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The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Book Details
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- Pages:184 pages
- Edition Year:2017
- Publisher:Rahul Foundation
- Language:English
- ISBN: 9788187728771
Book Description
Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State (1884) shows how the principles of Historical Materialism are applied
in the interpretation of the development of primitive society and of the
origins of civilisation.
In The Origin of the Family will be found:
1. An account of the development of the social forces of
production from the most primitive food-gathering and hunting stage, through
primitive agriculture, the domestication of animals, to the upper stages of barbarism,
when the smelting of iron ore and the invention of the alphabet led to the
beginnings of civilisation.
2. The history of the development of the family, as the most
elementary unit of human association, from group-marriage to monogamy. Engels
showed how the development of private property led to the transformation of
family relations and to the subjugation of women. And he deals with the future
of the family in socialist society.
3. An account of the kinship organisation-the gens-in
primitive society, and of its disruption by the development of private
property. 4. A demonstration of how the state arose with the division of
society into antagonistic classes. Engels traces the history of the rise of the
state amongst the ancient Greeks, Romans and Germans, and shows in detail the
nature and functions of the state as an instrument of the oppression of one
class by another.
5. The last chapter contains a brilliant sketch of the whole
development of civilisation. Engels shows how classes and exploitation arose
out of the division of labour, and how in consequence every advance in
production has been made only at the cost of fresh sufferings of the exploited.
– Maurice Cornforth