The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕
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Yet some progress had been made during these four hundred years. Although in the end we find the same main classes as in the beginning, still the human beings that made up these classes had changed. The ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the beggared freemen who had despised work as slavish. Between the Roman colonist and the new serf, there had been the free Frank peasant. The "useless remembrance and the vain feud" of the decaying Roman nation was dead and gone. The social classes of the ninth century had been formed during the travail of a new civilization, not in the demoralization of a sinking one. The new race, masters and servants, were a race of men as compared to their Roman predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords to serving peasants, which had been the unavoidable result of collapse in the antique world, was for the Franks the point of departure on a new line of development. Moreover, unproductive as these four hundred years may appear, they left behind one great product: the modern nationalities, the reorganization and differentiation of West European humanity for the coming history. The Germans had indeed infused a new life into Europe. Therefore the dissolution of the states in the German period did not end in a subjugation after the Norse-Saracene plan, but in a continued development of the estate of the royal beneficiaries and an increasing submission (commendatio) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase of the population, that no more than two centuries later the bloody drain of the crusades could be sustained without injury.
What was the mysterious charm by which the Germans infused a new life into decrepit Europe? Was it an innate magic power of the German race, as our jingo historians would have it? By no means. Of course, the Germans were a highly gifted Aryan branch and, especially at that time, in full process of vigorous development. They did not, however, rejuvenate Europe by their specific national properties, but simply by their barbarism, their gentile constitution.
Their personal efficiency and bravery, their love of liberty, and their democratic instinct which regarded all public affairs as its own affairs, in short all those properties which the Romans had lost and which were alone capable of forming new states and raising new nationalities out of the muck of the Roman world—what were they but characteristic marks of the barbarians in the upper stage, fruits of the gentile constitution?
If they transformed the antique form of monogamy, mitigated the male rule in the family and gave a higher position to women than the classic world had ever known, what enabled them to do so, unless it was their barbarism, their gentile customs, their living inheritance of the time of maternal law?
If they could safely transmit a trace of the genuine gentile order, the mark communes, to the feudal states of at least three of the most important countries—Germany, North of France, and England—and thus give a local coherence and the means of resistance to the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the hardest medieval serfdom; means which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern proletarian found ready at hand—to whom did they owe this, unless it was again their barbarism, their exclusively barbarian mode of settling in gentes?
And in conclusion, if they could develop and universally introduce the mild form of servitude which they had been practicing at home, and which more and more displaced slavery also in the Roman empire—to whom was it due, unless it was again their barbarism, thanks to which they had not yet arrived at complete slavery, neither in the form of the ancient labor slaves, nor in that of the oriental house slaves?
This milder form of servitude, as Fourier first stated, gave to the oppressed the means of their gradual emancipation as a class (fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et progressif) and is therefore far superior to slavery, which permits only the immediate enfranchisement of the individual without any transitory stage. Antiquity did not know any abolition of slavery by rebellion, but the serfs of the middle ages gradually enforced their liberation as a class.
Every vital and productive germ with which the Germans inoculated the Roman world, was due to barbarism. Indeed, only barbarians are capable of rejuvenating a world laboring under the death throes of unnerved civilization. And the higher stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way up previous to the migrations, was best calculated to prepare them for this work. That explains everything.
[30] Author's note.
The number assumed here is confirmed by a passage of Diodorus on the Celts of Gaul: "Many nations of unequal strength are living in Gaul. The strongest of them numbers about 200,000, the weakest 50,000." (Diodorus Siculus, V., 25.) That gives an average of 125,000. The individual nations of Gaul, being more highly developed, should be gauged more numerous than those of Germany.
[31] Translator's note.
3861 square statute miles.
[32] A German geographical mile contains 7,420.44 meters, or 7.42044 kilometers; hence a German geographical square mile contains 55.0629 square kilometers, equal to 21.2598 square statute miles.
[33] Translator's note.
The Ingaevonians comprised the Friesians, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Angles, living on the coast of the North Sea from the Zuider Zee to Denmark.
[34] Author's note.
According to Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, the main industry of Verdun in the tenth century, in the so-called Holy German Empire, was the manufacture of eunuchs, who were exported with great profit to Spain for the harems of the Moors.
[35] Translator's note.
The "Gau" is a larger territory than the "Mark." Caesar and Tacitus called it pagus.
[36] Translator's note.
The name given in ancient law to dependent farmers.
CHAPTER IX. BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.Having observed the dissolution of the gentile order in the three concrete cases of the Greek, Roman, and German nations, we may now investigate in conclusion the general economic conditions that began by undermining the gentile organization of society during the upper stage of barbarism and ended by doing away with it entirely at the advent of civilization. Marx's "Capital" will be as necessary for the successful completion of this task as Morgan's "Ancient Society."
A growth of the middle stage and a product of further development during the upper stage of savagery, the gens reached its prime, as near as we can judge from our sources of information, in the lower stage of barbarism. With this stage, then, we begin our investigation.
In our standard example, the American redskins of that time, we find the gentile constitution fully developed. A tribe had differentiated into several gentes, generally two. Through the increase of the population, these original gentes again divided into several daughter gentes, making the mother gens a phratry. The tribe itself split up into several tribes, in each of which we again meet a large number of representatives of the old gentes. In certain cases a federation united the related tribes. This simple organization fully sufficed for the social conditions out of which it had grown. It was nothing else than the innate, spontaneous expression of those conditions, and it was well calculated to smooth over all internal difficulties that could arise in this social organization. External difficulties were settled by war. Such a war could end in the annihilation of a tribe, but never in its subjugation. It is the grandeur and at the same time the limitation of the gentile order that it has no room either for masters or servants. There were as yet no distinctions between rights and duties. The question whether he had a right to take part in public affairs, to practice blood revenge or to demand atonement for injuries would have appeared as absurd to an Indian, as the question whether it was his duty to eat, sleep, and hunt. Nor could any division of a tribe or gens into different classes take place. This leads us to the investigation of the economic basis of those conditions.
The population was very small in numbers. It was collected only on the territory of the tribe. Next to this territory was the hunting ground surrounding it in a wide circle. A neutral forest formed the line of demarcation from other tribes. The division of labor was quite primitive. The work was simply divided between the two sexes. The men went to war, hunted, fished, provided the raw material for food and the tools necessary for these pursuits. The women cared for the house, and prepared food and clothing; they cooked, weaved and sewed. Each sex was master of its own field of activity; the men in the forest, the women in the house. Each sex also owned the tools made and used by it; the men were the owners of the weapons, of the hunting and fishing tackle, the women of the household goods and utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families.[37] Whatever was produced and used collectively, was regarded as common property: the house, the garden, the long boat. Here, and only here, then, do we find the "self-earned property" which jurists and economists have falsely attributed to civilized society, the last deceptive pretext of legality on which modern capitalist property is leaning.
But humanity did not everywhere remain in this stage. In Asia they found animals that could be tamed and propagated in captivity. The wild buffalo cow had to be hunted down; the tame cow gave birth to a calf once a year, and also furnished milk. Some of the most advanced tribes—Aryans, Semites, perhaps also Turanians—devoted themselves mainly to taming, and later to raising and tending, domestic animals. The segregation of cattle raising tribes from the rest of the barbarians constitutes the first great division of social labor. These stock raising tribes did not only produce more articles of food than the rest of the barbarians, but also different kinds of products. They were ahead of the others by having at their disposal not alone milk, milk products, and a greater abundance of meat, but also skins, wool, goat's hair, and the spun and woven goods which the growing abundance of the raw material brought into common use. This for the first time made a regular exchange of products possible. In former stages, exchange could only take place occasionally, and an exceptional ability in manufacturing weapons and tools may have led to a transient division of labor. For example, unquestionable remains of workshops for stone implements of the neolithic period have been found in many places. The artists who developed their ability in those shops, most probably worked for the collectivity, as did the artisans of the Indian gentile order. At any rate, no other exchange than that within the tribe could exist in that stage, and even that was an exception. But after the segregation of the stock raising tribes we find all the conditions favorable to an exchange between groups of different tribes, and to a further development of this mode of trading into a fixed institution. Originally, tribe exchanged with tribe through the agency of their tribal heads. But when the herds drifted into the hands of private individuals, then the exchange between individuals prevailed more and more, until it became the established form. The principal article of exchange which the stock raising tribes offered to their
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