable progress towards civilization is one of those views more correct than the other and what's

set stake with each? Yeah. So I think this is worth wrestling with a little bit because this really is a tension within Marxism on the whole that has gotten debated out in so many different ways. Various Marxist thinkers have kind of come down on different sides of this question. We can think of people like Federici, for example, who tend to lean more towards that earlier view, right, where there's something lost that could have been progressive in some way. And often her ideas kind of try to point to pre-capitalist and pre-state development as a primitive communism that exists and which can be viewed through the lens of communism. And on the other hand, you have very structuralist Marxist thinkers who tend to kind of fall into a more linear view where, you know,

all societies progress through a identical set of stages and in the end will all reach communism through a relatively identical path. And these are kind of two extremes that can then be applied to this text in various ways, and I think it's important to tease out some of the consequences politically and ideologically behind those. So for example, as we get into these chapters, one of the interesting things that we're encountering is that Ingalls is looking at societies where the gens was ultimately kind of defeated, right? It no longer became the social basis of society and it was replaced by the state within the Greek and the Roman context. And so on the one hand, we might want to read this as some sort of loss for humanity, like a primitive communism that

was the gens which had been lost. And certainly, you know, there are ways to think about primitive communism and take it seriously as a concept, but I think a close reading of Ingalls here is very important. I don't think that at least in the case of the Greek state and the Roman state, the gens itself is identical to that primitive communism. And we can actually see this really interestingly in Ingle's writing on Rome, in the Roman gens and the development of the Roman state. And what Ingalls really focuses in on here is the fact that by the time that the state could emerge, the Jens had begun to produce its own set of contradictions in an interesting way. Because Roman territory had become so large, you had people who were a part of the Jens and then people

who were a part of the populace, creating this contradiction between these two groups that eventually ruptured through the Plagian Revolution. And what is interesting to see here, right, is that even though the Jens represent something outside of property, something outside of the state and prefigures the emergence of both of those things, that doesn't mean that no contradictions at all existed within it. And so I think it would be simplistic to say, like, the Jens was an inherently progressive system of social organization, which was lost, and I think we should avoid that reading when we see that those contradictions exist there in the first place. And it's here actually that I think we have a chance to assert a more dialectical view at play and a dialectical view that really undergirds Ingalls' own perception of what happens here. The fact that the state replaced the Gens wasn't a historical accident. It wasn't a coincidence.

It was a result of contradictions which already existed. And we can extrapolate this out more broadly to the Marxist theory of history, which notes that all systems rise and fall based on these contradictions, which already exist within them. So in terms of how we ought to think about Ingalls, is he lamenting the loss of this thing in some ways, yes, but it's not like that loss could have been prevented to a certain degree because preexisting dialectical contradictions were already there, at least in the case of Rome and Grace. And I think we need to be careful about how we might extrapolate that to other contexts. But in these two cases in the text, I think that's important. Now, on the other hand, there's the way to read this text more deterministically. And this is an easy way to read it because of the way that Ingalls uses more. Morgan's work, right? Morgan really does trace these clear stages that societies go through, and it is easy to see that as a deterministic and universal theory. And unfortunately, as a result of that, this text has been used by open reactionaries and chauvinists in order to justify

some of their more horrific arguments. There are those who use this text to argue that pre-capitalist cultures somehow had to be overcome by capitalism and even by conquest by outside capitalist groups. There are definitely certain chauvinists and reactionaries who call themselves Marxists who will use this to delegitimize claims to self-determination of various indigenous peoples or to claim that the colonization of the Americas was somehow progressive because it spread to the state and capitalist development, which was a higher stage. And really quickly, I think it's worth saying that this is a tacitly absurd position that Ingalls is not actually supporting in this text, and it would be a mistake to read that into it.

There's a couple of reasons that this is obviously incorrect just on face. The first is that even if all societies were to progress through identical stages, it doesn't follow that that progress should take the form from some sort of external conquest, right? Given society should be able to develop along its own lines, knowing that contradictions exist within it that will inevitably play out in some way or another. So the people who try to read Ingalls' more deterministic side of things here as a justification for colonialism or a justification, for, you know, the kind of almost like Marxist version of manifest destiny in the U.S.

are clearly misinterpreting what's happening here. And second, outside of the text, on just a much more historical level, colonialism didn't lead to the development of societies. It actually led to the underdevelopment of the societies were subjected to colonialism. So again, even if we risk this more deterministic reading, it's very important to delineate why it cannot be used to support these very chauvinist and reactionary positions. But still, of course, despite the patent absurdity of this position, there are those who will try to cite this text further blatantly shown as positions, and I think that's why it's worth wrestling with here.

How we view this text in the end, I think, requires a high level of nuance. And Ingles, I think, gives us that nuance. From the three chapters that we read last week, I think it's really interesting that Ingalls does point out that between the old world and the new world, the stages of development that Morgan talked about, played out very differently. And here, where we get a direct comparison of the Iroquois gens, the Greek gens, and the Roman gens, Engels is very attentive to the similarities, but also recognizes the differences that exist between them and the way that the movement beyond the cretians and the Roman gens was culturally and historically specific to the situations that those societies found themselves in, and the contradictions which existed within them. So I think it is important that we're not too totalizing here. What we need to point out as we try to wrestle with all this is that the Marxist view of progress, which I think does exist in this text, doesn't hold that progress as uniform in all instances, but it's rather based on contradictions which are imminent to a given

historical situation. Those who bend this theory of progress into an apology for colonialism or some sort of ideological justification for the conquest of pre-cathalist or pre-state societies are engaged in a flattening of a complex history that is a disservice to the level of detail and nuance that Ingalls actually addresses in this text, especially in these three chapters. But furthermore, I do think we also need to avoid an error that assumes that all pre-state or pre-capital social relations are somehow identical to communism or are inherently progressive, right? While so-called primitive communism, which is a term that, you know, is a little difficult to wrestle with, was a real phenomenon, pre-state social formations are not immune to contradictions and to the

development of class struggle internally on the basis of those contradictions. That's what we see so clearly in Engel's assessment of Rome here. So as a result, we can neither really be uncritical defenders of a deterministic progress in the abstract, nor advocates to return to a time before capitalism and the development of the state, because capitalism in the state are here, and the real issue that we are faced with is how they can be overcome and transcended. And it's important when engaging with a historical text like this that we try to avoid both of these errors that we can potentially fall into, one overly determined.

one almost romanticizing pre-capitalist society and really try to trace out what Ingalls is doing here, which is following the dialectical movement of contradictions through these different historical formations. Yeah, really, really well said, well argued, always bringing the nuance and complexity back into the situation. Yeah, I just, your point about this, this lamenting the loss of previous states of affairs and the wanting to go back. I think this is something you and I talk about quite often, which is, you know, that to start thinking in terms of a lost golden age and weaving that into your politics is inherently reactionary and defeatist because it's absolutely impossible to go back. And any and all attempts, attempts historically to try to go back have always ended in failure. And so it always reminds me that the only way out is through.

So even if something beautiful or, you know, noble was lost, which certainly, you know, even in the communist manifesto, there's gestures, towards this idea that it wasn't perfect, but, you know, things of value were lost in this transition. It's still, it's just completely defeatist and impossible to go back. So we just have to accept it, analyze it, and then understand that we are locked in in a forward motion, and there's no way out of that. And so, I mean, that really is. I mean, the lost golden era, I think manifests in all forms of reactionary politics. You see it in the conservative flavor. You see it in the more explicitly fascistic nature. And it's something that, you know, we really have to, um, to, you know, be skeptical of whenever we feel it in ourselves. But I also

really do like your point about this chauvinist sort of, almost too mechanical application of this idea to justify, um, you know, colonialism. I think that's really important for Marxist to understand, especially at this time when many people calling themselves Marxist and Marxist educators are, are really misleading people on that front. Right. Yeah, no, I think it's an important clarification. As always, I think Ingalls, you know, read this text. He makes his case well. It's easy to see how you can avoid those errors if you actually read it. Too much happens when juvenists just kind of gesture towards this text without ever actually providing any analysis of it. And Ingalls is very clear on his position. And it is a very dialectical position.

Absolutely. And it just reminds me of like even J.K. Rowling recently referencing Engels to make her reactionary as a bullshit point. So I thought. No one wants to actually read it. Exactly. Exactly. Awesome. All right. So I have a question for you. Brett, and this gets to the state question in some really interesting ways. So what does Abel's analysis of the rise of the Athenian state tell us about a historical materialist account of the modern nation state? And why does the state still exist under socialism, but not communism? Sure. Well, this is, you know, I think interesting and important, certainly ground that we've covered in various ways before, but, you know, I've discovered through a few years of

doing political education that it doesn't hurt to re-articulate stuff in different contexts. and say things in different ways. So I'm going to kind of remind veteran, you know, Marxists of some stuff that they should already know, and then hopefully also educate some people who are still learning. So what Engels offers in this text is the foundational historical materialist analysis of the emergence of the state through the examples of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Throughout the text, Engels traces the development of the family unit, private property, class society as a whole, and the state, and the way they all evolve,

and co-evolved due to underlying changes in the material basis of society, i.e. how human beings produce and reproduce the necessities of life. These things are also deeply related, as I said, as the emergence of private property underpins the overthrow of primitive communism in the rise of class stratification, which in turn deeply impacts the formation of family units, one's relationship to extended family, the rise of monogamy and patriarchy as a way of protecting and handing down private property,

to biological offspring and the emergence of the state as the organic mechanism by which the ruling classes instantiate the rule and fortify the economic base which privileges them. When Marxists think of a historical materialist analysis of the state, we often think of Lenin's famous State and Revolution, which was actually the first text that Allison and I explored on Red Menace for what it's worth, but it's also worth noting that Lenin drew heavily and explicitly from this work by angles in the construction of that foundational and essential Marxist text. In particular, Lenin seized on the idea that Engels advanced regarding the state as inherently an instrument of class domination and built on Engels' ideas and analysis to craft his

vision of a socialist state which he was in the process of building in a real-world historical revolution. This analysis developed by Marx and Engels and brought to new heights by Lenin stands in stark contrast to idealist liberal conceptions of the state as either a Hobbesian Leviathan protecting citizens from the nasty, brutish, and short lives on offer from a pure state of nature, or the more modern idea of the state as simply a neutral mediator of competing interests underpinned by the will of the governed and various social contract theories. While liberal thinkers since the Enlightenment invented various just-so stories about the rise in necessity of the state,

Marxist thinkers employed an analysis of the material basis of society and its evolution through time to scientifically construct an understanding, understanding of the state as inseparable from the emergence of class society, private property, the exploitation of peasants and then workers, and the various mystifications invented by the dominant class to obscure the actual foundations and aims of the state and their control of it. Now that we have a proper account of the state from a historical materialist analysis, thanks of course to Marx, Engels and Lenin, we can begin to understand how socialists and communists in particular, i.e. those interested in overthrowing class society and replacing it with an egalitarian

society of equals cooperating to increase human freedom and flourishing, how they approach the state as part of our revolutionary vision. First and foremost, if we understand that the state is an instrument of class rule, and we understand that socialism is the protracted transition out of capitalism in particular and class society in general, but is not and cannot be full communism by definition, then we understand that the state must play an essential role in socialist revolution, construction, consolidation, and defense. After all, the long transition out of class society and toward a classless society is one that will still have classes and thus class struggle, and the state will remain a necessary component of human society during this time. It is only by eradicating the

underlying material basis of the state that one could ever hope to get rid of it. You do not get rid of the symptoms of an underlying disease by covering up or merely treating the symptoms themselves. You can only get rid of SIDS symptoms permanently by addressing the underlying disease, which gives rise to them. In the same way, we cannot get rid of the state by merely throwing it aside irrespective of the material reality that gives rise to it. We must radically alter the underlying material reality through revolutionary struggle in order to make possible the disappearance of one of its primary symptoms, namely the state. This helps us see why. others on the revolutionary left who make an a priori commitment to jettison the state immediately

are doomed to failure. It is in fact an idealist error to make such an a priori commitment and to hold such a view of the state that flies in the face of materialist analysis and more importantly, objective reality. This, however, does not mean that during socialist revolution we merely take over the state as it is. Rather, we must radically alter it in the process of revolution to turn it into a functioning mechanism of working class rule instead of bourgeois class rule. This fundamentally alters the state, its institutions, its goals, its orientation to other states, its mechanism of democratic input, etc. Communism then is that final stage of the world historical attempt to liberate humanity from the yoke of class division, oppression, and

exploitation, in which the division of society into classes itself has been overcome, such that the material basis of the modern state is pulled out from underneath it like a rug, and no longer having its roots, withers away naturally like a dandelion plucked from the grass. One does not have to force the dandelion to wilt and die through will. Having taken away its material basis in the soil, it wilts and dies of its own accord. Having uprooted the weeds that choked our little garden, we are then free to sow the seeds of a new era of human flourishing, one that blossoms with the cornucopia of abundance and is shared equally by all. Allison. A very, very beautiful little analogy there at the end, which I have to do it. Yeah, of course. So there's a few things that I think I want to focus in on. One of them is that comparison to liberalism, which I think is so useful, right? So obviously, like, let's not straw man liberal theorists of the state, right? Like Hobbs and Locke had their own place, but I don't think most liberal theorists of the state believe that there was like a real state of nature with a social contract, right? It seemed more as like an imaginary situation that allowed.

us to consider the, you know, conditions in which the state serves the populace in some way. But what I think is interesting is even these more advanced liberal theorists, I'm thinking of people like Rawls, right? And the notion of the original position still try to like imagine society and the state ex and Elo and out of nothing, right? There is still this thought experiment that is engaged in as the starting point. And when you compare it to what we see in this text, it really just does look almost childish, right? Like, alongside and an actual exploration of history, which tries to trace why the state came about, just seeing thought experiments about the purpose of the state in the abstract, it's just pretty obviously,

you know, not very useful. So I think that reading this text alongside those other theorists of state is really useful in a way because even beyond Lenin, right, we get the historical specificity here. Lenin is doing more kind of the big level structural analysis here. So I think that's really important for us to focus in on. And then the other thing that I want to say about like the transformation of the state that occurs through socialism. Again, part of that is that the state needs to take on a proletarian character. But the other thing I would suggest for those who are uncomfortable with the idea of the continued maintenance of the state is I really think there is value in the way that Maoist theory has kind of conceptualized permanent,

or not permanent revolution, has kind of conceptualized the cultural revolution as a check on the state and on the party, right? And how the state can still exist, but also be be held in check against the masses in very important ways. So when we're talking about the creation of the state and the continuation of the state under communism, that doesn't mean like a state that is completely unchecked by anything externally to it, right? It has to actually be checked by the masses themselves. And I think that hopefully quell some of the concerns and the reasons people want to throw away the state completely and fall into what I think you're correct to say are just sort of a historical perspectives on this. Yeah. Yeah, really well said.

And yeah, you know, when Lenin was talking about, you know, altering the state in the process of taking it over and revolutionizing, he really stressed the Soviets, which is a mechanism of democratic bottom-up control that, you know, maybe got ossified into a top-down bureaucracy later on in the Soviet Union for a number of reasons. But with the rise of communist China and the sort of Maoist sort of advance of the communist movement, there was this conscious attempt to try to prevent that ossification into a top-down bureaucracy by, quote, unquote, unleashing the masses on the party. itself, which resulted in the world historical events that took place, good, bad, and ugly, you know, but it was this attempt historically to try and work out that problem and prevent that from happening again. And I also, yeah, the idea that Lenin, when he was talking in state and revolution was emphasizing the Soviets is something I think is important for Marxist to keep in mind going forward, because having that bottom up actual institutional mechanism built in to the, you know, the process, I think is a really important aspect to it. And you're also right about the liberal theorist. I certainly, yeah, as you say, I don't think they literally believe

in the state of nature. There are imaginary hypothetical scenarios that I try to capture with the term just so, which might not be the perfect phrase to encapsulate that, but that was my intention. But yes, it's funny because it's kind of ironic because, you know, liberal thinkers of the sort that we were mentioning would certainly, or often would call people on the far left, you know, utopian idealist when they're literally sort of inventing these starting points of their analysis or like in Rawls' case, this imaginary behind the veil starting point to imagine the best society when Marxists are just literally trying to trace out how it actually evolved. And then once you understand the process by which it actually came to be in its present state, then you can have

a more realistic and effective way of approaching the altering of it going forward. And starting from you know, the veil of ignorance or starting from the state of nature or whatever kind of prevents that analysis from really getting off the ground. So I do think that's important. Yeah. And I think like you said, it is funny, right, because this is what liberals will always chide us for, right? It's somehow being a historical in some way or again being idealist in some way when really the Marxist perspective is at its starting point attempting to avoid both of those mistakes, right? To be deeply historical and deeply material in its outlook. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap it up for today.

This was, you know, a bit of a shorter episode, but I think we still packed in a lot of important stuff. The last three chapters, I'll just let people know right now. The next one is the gens amongst Celts and Germans, which will be interesting. The formation of the state among the Germans, which would be very interesting. And then ending with a chapter called Barbarism and Civilization, which will be, I think, a really fascinating thing to read, summarize, and discuss in the next episode. And after this next episode, we will be wrapping up this. text by angles and moving on to a new text. Not exactly sure which one it'll be yet.

We still have some deciding to do. But I'm excited to reveal to ourselves and then to the audience with the next text will be after that. So yeah, thanks you to everybody who supports the show, who listens, who shares the show with people who might also enjoy it. And we really appreciate it. And we will be back soon. We're going to be.