Basics, Part 2b
Wampanoag
Origin of Family, Property and State
The previous post introduced Chapter 32 of Karl Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1. It is typically sweeping overview of history, placed at the end of Marx's long book as a summary.
Machiavelli, and later Marx, were familiar with the history of “the ancients” and especially with the literature of the Greeks and the Romans. These ancients often wrote in similarly sweeping terms. They were humanists and generalists and not narrow-minded specialists. They were philosophers in the broad sense of the word: people who sought wisdom of all kinds, and the essence of wisdom itself.
With today's item, and once again to support the kind of historical view that Machiavelli brought back into modern historiography, and into literature, we have Chapter 9 of Frederick Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (download linked below). This chapter is over 8000 words long. If it is too much for now, so be it. It is basic. It can usefully be read many times over.
We will return to “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” later in this Basics course when we are dealing more specifically with the State, and we will return to it again when we deal with the set called “No Woman, No Revolution”. This is because the rise of property, and the State that secured property, was also at one and the same time the cause of the fall of the women in human society.
Please ignore the first three paragraphs of today’s given chapter. These paragraphs only refer back to earlier chapters in the book. But from then onwards what you will find is a short history of human society from its beginning right up to modern times.
In the literature of Marx and Engels, as in the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and as in Machiavelli, there is a constant sense of history on a grand scale, or what is sometimes called a “grand narrative” of human life - which is then projected into the future.
Engels was a pioneer in the field of prehistory (the study of the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of the written word), as he was in many other fields of learning. His ideas on prehistory, based also on work done by Henry Morgan and then by Karl Marx, have stood the test of time.
Marx had recently died when Engels wrote this book. Hence it is also to some extent a tribute to Marx from Engels.
Please download and read the text via the following link:
Further reading:
