The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

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Here we present a work by Friedrich Engels in our Publications for Young People, preceded by a preface taken from the third volume of the history of our party, Lotta Comunista. The Bolshevik Model 1965-1995. This analyses the family of imperialist maturity starting from the social changes of the 1980s, based on the theses of Arrigo Cervetto, the founder, theorist, and leader of Lotta Comunista.The reasons for our choice can be clarified by what Paolo Rivetti wrote in his 2014 introduction to Engels’ writings from the period 1883-1889, which were later included in the Italian edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels: “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is, for Engels, a necessary completion of the legacy of his departed comrade-in-arms. Starting from Marx’s notes on Lewis Morgan’s work, Engels integrates and develops, in the light of the materialist conception of history, some crucial anthropological discoveries of the second half of the 19th century and discovers the link between the emergence of private property, classes, and the State. The foundations of the Marxist theory of the State are thus firmly established.Lenin built his State and Revolution on these foundations, and in particular on the definition of the State as ‘a public force that no longer coincides directly with the totality of the armed people’. Subsequently, official anthropological research followed a fate similar to that of economic research: the accumulation of empirical studies was mirrored by a halt in theoretical development, as the latter, wielded by the proletariat through Marxism, had become socially dangerous.In this respect, Engels’ work requires very little updating. The family, on the other hand, like the State, has undergone profound transformations linked to the imperialist maturation of the socio-economic formation. The Marxist school has investigated both processes. Through Lenin, Marxism arrived at the concept of imperialist democracy as historically reactionary and devoid of any progressive function.Arrigo Cervetto, in an analysis focused on the Italian social restructuring of the 1980s, investigated the link between the hypertrophic parasitism of the State and the recycling within it of a large share of the petty bourgeoisie undergoing proletarianisation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the increase in female employment, the decline in birth rates, and the emergence of the multi-income and multi-rent family. The material accumulated in this research is the natural development of Engels’ work, according to the typical approach of Marxism, the science of change”.

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