Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the non-possessing class.
This is already the case in the Athenian and Roman property classes.
Similarly in the medieval feudal state, in which the extent of political power was determined by the extent of landownership.
Similarly, also, in the electoral qualifications in modern parliamentary states.
This political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means essential.
On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the state.
The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property.
Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely.
It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange.
In addition to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field.
But that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank.
And lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage.
As long as the oppressed class – in our case, therefore, the proletariat – is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognize the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tall of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing.
But in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation, in the same measure it constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists.
Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class.
It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state; but that is enough.
On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand.
The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity.
There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power.
At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage.
We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production.
They will fall as inevitably as they once arose.
The state inevitably falls with them.
The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
Civilization is, therefore, according to the above analysis, the stage of development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange between individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which combines them both, come to their full growth and revolutionizes the whole of previous society.
At all earlier stages of society production was essentially collective, just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communistic communities.
This collective production was very limited; but inherent in it was the producers’ control over their process of production and their product.
They knew what became of their product: they consumed it; it did not leave their hands.
And so long as production remains on this basis, it cannot grow above the heads of the producers nor raise up incorporeal alien powers against them, as in civilization is always and inevitably the case.
But the division of labor slowly insinuates itself into this process of production.
It undermines the collectivity of production and appropriation, elevates appropriation by individuals into the general rule, and thus creates exchange between individuals – how it does so, we have examined above.
Gradually commodity production becomes the dominating form.
With commodity production, production no longer for use by the producers but for exchange, the products necessarily change hands.
In exchanging his product, the producer surrenders it; he no longer knows what becomes of it.
When money, and with money the merchant, steps in as intermediary between the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more complicated, the final fate of the products still more uncertain.
The merchants are numerous, and none of them knows what the other is doing.
The commodities already pass not only from hand to hand; they also pass from market to market; the producers have lost control over the total production within their own spheres, and the merchants have not gained it.
Products and production become subjects of chance.
But chance is only the one pole of a relation whose other pole is named “necessity.”
In the world of nature, where chance also seems to rule, we have long since demonstrated in each separate field the inner necessity and law asserting itself in this chance.
But what is true of the natural world is true also of society.
The more a social activity, a series of social processes, becomes too powerful for men's conscious control and grows above their heads, and the more it appears a matter of pure chance, then all the more surely within this chance the laws peculiar to it and inherent in it assert themselves as if by natural necessity.
Such laws also govern the chances of commodity production and exchange.
To the individuals producing or exchanging, they appear as alien, at first often unrecognized, powers, whose nature Must first be laboriously investigated and established.
These economic laws of commodity production are modified with the various stages of this form of production; but in general the whole period of civilization is dominated by them.
And still to this day the product rules the producer; still to this day the total production of society is regulated, not by a jointly devised plan, but by blind laws, which manifest themselves with elemental violence, in the final instance in the storms of the periodical trade crises.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
Civilization is, therefore, according to the above analysis, the stage of development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange between individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which combines them both, come to their full growth and revolutionizes the whole of previous society.
At all earlier stages of society production was essentially collective, just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communistic communities.
This collective production was very limited; but inherent in it was the producers’ control over their process of production and their product.
They knew what became of their product: they consumed it; it did not leave their hands.
And so long as production remains on this basis, it cannot grow above the heads of the producers nor raise up incorporeal alien powers against them, as in civilization is always and inevitably the case.
But the division of labor slowly insinuates itself into this process of production.
It undermines the collectivity of production and appropriation, elevates appropriation by individuals into the general rule, and thus creates exchange between individuals – how it does so, we have examined above.
Gradually commodity production becomes the dominating form.
With commodity production, production no longer for use by the producers but for exchange, the products necessarily change hands.
In exchanging his product, the producer surrenders it; he no longer knows what becomes of it.
When money, and with money the merchant, steps in as intermediary between the producers, the process of exchange becomes still more complicated, the final fate of the products still more uncertain.
The merchants are numerous, and none of them knows what the other is doing.
The commodities already pass not only from hand to hand; they also pass from market to market; the producers have lost control over the total production within their own spheres, and the merchants have not gained it.
Products and production become subjects of chance.
But chance is only the one pole of a relation whose other pole is named “necessity.”
In the world of nature, where chance also seems to rule, we have long since demonstrated in each separate field the inner necessity and law asserting itself in this chance.
But what is true of the natural world is true also of society.
The more a social activity, a series of social processes, becomes too powerful for men's conscious control and grows above their heads, and the more it appears a matter of pure chance, then all the more surely within this chance the laws peculiar to it and inherent in it assert themselves as if by natural necessity.
Such laws also govern the chances of commodity production and exchange.
To the individuals producing or exchanging, they appear as alien, at first often unrecognized, powers, whose nature Must first be laboriously investigated and established.
These economic laws of commodity production are modified with the various stages of this form of production; but in general the whole period of civilization is dominated by them.
And still to this day the product rules the producer; still to this day the total production of society is regulated, not by a jointly devised plan, but by blind laws, which manifest themselves with elemental violence, in the final instance in the storms of the periodical trade crises.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
We saw above how at a fairly early stage in the development of production, human labor-power obtains the capacity of producing a considerably greater product than is required for the maintenance of the producers, and how this stage of development was in the main the same as that in which division of labor and exchange between individuals arise.
It was not long then before the great “truth” was discovered that man also can be a commodity; that human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making a man into a slave.
Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being exchanged.
The active became the passive, whether the men liked it or not.
With slavery, which attained its fullest development under civilization, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class.
This cleavage persisted during the whole civilized period.
Slavery is the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is succeeded by serfdom in the middle ages, and wage-labor in the more recent period.
These are the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and in recent times disguised, slavery always accompanies them.
The stage of commodity production with which civilization begins is distinguished economically by the introduction of (1) metal money, and with it money capital, interest and usury; (2) merchants, as the class of intermediaries between the producers; (3) private ownership of land, and the mortgage system; (4) slave labor as the dominant form of production.
The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society.
The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.
Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labor; and, further, the introduction of wills, whereby the owner of property is still able to dispose over it even when he is dead.
This institution, which is a direct affront to the old gentile constitution, was unknown in Athens until the time of Solon; in Rome it was introduced early, though we do not know the date; [4] among the Germans it was the clerics who introduced it, in order that there might be nothing to stop the pious German from leaving his legacy to the Church.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
We saw above how at a fairly early stage in the development of production, human labor-power obtains the capacity of producing a considerably greater product than is required for the maintenance of the producers, and how this stage of development was in the main the same as that in which division of labor and exchange between individuals arise.
It was not long then before the great “truth” was discovered that man also can be a commodity; that human energy can be exchanged and put to use by making a man into a slave.
Hardly had men begun to exchange than already they themselves were being exchanged.
The active became the passive, whether the men liked it or not.
With slavery, which attained its fullest development under civilization, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class.
This cleavage persisted during the whole civilized period.
Slavery is the first form of exploitation, the form peculiar to the ancient world; it is succeeded by serfdom in the middle ages, and wage-labor in the more recent period.
These are the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and in recent times disguised, slavery always accompanies them.
The stage of commodity production with which civilization begins is distinguished economically by the introduction of (1) metal money, and with it money capital, interest and usury; (2) merchants, as the class of intermediaries between the producers; (3) private ownership of land, and the mortgage system; (4) slave labor as the dominant form of production.
The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society.
The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.
Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labor; and, further, the introduction of wills, whereby the owner of property is still able to dispose over it even when he is dead.
This institution, which is a direct affront to the old gentile constitution, was unknown in Athens until the time of Solon; in Rome it was introduced early, though we do not know the date; [4] among the Germans it was the clerics who introduced it, in order that there might be nothing to stop the pious German from leaving his legacy to the Church.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable.
But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities.
From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual – here was its one and final aim.
If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.
Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction.
Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority.
Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new oppression for another class.
The most striking proof of this is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now known to the whole world.
And if among the barbarians, as we saw, the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn, civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class practically all the duties.
But that should not be: what is good for the ruling class must also be good for the whole of society, with which the ruling-class identifies itself.
Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them – in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters. [5]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, continued ...
With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable.
But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities.
From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual – here was its one and final aim.
If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.
Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, its whole development proceeds in a constant contradiction.
Every step forward in production is at the same time a step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority.
Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new oppression for another class.
The most striking proof of this is provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are now known to the whole world.
And if among the barbarians, as we saw, the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn, civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class practically all the duties.
But that should not be: what is good for the ruling class must also be good for the whole of society, with which the ruling-class identifies itself.
Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity, to palliate them or to deny them – in short, to introduce a conventional hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the first stages of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement: the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters. [5]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, concluded ...
And now, in conclusion, Morgan’s judgment of civilization:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power.
The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.
The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners.
The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations.
A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past.
The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come.
The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.
Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.
It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
[Morgan, op. cit., p. 562.–Ed.]
Footnotes
[1] Especially on the north-west coast of America – see Bancroft. Among the Haidahs on Queen Charlotte Islands there are households with as many as 700 persons under one roof. Among the Nootkas whole tribes used to live under one roof.
[2] For the number of slaves in Athens, see above, page 107. In Corinth, at the height of its power, the number of slaves was 460,000; in Ægina, 470,000. In both cases, ten times the population of free citizens.
[3] The first historian who had at any rate an approximate conception of the nature of the gens was Niebuhr, and for this he had to thank his acquaintance with the Ditmarechen families, though he was overhasty in transferring their characteristics to the gens.
[4] The second part of Lassalle’s System der erworbenen Rechte (System of Acquired Rights) turns chiefly on the proposition that the Roman testament is as old as Rome itself, that there was never in Roman history “a time when there were no testaments“; that, on the contrary, the testament originated in pre-Roman times out of the cult of the dead. Lassalle, as a faithful Hegelian of the old school, derives the provisions of Roman law not from the social relations of the Romans, but from the “speculative concept” of the human will, and so arrives at this totally unhistorical conclusion. This is not to be wondered at in a book which comes to the conclusion, on the ground of the same speculative concept, that the transfer of property was a purely secondary matter in Roman inheritance. Lassalle not only believes in the illusions of the Roman jurists, particularly of the earlier periods; he outdoes them.
[5] I originally intended to place the brilliant criticism of civilization which is found scattered through the work of Charles Fourier beside that of Morgan and my own. Unfortunately, I have not the time. I will only observe that Fourier already regards monogamy and private property in land as the chief characteristics of civilization, and that he calls civilization a war of the rich against the poor. We also find already in his work the profound recognition that in all societies which are imperfect and split into antagonisms single families (les families incohirentes) are the economic units.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
IX. Barbarism and Civilization, concluded ...
And now, in conclusion, Morgan’s judgment of civilization:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power.
The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.
The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners.
The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations.
A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past.
The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come.
The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.
Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.
It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
[Morgan, op. cit., p. 562.–Ed.]
Footnotes
[1] Especially on the north-west coast of America – see Bancroft. Among the Haidahs on Queen Charlotte Islands there are households with as many as 700 persons under one roof. Among the Nootkas whole tribes used to live under one roof.
[2] For the number of slaves in Athens, see above, page 107. In Corinth, at the height of its power, the number of slaves was 460,000; in Ægina, 470,000. In both cases, ten times the population of free citizens.
[3] The first historian who had at any rate an approximate conception of the nature of the gens was Niebuhr, and for this he had to thank his acquaintance with the Ditmarechen families, though he was overhasty in transferring their characteristics to the gens.
[4] The second part of Lassalle’s System der erworbenen Rechte (System of Acquired Rights) turns chiefly on the proposition that the Roman testament is as old as Rome itself, that there was never in Roman history “a time when there were no testaments“; that, on the contrary, the testament originated in pre-Roman times out of the cult of the dead. Lassalle, as a faithful Hegelian of the old school, derives the provisions of Roman law not from the social relations of the Romans, but from the “speculative concept” of the human will, and so arrives at this totally unhistorical conclusion. This is not to be wondered at in a book which comes to the conclusion, on the ground of the same speculative concept, that the transfer of property was a purely secondary matter in Roman inheritance. Lassalle not only believes in the illusions of the Roman jurists, particularly of the earlier periods; he outdoes them.
[5] I originally intended to place the brilliant criticism of civilization which is found scattered through the work of Charles Fourier beside that of Morgan and my own. Unfortunately, I have not the time. I will only observe that Fourier already regards monogamy and private property in land as the chief characteristics of civilization, and that he calls civilization a war of the rich against the poor. We also find already in his work the profound recognition that in all societies which are imperfect and split into antagonisms single families (les families incohirentes) are the economic units.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Chapter Eight | Appendix
Appendix. A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage
1892
From Die Neue Zeit
Vol. XI, No. I, pp. 373-75
Since it has recently become fashionable among certain rationalistic ethnographers to deny the existence of group marriage, the following report is of interest; I translate it from the Russkiye Vyedomosti, Moscow, October 14, 1892 (Old Style). Not only group marriage, i.e., the right of mutual sexual intercourse between a number of men and a number of women, is expressly affirmed to be in full force, but a form of group marriage which closely follows the punaluan marriage of the Hawaiians, the most developed and classic phase of group marriage. While the typical punaluan family consists of a number of brothers (own and collateral), who are married to a number of own and collateral sisters, we here find on the island of Sakhalin that a man is married to all the wives of his brothers and to all the sisters of his wife, which means, seen from the woman's side, that his wife may freely practice sexual intercourse with the brothers of her husband and the husbands of her sisters. It therefore differs from the typical form of punaluan marriage only in the fact that the brothers of the husband and the husbands of the sisters are not necessarily the same persons.
It should further be observed that this report again confirms what I said in The Origin of the Family, 4th edition, pp. 28-29: that group marriage does not look at all like what our brother-obsessed philistine imagines; that the partners in group marriage do not lead in public the same kind of lascivious life as he practices in secret, but that this form of marriage, at least in the instances still known to occur today, differs in practice from a loose pairing marriage or from polygamy only in the fact that custom permits sexual intercourse in a number of cases where otherwise it would be severely punished. That the actual exercise of these rights is gradually dying out only proves that this form of marriage is itself destined to die out, which is further confirmed by its infrequency.
The whole description, moreover, is interesting because it again demonstrates the similarity, even the identity in their main characteristics, of the social institutions of primitive peoples at approximately the same stage of development. Most of what the report states about these Mongoloids on the island of Sakhalin also holds for the Dravidian tribes of India, the South Sea Islanders at the time of their discovery, and the American Indians.
The report runs:
"At the session of October 10 (Old Style; October 22, New Style) of the Anthropological Section of the Society of the Friends of Natural Science, N. A. Yanchuk read an interesting communication from Mr. Sternberg on the Gilyaks, a little-studied tribe on the island of Sakhalin, who are at the cultural level of savagery. The Gilyaks are acquainted neither with agriculture nor with pottery; they procure their food chiefly by hunting and fishing; they warm water in wooden vessels by throwing in heated stones, etc. Of particular interest are their institutions relating to the family and to the gens. The Gilyak addresses as father, not only his own natural father, but also all the brothers of his father; all the wives of these brothers, as well as all the sisters of his mother, he addresses as his mothers; the children of all these 'fathers' and 'mothers' he addresses as his brothers and sisters. This system of address also exists, as is well known, among the Iroquois and other Indian tribes of North America, as also among some tribes of India. But whereas in these cases it has long since ceased to correspond to the actual conditions, among the Gilyaks it serves to designate a state still valid today. To this day every Gilyak has the rights of a husband in regard to the wives of his brothers and to the sisters of his wife; at any rate, the exercise of these rights is not regarded as impermissible. These survivals of group marriage on the basis of the gens are reminiscent of the well-known punaluan marriage, which still existed in the Sandwich Islands in the first half of this century. Family and gens relations of this type form the basis of the whole gentile order and social constitution of the Gilyaks.
"The gens of a Gilyak consists of all-nearer and more remote, real and nominal-brothers of his father, of their fathers and mothers of the children of his brothers, and of his own children."
One can readily understand that a gens so constituted may comprise an enormous number of people. Life within the gens proceeds according to the following principles. Marriage within the gens is unconditionally prohibited. When a Gilyak dies, his wife passes by decision of the gens to one of his brothers, own or nominal. The gens provides for the maintenance of all of its members who are unable to work. 'We have no poor,' said a Gilyak to the writer. 'Whoever is in need, is fed by the khal [gens].' The members of the gens are further united by common sacrificial ceremonies and festivals, a common burial place, etc.
"The gens guarantees the life and security of its members against attacks by non-gentiles; the means of repression used is blood-revenge, though under Russian rule the practice has very much declined. Women are completely excepted from gentile blood-revenge. In some very rare cases the gens adopts members of other gentes. It is a general rule that the property of a deceased member may not pass out of the gens; in this respect the famous provision of the Twelve Tables holds literally among the Gilyaks: si suos heredes non habet, gentiles familiam habento -- if he has no heirs of his own, the members of the gens shall inherit. No important event takes place in the life of a Gilyak without participation by the gens. Not very long ago, about one or two generations, the oldest gentile member was the head of the community, the starosta of the gens; today the functions of the chief elder of the gens are restricted almost solely to presiding over religious ceremonies. The gentes are often dispersed among widely distant places, but even when separated the members of a gens still remember one another and continue to give one another hospitality, and to provide mutual assistance and protection, etc. Except under the most extreme necessity, the Gilyak never leaves the fellow-members of his gens or the graves of his gens. Gentile society has impressed a very definite stamp on the whole mental life of the Gilyaks, on their character, their customs and institutions. The habit of common discussion and decision on all matters, the necessity of continually taking an active part in all questions affecting the members of the gens, the solidarity of blood-revenge, the fact of being compelled and accustomed to live together with ten or more like himself in great tents (yurtas), and to be, in short, always with other people-all this has given the Gilyak a sociable and open character. The Gilyak is extraordinarily hospitable; he loves to entertain guests and to come himself as a guest. This admirable habit of hospitality is especially prominent in times of distress. In a bad year, when a Gilyak has nothing for himself or for his dogs to eat, he does not stretch out his hand for alms, but confidently seeks hospitality, and is fed, often for a considerable time.
"Among the Gilyaks of Sakhalin crimes from motives of personal gain practically never occur. The Gilyak keeps his valuables in a storehouse, which is never locked. He has such a keen sense of shame that if he is convicted of a disgraceful act, he immediately goes into the forest and hangs himself. Murder is very rare, and is hardly ever committed except in anger, never from intentions of gain. In his dealings with other people, the Gilyak shows himself honest, reliable, and conscientious.
"Despite their long subjection to the Manchurians, now become Chinese, and despite the corrupting influence of the settlement of the Amur district, the Gilyaks still preserve in their moral character many of the virtues of a primitive tribe. But the fate awaiting their social order cannot be averted. One or two more generations, and the Gilyaks on the mainland will have been completely Russianized, and together with the benefits of culture they will also acquire its defects. The Gilyaks on the island of Sakhalin, being more or less remote from the centers of Russian settlement, have some prospect of preserving their way of life unspoiled rather longer. But among them, too, the influence of their Russian neighbors is beginning to make itself felt. The Gilyaks come into the villages to trade, they go to Nikolaievsk to look for work; and every Gilyak who returns from such work to his home brings with him the same atmosphere which the Russian worker takes back from the town into his village. And at the same time, working in the town, with its chances and changes of fortune, destroys more and more that primitive equality which is such a prominent feature of the artlessly simple economic life of these peoples.
"Mr. Sternberg's article, which also contains information about their religious views and customs and their legal institutions, will appear unabridged in the Etnografitcheskoye Obozrenic (Ethnographical Review)."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... /appen.htm
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Chapter Eight | Appendix
Appendix. A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage
1892
From Die Neue Zeit
Vol. XI, No. I, pp. 373-75
Since it has recently become fashionable among certain rationalistic ethnographers to deny the existence of group marriage, the following report is of interest; I translate it from the Russkiye Vyedomosti, Moscow, October 14, 1892 (Old Style). Not only group marriage, i.e., the right of mutual sexual intercourse between a number of men and a number of women, is expressly affirmed to be in full force, but a form of group marriage which closely follows the punaluan marriage of the Hawaiians, the most developed and classic phase of group marriage. While the typical punaluan family consists of a number of brothers (own and collateral), who are married to a number of own and collateral sisters, we here find on the island of Sakhalin that a man is married to all the wives of his brothers and to all the sisters of his wife, which means, seen from the woman's side, that his wife may freely practice sexual intercourse with the brothers of her husband and the husbands of her sisters. It therefore differs from the typical form of punaluan marriage only in the fact that the brothers of the husband and the husbands of the sisters are not necessarily the same persons.
It should further be observed that this report again confirms what I said in The Origin of the Family, 4th edition, pp. 28-29: that group marriage does not look at all like what our brother-obsessed philistine imagines; that the partners in group marriage do not lead in public the same kind of lascivious life as he practices in secret, but that this form of marriage, at least in the instances still known to occur today, differs in practice from a loose pairing marriage or from polygamy only in the fact that custom permits sexual intercourse in a number of cases where otherwise it would be severely punished. That the actual exercise of these rights is gradually dying out only proves that this form of marriage is itself destined to die out, which is further confirmed by its infrequency.
The whole description, moreover, is interesting because it again demonstrates the similarity, even the identity in their main characteristics, of the social institutions of primitive peoples at approximately the same stage of development. Most of what the report states about these Mongoloids on the island of Sakhalin also holds for the Dravidian tribes of India, the South Sea Islanders at the time of their discovery, and the American Indians.
The report runs:
"At the session of October 10 (Old Style; October 22, New Style) of the Anthropological Section of the Society of the Friends of Natural Science, N. A. Yanchuk read an interesting communication from Mr. Sternberg on the Gilyaks, a little-studied tribe on the island of Sakhalin, who are at the cultural level of savagery. The Gilyaks are acquainted neither with agriculture nor with pottery; they procure their food chiefly by hunting and fishing; they warm water in wooden vessels by throwing in heated stones, etc. Of particular interest are their institutions relating to the family and to the gens. The Gilyak addresses as father, not only his own natural father, but also all the brothers of his father; all the wives of these brothers, as well as all the sisters of his mother, he addresses as his mothers; the children of all these 'fathers' and 'mothers' he addresses as his brothers and sisters. This system of address also exists, as is well known, among the Iroquois and other Indian tribes of North America, as also among some tribes of India. But whereas in these cases it has long since ceased to correspond to the actual conditions, among the Gilyaks it serves to designate a state still valid today. To this day every Gilyak has the rights of a husband in regard to the wives of his brothers and to the sisters of his wife; at any rate, the exercise of these rights is not regarded as impermissible. These survivals of group marriage on the basis of the gens are reminiscent of the well-known punaluan marriage, which still existed in the Sandwich Islands in the first half of this century. Family and gens relations of this type form the basis of the whole gentile order and social constitution of the Gilyaks.
"The gens of a Gilyak consists of all-nearer and more remote, real and nominal-brothers of his father, of their fathers and mothers of the children of his brothers, and of his own children."
One can readily understand that a gens so constituted may comprise an enormous number of people. Life within the gens proceeds according to the following principles. Marriage within the gens is unconditionally prohibited. When a Gilyak dies, his wife passes by decision of the gens to one of his brothers, own or nominal. The gens provides for the maintenance of all of its members who are unable to work. 'We have no poor,' said a Gilyak to the writer. 'Whoever is in need, is fed by the khal [gens].' The members of the gens are further united by common sacrificial ceremonies and festivals, a common burial place, etc.
"The gens guarantees the life and security of its members against attacks by non-gentiles; the means of repression used is blood-revenge, though under Russian rule the practice has very much declined. Women are completely excepted from gentile blood-revenge. In some very rare cases the gens adopts members of other gentes. It is a general rule that the property of a deceased member may not pass out of the gens; in this respect the famous provision of the Twelve Tables holds literally among the Gilyaks: si suos heredes non habet, gentiles familiam habento -- if he has no heirs of his own, the members of the gens shall inherit. No important event takes place in the life of a Gilyak without participation by the gens. Not very long ago, about one or two generations, the oldest gentile member was the head of the community, the starosta of the gens; today the functions of the chief elder of the gens are restricted almost solely to presiding over religious ceremonies. The gentes are often dispersed among widely distant places, but even when separated the members of a gens still remember one another and continue to give one another hospitality, and to provide mutual assistance and protection, etc. Except under the most extreme necessity, the Gilyak never leaves the fellow-members of his gens or the graves of his gens. Gentile society has impressed a very definite stamp on the whole mental life of the Gilyaks, on their character, their customs and institutions. The habit of common discussion and decision on all matters, the necessity of continually taking an active part in all questions affecting the members of the gens, the solidarity of blood-revenge, the fact of being compelled and accustomed to live together with ten or more like himself in great tents (yurtas), and to be, in short, always with other people-all this has given the Gilyak a sociable and open character. The Gilyak is extraordinarily hospitable; he loves to entertain guests and to come himself as a guest. This admirable habit of hospitality is especially prominent in times of distress. In a bad year, when a Gilyak has nothing for himself or for his dogs to eat, he does not stretch out his hand for alms, but confidently seeks hospitality, and is fed, often for a considerable time.
"Among the Gilyaks of Sakhalin crimes from motives of personal gain practically never occur. The Gilyak keeps his valuables in a storehouse, which is never locked. He has such a keen sense of shame that if he is convicted of a disgraceful act, he immediately goes into the forest and hangs himself. Murder is very rare, and is hardly ever committed except in anger, never from intentions of gain. In his dealings with other people, the Gilyak shows himself honest, reliable, and conscientious.
"Despite their long subjection to the Manchurians, now become Chinese, and despite the corrupting influence of the settlement of the Amur district, the Gilyaks still preserve in their moral character many of the virtues of a primitive tribe. But the fate awaiting their social order cannot be averted. One or two more generations, and the Gilyaks on the mainland will have been completely Russianized, and together with the benefits of culture they will also acquire its defects. The Gilyaks on the island of Sakhalin, being more or less remote from the centers of Russian settlement, have some prospect of preserving their way of life unspoiled rather longer. But among them, too, the influence of their Russian neighbors is beginning to make itself felt. The Gilyaks come into the villages to trade, they go to Nikolaievsk to look for work; and every Gilyak who returns from such work to his home brings with him the same atmosphere which the Russian worker takes back from the town into his village. And at the same time, working in the town, with its chances and changes of fortune, destroys more and more that primitive equality which is such a prominent feature of the artlessly simple economic life of these peoples.
"Mr. Sternberg's article, which also contains information about their religious views and customs and their legal institutions, will appear unabridged in the Etnografitcheskoye Obozrenic (Ethnographical Review)."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... /appen.htm