Engels, colonialism, race, gender, and the family
Author’s Note: This essay was originally written as a memo for my Sociological Theory I class. It was based on readings including: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (Marx), “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” (Engels), “Versus the Anarchists” (Engels), “Letters on Historical Materialism” (Engels), “The Housing Question” (Engels), “The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State” (Engels), and “Marx in Detroit, Smith in Beijing” (Arrighi) and subsequent class discussions. Presented below is a mostly unedited product as it was turned in for the aforementioned class. I look forward to good faith engagement. This writing is an engagement with Marxism and acts more as an intellectual exercise than a positing of a theory.
Starting with Engels brief mention about the Missouri tribes (736), a reader can begin to wonder about what role Marxist theory has in colonization. “Transplantation,” for example is a weird way to say, “forcibly moved by colonialist forces from their homes and reassigned to less desirable lands.” One might suppose that wealth here is being measured in a Marxist way, which may suggest the colonial limitation of a Marxist conception of wealth.
And then there’s the second part of this quote, the part about the “moral influence of civilization” and missionaries. This is obviously a colonial conception of morality and civilization, and “missionaries” is a weird word for religious colonialists. This framing of the last remnants of an old system within “prehistoric times” (736) and then the mention that two Missouri tribes “retain the female lineage and female inheritance” suggests, rather quickly and briefly, that those peoples indigenous to North America were somehow ‘stuck’ in prehistoric times due to the fact that they didn’t share the customs and practices of Engels’ Europe (including, apparently, lying to and orphaning children for political convenience).
The interesting part, most would argue, is where Engels argues: “The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex,” (736, emphasis original). Engels quickly moves on to talking about the Greeks. This re-centering doesn’t evidence that his isn’t a colonial approach, in fact, the use of putting to work indigenous peoples lived experiences to attempt to bring evidence to bare on a point only to leave those same indigenous peoples on the periphery is a favorite of colonial theorists, academics, and scholars. This can be seen today in the wielding of non-western third gender categories by transgender people in the west to attempt to prove the validity of their genders in the gender systems of the west.
It may be too generous a reading to imagine that Engels is using “civilization” here ironically. Though he moves on to write about the movement from polygamy to monogamy as a tool used to control women, and a reader might understand that he’s tracing this now still through Rome and Greece, there seems to be a gap where Engels could have expanded on which cultures had polygamy, and to what ends, and moreso to Engels’ point, which cultures had polygyny and which cultures had polyandry. If family and monogamy are tools of patriarchal slavery, one would be almost forced to imagine that Engels doesn’t imagine that the European missionaries could possibly act as a moralizing or civilizing force.
Engels seems almost invested in a feminizing of slavery, and this narrative of patriarchy as a driving force of slavery seems to ignore any dynamics of race. If one agrees with David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness one might argue that whiteness as a racial category either didn’t yet exist or was infantile in the time when Engels lived and wrote and as such Engels could be excused for not writing through a lens of race. However, if Engels takes a moment to return to North America, he finds that anti-racism has roots going back at least to the 1700s with attempts to ban the slave trade. Surely the fact that Germany implemented full male suffrage almost fifteen years prior to the publication of “The Origin of the Family,” isn’t enough for Engels to have imagined that there was equity even between men of color and white men, in Germany or anywhere else. Especially since Germany had colonies throughout the African continent until at least World War 1.
Engels goes on to argue that men degraded themselves through “perversion” and “boy-love,” (739). Engels argument here is that men turned away from women, turned away from their own wives, and participated in homosexual sex. If one reads this through a lens of sexual ahistoricism that’s encouraged by the moralizing and civilizing forces of Christian missionaries, that is, if one reads this through a Western lens, one is willing to pretend that there is not disdain for homosexual sex acts written into Engels’ statement. Instead, it is more, if not singularly, a criticism of what is now understood as pedophilia, if one applies a psychological lens.
For Engels then, the pre-pathologized pedophilic relationship owes to monogamy and the degradation of women (one might be tempted here to write “devaluation of women,” but one must be careful when writing about value when considering a Marxist perspective). Does this mean then that a return to polygamy, if not matriarchal polyandry, is the answer not only to the subjugation of women, but to the subjugation of boys and young men of all races?
It is hard for one to imagine under what basis, even given the evidence provided that Engels argument that the first class antagonism was that between men and women, particularly in monogamous marriage. Engels does not offer enough evidence to provide for a convincing argument about this “first” class antagonism. One might wonder also what the usefulness of distinguishing the first class is from a Marxist perspective of ignoring cleavages amongst the working class. Engels argues that the “most extreme form” of “hetaerism,” or a sexual relationship out of wedlock is prostitution (740). Is the most extreme form of hetaerism then not “boy-love” (739) after all?
Engels at this point does come to an agreeable argument when he argues that women who engage in “prostitution” are doubly condemned for engaging in these acts (740), whereas the men who solicit them aren’t condemned at all. Women then bear the brunt of a patriarchal system of ostracism and institutional punishment.
Clearly the solution to this problem of monogamy and the first class antagonism is queer agender polyamory. Of course, the argument seems to persist over whether there is a material transgender, let alone a material agender, experience. Therein lies a difficulty: for Engels, what constitutes the class of “man” and the class of “woman?” Could Engels have predicted or imagined the reality of Lili Elbe? Surely, even if Elbe was the “first” to undergo what is now understood as transgender-related healthcare, can we afford to imagine that she was the first ever transgender person to openly grace Germany with her presence? Still, except for the brief aforementioned line about “boy-love” Engels seems not at all interested in queer relationships, even as they may inform an understanding of this first class antagonism. Engels taking-for-granted of what constitutes a “man” and what constitutes a “woman” makes it simultaneously very easy and very difficult to interpret his theory of the first class antagonism.
Engels does end “The Origin of Family” by writing that slavery was the “first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class,” (756), thus addressing some of the earlier criticisms in this memo. One might be left confused by the difference between a class cleavage and a class antagonism. This distinction seems worthwhile to understand, however, when going on to study further Marxist theory.
Worthwhile here would be further understandings of applied Marxism in the area of the modern family. As broadly as Engels might’ve suspected he was surveying family structures when he wrote “The Origin of Family,” surely there is much more to understand of family structures, both then as now. Even looking at the example of poor — working class and lower middle-class families — on the surface they seem to conform to the isolated monogamous family unit that under Marxism is fully socialized into their role as members of the proletariat. However, upon further, albeit anecdotal, observation, one might see that these family structures are first interconnected with blood relatives as the distinction might be made, wherein the extended family shares larger appliances and more expensive tools, spending their time and energy when they aren’t at work/their day job/in their “free time” helping each other with projects, chores, and what are often colloquially called “small jobs” to help maintain and fortify their house and property. Here then, each individual household may not have their own x. Where x could be lawnmower, trailer, power saw, pressure washer, carpet cleaner, etc. As such, they loan to each other. And this loaning to each other, along with shared labor, usually aids in helping to maintain strong familial bonds.
Then there is the way that friends make a small community. Both, firstly, in the ways we see the family aiding one another above, so do friends participate in these ways to help not only their friends, but the friends and family of their friends, extending the network. Friend networks in the 21st century now not only can loan what they have in terms of the sorts of examples listed above, they can also send money, digitally, instantly to one another. Often this exchange of money is so that another person can afford some necessity: rent, medicine, food, etc. And this shift from the sharing of already-purchased materials to the sharing back and forth of money to purchase necessary materials may indicate, for a Marxist, a promising move toward revolution. One might imagine the Marxist equivalent of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock. The revolution clock may not be closer than it’s ever been to midnight, but it may be closer to midnight than it was a decade or two ago.
