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Nathaniel Le Sage

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Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

by Daniel M. Ingram

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Mar 18, 2025 07:57PM

Nathaniel Le Sage is currently reading

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

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Nathaniel Le Sage said: " “And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sec “And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.”

The problem with this book is well highlighted in my copy's introduction, which basically asserts Engels rushed this book to publication and that his arguments are half-assed.

The half-assery is pretty evident here, as Engels is primarily relying on anthropological reports we can't assume to be reliable. For example, Engels takes seriously one report that Native Americans who eat fish have larger brains than ones who don't, and this explains the differences in their social organization (also see the above quote of the tapeworm in a constant state of getting funky with itself). Engels is honest enough to admit he doesn't know how father right replaced mother right, but this admission is pretty glaring. You would think he would have given some thought to this, as it basically underpins his entire argument that the material conditions of late stage barbarism gave rise to the state.

He also does a piss-poor job of explaining how medieval Germans retained their gentile customs, basically chalking it up to their "vigour" as a tribe. He considers their individual ability, instinct and courage as deciding factors in the achievement of mark communities (this is his term and I have no idea what it means), resistance to concentrated feudal power, and relatively high degrees of freedom for women. This seems totally out of place when Engel's whole thesis is about explaining all this stuff through the lens of historical materialism. I also suspect Engels was doing a bit of pandering here, as his audience was probably heavily German. Knowing that Marx predicted the first communist revolution would occur in Germany, these lines are probably Engels searching for that "special something" in the German proletariat that wants to reject Romanesque patterns of statehood. Unfortunately, the Nazis seemed to prove the opposite was true.

Nevermind the terminology of "savagery" and "barbarism": we know what Engels meant by this, and it wasn't Western chauvinism. Engels expresses widespread admiration for what he sees in barbarism, particularly the social organization of the Iroquois, which by all accounts was democratic, egalitarian, feminist and just. Even vanquished foes could be integrated into the victorious tribe, and there were obviously no cops or prisons. He thinks the ancient Greeks had the same system up until the Heroic age, when it got polluted by private property accumulation and class warfare. In short, he thinks the West fucked up, the fuck-up happens somewhere between barbarism and civilization, and it peaks with the Roman Empire. Why this exactly happened is inadequately treated, although it has something to do with transfer of inheritance rights and private property to the male line, promotion of temporary military chiefs to full-time political power, and shifts in labor relations that caused slavery to become profitable. Classes would emerge as a consequence of this. In the beginning of the book he says the first class division was between male and female, and later in the book he says slaves were the first underclass (what he ultimately believes here I do not know). He also suggests that Roman women were, quite literally, domestic slaves. He traces the etymology of the word "family" back to Familus, which is Latin for domestic slave. So maybe it's implied that women were the first slaves?

Also suspicious is his total lack of discussion of homosexuality. The ancient Greeks and Romans practiced it, and surely it must have been present in the stages of savagery and barbarism. I suspect he thinks it is an aberration happening due to scarce mating resources, like competitive polygamy or polygyny. That would make it an anti-homosexual or homophobic position and surprising for Engels, whose ultimate form of the relationship is "individual sex love" (his term), a relationship freely entered into by two people on the basis of love as opposed to economic obligation. Ultimately he wants to abolish the monogamous family and replace domestic servitude of women with public care and education of children, an extremely radical position. But he never mentions homosexuality explicitly, so we can only guess as to how he viewed it.

But broadly, does a material analysis of marriage and the family make sense? Yeah, totally. I have no doubt the existence of the male gens and male birthright has almost everything to do with private property. My belief is simply that men have always been stronger than women and generally much more capable of fighting due to division of labor that favored men doing the job of soldiery. This allowed men to enforce whatever familial relations they wanted because they were strong and armed. Realism if you will. Still, this doesn't explain why they would seek to change those familial relations in the first place: if matriarchy was prevalent and accepted, why go through the trouble of changing it? For centuries men happily gave their property to the female gens after they died. What caused them to seek to change that relation? There must have been an enormous cost to this, because (if Engels is correct) men went from practically worshiping women as deities to beating their wives on the reg and instituting slavery and class division.

My introduction says that anthropology was still in its infancy when this book was written, and even though Engels is not a Western chauvinist he still struggles to be objective in many places. It's a shame, because the analysis is very interesting but highly incomplete. My internet research on many of the tribes encountered by the anthropologists he cites turned up almost nothing, suggesting most of them no longer exist for modern anthropologists to even "follow up" on. Guess I'll have to read Graeber next. The other depressing fact of history is that people and their customs can go extinct and never come back, a fact Engels understood well as the preeminent historical dialectician. ...more "

Oct 13, 2024 01:05PM · see review