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Workers Vanguard No. 954
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12 March 2010
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Socialism and Women’s Liberation
(Quote of the Week)
TROTSKY
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LENIN
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In Woman and Socialism, the first full-length Marxist
study of women’s oppression, early German Marxist leader August Bebel stressed
that the struggle for women’s emancipation is strategic to the fight for
socialism. Women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family, a core
element of class society that arose with the advent of private property, as
Friedrich Engels would further develop in his work The Origin of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884). As Bebel outlined, complete social
equality can be realized only with the abolition of classes in a world socialist
society.
For thousands of years human society has passed thru all phases of
development, only to return to its starting point: communistic property and
complete liberty and fraternity: but no longer only for the members of the gens,
but for all human beings. That is what the great progress consists
of. What bourgeois society has striven for in vain, in what it failed and was
bound to fail,—to establish liberty, equality and fraternity for all,—will be
realized by Socialism. Bourgeois society could merely advance the theory, but
here, as in many other things, practice was contrary to the theories. Socialism
will unite theory and practice.
But as mankind returns to the starting point of its development, it
will do so on an infinitely higher level of civilization. If primitive society
had common ownership in the gens and the clan, it was but in a coarse form and
an undeveloped stage. The course of development that man has since undergone,
has reduced common property to small and insignificant remnants, has shattered
the gens and has finally atomized society; but in its various phases it has also
greatly heightened the productive forces of society and the extensiveness of its
demands; it has transformed the gentes and the tribes into nations, and has
thereby again created a condition that is in glaring contradiction to the
requirements of society. It is the task of the future to remove this
contradiction by re-establishing the common ownership of property and the means
of production on the broadest basis.
Society takes back what it has at one time possessed and has itself
created, but it enables all to live in accordance with the newly created
conditions of life on the highest level of civilization. In other
words, it grants to all what under more primitive conditions has been the
privilege of single individuals or classes. Now woman,
too, is restored to the active position maintained by her in primitive society;
only she no longer is mistress, but man’s equal….
The complete emancipation of woman, and her establishment of equal
rights with man is one of the aims of our cultured development, whose
realization no power on earth can prevent. But it can be accomplished only by
means of a transformation that will abolish the rule of man over man, including
the rule of the capitalist over the laborer. Then only can humanity attain its
fullest development. The “golden age” of which men have been dreaming, and for
which they have been yearning for thousands of years, will come at last.
Class rule will forever be at an end, and with it the rule of man over
woman.
—August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879)
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Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and
the State
II. The Family
MORGAN, who spent a great part of his life
among the Iroquois Indians – settled to this day in New York State – and was
adopted into one of their tribes (the Senecas), found in use among them a system
of consanguinity which was in contradiction to their actual family
relationships. There prevailed among them a form of monogamy easily terminable
on both sides, which Morgan calls the “pairing family.” The issue of the married
pair was therefore known and recognized by everybody: there could be no doubt
about whom to call father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister. But these
names were actually used quite differently. The Iroquois calls not only his own
children his sons and daughters, but also the children of his brothers; and they
call him father. The children of his sisters, however, he calls his nephews and
nieces, and they call him their uncle. The Iroquois woman, on the other hand,
calls her sisters’ children, as well as her own, her sons and daughters, and
they call her mother. But her brothers’ children she calls her nephews and
nieces, and she is known as their aunt. Similarly, the children of brothers call
one another brother and sister, and so do the children of sisters. A woman's own
children and the children of her brother, on the other hand, call one another
cousins. And these are not mere empty names, but expressions of actual
conceptions of nearness and remoteness, of equality and difference in the
degrees of consanguinity: these conceptions serve as the foundation of a fully
elaborated system of consanguinity through which several hundred different
relationships of one individual can be expressed. What is more, this system is
not only in full force among all American Indians (no exception has been found
up to the present), but also retains its validity almost unchanged among the
aborigines of India, the Dravidian tribes in the Deccan and the Gaura tribes in
Hindustan. To this day the Tamils of southern India and the Iroquois Seneca
Indians in New York State still express more than two hundred degrees of
consanguinity in the same manner. And among these tribes of India, as among all
the American Indians, the actual relationships arising out of the existing form
of the family contradict the system of consanguinity.
How is this to be explained? In view of the decisive part played by
consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples, the
importance of a system so widespread cannot be dismissed with phrases. When a
system is general throughout America and also exists in Asia among peoples of a
quite different race, when numerous instances of it are found with greater or
less variation in every part of Africa and Australia, then that system has to be
historically explained, not talked out of existence, as McLennan, for example,
tried to do. The names of father, child, brother, sister are no mere
complimentary forms of address; they involve quite definite and very serious
mutual obligations which together make up an essential part of the social
constitution of the peoples in question.
The explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there still
existed in the first half of the nineteenth century a form of family in which
the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and
aunts, nephews and nieces were exactly what is required by the American and old
Indian system of consanguinity. But now comes a strange thing. Once again, the
system of consanguinity in force in Hawaii did not correspond to the actual form
of the Hawaiian family. For according to the Hawaiian system of consanguinity
all children of brothers and sisters are without exception brothers and sisters
of one another and are considered to be the common children not only of their
mother and her sisters or of their father and his brothers, but of all the
brothers and sisters of both their parents without distinction. While,
therefore, the American system of consanguinity presupposes a more primitive
form of the family which has disappeared in America, but still actually exists
in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the other hand, points to a
still earlier form of the family which, though we can nowhere prove it to be
still in existence, nevertheless must have existed; for otherwise the
corresponding system of consanguinity could never have arisen.
The family [says Morgan] represents an active principle. It is
never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances
from a lower to a higher condition.... Systems of consanguinity, on the
contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long
intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically
changed.
[Morgan, op. cit., p. 444. – Ed.]
“And,” adds Marx, “the same is true of the political, juridical, religious,
and philosophical systems in general.” While the family undergoes living
changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while the system survives by
force of custom, the family outgrows it. But just as Cuvier could deduce from
the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near Paris that it belonged to a
marsupial animal and that extinct marsupial animals once lived there, so with
the same certainty we can deduce from the historical survival of a system of
consanguinity that an extinct form of family once existed which corresponded to
it.
The systems of consanguinity and the forms of the family we have just
mentioned differ from those of today in the fact that every child has more than
one father and mother. In the American system of consanguinity, to which the
Hawaiian family corresponds, brother and sister cannot be the father and mother
of the same child; but the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the contrary,
presupposes a family in which this was the rule. Here we find ourselves among
forms of family which directly contradict those hitherto generally assumed to be
alone valid. The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in addition,
polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most polyandry on the
part of individual women; being the view of moralizing philistines, it conceals
the fact that in practice these barriers raised by official society are quietly
and calmly ignored. The study of primitive history, however, reveals conditions
where the men live in polygamy and their wives in polyandry at the same time,
and their common children are therefore considered common to them all – and
these conditions in their turn undergo a long series of changes before they
finally end in monogamy. The trend of these changes is to narrow more and more
the circle of people comprised within the common bond of marriage, which was
originally very wide, until at last it includes only the single pair, the
dominant form of marriage today.
Reconstructing thus the past history of the family, Morgan, in agreement with
most of his colleagues, arrives at a primitive stage when unrestricted sexual
freedom prevailed within the tribe, every woman belonging equally to every man
and every man to every woman. Since the eighteenth century there had been talk
of such a primitive state, but only in general phrases. Bachofen – and this is
one of his great merits – was the first to take the existence of such a state
seriously and to search for its traces in historical and religious survivals.
Today we know that the traces he found do not lead back to a social stage of
promiscuous sexual intercourse, but to a much later form – namely, group
marriage. The primitive social stage of promiscuity, if it ever existed, belongs
to such a remote epoch that we can hardly expect to prove its existence directly
by discovering its social fossils among backward savages. Bachofen's merit
consists in having brought this question to the forefront for examination. [1]
Lately it has become fashionable to deny the existence of this initial stage
in human sexual life. Humanity must be spared this “shame.” It is pointed out
that all direct proof of such a stage is lacking, and particular appeal is made
to the evidence from the rest of the animal world; for, even among animals,
according to the numerous facts collected by Letourneau (Evolution du manage
et de la faults, 1888), complete promiscuity in sexual intercourse marks a
low stage of development. But the only conclusion I can draw from all these
facts, so far as man and his primitive conditions of life are concerned, is that
they prove nothing whatever. That vertebrates mate together for a considerable
period is sufficiently explained by physiological causes – in the case of birds,
for example, by the female’s need of help during the brooding period; examples
of faithful monogamy among birds prove nothing about man, for the simple reason
that men are not descended from birds. 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. Confining
ourselves to mammals, however, we find all forms of sexual life – promiscuity,
indications of group marriage, polygyny, monogamy. Polyandry alone is lacking –
it took human beings to achieve that. Even our nearest relations, the
quadrumana, exhibit every possible variation in the grouping of males and
females; and if we narrow it down still more and consider only the four
anthropoid apes, all that Letourneau has to say about them is that they are
sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, while Saussure, quoted by
Giraud-Teulon, maintains that they are monogamous. The more recent assertions of
the monogamous habits of the anthropoid apes which are cited by Westermarck
(The History of Human Marriage, London 1891), are also very far from
proving anything. In short, our evidence is such that honest Letourneau admits:
“Among mammals there is no strict relation between the degree of intellectual
development and the form of sexual life.” And Espinas (Des societes
animates, 1877), says in so many words:
The herd is the highest social group which we can observe among
animals. It is composed, so it appears, of families, but from the start the
family and the herd are in conflict with one another and develop in inverse
proportion.
As the above shows, we know practically nothing definite about the family and
other social groupings of the anthropoid apes; the evidence is flatly
contradictory. Which is not to be wondered at. The evidence with regard to
savage human tribes is contradictory enough, requiring very critical examination
and sifting; and ape societies are far more difficult to observe than human. For
the present, therefore, we must reject any conclusion drawn from such completely
unreliable reports.
The sentence quoted from Espinas, however, provides a better starting point.
Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one
another, but antagonistic. Espinas shows very well how the jealousy of the males
during the mating season loosens the ties of every social herd or temporarily
breaks it up.
When the family bond is close and exclusive, herds form only in
exceptional cases. When on the other hand free sexual intercourse or polygamy
prevails, the herd comes into being almost spontaneously.... Before a herd can
be formed, family ties must be loosened and the individual must have become free
again. This is the reason why organized flocks are so rarely found among
birds.... We find more or less organized societies among mammals, however,
precisely because here the individual is not merged in the family.... In its
first growth, therefore, the common feeling of the herd has no greater enemy
than the common feeling of the family. We state it without hesitation: only by
absorbing families which had undergone a radical change could a social form
higher than the family have developed; at the same time, these families were
thereby enabled later to constitute themselves afresh under infinitely more
favorable circumstances.
[Espinas, op. cit., quoted by Giraud-Teulon, Origines du mariage
et de la famille,
1884, pp. 518-20].
Here we see that animal societies are, after all, of some value for drawing
conclusions about human societies; but the value is only negative. So far as our
evidence goes, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family – polygyny
or separate couples; each form allows only one adult male, only one husband. The
jealousy of the male, which both consolidates and isolates the family, sets the
animal family in opposition to the herd. The jealousy of the males prevents the
herd, the higher social form, from coming into existence, or weakens its
cohesion, or breaks it up during the mating period; at best, it attests its
development. This alone is sufficient proof that animal families and primitive
human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were working their
way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that
does not occur among animals. In small numbers, an animal so defenseless as
evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of isolation, with no
higher social grouping than the single male and female pair, such as
Westermarck, following the reports of hunters, attributes to the gorillas and
the chimpanzees. For man's development beyond the level of the animals, for the
achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed:
the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made good by the united
strength and co-operation of the herd. To explain the transition to humanity
from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid apes live today would be
quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes had strayed off the line
of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least degenerating. That alone
is sufficient ground for rejecting all attempts based on parallels drawn between
forms of family and those of primitive man. Mutual toleration among the adult
males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of those
larger, permanent groups in which alone animals could become men. And what, in
fact, do we find to be the oldest and most primitive form of family whose
historical existence we can indisputably prove and which in one or two parts of
the world we can still study today? Group marriage, the form of family in which
whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually possess one another, and
which leaves little room for jealousy. And at a later stage of development we
find the exceptional form of polyandry, which positively revolts every jealous
instinct and is therefore unknown among animals. But as all known forms of group
marriage are accompanied by such peculiarly complicated regulations that they
necessarily point to earlier and simpler forms of sexual relations, and
therefore in the last resort to a period of promiscuous intercourse
corresponding to the transition from the animal to the human, the references to
animal marriages only bring us back to the very point from which we were to be
led away for good and all.
What, then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean? It means the
absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force. We
have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down. If there is one thing
certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late. The same
is true of the conception of incest. Not only were brother and sister originally
man and wife; sexual intercourse between parents and children is still permitted
among many peoples today. Bancroft (The Native Races of the Pacific States
of North America, 1875, Vol. I), testifies to it among the Kadiaks on the
Behring Straits, the Kadiaks near Alaska, and the Tinneh in the interior of
British North America; Letourneau compiled reports of it among the Chippewa
Indians, the Cucus in Chile, the Caribs, the Karens in Burma; to say nothing of
the stories told by the old Greeks and Romans about the Parthians, Persians,
Scythians, Huns, and so on. Before incest was invented – for incest is an
invention, and a very valuable one, too – sexual intercourse between parents and
children did not arouse any more repulsion than sexual intercourse between other
persons of different generations, and that occurs today even in the most
philistine countries without exciting any great horror; even “old maids” of over
sixty, if they are rich enough, sometimes marry young men in their thirties. But
if we consider the most primitive known forms of family apart from their
conceptions of incest – conceptions which are totally different from ours and
frequently in direct contradiction to them-then the form of sexual intercourse
can only be described as promiscuous – promiscuous in so far as the restrictions
later established by custom did not yet exist. But in everyday practice that by
no means necessarily implies general mixed mating. Temporary pairings of one man
with one woman were not in any way excluded, just as in the cases of group
marriages today the majority of relationships are of this character. And when
Westermarck, the latest writer to deny the existence of such a primitive state,
applies the term “marriage” to every relationship in which the two sexes remain
mated until the birth of the offspring, we must point out that this kind of
marriage can very well occur under the conditions of promiscuous intercourse
without contradicting the principle of promiscuity – the absence of any
restriction imposed by custom on sexual intercourse. Westermarck, however, takes
the standpoint that promiscuity “involves a suppression of individual
inclinations,” and that therefore “the most genuine form of it is prostitution.”
In my opinion, any understanding of primitive society is impossible to people
who only see it as a brothel. We will return to this point when discussing group
marriage.
According to Morgan, from this primitive state of promiscuous intercourse
there developed, probably very early:
1. The Consanguine Family, The First Stage of the Family
Here the marriage groups are separated according to generations: all the
grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands
and wives of one another; so are also their children, the fathers and mothers;
the latter’s children will form a third circle of common husbands and wives; and
their children, the great-grandchildren of the first group, will form a fourth.
In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny, and parents and
children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should say) of marriage
with one another. Brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first,
second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another,
and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another. At
this stage the relationship of brother and sister also includes as a matter of
course the practice of sexual intercourse with one another. [2] In its typical form, such a
family would consist of the descendants of a single pair, the descendants of
these descendants in each generation being again brothers and sisters, and
therefore husbands and wives, of one another. [3]
The consanguine family is extinct. Even the most primitive peoples known to
history provide no demonstrable instance of it. But that it must have existed,
we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still
prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of
consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole
subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the
consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage.
Footnotes
[1] Bachofen proves how little
he understood his own discovery, or rather his guess, by using the term
"hetaerism" to describe this primitive state. For the Greeks, when they
introduced the word, hetaerism meant intercourse of men, unmarried or living in
monogamy, with unmarried women, it always presupposes a definite form of
marriage outside which this intercourse takes place and includes at least the
possibility of prostitution. The word was never used in any other sense, and it
is in this sense that I use it with Morgan. Bachofen everywhere introduces into
his extremely important discoveries the most incredible mystifications through
his notion that in their historical development the relations between men and
women had their origin in men's contemporary religious conceptions, not in their
actual conditions of life.
[2] In a letter written in the
spring of 1882, Marx expresses himself in the strongest terms about the complete
misrepresentation of primitive times in Wager's text to the Nibelangen:
“ Have such things been heard, that brother embraced sister as a
bride?” To Wagner and his “ lecherous gods” who,
quite in the modern manner, spice their love affairs with a little incest, Marx
replies: “ In primitive times the sister was the wife, and that was
moral.”
[3] NOTE in Fourth edition: A
French friend of mine who is an admirer of Wagner is not in agreement with this
note. He observes that already in the Elder Edda, on which Wagner based his
story, in the Œgisdrekka, Loki makes the reproach to Freya: In the sight of the
gods thou didst embrace thine own brother." Marriage between brother and sister,
he argues, was therefore forbidden already at that time. The OEgisdrekka is the
expression of a time when belief in the old myths had completely broken down; it
is purely a satire on the gods, in the style of Lucian. If Loki as Mephisto
makes such a reproach to Freya, it tells rather against Wagner. Loki also says
some lines later to Niordhr: “ With thy sister didst thou breed
son.” (vidh systur thinni gaztu slikan mog) Niordhr is not, indeed, an
Asa, but a Vana, and says in the Ynglinga saga that marriages between brothers
and sisters are usual in Vanaland, which was not the case among the Asas. This
would seem to show that the Vanas were more ancient gods the Asas. At any rate,
Niordhr lives among the OEgisdrekka is rather a proof that at the time when the
Norse sagas of the gods arose, marriages between brothers and sisters, at any
rate among the gods, did not yet excite any horror. If one wants to find excuses
for Wagner, it would perhaps be better to cite Goethe instead of the Edda, for
in his ballad of the God and the Bayadere Goethe commits a similar mistake in
regard to the religious surrender of women, which he makes far too similar to
modern prostitution.
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