The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. But I have the critical notes which he made to his extensive extracts from Morgan, and as far as possible I reproduce them here.Īccording to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.

My work can only provide a slight substitute for what my departed friend no longer had the time to do. And just as the professional economists in Germany were for years as busy in plagiarizing Capital as they were persistent in attempting to kill it by silence, so Morgan's Ancient Society received precisely the same treatment from the spokesmen of 'prehistoric' science in England. For Morgan in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization it had led him, in the main points, to the same conclusions as Marx. No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present the results of Morgan's researches in the light of the conclusions of his own-within certain limits, I may say our-materialistic examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance. The following chapters are, in a sense, the execution of a bequest.

Preface to the First Edition, 1884 Frederick Engels

Preface 1884 1891 Chapter I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX Appendix The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State-Engels Farsi Arabic

Family private property and the state