The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕

so among the Greeks. The advent of private property in herds of cattle and articles of luxury led to an exchange between individuals, to a transformation of products into commodities. Here is the root of the entire revolution that followed. When the producers did no longer consume their own product, but released their hold of it in exchange for another's product, then they lost the control of it. They did not know any more what became of it. There was a possibility that the product might be turned against the producers for the purpose of exploiting and oppressing them. No society can, therefore, retain for any length of time the control of its own production and of the social effects of the mode of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.

How rapidly after the establishment of individual exchange and after the transformation of products into commodities the product manifests its rule over the producer, the Athenians were soon to learn. Along with the production of marketable commodities came the tilling of the soil by individual cultivators for their own account, soon followed by individual ownership of the land. Along came also the money, that general commodity for which all others could be exchanged. But when men invented money they little suspected that they were creating a new social power, that one universal power before which the whole of society must bow down. It was this new power, suddenly sprung into existence without the forethought and intention of its own creators, that vented its rule on the Athenians with the full brutality of youth.

What was to be done? The old gentile organization had not only proved impotent against the triumphant march of money: it was also absolutely incapable of containing within its confines any such thing as money, creditors, debtors and forcible collection of debts. But the new social power was upon them and neither pious wishes nor a longing for the return of the good old times could drive money and usury from the face of the earth. Moreover, gentile constitution had suffered a number of minor defeats. The indiscriminate mingling of the gentiles and phrators in the whole of Attica, and especially in Athens, had assumed larger proportions from generation to generation. Still even now a citizen of Athens was not allowed to sell his residence outside of his gens, although he could do so with plots of land. The division of labor between the different branches of production—agriculture, trades, numberless specialties within the trades, commerce, navigation, etc.—had developed more fully with the progress of industry and traffic. The population was now divided according to occupations into rather well defined groups, everyone of which had separate interests not guarded by the gens or phratry and therefore necessitating the creation of new offices. The number of slaves had increased considerably and must have surpassed by far that of the free Athenians even at this early stage. Gentile society originally knew no slavery and was, therefore, ignorant of any means to hold this mass of bondsmen in check. And finally, commerce had attracted a great many strangers who settled in Athens for the sake of the easier living it afforded. According to the old constitution, the strangers had neither civil rights nor the protection of the law. Though tacitly admitted by tradition, they remained a disturbing and foreign element.

In short, gentile constitution approached its doom. Society was daily growing more and more beyond it. It was powerless to stop or allay even the most distressing evils that had grown under its very eyes. But in the meantime the state had secretly developed. The new groups formed by division of labor, first between city and country, then between the various branches of city industry, had created new organs for the care of their interests. Public offices of every description had been instituted. And above all the young state needed its own fighting forces. Among the seafaring Athenians this had to be at first only a navy, for occasional short expeditions and the protection of the merchant vessels. At some uncertain time before Solon, the naukrariai were instituted, little territorial districts, twelve in each tribe. Every naukraria had to furnish, equip and man a war vessel and to detail two horsemen. This arrangement was a twofold attack on the gentile constitution. In the first place it created a public power of coërcion that did no longer absolutely coincide with the entirety of the armed nation. In the second place it was the first division of the people for public purposes, not by groups of kinship, but by local residence. We shall soon see what that signified.

As the gentile constitution could not come to the assistance of the exploited people, they could look only to the rising state. And the state brought help in the form of the constitution of Solon. At the same time it added to its own strength at the expense of the old constitution. Solon opened the series of so-called political revolutions by an infringement on private property. We pass over the means by which this reform was accomplished in the year 594 B. C. or thereabout. Ever since, all revolutions have been revolutions for the protection of one kind of property against another kind of property. They cannot protect one kind without violating another. In the great French revolution the feudal property was sacrificed for the sake of saving bourgeois property. In Solon's revolution, the property of the creditors had to make concessions to the property of the debtors. The debts were simply declared illegal. We are not acquainted with the accurate details, but Solon boasts in his poëms that he removed the mortgage columns from the indented lots and enabled all who had fled or been sold abroad for debts to return home. This was only feasible by an open violation of private property. And indeed, all so-called political revolutions were started for the protection of one kind of property by the confiscation, also called theft, of another kind of property. It is absolutely true that for more than 2,500 years private property could only be protected by the violation of private property.

But now a way had to be found to avoid the return of such an enslavement of the free Athenians. This was first attempted by general measures, e. g., the prohibition of contracts giving the person of the debtor in lien. Furthermore a maximum limit was fixed for the amount of land any one individual could own, in order to keep the craving of the nobility for the land of the farmers within reasonable bounds. Constitutional amendments were next in order. The following deserve special consideration:

The council was increased to four hundred members, one hundred from each tribe. Here, then, the tribe still served as a basis. But this was the only remnant of the old constitution that was transferred to the new body politic. For otherwise Solon divided the citizens into four classes according to their property in land and its yield. Five hundred, three hundred and one hundred and fifty medimnoi of grain (1 medimnos equals 1.16 bushels) were the minimum yields of the first three classes. Whoever had less land or none at all belonged to the fourth class. Only members of the first three classes could hold office; the highest offices were filled by the first class. The fourth class had only the right to speak and vote in the public council. But here all officials were elected, here they had to give account, here all the laws were made, and here the fourth class was in the majority. The aristocratic privileges were partly renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, but the people retained the decisive power. The four classes also formed the basis for the reorganization of the fighting forces. The first two classes furnished the horsemen; the third had to serve as heavy infantry; the fourth was employed as light unarmored infantry and had to man the navy. Probably the last class also received wages in this case.

An entirely new element is thus introduced into the constitution: private property. The rights and duties of the citizens are graduated according to their property in land. Wherever the classification by property gains ground, there the old groups of blood relationship give way. Gentile constitution has suffered another defeat.

However, the gradation of political rights according to private property was not one of those institutions without which a state cannot exist. It may have been ever so important in the constitutional development of some states. Still a good many others, and the most completely developed at that, had no need of it. Even in Athens it played only a passing role. Since the time of Aristides, all offices were open to all the citizens.

During the next eighty years the Athenian society gradually drifted into the course on which it further developed in the following centuries. The outrageous land speculation of the time before Solon had been fettered, likewise the excessive concentration of property in land. Commerce, trades and artisan handicrafts, which were carried on in an ever larger scale as slave labor increased, became the ruling factors in gaining a living. Public enlightenment advanced. Instead of exploiting their own fellow citizens in the old brutal style, the Athenians now exploited mainly the slaves and the customers outside. Movable property, wealth in money, slaves and ships, increased more and more. But instead of being a simple means for the purchase of land, as in the old stupid times, it had now become an end in itself. The new class of industrial and commercial owners of wealth now waged a victorious competition against the old nobility. The remnants of the old gentile constitution lost their last hold. The gentes, phratries and tribes, the members of which now were dispersed all over Attica and completely intermixed, had thus become unavailable as political groups. A great many citizens of Athens did not belong to any gens. They were immigrants who had been adopted into citizenship, but not into any of the old groups of kinship. Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants who were only protected by traditional sufferance.

Meanwhile the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility tried to regain their former privileges and for a short time recovered their supremacy, until the revolution of Kleisthenes (509 B. C.) brought their final downfall and completed the ruin of gentile law.

In his new constitution, Kleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded on the gentes and phratries. Their place was taken by an entirely new organization based on the recently attempted division of the citizens into naukrariai according to residence. No longer was membership in a group of kindred the dominant fact, but simply local residence. Not the nation, but the territory was now divided; the inhabitants became mere political fixtures of the territory.

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts, so-called demoi, every one of which was autonomous. The citizens living in a demos (demotoi) elected their official head (demarchos), treasurer and thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor cases. They also received their own temple and divine guardian or heros, whose priest they elected. The control of the demos was in the hands of the council of demotoì. This is, as Morgan correctly remarks, the prototype of the autonomous American township. The modern state in its highest development ended in the same unit with which the rising state began its career in Athens.

Ten of these units (demoi) formed a tribe, which, however, was now designated as local tribe in order to distinguish it from the old sex tribe. The local tribe was not only an autonomous political, but also a military group. It elected the phylarchos or tribal head who commanded the horsemen, the taxiarchos commanding the infantry and the strategic leader, who was in command of the entire contingent