Book Details

Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) shows how the principles of Historical Materialism are applied in the interpretation of the development of primitive society and of the origins of civilisation.

In The Origin of the Family will be found:

1. An account of the development of the social forces of production from the most primitive food-gathering and hunting stage, through primitive agriculture, the domestication of animals, to the upper stages of barbarism, when the smelting of iron ore and the invention of the alphabet led to the beginnings of civilisation.

2. The history of the development of the family, as the most elementary unit of human association, from group-marriage to monogamy. Engels showed how the development of private property led to the transformation of family relations and to the subjugation of women. And he deals with the future of the family in socialist society.

3. An account of the kinship organisation-the gens-in primitive society, and of its disruption by the development of private property. 4. A demonstration of how the state arose with the division of society into antagonistic classes. Engels traces the history of the rise of the state amongst the ancient Greeks, Romans and Germans, and shows in detail the nature and functions of the state as an instrument of the oppression of one class by another.

5. The last chapter contains a brilliant sketch of the whole development of civilisation. Engels shows how classes and exploitation arose out of the division of labour, and how in consequence every advance in production has been made only at the cost of fresh sufferings of the exploited.

– Maurice Cornforth