Letter to Karl Kautsky, March 2, 1883

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 2 March 1883


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY

IN VIENNA

London, 2 March 1883

Dear Mr Kautsky,

I have received your second article on marriage[1] and, since this contains your answer to my criticism of the first one,a I shall continue where I left off; I happen to have an hour to spare which will not be the case tomorrow.

To begin with I consider it absolutely inadmissible that, having contested community of wives as a primary manifestation, you should seek to reintroduce it as a secondary one. Wherever common ownership exists, be it of land, women or anything else, it will necessarily be primitive, a legacy of the animal kingdom. The subsequent process of development consists entirely in the gradual dissolution of this primeval common ownership; in no case do we find an instance of secondary common ownership evolving out of primitive private ownership. So irrefutable and universally valid do I consider this proposition to be that, even were you to produce what appeared to be exceptions — and however striking these might be at first sight — I would not regard them as an argument to the contrary, but only as a question yet to be solved.

Moreover, having made jealousy the one decisive factor in the first article, you ought not to discard it entirely in the second. Article I presupposes a loose form of monogamy, and this very largely on the strength of jealousy for, as I have said, your other reasons carry very little weight with me. But if jealousy is able to overcome natural community of sexes — and you do after all indirectly concede the existence of the latter when you say: 'Within the tribe complete sexual licence prevailed' —if jealousy can relegate that natural licence to the confines of temporary monogamy, how much more easily must it be able to overcome lesser obstacles. The tribe's common ownership of captives is, however, an obstacle of much less magnitude. A woman remains a woman, whether she is free or a slave; true, in the case of[2]

female slaves, a man's jealousy is able to impose sole possession much more easily than in the case of free women who have a right to adultery! But the moment there is any question of marriage with captives, the jealousy of the husbands suddenly evaporates; the community of sexes which so appalled them in the primitive state, becomes acceptable and pleasing and, even after monogamy or polygamy has already been introduced, even in the case of Semitic peoples where harems are the rule, husbands do not object to their wives coupling with every Tom, Dick and Harry, either in the temple or at special seasons. No, my dear fellow, you can't dismiss the thing as easily as all that. For you are duty-bound to stick to the point even when it becomes awkward for you to do so. If primary community of sexes was inhibited by jealousy, then community of sexes is excluded once and for all, right down to and including capitalist society. Either your second article refutes the first or vice versa.

Incidentally, I would contest your statement that the freedom of women, at your first stage, contributed to monogamy because there could be no question of repression. The argument that community of sexes is dependent on repression is itself false and a modern distortion arising out of the idea that common ownership in the sexual sphere was only of women by men and at the latter's pleasure. This is totally foreign to the primitive state. Common ownership in this sphere was available to both sexes. To refute the false assumption, however, is not the same thing as refuting the correct facts on which the distortion is based.

Again, by reducing all community of sexes and traces thereof to marriage by rapine with foreign women, you attribute to that form of marriage, qua predominant form, a really vast range. Yet you adduce not the slightest proof of this.

What follows is lost in a welter of hypotheses [among them much][3] that is undoubtedly correct [in regard to specific times and] places. But you generalise at the speed of an express train, whereas questions of this kind do not lend themselves to such rapid despatch. And while the Celtic clan, the Roman gens and the German Geschlecht are, it is true, all sub-divisions of the tribe, they all have very marked differences and also, surely, different origins. As do the various kinds of clan amongst non-Celtic peoples.

I am convinced that, should you pursue these studies or resume them after a lapse of time, you will arrive at quite different conclusions and, perhaps, regret your premature endeavours in this difficult field. You have done some hard slogging, but you have leapt too rapidly to conclusions, at the same time laying too much weight on the opinions of self-styled anthropologists, all of whom have what I might call a certain obliquity reminiscent of your armchair socialist.[4]

While you may refute Bachofen's deification and mystification of community of sexes,[5] this is not to say that community of sexes does not and will not continue to exist.

Well, the dinner-bell is being rung — no offence meant, and so I still remain,

Your old friend,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ This letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx, On Education, Women and Children. Arranged and edited, with an introduction and new translations by Saul K. Padover. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1975.
  2. ↑ See this volume, pp. 437-38.
  3. ↑ Ms. damaged.
  4. ↑ In March 1872, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for their membership of the International Working Men's Association, their socialist convictions and democratic politics. At another trial, on 6 July 1872, Bebel was sentenced to additional nine months' imprisonment and deprived of his seat in the Reichstag for 'insulting His Imperial Highness William I.'
    Liebknecht was released on 15 April 1874, while Bebel was freed only on 1 April 1875.
  5. ↑ J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur, Stuttgart, 1861.