The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕

7. Any one of the five tribes could convoke the federal council, but the council could not convene itself.

8. Federal meetings were held publicly in the presence of the assembled people. Every Iroquois could have the word, but the final decision rested with the council.

9. The league had no official head, no executive chief.

10. It had, however, two high chiefs of war, both with equal functions and power (the two "kings" of Sparta, the two consuls of Rome).

This was the whole constitution, under which the Iroquois lived over four hundred years and still live. I have described it more fully after Morgan, because we have here an opportunity for studying the organization of a society that does not yet know a state. The state presupposes a public power of coërcion separated from the aggregate body of its members. Maurer, with correct intuition, recognized the constitution of the German Mark as a purely social institution, essentially different from that of a state, though furnishing the fundament on which a state constitution could be erected later on. Hence in all of his writings, he traced the gradual rise of the public power of coërcion from and by the side of primordial constitutions of marks, villages, farms and towns. The North American Indians show how an originally united tribe gradually spreads over an immense continent; how tribes by segmentation become nations, whole groups of tribes; how languages change so that they not only become unintelligible to one another, but also lose every trace of former unity; how at the same time one gens splits up into several gentes, how the old mother gentes are preserved in the phratries and how the names of these oldest gentes still remain the same in widely distant and long separated tribes. Wolf and bear still are gentile names in a majority of all Indian tribes. And the above named constitution is essentially applicable to all of them, except that many did not reach the point of forming leagues of related tribes.

But once the gens was given as a social unit, we also see how the whole constitution of gentes, phratries and tribes developed with almost unavoidable necessity—because naturally—from the gens. All three of them are groups of differentiated consanguine relations. Each is complete in itself, arranges its own local affairs and supplements the other groups. And the cycle of functions performed by them includes the aggregate of the public affairs of men in the lower stage of barbarism.

Wherever we find the gens as the social unit of a nation, we are justified in searching for a tribal organization similar to the one described above. And whenever sufficient material is at hand, as in Greek and Roman history, there we shall not only find such an organization, but we may also be assured, that the comparison with the American sex organizations will assist us in solving the most perplexing doubts and riddles in places where the material forsakes us.

How wonderful this gentile constitution is in all its natural simplicity! No soldiers, gendarmes and policemen, no nobility, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits, and still affairs run smoothly. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the entire community involved in them, either the gens or the tribe or the various gentes among themselves. Only in very rare cases the blood revenge is threatened as an extreme measure. Our capital punishment is simply a civilized form of it, afflicted with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Not a vestige of our cumbersome and intricate system of administration is needed, although there are more public affairs to be settled than nowadays: the communistic household is shared by a number of families, the land belongs to the tribe, only the gardens are temporarily assigned to the households. The parties involved in a question settle it and in most cases the hundred-year-old traditions have settled everything beforehand. There cannot be any poor and destitute—the communistic households and the gentes know their duties toward the aged, sick and disabled. All are free and equal—the women included. There is no room yet for slaves, nor for the subjugation of foreign tribes. When about 1651 the Iroquois had vanquished the Eries and the "Neutral Nation," they offered to adopt them into the league on equal terms. Only when the vanquished declined this offer they were driven out of their territory.

What splendid men and women were produced by such a society! All the white men who came into contact with unspoiled Indians admired the personal dignity, straightforwardness, strength of character and bravery of these barbarians.

We lately received proofs of such bravery in Africa. A few years ago the Zulus, and some months ago the Nubians, both of which tribes still retain the gentile organization, did what no European army can do. Armed only with lances and spears, without any firearms, they advanced under a hail of bullets from breechloaders up to the bayonets of the English infantry—the best of the world for fighting in closed ranks—and threw them into confusion more than once, yea, even forced them to retreat in spite of the immense disparity of weapons, and in spite of the fact that they have no military service and don't know anything about drill. How enduring and able they are, is proved by the complaints of the English who admit that a Kaffir can cover a longer distance in twenty-four hours than a horse. The smallest muscle springs forth, hard and tough like a whiplash, says an English painter.

Such was human society and its members, before the division into classes had taken place. And a comparison of that social condition with the condition of the overwhelming majority of present day society shows the enormous chasm that separates our proletarian and small farmer from the free gentile of old.

That is one side of the question. We must not overlook, however, that this organization was doomed. It did not pass beyond the tribe. The league of tribes marked the beginning of its downfall, as we shall see, and as the attempts of the Iroquois at subjugating others showed. Whatever went beyond the tribe, went outside of gentilism. Where no direct peace treaty existed, there war reigned from tribe to tribe. And this war was carried on with the particular cruelty that distinguishes man from other animals, and that was modified later on simply by self-interest.

The gentile constitution in its most flourishing time, such as we saw it in America, presupposed a very undeveloped state of production, hence a population thinly scattered over a wide area. Man was almost completely dominated by nature, a strange and incomprehensible riddle to him. His simple religious conceptions clearly reflect this. The tribe remained the boundary line for man, as well in regard to himself as to strangers outside. The gens, the tribe and their institutions were holy and inviolate. They were a superior power instituted by nature, and the feelings, thoughts and actions of the individual remained unconditionally subject to them. Commanding as the people of this epoch appear to us, nothing distinguishes one from another. They are still attached, as Marx has it, to the navel string of the primordial community.

The power of these natural and spontaneous communities had to be broken, and it was. But it was done by influences that from the very beginning bear the mark of degradation, of a downfall from the simple moral grandeur of the old gentile society. The new system of classes is inaugurated by the meanest impulses: vulgar covetousness, brutal lust, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of common wealth. The old gentile society without classes is undermined and brought to fall by the most contemptible means: theft, violence, cunning, treason. And during all the thousands of years of its existence, the new society has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed majority. More than ever this is true at present.

Greeks, Pelasgians and other nations of the same tribal origin were constituted since prehistoric times on the same systematic plan as the Americans: gens, phratry, tribe, league of tribes. The phratry might be missing, as e. g. among the Dorians; the league of tribes might not be fully developed in every case; but the gens was everywhere the unit. At the time of their entrance into history, the Greeks were on the threshold of civilization. Two full periods of evolution are stretching between the Greeks and the above named American tribes. The Greeks of the heroic age are by so much ahead of the Iroquois. For this reason the Grecian gens no longer retains the archaic character of the Iroquois gens. The stamp of group marriage is becoming rather blurred. Maternal law had given way to paternal lineage. Rising private property had thus made its first opening in the gentile constitution. A second opening naturally followed the first: Paternal law being now in force, the fortune of a wealthy heiress would have fallen to her husband in the case of her marriage. That would have meant the transfer of her wealth from her own gens to that of her husband. In order to avoid this, the fundament of gentile law was shattered. In such a case, the girl was not only permitted, but obliged to intermarry within the gens, in order to retain the wealth in the latter.

According to Grote's History of Greece, the gens of Attica was held together by the following bonds:

1. Common religious rites and priests installed exclusively in honor of a certain divinity, the alleged gentile ancestor, who was designated by a special by-name in this capacity.

2. A common burial ground. (See Demosthenes' Eubulides.)

3. Right of mutual inheritance.

4. Obligation to mutually help, protect and assist one another in case of violence.

5. Mutual right and duty to intermarry in the gens in certain cases, especially for orphaned girls or heiresses.

6. Possession of common property, at least in some cases, and an archon (supervisor) and treasurer elected for this special case.

The phratry united several gentes, but rather loosely. Still we find in it similar rights and duties, especially common religious rites and the right of avenging the death of a phrator. Again, all the phratries of a tribe had certain religious festivals in common that recurred at regular intervals and were celebrated under the guidance of a phylobasileus (tribal head) selected from the ranks of the nobles (eupatrides).

So far Grote. And Marx adds: "The savage (e. g. the Iroquois) is still plainly visible in the Grecian gens." On further investigation we find additional proofs of this. For the Grecian gens has also the following attributes:

7. Paternal Lineage.

8. Prohibition of intermarrying in the gens except in the case of heiresses. This exception formulated as a law clearly proves the validity of the old rule. This is further substantiated by the universally accepted custom that a woman in marrying renounced the religious rites of her gens and accepted those of her husband's gens. She was also registered in his phratry. According to this custom and to a famous quotation in Dikaearchos, marriage outside of the gens was the rule. Becker in "Charikles" directly assumes that nobody was permitted to intermarry in the gens.

9. The right to adopt strangers in the gens. It was exercised by adoption into the family under public formalities; but it was used sparingly.

10. The right to elect and depose the archons. We know that every gens had its archon. As to the heredity of the office, there is no reliable information. Until the end of barbarism, the probability is always against strict heredity. For it is absolutely incompatible with conditions where rich and poor had perfectly equal rights in the gens.

Not alone Grote, but also Niebuhr, Mommsen and all other historians of classical antiquity, were foiled by the gens. Though they chronicled many