On the Association of the Future

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 1884


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XVI, Part 1, Moscow, 1937
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 26

Note from MECW :

Engels probably wrote this passage when working on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In content, it relates to the passage in Chapter IX of the book which deals with the survival of the gentile system in medieval aristocratic, patrician and peasant associations. However, due to the absence of any other information, the dating of this fragment, written in longhand on a separate sheet, is only provisional. The title has been supplied by the editors.

In essence, associations—whether naturally evolved or created— have hitherto existed for economic ends, but these ends have been concealed and buried beneath ideological matters of secondary importance. The ancient polis,[1] the medieval town or guild, the feudal confederacy of landowning nobility—all had secondary ideological aims which they hallowed and which in the case of the patrician body of consanguinity and the guild arose from the memories, traditions and models of gentile society no less than in that of the ancient polis. The capitalist commercial companies are the first to be wholly rational and objective—but vulgar. The association of the future will combine the rationality of the latter with the old ones' concern for the social welfare of all, and thus fulfil its purpose.

  1. ↑ Polis (a city state)—a typical socio-economic and political organisation in Ancient Greece and Ancient Italy. The Greek polis emerged in the 8th-6th cent. B.C. It included the city proper and the adjacent agricultural settlements. Only its indigenous inhabitants who owned land and slaves possessed full civic rights. There were also free citizens who did not enjoy full rights, such as metoikos, they engaged in trades and commerce.