Rev Left Radio - The Origin of the Family, Private Property, & The State by Friedrich Engels (Pt. 1)

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

In this episode of Red Menace, Alyson and Breht summarize and discuss the first three chapters of Friedrich Engel's important work of historical materialism, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State". Together they discuss the core arguments of the text, the anthropological science behind it, why this text is considered a foundational text of Marxist Feminism, and much more!   00:15 Intro 4:28 Summary 51:58 Discussion   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. It has been a little while since our last episode, but we are back, and this time we are covering, as promised, Frederick Engels, the origin of the family, private property, and the state. this is a really exciting and fun text also a really important and crucial one and one that we're going to take our time with so we're going to be covering the first three the a little bit of the prefaces and you know allison's going to contextualize it and then we're going to tackle the first three chapters of this text today have a discussion on them etc and then the next episode we're going to tackle the next three chapters and then finish it out with the final three chapters at the end and that will be a three episode series on this one text. But today we are discussing

chapters one, two, and three of this text by angles. Allison, how are you doing? Doing pretty good. I am super excited to dive into this text. It is a really important text for so many aspects of Marxism, right? This is a text that is important when we're thinking about how Marxism has dealt with questions of feminism and, you know, the framing of the woman question in Marxism. It's important for theories of the state. And it's also one of those cool times where we get to see Ingalls, like, as someone who likes science, engaging scientific literature of his time and just getting really excited about it, which I always appreciate with his writing. So I'm super excited for us to be diving into what I think is a very important work here. Totally. And I love the way that the muscles

of historical and dialectical materialism get flexed throughout this text and how the application of historical materialism to the evolution of the family is obviously a huge part. of this text and i found it incredibly fascinating and worthwhile highly recommend the text anybody who hasn't read it yet and hopefully this can act as a summary or a compliment to anybody trying to read that text also worth noting as is made very clear in the introduction to the at least the version i have this is a book by frederick angles but it's really worth noting that as in everything that marks and angles did it was a collaborative effort marks unfortunately died before he could finish this text,

but he had copious amounts of notes and some basic outlining already structured. I think he was the one that introduced the work of Morgan Two Angles, which will make more sense as the summary unfolds for people that don't know the text very well. And so it was really like Mark's, you know, dying in a fairly untimely fashion and handing off the baton to Angles who picked up his notes

and sort of organized them and structured them into this book. So while it is a book by Angles, it's worth noting that it is like everything else, largely a collaboration between the two. And it was, you know, I kind of get a little moved by Angles' dedication to his friend because he really wanted to preserve Marx's intellectual legacy. He really wanted to take, you know, pick up where Marks left off. And, you know, without Angles, I think so much would have been left on the table regarding, you know, notes that would never have been published or never have been turned into full text. And so it's a real, it's a real, like,

sort of salute to his friend and it's a real emphasis on why angles I think is so important in the Marxist tradition and just how much, how crucial he was to the development of what we know is Marxism today. Definitely. All right. Well, with that little intro out of the way, let's go ahead and get into the text. And this episode is going to be broken down into just two main segments this time. The first part is going to be the classic summary where Allison will you know, contextualize and then cover chapters one and three. I'll cover the long chapter number two, and then we'll get into a discussion question. And going forward as well, I'm going to have David put the timestamps of the various parts of these episodes into the show notes. Because,

you know, I was kind of batting around this, the question of, you know, what if somebody had read the text, they just want to hear our discussion on it and might not want to sit through the summary part. They might want to go directly to the discussion. We talked about maybe moving them around. But after talking with Dave, I think it just might be easier to put the time stamps in the show notes. So that's going to be something we try to do for the show going forward. But with all that said, let's move into part one, the summary of this text. All right. And to start with, I kind of want to provide some context for this text before we get into the actual text itself. So in this book, Ingalls is really writing within the field of anthropology in many ways. And what he's

interested in is an approach to the history of humanity that can apply materialism in order help us understand changes in society and the forms that those changes take. And all this makes sense that materialism would be the method we would use to attack this sort of thing. So here he is primarily impacted by American anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan, whose work ancient society informs quite a lot of this text. Morgan was a somewhat eccentric American scholar who had an interesting relationship with the Iroquois people. He studied the history of the Iroquois in depth and was able to provide some assistance as an activist to the Iroquois as they dealt with various land disputes.

He was a bit of an advocate for the Seneca people in particular with one land dispute and was supposedly adopted by Seneca leader Jimmy Johnson into the tribal structure in some way of another as a sort of thank you for his assistance. As an anthropologist, Morgan was interested in the notion of his. historical progress, by which he meant a relatively linear progression of development which societies would undergo. Morgan wasn't quite foolish enough to believe that all societies went through an identical process of progress, but he argued that there was a generalized form which could be applied across society. Morgan's notion of progress traces the development

through three stages. His first stage is savagery, the second stage is barbarism, and the third stage is civilization. And each of these stages was further broken down into a lower, middle, and upper stage. Interestingly, the distinctions between these stages are largely material and technological in nature, with societies progressing based on their mastery of horticulture, agriculture, agriculture, weaponry, forging, etc. You may already be seeing why this would be interesting to and appealing to a materialistly Ingalls.

And so this, of course, you know, means that Morgan is going to be doing the kind of research that Ingalls and Marx are going to find interesting because he's tracing societal development in a rather material's lens to begin with. And it's worth upfront wrestling that there are some difficulties with Morgan's work in legacy. On the one hand, he was an activist who supported tribal nations and their land disputes, and on the other hand, he also had a theory of progress which caused a somewhat paternalistic view of those nations and led him to make several questionable comments about the need to bring Native Americans into modernity and civilization. Likewise, Morgan's work is part of a broader issue,

within Western anthropology, wherein a linear theory of progress is supposed that just so happens to culminate in a civilizational society at its apex, which is Western or European society. And we and dive deeper into whether linear theories of progress are inherently concerning in this regard, but there's no doubt that the anthropological framings that did adopt this definitely served an ideological justification for colonialism and settler colonialism, and the idea that these were ways of civilizing pre-civilizational peoples. None of this is to say if there's nothing to learn from Morgan's work, obviously. I don't think we would be tackling this text if we thought that was the case,

or that Ingle's was wrong to draw on it. Ingalls was a well-read scholar of his time who was keeping up with what appeared to be the most advanced scholarship of hit on history. And likewise, although the details of Morgan's thought regarding progress have been subjected to thorough critique, his legacy and anthropology continues to this day, especially his work on kinship, which is what Ingalls is drawing most heavily on within this text. So before jumping in, I want to talk about the preface a little bit. So Ingalls prefaces the first edition of this text by explaining that his goal in this text

was to fulfill a wish of Marx, which was to get this done and written. We'll quote him at length here, since I think he clearly explains what is at stake in this project. He writes that quote, No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present to the results Morgan's research, in the light of the conclusions of his own, within certain limits, I might say, are materialist examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance. For Morgan, in his own way, had discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx 40 years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization,

it had led him in the main points to the same conclusions as Marx. And just as the professional economists in Germany were 40 years as busy in plagiarizing capital as they were persistent in attempting to kill it by silence, so Morgan's ancient society received precisely the same treatment from the spokesman of prehistoric science in England. My work can only provide a slight substitute for what my departed friend no longer had the time to do, but I have the critical notes which he made to his extensive extracts from Morgan, and as far as possible, I reproduce them here. According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is,

in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate needs of essential life. This, again, is of a two-fold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for their production. On the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production. by the stage of the development of labor on the one hand and the family on the other end quote so again pretty clearly laying out what's going on in this text this was about finishing a project that unfortunately marks was not able to finish before passing away and for showing the way that the materialist view of history is at play here and interestingly there's this kind of focus on reproduction in the family as well so in the preface to the fourth edition of the text which comes with most current printings Ingalls explains that

there have also been a lot of developments in the historical and anthropological study of the family since the first edition was published seven years earlier. And ever, the scientist Ingalls feels the need to comment on these changes in order to keep his text upstate and relevant. And we're not going to get too much into the nitty gritty of this here, as it really wouldn't make sense without the context of the work on the whole. But Engel's primary focus here is defending Morgan from certain critiques that have emerged within anthropology. Ingalls in this defense compares Morgan to Marx and Darwin in as much as he discovered certain laws of change which govern the development of culture and family. Ingalls writes that quote, this rediscovery of the primitive

matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized people has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin's theory of evolution for biology and Marx's theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present, so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of development and their main outlines are now determined, end quote. So again, Ingalls kind of insists that Morgan is kind of on this level of Marx and Darwin in terms of his contribution to science that works in a dialectical fashion. So having kind of had his preface for why this matters, why we need to engage Morgan, why Marx was interested in

it, we can now jump into the first chapter of this text. And in chapter one, Ingalls briefly lays out Morgan's theory of the various stages of prehistoric culture. And as a reminder, this covers the first two basic stages in Morgan's theory, savagery and barbarism. And each of these is broken down into an additional three subdivisions, with these subdivisions based on the changes which occur regarding the production of food primarily. Engels quotes Morgan briefly here, who writes,

that quote, upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human supremacy on the earth depended. Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained, and Ingalls inserts almost absolute control over the production of food. It is accordingly probable that the great epoch of human progress has been identified more or less directly with the enlargement of the sources of substance, end quote. So Ingalls next dives into the details of these stages of history, and the first stage is what Morgan calls savagery. Again, we also, of course, be careful with the terminology at play here, since this is a term, which obviously has historically been racially loaded in colonial contexts and requires that we navigate the scientific claims here made very carefully, but we'll have that discussion kind of after the summary. For now, we're going to just have to kind of bear with the language, which Morgan gives us here. So the lower stage of savagery is what Ingalls refers to as, quote, the childhood of the human race, in which humanity lived primarily in tropical or subtropical climates,

and may have still lived at least some of their time in the trees. This level of human existence no longer exists, according to Ingalls, and as such, is given fairly little attention. The middle stage of savagery gets a bit more detail in Ingalls' account, however. And the main differentiating factor that marks humanity's emergence into this middle stage is the, quote, utilization of fish for food, end quote, alongside the use of fire. And you may notice that these two technologies obviously complement each other, since the latter allows for the safer consumption of the former when we are able to actually cook fish.

And these changes, according to Ingalls, actually allowed for humanity to break into new climates because it allowed us to essentially follow bodies of water in order to ensure we had access to food and occasionally leave tropical and subtropical climates. Ingalls writes that, quote, new environments, ceaseless exercise of this inventive faculty, and the ability to produce a fire by friction led man to discover new kinds of food. Ferenacious roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot ashes or in ground ovens. With the invention of the first weapons, clubs, spears, game could sometimes be added to the fair. But the tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively by hunting, never existed in reality.

The yield of the hunt was far too precarious. At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen and was practiced from now onward for a long time, end quote. So a couple of things to note here, obviously, again, because of this kind of materialist focus on development, it sort of changes in technology, which Ingle's very interested in, as, you know, kind of being signifying of what's happening in these various stages. And Ingles concludes his assessment of this middle stage. By saying that it still exists at the time of writing, he ascribes it to the indigenous people of Australia and the peoples of Polynesia. Again, things might be a little bit loaded there. We'll deal with that a little bit later. This is how he kind of summarizes that middle stage.

So the upper stage of savagery begins with the development of weaponry, in particular the development of the bow and arrow. And this is a really important development for two reasons. First, because it allows the new hunting of bigger territorial game. And second, because it shows a general complexity of invention, which is developed within a culture. This represents a broader progression technology that begins to move towards settled living in villages. Ingalls actually states that, quote, the bow and arrow was for

savagery, but the iron sword was for barbarism and firearms for civilization, the decisive weapon because of how much this change in weaponry actually fundamentally transformed the cultures in which it emerged. So having covered a little bit the three stages of savagery, Ingalls next turns to the middle stage, which is the age of barbarism, which again is broken down into its own three stages. Ingalls and Morgan argue that up until the development of the barbarism stage, humanity progressed along identical lines regardless of location and climate. Ingalls writes that, quote, thus far, we have been able to follow a general line of development, applicable to all the people at a given period without a distinctive a place.

With the beginning of barbarism, however, we have reached a stage when the difference in the natural endowments of the two hemispheres comes into play. characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding in the cult of animals and the cultivation of plants. Now, the eastern hemisphere, the so-called old world, possess nearly all animals adapted to domestication and all the variables of cultivated cereal except for one. The western hemisphere America had no mammals that could be domesticated except the llama, which moreover was only found in one part of South America, and of all the cultivatable cereals only one, though that was the best.

namely maze. Owing to these differences in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere now goes its own way, and the different landmarks divide the particular stages in each of these two cases. So interestingly here, we see the development through these different stages no longer being strictly linear because there's a split based on hemisphere, although the stages get the same name, the details of those stages, and what marks advancement through them is actually contingent on the climate and context in which a society exists. So, the lower stage of barbarism is given the least significant in Ingle's analysis. It actually occupies only a single paragraph devoted to its distinctiveness.

Ingalls writes that, quote, dates from the introduction of pottery. In many cases, it has been proved, and in all it is probable that the first pots originated from the habit of covering baskets or wooden vessels with clay to make them fireproof. In this way, it was soon discovered that the clay, mold answered the purpose without any inner vessel, end quote. So again, very briefly, the lower stage is pottery. That's what we get there. And nothing else really in details from Ingalls on this front. So the middle stage of barbarism received significantly more attention from Ingalls. And this is also the stage where a geographical split, again, really starts to

matter. So in the eastern hemisphere, the stage is marked by the domestication of animals, whereas the Western Hemisphere, it is marked by agricultural development, specifically the growth of plants and food using irrigation, so not just basic plant and food growth, but an actual system of irrigation to allow that to take over at a larger scale. So some level of food growing, you know, in terms of agriculture, precedes this stage, as Ingalls argues that the lower stage of barbarism in the Americas was marked by horticulture, but the middle stage was found really distinctly among the indigenous people, Mexico and the southwest at the time of the Spanish conquest. In Europe, in the eastern hemisphere,

it was animal domestication that mattered as specific groups. Ingle's names, quote, the Aryans and the Semites, began to develop large herds of animals. And again, we'll go ahead and quote at a little bit of length here. Quote, in suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life. The Semites lived upon the grassy plain of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Aryans upon those of India of the Oxus and the Dixartis and the Don and the Dniper. It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated. To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors, and even for man,

at the lower stages of barbarism. But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life and the grassy plains and the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors, end quote. So, the final and upper stage of barbarism, which is the last kind of point of this chapter, begins where iron ore is first being smelted, and it ends and it thus progresses to the level of civilization when an alphabetic system of writing is developed. This development in turn had massive impacts on agriculture, and we can quote Ingalls here, who writes that quote. Above all, we now first meet the iron plow share drawn by cattle, which made large-scale agriculture, the cultivation of fields

possible, and thus created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions. This led to a clearance of forest land for tillage and pasture. which in turn was impossible on a large scale without the iron axe and the iron spade. Population rapidly increased a number and in small areas became dense. Prior to field agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they allowed half a million people to be united under a central organization. Probably such a thing never occurred, end quote. And so Ingalls wraps up his explanation of chapter one.

okay so in chapter two titled the family angles having laid out morgan's three main stages of human social development seeks now to connect these stages and their transitions with alterations in the way the family is structured and understood as well as the rules governing it especially taboos regarding incest in other words angles is linking the evolution of the family structure to the underlying economic base of a given social or order. Much of this is, of course, taken from Morgan, but Engels also imbues it with his own commentary, especially as the chapter develops. Now, we know Morgan's three main stages of development as savagery, barbarism, and civilization, each with three or so sub-stages that are passed through as the main stage develops from their beginning to their end and subsequent replacement with the

next higher stage. Alongside this development is the development of the family, which evolves through four main stages, the consanguine family, the Peneluin family, the pairing family, and finally, the monogamous family. Each of these, in turn, have their own internal development and evolution within and between stages. The first three stages of family evolution are seen as purely evolutionary and forms of natural selection by which incest was banned piece by piece, helping to create a healthier and more intelligent human species. The last stage of monogamy, however, was different in that it was the result of economic development primarily, spurred on by the rise of private property.

And it is with the rise of monogamy in particular, with its roots in class society and private property, that patriarchy emerges structurally for the first time. But let's take these stages of family evolution one by one, to help you get a better grasp on the substance of this chapter. For brevity's sake, I'll only highlight the major features of each stage, but it's worth knowing this chapter is fairly long, and he goes into quite a bit of detail that I cannot fully cover in this summary. As always, we highly recommend that you wrestle with the text itself

for a further and fuller understanding. But let's dive into the summary. The first family type, as I mentioned above, is the consanguine family. here Engel says the marriage groups are separated according to generations all the grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands and wives to one another their children the fathers and mothers generation are likewise all husbands and wives with one another as are their children's generation each generation sees all members of its group as brothers and sisters even if today we would call them cousins and whatnot they were all also also husbands and wives. I'll say that again, each generation sees all members of its group as its brothers and sisters, and as such, they were all also husbands and wives. The incest taboo applies in this context only to different generations, meaning sexual

relationships between, say, parents and children, or between grandchildren and grandparents, were taboo. But as long as you are in the same generation as another, you were siblings and possible sexual partners. That's the first stage. The second family stage is the Punaluan family stage. In this stage, the incest taboo was extended, gradually over time, no doubt, first to siblings of the same mother, and then gradually and in different places at different times, to all

siblings who had either parent in common, and eventually to those who were considered siblings at the time, but who we today would call first, second, and third cousins. says, quote, there can be no question that the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted by this advance were bound to develop more quickly and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters remained the rule and the law, end quote. But while most forms of incest are abolished, group marriage still holds, meaning that all members of the group who are not brothers and sisters with the same matrilineal ancestor are available to all other members who also meet this standard. The pairing family is this third stage, and here, or during the

transition into this stage, not only is inbreeding and incest practically eradicated in all its forms, but the first indications of pairing emerge as well, where, still in a context of group marriage, certain pairs would start to be emphasized, meaning a man might have a primary wife among many wives, and wherein a woman would have a primary husband among many husbands. As these pairings developed, pairs would sometimes be given primary responsibility over specific goods or even property. Over time, men were still allowed to have many wives, but women began to lose their ability to have many husbands, since the practice of inheritance started to emerge, and men needed to pass things down. At this stage, inheritance was

was given to the entire network of what we would call his kids, meaning his nieces, his nephews, and his biological children, but not just to his biological children. So it was not a situation in which inheritance was handed down from a father to his biological children, but rather one in which it was handed down from a father to the entire generation of kids that coming up next, that could be reasonably within his family unit. Even still, since fatherhood could not be proven, but motherhood could, obviously, and since things started being handed down as inheritances through men, women became restricted to one husband. Now, this is a process that happens over long periods of time, and I am summarizing it for brevity's sake.

But women still had a superior role in the family at this time. Angles caused this ability for men to hand down inheritance and the restriction of women's freedom to have many husbands while her husband had many wives as the quote, overthrow of mother right and the world historical defeat of the female sex. So it is in this third stage, the pairing family, when these elements that will eventually result in patriarchy and class society begin to develop. In the previous two stages, patriarchy did not exist, and the conditions for patriarchy did not exist. Now, this ownership of property and the man's exclusive right to inherit it to the next generation created,

according to Angles, the first major division between men and women, wherein women took the inferior position, and lays the groundwork for the emergence of the next stage of family development, the monogamous family. Now, the development of monogamy occurs during the middle and high stages of barbarism and signals the opening to Morgan's third stage of human development called civilization. This family structure is founded on the supremacy of men over women, and is aimed at the goal of establishing paternal lineage, which is essential for the passing down of property and wealth

from the father to his legitimate biological children. This stage is defined by exclusive marriage between a single man and a single woman in an institution of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the behest of either party's wishes, but only at the behest of the man. A woman cannot initiate divorce only a marriage. can. Women at this point

lose all ability to have multiple husbands, to own and pass down property, or, as I just said, to divorce her husband. At this point, patriarchy is fully entrenched. Women's oppression is built in. Private property and the division

of society into classes is finalized. And Morgan's era of civilization has dawned. In Marxist terms, we are now in the epoch of slavery. One can think of ancient Greece of the era of Homer who authored the Iliad and the Odyssey as a rough approximation of this epoch. Now, it's important to stress again that although monogamy was now the

primary feature of family life, the husband was not confined to it. Only the woman was. Men could, and did, have sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and there was nothing the woman could do about it. It was accepted as natural and normal. In this context, we see the development of prostitution. By no means, as many defenders of the sex trade argue, the oldest profession on earth, but rather a byproduct of the historical evolution of class society, patriarchy, literal slavery, and the double standards of monogamy. Engel says, quote, with the rise of inequality of property, already at the upper stage of barbarism, wage labor appears sporadically side by side with slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlates,

it, the professional prostitution of free women, side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus, the heritage which group marriage has bequeathed to civilization is double-edged. Just as everything civilization brings forth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself contradictory. Here, monogamy, their hauteurism with its most extreme form prostitution. It continues the old sexual freedom of earlier stages, but this time to the sole advantage of the man, not merely tolerated, but in actuality happily practiced by the ruling classes in particular. It is condemned in words, but in reality this condemnation never falls on the men concerned, but only on the women.

They are despised and outcast in order that the unconditional supremacy of men over the female sex may be once more proclaimed as a fundamental law of society, end quote. Angles goes on to describe, in great detail, the various developments in these dynamics through slavery, feudalism, and into capitalism, all of these things happening within Morgan's civilization stage, showing how they change and morph along the way, but since all of these ways of organizing society require the division of humanity into classes, the patriarchy class society produces continues on in different forms and to different degrees but always continuing on and deforming the lives of men and women alike in the long, long process of the evolution of society through history. Angles then toward the end of the chapter and firmly rooted in his own time 150 years ago, looks into the future and asks what might come next. He says, quote,

We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that. of the man. So this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming

by far the greater portion at any rate of permanent heritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from

economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear? One might answer, not without reason, far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, begin to be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property, there will disappear also wage labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain statistically calculable number of women to surrender themselves for money. prostitution disappears, monogamy instead of collapsing at last becomes a reality, also for men. In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change.

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair. Society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the consequences, which today is the most essential social, moral as well as economic, factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man that she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden's honor and a woman's shame?

And finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss? Here a new element comes into play, an element which at the time when monogamy was developing, existed at most in embryo. Individual sex love. End quote. Now, individual sex love is the term angles advances for what comes next.

But what does this mean? Well, briefly, it's a form of monogamy based totally and solely on each other's, on each partner's free choice and love for another human being. As all forms of inequality, patriarchal domination, and economic coercion, will, have been removed from human romantic affairs. Sex love is a mutual love between two people who genuinely care for one another and freely choose to be an exclusive relationship with one another outside of any other coercive factors. This form of love certainly exists at points today in our world, but still because we live under capitalism is not available to everyone. prostitution still exists

economic coercion and relationships still exists patriarchy still exists so while we have come a long way and are finally starting to see the horizon of possibility the final barrier of capitalist class society still stands and still impedes such a way of being from being fully realized as for what comes beyond even the horizon

we can glance today say during full communism angles must remain humble and admit he does not know. But, he says, quote, what we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear, like prostitution, like economic coercion, etc. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has,

grown up. A generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a women's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power. And a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do. They will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual, and that will be the end of it. Since Angles' time, things have changed, often for the better. In the United States, we had the

sexual revolution of the 1960s, a sort of cultural revolution, fully equipped with the good, the bad, and the ugly, and a million contradictions. But it was made possible by the conditions of post-war prosperity for white middle-class youths. Since then, sex love has been able to seep into our society more than was allowable during Angles' time. Different forms of sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression have blossom, but have also remained held back by the forces of capitalist economics, social reaction, and forms of bigotry forged in earlier periods of human social evolution. With every social advance made on these fronts, there came along with it violent forms of reaction to contest it.

Only with a full proletarian revolution and a robust socialist transition can we begin to truly advance, explore, and clear the way for new ways of being human together outside the menacing shadow of violent reaction. New ways to love each other, to take care of one another, to come together as partners and lovers, to make more human life with one another, and to create the material conditions for future generations of people to develop new and exciting ways of being fully, unapologetically human. Allison.

All right. So with that said, we are going to go ahead and move on to Chapter 3. And Chapter 3 is primarily concerned with an analysis of a concept that has already been referred to throughout this work. That is the concept of the Gens. and Engels begins by explaining that the notion of the gins, which Morgan develops in his earlier discussion of the evolution of culture, represents a key scientific discovery. And he writes that, quote, Morgan discovered, quote, that the gins is an institutional common to all barbarians until their entry in civilization and even afterwards.

So far as our sources go up to the present. This proof has cleared up at one stroke the most difficult questions in the most ancient periods of Greek and Roman history, providing us at the same time with an unsuspected wealth of information about the fundamental features of social constitution in primitive times before the introduction of the state, end quote. And so we might ask, as does Ingalls, what exactly is the gins? Well, Engels answers by giving us a bit of etymology, noting that the term derives from the Latin Greek in which it referred to a group unified not only by descent, but by shared cultural norms and customs. The term, however, has a slightly different meaning for Morgan.

For Morgan, the gyms represents the social unit, unified in descent on the basis of matrilineal descent, organized primarily by the mother right. He explains that, quote, in this form of family, as paternity is uncertain, only the female line counts. Since brothers may not marry their sisters, but only women of different descent, the children begotten by them with these alien women cannot, according to Mother Right, belong to the father's gens. Therefore, only the offspring of the daughters in each generation remain within the kinship organization. The offspring of the son goes into the gents of their mothers. What becomes of these consanguine group, when it has constituted itself into separate groups, distinct from similar groups within the tribe, end quote. And so this

explains to us the way that the gens emerges, which is the line of descent that comes from the mother. And here, Ingalls turns to Morgan's own exploration of the gins within Iroquois society, and according to Morgan, the Seneca tribe had within it actually eight distinct gins named after different animals, which were defined based on a set of principles. So again, these would be eight distinct social units, essentially, within the Seneca tribe that traced their descent in terms of the mother right and the matriarchal line. So here are the kind of principles which governed them. So the Jens elected its own Sackham and War Chief. This leader had to come from within the Jens itself, was voted on by both men and women, and had to be signed off on by other Jens. The

Sackam or War Chief could have their position revoked by the Jens at any time. Marriage was forbidden within the Jens. This allowed us to understand how the Jens operates as a broader structure of kinship and not just a simple structure of dissent. Engels writes that, quote, this is the fundamental law of the Jens, the bond which holds it together. It is the negative expression of the very positive blood relation, by virtue which its individuals comprise becomes a gins. By his discovery of this simple fact, Morgan has revealed for the first time the nature of the gins, end quote. And additionally, as another principle, when a member of the gins died, their possessions were shared within the gins. Ingalls explains this one a little bit

further when he writes that, as an iroquois had only things of little value to leave, the inheritance was shared by his nearest gentile relations in the case of a man by his own brothers and sisters and maternal uncle, in the case of a woman by her children and own sister, but not by her brothers. For this reason, man and wife could not inherit from one another, nor children from their father, end quote. So an additional principle was that there was a specific obligation that members of the Jens owed to each other, such as general assistance, protection, and vengeance in the case of someone being killed. And in regard to the latter, Engels writes that if any person from outside the Jens killed a Gentile member, the

obligation of blood revenge rested upon the entire gins of the slayed man. First, mediation was tried. The gins of the slayer sat in council and made proposal for settlement to the council of the jens of the slain, usually offering expressions of regret and presence of considerable value. If these were accepted, the matter was disposed of. In the contrary case, the wronged jens appointed one or more avengers, whose duty it was to pursue and kill the slayer. If this was accomplished, the gins of the slayer had no ground of complaint, accounts were even enclosed. end quote. And so a couple more principles wrapping up. Next would be that there were specific names excited to members exclusively within the gens in order to easily differentiate members of a given

gens. The gens was able to adopt strangers into itself. This could be those they had conquered, or rarely and in very extreme circumstances, members of the other gens could voluntarily be adopted into it. The gens had a shared burial right, although Engels notes that this is no longer the case and does not actually exist by the time that Morgan wrote and encountered the Iroquois. And there was a general council of Jens, which all male and female members were able to vote equally within. So Ingalls argues that all Native Americans in North America had at one point existed in Jens based on the mother right. And over time, a change occurred where Jens that were based on the father right began to emerge. In addition to the Jens, Morgan was also interested in the

notion of the fratry, translated roughly to brotherhood. Engels writes that, quote, among very many Indian tribes of more than five or six gents, we find every three or four or more gents united into a special group, which Morgan, rendering the Indian name faithfully by its Greek equivalent, calls the fratry, meaning brotherhood, end quote. And so the fratry exists as a grouping of gins that, you know, operates at a level higher than the gins, right? So it's made up of several of them. And we're going to quote Ingle's description of the fratry here at length. We'll admit a little bit from it, but it's pretty useful to just get what he writes directly. So he writes that quote. One, in the ball game, one fratry plays against another. Each fratry puts forward its best player, while the other members grouped according to fratries look on and bet against one another on the victory of their players. Two, in the tribal council, the Sackams and the war chiefs of each fratry sit together, the two groups facing one another. Each speaker addresses the representative of each fratry as a separate body. Three, if a murder has been committed in the tribe and the slayer and the slain

belong to different fratries, the injured gen often appealed to its brother gents. These held a counsel of the fratry and appeared in a body to the other fratry that it also should assemble its counsel to affect a settlement. Four, at the death of a prominent person, the opposite fratry saw the internment and burial ceremonies, while the fratry of the dead person attended as mourners. Five, the council of the fratry also played a part in the election of the Sackham. That this election would be confirmed by the brother gents was more or less taken for granted, but the gins of the opposite fratry might raise an objection.

In this case, the councils of the opposite fratry was assembled. If it maintained the objection, the election was void. The Iroquois formally had special religious mysteries called medicine lodges by the white men. Among the cynicas, these mysteries were celebrated by two religious brotherhoods, into which new members were admitted by formal initiation, there was one such brotherhood in each of the two fratries. Seven, if, as is almost certain, the four lineages occupying the four quarters of Tlaxcala

at the time of the conquest were four fratries, we here have proof that the fraturies were also military units, like the fratries among the Greeks and similar kinship organizations among the Germans, end quote. So we have Ingalls outlined there kind of at its highest level. So with the fraturies, operating at the level above the gens, there's a level above the fratry, which is the tribe itself. And Morgan again tried to define the tribe and its core functions in terms of some shared principles.

So first, tribes had their own territory and name. Second, tribes had their own distinct dialects. Third, tribes had a right to depose Sackham's and war chiefs and were able to override the will of the Jens who had elected them originally. fourth tribes had shared religious and ceremonial practices five tribes had a tribal council which governed tribal concerns above the level of the gins and six tribes had a head chief for the whole tribe and here ingles notes that quote he is one of the sackams and in situations demanding swift action he has to take provisional measures until the council can be assembled and make a definite decision his function represents the first feeble attempt at the creation of an individual with executive power, though generally nothing more came of it, as we shall see, the executive official developed in most cases, if not in all, out of the chief military commander, end quote. And Ingle's claims that for many Native Americans, the tribal group remained basically the highest level of formal social organization. But there were significant and notable exceptions

to this. Of note in particular, for Morgan, was the Iroquois Confederacy, which had had shown kind of its own distinctive principles that Ingalls outlines here. And again, we will quote at length omitting a couple sections. So the first principle of the Confederacy was one, perpetual federation of the five consanguantist tribes on the basis of complete equality and independence of all internal matters of the tribe. This bond of kin represented the real basis of the Confederacy. Of the five tribes, three were known as father tribes and were brother tribes to one another. The other two were known as Sun tribes and were likewise brother tribes to one another. Two, the organ of the Confederacy was a federal council of 50 Sackams, all equal in rank and

authority. The decisions of this council were final in all matters relating to the Confederacy. Three, the 50 Sackams were distributed among the tribes and gents at the foundation of the confederacy to hold new offices specially created for federal purposes. They were elected by the respective gents whenever a vacancy occurred and could be deposed by the gents at any time. But the right of investing them with their office belonged to the federal council. Four, these federal saccums were also saccums in their respective tribes and had a seat and a vote in the tribal council. Five, all decisions of the federal council had to be unanimous. Six, voting was by tribes so that all decisions to be valid every tribe and all members of the council in every tribe had to

signify their agreement. 7. Each of the five tribal councils could convene the federal council, but it could not convene itself. 8. The meeting of the councils were held in the presence of the assembled people. Every Iroquois could speak, the council alone decided. 9. The Confederacy had no official head or chief executive officer.

And 10, on the other hand, the council had two principal war chiefs with equal powers and equal authority, the two kings of the Spartan, the two consuls in Rome. quote. And so Ingalls wraps up this third chapter, having explored these different structures of organization that existed within Iroquois society. Again, starting at the most basic level with the gens, which is traced in terms of the mother right matrilineal descent, then the fratry, which occurs on a level above that that groups brother gens into single groupings, then the tribe, which occurs even above that, and then finally within the Iroquois. Confederacy itself, which represented almost, you know, to a modern eye, we might compare it to

a state, although Ingalls tries to argue that it is somewhat distinct from a state and actually prefigures early attempts at governance absent the full creation of a state. And we will get into that a little bit more next week when we move on into the next chapters. But for now, this is where Ingalls leaves us at the end of chapter three. Okay. And that is the summary of the first three chapters of Frederick Engels is the origin of the family private property and the state. And now we are moving into part two, the discussion period. So I'll ask the first question, toss it over to Allison for the answer, and we'll have a little back and forth after she responds. So the first question to start this discussion section is this. Much of the left today doesn't seem to know

what to make of Morgan's work and the theory of progress which angles imports into this text. is a theory of progress inherently racist or Eurocentric? Yeah, so this is something that I wanted us to tackle really directly, because while this text has been super influential within the Marxist canon, leading to some very important works, it's also been subjected to criticism within and outside of Marxism on sort of these grounds of racism and Eurocentrism. So I think, you know, having gone through this whole summary,

it's pretty straightforward to see what problems someone could have with Morgan's idea of progress, which Ingalls ends up using here, right? According to Morgan's stages of ancient societies, they start with savagery, move to barbarism, and then end in civilization, where civilization looks a lot like modern European civilizations, right? And one critique that has really been leveraged against that is that this is a Eurocentric outlook on what history looks like, and it's an assumption that Europe is more advanced or in some normative way better

than societies that have other modes of development or other sort of structural forms. And I think this criticism needs to be taken very seriously in order for us to kind of work with this text. It would be a mistake, I think, to ignore it. So first, I think there's some distinguishing work that just needs to be done here. So on the one hand, I think it's very true that kind of linear notions of progress like this were absolutely used as a justification for colonialism and for settler colonialism in particular. As Europe expanded to the rest of the world in its colonial projects, it did argue that it was more civilized, that it existed in a higher, more advanced stage. And this provided a framework both for supposedly civilizing the rest of the world through colonialism, but also in

the case of settler colonialism through genociding those societies which were seen as stuck in the historical past. We can see this in all sorts of historical context, but in the United States, for example, we could see arguments that the indigenous peoples of the United States were stuck in this, you know, more barbarist phase. They didn't have notions of land ownership, and as a result, it was justified to just take the land since they didn't have these civilizational concepts. So there was a sense in which this kind of approach to history definitely played an ideological role in settler colonialism more broadly. And at the same time, though, I do want us to try to distinguish from saying this thing was used to cause or you know used as a justification for

settler colonialism and this thing is inherently settler colonial and this is where we need to do some fine differentiation and i think for one example of this we could think about darwin's theory of evolution right so darwin's theory of evolution similarly has a difficult place in science in as much as it also provided ideological cover and justification for some of the horrors of the last several centuries, in particular eugenics and the genocides which, you know, existed there. The supporters of the eugenicist movement framed themselves as social Darwinists, who were applying Darwin's concepts to society. And I think one thing that we do need to note here, right, is that this hasn't led us to throw out every single idea that Darwin had. The fact that Darwin's ideas were

used to justify this forms of violence has led us to think about them more critically and has led us to think about the way that scientific ideas might be misapplied ideologically, but it hasn't led anyone to throw out Darwin, and I would suggest that we need a similar approach to what's happening in this text. So on the one hand, I think that we need to distinguish the ideological mobilization of scientific discoveries by the ruling class from the scientific discoveries themselves. And this isn't to suggest that science is above political critique, but rather to suggest that the intersections of science and politics are very fraught, and that's the intersection. where we find Morgan's ideas at. And I also want to suggest that the question is not whether or not

Morgan's ideas were and could be used to justify horrible things. It's pretty incontestable that they were, but rather that we need to ask if there is a necessary conclusion from his ideas that results in those horrible things. And that's where it's not so clear to me. One thing to note is that Morgan actually is not giving a 100% linear account of progress here in a way that might undercut some of the more reductive readings you could use of Morgan if you wanted to justify Europe as the ultimate civilization. For example, Morgan and Engels note that in the middle stage of barbarism, there's big differences in how societies develop based on geography, and that does kind of add some contingency into the picture. I think we also need to consider whether or not claims about progress

and advancement of society are normative or whether or not they're descriptive from a historical perspective. So does more advanced mean good and less advanced mean bad? Perhaps Morgan might have had those thoughts, but it's not clear that that's how Engels is using them. In particular, within the Marxist tradition, the emphasis on primitive communism, looking back on pre-civilizational societies according to this framework that had communistic forms of living, actually would seem to indicate that there are normatively desirable things that exist in what could be called less advanced societies. So I think that we need to do some detangling work there too between descriptions of advancement in progress and normative value judgments. And I think that this is a huge debate

within Marxism on the whole that Marxists often disagree with. But one thing that we can't really escape is the fact that Marxism does have a somewhat linear theory of progress, wherein, for example, a capitalist society represents an increase in development from feudalism, right? Capitalism is more economically advanced than feudalism. Is that a normative claim about the value of both? Well, that's a broader discussion to have that we can hopefully have here, but I do think that we do have to wrestle with the fact that Ingalls and Marxism more broadly do have a theory of progress here. And I don't know that we can just throw that out and still claim to hold on to Marxism. At the same time,

one last thing that I would suggest in defense of Ingalls and Marxism is that they would push back against the Eurocentric idea that the European civilization is the highest stage a development that humanity can ever reach, because as Marxism points out, you know, European capitalism isn't the end of history, right? Like, that is not the point that everything is moving towards. That is not the ultimate advancement to which everything is progressing. And so there is kind of an undercutting of that colonial ideology at the same time that treated European civilization as a sort of end of history. So those are some thoughts I think are worth working with here. I think we need to take the critiques of Morgan seriously. But I also think

that we need to not throw out potentially useful ideas about kinship that Morgan has uncovered in history and Engle's application of them here, which allows us to think about the family and the state as historically contingent realities that emerge because of materialist changes within a society. So kind of broadly my thoughts, Brett, I'll throw it your way if you have any, but I do want to kind of tackle this question head on as we work with this text. Sure. I mean, one of my initial thoughts is, you know, of course the ideological superstructure is going to shape how science is interpreted and applied. People operating in the 1800s also had relatively compared to today limited abilities to engage perhaps with other cultures and their deep histories,

never an excuse for shortcomings of these sorts, but just worth thinking about. And then I do wonder, I mean, especially these Darwinian theories and theories of Morgan, etc., are occurring during the time of colonialism and imperialism and are put to those ends. it's not necessarily a surprise you certainly don't want to throw out like as you said the theories of natural selection that darwin um originated and and brought forth because those ideas were you know explicitly put towards horrific ends so those those are things um worth thinking about but also i do wonder if the i think we talked about this last time we got together the evolution does not equal progress is there a way to is there a way that that helps alleviate some of the tensions in

text at all, or do you still think that this idea of linear progress is more or less a problem that we have to wrestle with? Yeah. So I think that's an open question, right? And this is where we might want to try to distinguish between Morgan and Marxism, right? Because for Morgan, it does seem like those things are identical, right? Like some level of evolution is inherently moving progressively in one direction. But I don't know if that's the case for Marxism, right? Like, Marxism kind of subjects every society that it gives an analysis of to a criticism that finds fundamental contradictions within it, that, you know, it create inherent crisis, inherent instability with the exception of a communist society, right, where those contradictions wouldn't exist. So it is possible

that maybe as Marx is tracing the evolution of society going from, you know, slave states to feudal states to capitalist states to eventually socialist states, he's just tracing one possible path that things could take, right? It might not be the only one. And the changes that are happening there, even if they represent changes in advancement, may not be, you know, like the end-all, be-all of how things can go. It's not super clear to me whether or not that's the case in Marxism, but I do worry that for Morgan, that may be kind of how he views history. But I think the main takeaway is that Ingalls, while citing Morgan and clearly very impressed with him, isn't just saying, like, Morgan's system is correct about everything, right? He's taking particular

historical insights from it, and then kind of grafting them into historical materialism that Morgan isn't even quite aware of is present in his work, perhaps. So it's a tricky question in my mind, but I do think that we can start to differentiate here between what Marxism does with Morgan's ideas and Morgan's own ideas. Yeah, I think that's an important distinction. And of course, in the entire Marxist tradition, there's always this constant engagement with certain bourgeois philosophers, bourgeois scientists, bourgeois economists, and and then taking whatever we can get out of them and applying them within the historical and dialectical materialist framework that Marxist think and operate in. So that's not wholly new either.

But yeah, that's very interesting. I don't have too much more on that. I know your next question is going to maybe dive a little bit deeper into some of these questions as well. So we can go on to the next one if you'd like. Awesome. Yeah. I'll go ahead and throw on your way then and we'll kind of get back to the question Morgan a bit. But in the meantime, I think a really important question that we also need to tackle when we're thinking about the legacy of this work, is why is this work considered a early work of Marxist feminism and how did it help kind of lay a groundwork for a much more robust Marxist understanding of women's oppression? Yeah, really, really important question and an important aspect of this text.

So this famous work by Angles not only maps out and articulates for the first time in the Marxist tradition, an historical and dialectical materialist account of the development of the family structure over time, based on the material conditions in which families existed, but also sketches out the history of patriarchy, its underlying causes, and ultimately the path to its transcendence. To be clear, Engel shows us that patriarchy is not unique to capitalism, but nor is it an immutable characteristic of human nature, as many assume and even argue. Rather, it emerged alongside the development of class society and private property. Importantly, though, and in contrast, to much academic work on this front, even among fellow socialists like August, Babel, and Karl Kotzky,

Angles shows how in primitive communist societies, arguably humanity's most natural state, before the rise of class societies like the classical period of slavery and then the medieval period of feudalism, patriarchy did not exist at all. Men and women held all property in common, contributed more or less equally to securing the essentials of life, and this collective egalitarian mode of production gave rise to a communal egalitarian family structure in which all the men of the group belonged to all the women and all the women belong to all the men. Children were raised collectively and communally, and since motherhood was for certain while fatherhood was not, these societies often took on matriarchal structures, tracing themselves back through matriol lines.

One major breakthrough that this analysis provides is to challenge, the idea so common then as well as today that patriarchy and the domination of women is humanity's natural state. Some celebrate that fact, some bemoan it, but many people seem to implicitly accept it as more or less of fact. However, if Angles is correct following the scholarship of Morgan, then not only is patriarchy not the natural state of human beings, but it can be transcended. And not only can it be transcended, but historical materialism tells us how it can be transcended, namely through the revolutionizing of the mode of production into collectively held property, i.e. socialist revolution. So already we see

the first feminist breakthroughs made by angles. Patriarchy is not the natural state of human beings. Family formation and the inequality between men and women are superstructural results of the underlying mode of production, and by confronting and defeating class society through proletarian revolution, we can once again create the material conditions for true equality and end women's oppression in the patriarchal modes of social organization that require it. Importantly, though, this is not a reversion to primitive communism. Dialectical apprehension of the evolution of society shows us that evolutionary advances never replicate the past, but spiral upwards out of the past, replicating aspects of the past

that are still viable, while developing them to new and higher degrees. This is obvious to diletticians, but worth noting anyways. In addition to this, Engel shows how and why women have been treated as property throughout the different epochs of class society, from slavery through feudalism and up to capitalism, as well as makes some predictions for family structures and relationships between men and women in a socialist and possibly even communist future. While the specifics can never be known for sure, outlines of these possibilities can be seen. One of those possibilities, one in which sadly many ostensible leftists still

struggle with comprehending today, is that the defeat of class society, that with the defeat of class society, women cease to be the property of men, they cease to be economically coerced by men, and importantly, they cease to be commodities which men can buy access to. Marxists seek to create the social conditions under socialism and eventually communism, in which no human being is the property of another, in which a member of one class can no longer leverage their wealth coercively against a member of another class, and in which, importantly, no human being is a commodity that can be bought by another. Angles makes it clear that under socialist and communist material conditions, prostitution will be eliminated, as the underlying material conditions

that create it will have been abolished and overcome. This fact compels Marxists today to analyze, critique, and fight the sex trade, its underlying causes, the injustices it imposes on sex workers, as well as seek its ultimate abolition through revolution. Another feminist element of this work is the focus on reproductive and domestic labor. This focused opened up an entire world of proletarian feminist critique and analysis that survives and thrives to this day on the socialist left. An angle shows us how even under certain advancements made by capitalism for women, like no longer being confined to the home exclusively and having various legal rights, which were fought

for, of course, by women and their allies, there still exists a radical inequality when it comes to women reproducing the next generation of workers and the domestic labor which falls disproportionately on their shoulders, even if they have a full workday alongside men. Crucially, though, Engels highlights how all of this labor, which is utterly necessary for the functioning of capitalist society and its reproduction, is unpaid. This saves the capitalist class trillions of dollars, even though their existence as capitalists depend on the reproductive and domestic labor of women. Moreover, many of the caregiving jobs for the disabled and the elderly also historically and presently fall on women and are also unpaid in most instances. A mother with a child who has severe disabilities or who has to stay home from work to take care of an elderly parent gets no help from society at large or from the state in most instances.

And even when some help or compensation is given, it's rarely, if ever enough. The solution, according to Angles and the Marxist tradition since him, is the socialization of domestic labor, in the form of equality between men and women who work equally in the home, as well as in the development of communal living more broadly, but also, and importantly, in the form of the state actively supporting, socializing, and compensating this work. For example, a socialist state would fully fund things like, like universal child care for working parents, with highly trained and licensed professionals taking care of children when parents cannot. It would involve providing universal maternal care during pregnancy, fully compensated paid leave for both parents of a newborn child, universal

health care, communal education, state services for healthy food, healthy and safe housing, and a million other things that are anathema in varying degrees to capitalist dictatorships like the one we currently live in. The Marxist feminist analysis inaugurated by this historic work of Engels has informed every major socialist revolutionary movement from the Bolsheviks to the Chinese communists to Sankara in Burkina Faso to the Zapatistas and Chiapas to revolutionary Cuba and beyond. In addition, it puts the issues that women face at the forefront of class struggle and shows women that they can only overcome their oppression through uniting with other oppressed peoples under capitalism and fighting the division of society.

into classes alongside everyone else who has a material interest in overcoming its injustices and inequalities. It also put essential emphasis on proletarian feminism as opposed to bourgeois feminism, the latter of which operates under the delusion that equality for women can exist in a class society. Angles shows us with extreme clarity that it cannot. Moreover, it shows that certain forms of feminism that pit men against women and see men, as the primary cause of women's oppression, work only to entrench the system, divide would-be comrades, essentialize men and women, and mystify the underlying causes of inequality between the genders, namely class society and private property.

Lastly, let me touch on one more point of interest here. One thing that really struck me about this text was how it flies in the face of certain human nature arguments. Now, we're all familiar with the deployment of such arguments against socialism, those silly little platitudes about capitalism being human nature and socialism being antithetical to it. We are also familiar, if less consciously so, with how this metaphysical perspective, which is to say anti-dialectical perspective, is deployed in defense of patriarchy and bioessentialism. It comes in many forms, but is usually stated something like this. Patriarchy is human nature. Men are

physically stronger than women, and that superior strength put them in the position of dominance over women, both because men use that strength to be more productive agriculturally and then industrially, but also because women depended on men to protect them from threats. This biological fact of physical superiority caches out socially as a patriarchal social structure, which is unavoidable and rooted ultimately in the biology of men and women. To resist it is to go against nature. In religious terms, this bioessentialism gets framed as divine will, a natural high, hierarchy that God ordained and consciously put men on top of.

Some take it even further to argue against feminism and LGBTQ people by arguing that the many problems we face in society today are a product of the breakdown of this natural hierarchy and its deleterious effects on men in particular, but also on women, who they say belong in the home. What we need, this fairy tale goes, is for men to triple down on patriarchy and for women to submit to it. it. All other forms of gender expression and sexual orientation are to be decried, attacked, and even outlawed as unnatural and socially corrosive.

This argument is paraded around constantly by the reactionary right to this day, and it's not only an anti-dialectical and a historical argument rooted in chauvinism, bioessentialism, and pseudoscience, it also serves to mystify, often as an unconscious act by these rather dumb folks, the relationship between class society, private property, the capitalist mode of production, and the way they destabilize and harm society, and reinforce unjust ways of being and thinking in the world. But finding scapegoats for the failures of capitalism is the hallmark of modern reaction, and so we shouldn't be surprised by it. But with a text like this and the many lines of Marxist and feminist thought it helped spawn,

we can equip ourselves properly to have that fight and to win. In summary, this work by Angles was the first historical and dialectical materialist analysis of family formation and women's structural oppression in class societies. He showed how primitive communist societies were egalitarian, matriarchal, and communal, and argued that patriarchy appeared in human societies only when those societies were divided into classes and rooted in private property. By comprehending the material conditions that give rise to inequality among men and women, he showed us that, that only by overcoming class society via revolution and holding property and the means of production in common, can we create the conditions for true equality between men and women? He demystifies the underlying causes of structural misogyny, women as property, and the sex trade, and shows how patriarchy evolved in the capitalist epoch.

He outlines the ways in which women are subjugated, oppressed, and forced to do socially necessary labor with no real assistance or compensation. He destroyed common just-so stories that people used to justify these inequalities, and finally he helped illuminate the path to overcoming such injustices, and in so doing helped to open a new field of study and analysis within the Marxist tradition. Is this a perfect text? No. Are there areas in which proletarian feminists can rightfully criticize the text's shortcomings? Of course. Is Angles the end-all be-all of Marxist feminism. Don't make me laugh. But still, for the Marxist tradition and for the human species, Angles provided a groundbreaking and essential work that all

thinking people must take seriously and engage with in good faith, and he laid the groundwork for the development of a robust Marxist feminism, which is still evolving and generating essential insights for revolutionary critique and strategy to this day. And for that, we salute him. Allison? Exceptionally well said, all in all. A couple thoughts that I'm super glad you touched on. First is, you know, kind of the way that we still today do hear these kind of human nature arguments, right?

Which are all about mystifying sort of the relationship between the men and women, between gender. And in particular, like, what comes to mind thinking about this that I think is interesting and that makes the legacy of this text so, so useful, is that the time that Ingle's wrote this, right? Like, the majority of these kind of human nature arguments would probably be relatively religious in their ideological expression, right? Obviously, religion is waning at this time, but still, it has much more sway than it has now. But what's interesting today, right, is that we do see these more kind of secular attempts at human nature arguments

that Ingalls responds to just as well. You kind of get at it here, right? But there's this sort of like almost pop evolutionary psychology explanation of why patriarchy exists. which is based on these ideas of inherent biological differences. And you see this in the work of like some very obvious hacks like Jordan Peterson, who can't shut up about these questions when it comes to patriarchy, but also kind of the whole kind of movement around him as a lot of more secular thinkers, people like Sam Harris have kind of dipped their toes into this too, where they're trying to use these evolutionary psychology arguments to mystify gender relations.

And what you never hear them do is get into history on the level of detail that Ingalls does hear, right? Like, when we hear these kind of broad explanations, they never get into actual historical specifics and examples of how patriarchy emerged from these biological differences. It's all very broad platitudes. And what makes this text have the legacy it has and make it still be worth reading is that this isn't broad platitudes, right? This is looking at specific historical moments where changes occurred and then tracing out the effect that that had on patriarchy. So I think, you know, the demystification that goes on, here, and really just like at the core, what is so important about this text, making patriarchy

historically contingent is just as relevant today at the time that Ingalls wrote it. As society progresses and as ideologies which reinforce the ruling class change, there are still always going to be some justification for patriarchy because it does play this role in class society. And so a demystification is always going to be necessary and important. So I think that, I'm really glad you kind of hit on that. did that application. And the other thing that you got at that I think is super important to point out is that this also correct certain leftist mistakes around patriarchy, right? Specifically, the idea that patriarchy itself is like a primal transhistorical category, which represents

the first contradiction, right? We see this in radical feminist analysis, and we also see this kind of like tacitly untheorized in some liberal feminism and even attempts at more revolutionary feminist analysis. But Ingalls does a really important job here of pushing back against to what I think we could jokingly refer to as like gender reductionist feminism, right? Which treats gender as the reducible category underneath everything else. And Ingle does a good job, I think, of showing how patriarchy is not something which has always existed throughout history and actually occurs in the context of property transformations. And within proletarian feminist thought that has used Ingalls here, this is one of the most

kind of crucial ideas that you get, which is pushing back against radical feminism to suggest that a Marxist understanding of feminism would treat the fight against private property and class, i.e. the fight for socialism, as a primary sort of battlefield for feminism because of that contingency. So I think it's really important to isolate that both there's an incredible sort of correcting of right-wing deviations and mystifications of patriarchy here, but also left-wing ones as well that make this text really still worth wrestling with and applicable to, you know where the left is at today and the ideological debates that were involved in both internally and with those who we are you know kind of fighting against absolutely yeah well said and this whole

text is just it really is a display of the power of real historical materialism and scientific socialism when applied properly right it really shows you how how deep this form of analysis can can really go and what it can explain that otherwise is not explained and a lot of the ways in which various reactionaries tell these, as I call them, just so stories about how things evolved, are absolutely not scientifically rigorous whatsoever, and they have no methodology by which to even begin approaching the question. And historical materialism, it just really shows the power. And I was continually struck by that over and over again while reading this text.

But more on what you said, you know, dialectical materialism or just the evolution of society over time, historical, the Marxist framework, the way we view things. it's a real challenge to to the status quo in many ways but you know one of the things that obviously historically it's done is is just as you said this text makes patriarchy historically contingent

you know Marxism and historical materialism make capitalism historically contingent capitalism and patriarchy are two things that people who are invested in them you know to this day want to naturalize and make seem not

contingent they do not want these things to be ephemeral they are rooted in some deeper you know ontological reality about humanity and our nature, but when we go back and we actually look at things and how things have actually happened over time, and we study history scientifically, we can see that these things are historically contingent, and you can see why having that view is going to be immediately a threat to those who are invested in the status quo. They do not want to see capitalism, in this case, as historically contingent or ephemeral. It is the end of history. It is

the end-all be-all of economic social organization. And to suggest otherwise is anathema to these people. Well, we suggest and we prove that it is ephemeral. And if it's ephemeral, that means it can be transcended. If patriarchy is not traceable back to the deepest depths of human evolution, which it is not, then it can be transcended. If capitalism is not from the very beginning of human evolution present with us, then it is a historically contingent, ephemeral sort of process that can be overcome and that's that's the power of dialectical thinking and that is why dialectical thinking is antithetical to maintaining the status quo and so i think that's important but even just to bring it to the politics of today what do we see around us today in the form of

reaction we see this hyper aggressive violent moral panic around men in crisis the so-called masculinity crisis, of feminism, and moral panics around LGBTQ people, particularly as of late trans people. We just saw in Ohio this week, Nazis doing the Sieg Hail, talking about Vimar conditions outside of a fucking drag show. This is reaction in its purest form, and it's revolving around these patriarchal ideas that they believe or claim to believe are synonymous with. human nature. And so you can see how this anti-dialectical view of patriarchy can manifest in these

really rotten, reactionary, violent political movements in our own day and time right now and here and how we can challenge it intellectually through historical materialism, but also we have to get organized to challenge it materially in the streets or they're going to continue to ramp up their reaction and eventually that reaction as we've seen time and time again spills over into violence, often against completely innocent, completely vulnerable people that have no power whatsoever. I mean, you know, the Tucker Carlson's, the Jordan Peterson's of the world, the Matt Walsh's of the world, spend their entire lives, their entire time on this planet, finding ways to dehumanize specifically LGBTQ people, but also feminists more broadly and the left even more broadly.

And it is a political project for them to maintain the hierarchies that are fostered under capitalism and class society, and to naturalize them. As you said, it used to be naturalized through reference to God. This is the hierarchy that God created, therefore, it's just a... I think Jordan Peterson is still on that tip. But in the modern world, it's more often naturalized in this pop anthropology, in these quote-unquote common sense platitudes, et cetera. And so to be aware of them, to be aware of the real history,

to be aware of how those rotten ideas produce rotten social formations that we have to organize and fight against. These are all absolutely crucial elements of Marxism, of revolutionary leftism, and I think of just being a fucking human being on planet Earth, trying to understand where you come from and trying to fight the bad guys, you know? Yeah, no, I think it's all really well said. One thing I do want to touch on real quick, maybe to wrap this up, is going back one point, that idea of dialectics, right?

And the idea that this historical contingency, this is kind of the central idea of dialectics, right? which is that the phenomena that we encounter are not metaphysically static things. They're in change constantly. Everything, according to the dialectical worldview, is in flux and in relationship to other phenomena around it. And I think, you know, I really appreciate you getting at that inside alone is like a threat to the fundamental justifying ideologies of capitalism or of any system wherein you

have a ruling class trying to naturalize its domination, right? And I think one thing to kind of land on there that's important and that I really want to hit is like that recognition that this is the core of dialectics, this idea of historical contingency in flux, is a heuristic that I think leftists need to adopt when they're analyzing other ideas, right? If you start finding yourself tempted by the ideas of someone like Jordan Peterson or the ideas of, I think, crass radical feminism or these other things, which posit kind of trans-historical static things and you consider yourself a Marxist, that's the idea. the time to step back and apply dialectical criticism to what you're looking at, right? And I think as a heuristic, it becomes a super useful way of avoiding errors that people often fall into. So I do kind of want to call attention to what I think is a really good point you had there. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, any idea or concept that is, you know, kind of promotes this trans historical idea that exists above and beyond material reality. That should just immediately, especially

in a more seasoned Marxist, just immediately set off. a bunch of alarm bells like hold on here something's not right let's investigate further and i think after a certain level of of development that becomes more like muscle memory it certainly feels like that more and more for me um but at the earlier stages of my marxist development i would fall into all sorts of of these sorts of you know pits not in any malicious or terrible or way that demonized anybody else but just because we're kind of trained to think in a non-dialectical metaphysical way and we are drowning in these platitudes and these commonsensical little states that are beaten into our brain from day one that can really shape the way we think.

And so, you know, being very critical of those ideas and thinking very deeply and using that as an alarm bell to investigate further, I think is a really wonderful capacity for Marxists to develop. Absolutely. All right. Well, with that said, let me go on to the final question of this discussion section, and then we'll wrap up the episode. The question is this, and it's kind of a little bit related to the first question you answered. How has Henry Morgan's theory, and as a result, angles his own theory in this text, held up to scrutiny over time? Yeah, so this I wanted to tackle kind of separate from the previous question, just because this text has been around for quite some time. There have been advancements in our understanding of history and our understanding of indigenous cultures and in anthropology, right?

And as a result of that, when you start to look at how people respond to this text today, there's a large chunk of large, anti-Marxists and anti-communists whose response to this text is like it hasn't held up right just historically it hasn't we Henry Morgan was wrong about things therefore Marxists are wrong is kind of the approach and you will see this in some academic context but also in more kind of popular discussions about this where it does come up and I you know wanted to take a second while I was working through this text to like get into some of the journal articles in secondary literature on Morgan's legacy and Engel's use of his legacy, to kind of see, like, what does anthropology today actually think about this, right?

Like, is it true that the overwhelming view in anthropology today is a rejection of Henry Morgan's ideas and Engel's applications of them? And diving into a couple articles, I found that this is, like, kind of a tough one. Morgan's super interesting because he remains really influential in anthropology. He actually kind of helped develop an entire historicizing approach to anthropology. And he also is super controversial at the same time. And I think we need to, you know, think about that. So a lot of the specifics of his account have been critiqued and rejected within contemporary anthropology. And to a large extent, scholars have just pointed out that there were like factual errors because we just didn't have such an abundance of research about the Iroquois and Seneca in particular, but also about Native American anthropology on the whole, right?

There was less data available at the time. And so, of course, that led to factual errors. that, you know, many people point out and have taken up. And, you know, kind of what we got at before, you will also find in the secondary literature, this criticism of Morgan is kind of like a paternalist, right? He is an activist on behalf of the Seneca in a lot of ways and is researching their society from an anthropological view. But as one anthropologist put it, quote, he never cast off the attitude of a Christian white man observing an inferior culture, end quote. And that to me seems kind of fair for how Morgan does view the people that he's studying. But even the scholars who've pointed that out with an anthropology that I was able to find

don't reject every idea Morgan had out of hand as a result of that. So again, the idea that like Morgan's just been disproved seems a little bit more complicated. There was a sort of third category that I found when looking at it with people who suggested that like even if the individual parts of Morgan's history that he recounts are, you know, now more fraught as we've had more research, his scientific contribution isn't quite history. It's a theory of history, right? And so the method might still have influence in thinking structurally about the development of societies and the historical forms that societies can take, even if we now can quibble about some of the empirical specifics. So I think that was an interesting perspective I saw in the

literature. And then the most important one that I want to point out that I think is really important in the context of this text is that for all of the scrutiny that Morgan has been subjected to, which is a good thing, right? This is how science works. We take past works and we subject them to this kind of scrutiny. For all of that, he is still just one of the most influential theories of kinship in particular, right? So much criticism has come down on his theory of the evolution of societies in a linear context. But the ideas about kinship that he had actually remain highly cited today and laid down some really important ideas in anthropology that would get taken up by a whole host of later anthropologists. In particular, Morgan pays special attention to the, like,

emergence of the incest taboo as a transition from a sort of primitive sexuality to a full-blown kinship system. And that's an idea that, like, to this day remains really fundamental in a lot of anthropology and also weirdly in post-structuralism that has drawn on anthropology in some interesting ways due to the work of like Levy Strauss, for example. So I spent some time and dove into some articles on this. And I just wanted to kind of at the end of this point out that it's great that we live in a world where we have developed a scientific approach to social questions, where we subject thinkers like Ingalls and Morgan to scrutiny and we check their empirical claims. But it's just not true as far as I can tell that Morgan is just disregarded as a hack within contemporary

anthropology. That is not the case. There has been strong criticism there. And there's also been a recognition of his ongoing legacy and of the legacy of Engle's work with him that I think, you know, should cause you to, if you hear this criticism of this text, take a second and maybe go look at some of the literature yourself and wrestle with it because while that scrutiny has been there, it's been intense and it has found problems, Borgon's text and Ingle's reading of it is still cited today within anthropology, within sociological texts, and obviously within political thought and philosophy as well. So this is still something that I don't think we can simply throw out and that is not where the secondary literature has landed on it. I think that's an important

clarification. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm not as up on the anthropological, you know, science as you are, as your investigation for this reading and then just your previous experiences in the field. You know, I'm not as as up to date with them, but, you know, a few things jump out. First thing I want to say, just kind of a side point is the evolution via natural selection being the reason why incest is eradicated through social taboo. I found that just fascinating that, you know, like slowly over time it makes sense evolutionarily that there has to be these taboos that develop incestually in certain social formations that develop these incest taboos are going to have a healthier gene pool and thus a healthier social formation i just found that absolutely fascinating but

to the the substance of what you're saying here you know i kind of think like what's the biggest threat to angles use of morgan what what could really what could be knocked down in morgan's theory that then, you know, just collapses, angles his entire premise. And I don't think much. Like, the stages could be wrong, right? He could be technically wrong about the details of these stages. There could be a more nuanced or complex version of these stages that took place over time. But it seems to me that kinship and its formation is the essential bit here.

The way that the family has structured through time is the essential bit. And if that is still, you know, well regarded within the field and it is still cited often, his work on kinship i think that is really crucial to angles his use of morgan right which takes that and develops it even out and those stages could be different morgan's stages could be different but angles analysis could still hold right you could imagine a context in which that happens now the thing that that would have to happen in the science of anthropology to really challenge angles's text at the deepest level is probably something like showing that basically like no communal or matriarchal forms of social formation existed at all, that patriarchy goes all the

way back and infiltrates basically every social formation from the earliest family formations that we can possibly find. And I think that would be a problem. But to my knowledge, as weak as it may be in this front, I do not think anything like that has been discovered or advanced as likely. A lot of the conversation, a lot of the pop anthropology we hear around patriarchy and why exist is it usually starts around like the agricultural revolution and that's why men's strength come into play right all the shit that i talked about earlier um but going deeper back into human evolutionary history and finding communal egalitarian matriarchal social formations i think is like the the real bit that's important for angles to use and then flesh out in these various ways

and i'm wondering if if you can think of if if you disagree with that and and then if if not if you can think of anything else that, you know, could really be a real problem for angles, even if in detail some things are not ultimately correct or are found later to be false, you know? Yeah, so I agree with your general assessment, right? And I think that's why it's important that the part of Morgan that really has had a lasting legacy is the kinship part, right, more than the stages part. And yeah, you know, the more sophisticated criticism of Engel's use, I think, would suggest something along the lines of, okay, well, there may be his. historical situations in which there was this transformation to patriarchy that occurred as property

emerged, but it's yet to be shown that that was a universal thing across all cultures, right? That's kind of the more subtle criticism that people make, and then people will point out, even as, you know, kind of exists within the text a little bit, that there are, you know, sort of pre-civilizational cultures to use Morgan's language that did adopt patriarchal forms. Now, whether or not those forms came as a result of private property that is up for historical debate, right? But I think that people still try to attack the universalism aspect of it, but to a certain degree, part of the problem is just we don't have sufficient data to answer that question, right? Like, we don't know the history of every culture that's possibly been in existence,

and at least what Ingalls is doing is giving us some tools to explain some of the changes that we have seen and that are documented and to be able to understand those. So, you know, you could make argument that it's a little much to universalize that into a story of how patriarchy as a global structure came to be. But I think that the burden of proof would still be to define kind of contradictory examples, which have not clearly been found. Right. Absolutely. And I think in almost any new facts that could be discovered, aside from a couple that would maybe strike at the core of what Engels is doing in this text, but most new facts that could possibly be discovered could still be integrated into a historical materialist account that wouldn't fundamentally alter the mode

of analysis that Engels is employing or the basic conclusion that he's drawing. And so, you know, there could be a lot of new discoveries that then might have to reassess Engels' work and do historical materialism with these new facts in mind. But outside of a couple like really crucial things that could be discovered, you know, I think it would, I think Engels is fairly protected overall. And I guess I could see your point about, you know, maybe patriarchy emerged but did not emerge in any way related to the development of class society and private property. And that would certainly be a problem for Engels's theory. But I do wonder that, you know, if a historical materialist, a robust historical materialist account could still make use of that

and still come to some interesting and insightful conclusions about the evolution of human social formation over time. I don't know. Again, I'm interested in deepening my knowledge of anthropology for sure. Right. Yeah, do you have any other thoughts or any finishing thoughts? No, I mean, I think that covers it for that particular question. I did just kind of want to wrestle with it a little bit because it was one criticism that I was seeing online. But, you know, like, maybe it's sort of a closing thought on the whole that I think fits this is like a thing that you and I have talked about before is it can always be kind of refreshing to go back to Ingalls as a writer, right? Because he is just like so committed to science and to wrestling with the world around him.

And that's what we're seeing here, right? Both Ingalls and Marx, as people who were committed to science as a concept, we're seeing Morgan's work as like this groundbreaking work and wrestling with it, right? And it's really cool to see them doing that and then finding parallels with their own ideas within that work. And so I think this is just like a good example of how Marxists can engage emerging scientific and social discoveries can be. productive with them by no means was Morgan a Marxist, right? And yet, how indebted we are to his

work because of the analysis that came from Marx and Ingalls here. And, you know, this is the thing that I think we always go back to when we sometimes interact with non-Marxist works. But this is why it's worth doing that, right? And I think it's a good model of why those kinds of engagement, which I hope that we can continue to facilitate on our show, are useful. Yeah. Yeah. And to that point, you know, Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection, is dialectical materialism in practice? Like, you know, he did not conceive of it like that, right? He did not understand his own theory in those terms.

But when it came to Marx and Engels' attention, they immediately saw their philosophical framework instantiated perfectly through Darwinian evolution by a natural selection. And I always find that incredibly interesting. And if anybody's interested in diving deeper on that particular point, I did put out an episode on Rev.F recently called Dialectics and Liberation. It was a speech I gave at Arizona State University, trying to connect or show the philosophical overlap between Buddhism and Marxism.

And in that speech, I go into some detail. I think pretty good detail is a way to introduce yourself and really get a grasp on what dialectical materialism is. And I use evolution via natural selection for precisely that. But another thing that makes me think about is how so much of human historical development before Marx and Engels happened below the conscious awareness. of any individual, right? The transition from slavery to feudalism to capitalism was not happening in a way that people were conceptually conscious of.

They were kind of living in the moment, you know, things were happening, things were developing, there's mercantilism, all this stuff. But with Marxism, you really get this meta-prospective that allows you not only to understand the history of the evolution of human society over time, but understand our own place in it in like this meta-perspective way

that really allows us to take a, a broader view of where we currently are that literally was not available to human beings before dialectical and historical materialism came onto the scene. And I always find that utterly fascinating, right? We know that we live in the capitalist epoch, and we know we want to fight for socialist revolution. You know, during feudalism, mercantilists knew they wanted to make some money, but they weren't thinking of themselves as the vanguard of the new mode of production. It was completely outside of anybody's conscious grasp.

And so I find it very fascinating that with Marx and Engels, we bring human consciousness to these processes, and we can understand them at deeper levels and understand, importantly, our place within them. And I think that is fascinating and a deep advantage of the Marxist methodological approach. Yeah, beautifully sad. All right. Well, that is the first three chapters of the origin of the family, private property in the state. We'll be back soon enough with the next three. Thank you so much, Allison, a perfect partner to have these discussions with. I could not ask for a better co-host, and thank you to all the listeners and supporters of Reveleft and Red Menace, love and solidarity. We'll know.

We're going to be. Thank you. I'll be able to be down.