Urbandale posted:

capitalism isnt a determinant though, patriarchy existed before it which is engels whole argument. its articulated via capitalism just like it was articulated via feudalism, but thats a very different claim.

unless im completely misunderstanding you

1) This isn't a very good reading of Engels. He very clearly believes that family structure is determined by material conditions, (generally understood as economic conditions, most importantly the means of production and the relations of production), just like the rest of society. Whether patriarchy existed prior to capitalism is neither here nor there. Economic exploitation existed prior to capitalism as well.

2) We shouldn't take a 130-year-old secondhand anthropology text as the definitive word on this subject just because it was written by Engels.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Actually Engels owns and is always right but otherwise I agree

this would be funny if it wasn't all of your posts. no wait i guess that's still funny

Urbandale posted:

1) that sounds like a bad reading of engels to me. it was the family structure, the usurpation of the gens, which allowed a change in the mode of production in the first place.

I don't remember if that's what Engels said (I think it isn't but don't quote me on) but it's also beside the point. Whether changes to family structure were the original cause of changes to the mode of production is a matter of historical fact but is irrelevant to contemporary social relations. This is what Engels has to say about the modern era, I'm bolding it because it directly contradicts what you've been claiming about the text:

The legal inequality of the two partners, bequeathed to us from earlier social conditions, is not the cause but the effect of the economic oppression of the woman.

Engels sees patriarchy as a particular economic relation acting in parallel to class relations. He talks about "the economic foundations of monogamy". He understands the problem in explicit economic terms, and envisions economic solutions:

Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.

The general thrust of the work is: just like class relations, familial and legal relations are the product underlying material forces that correspond to given stages of historical development. This is what you would expect a historical materialist like Engels to say. There is no sense in which patriarchy is prior to class society, it is just a particular social relation that corresponds to class society. It existed before capitalism, just as the state and private property existed before capitalism, but under capitalism (just like those relations) it comes into conflict with the means of production, and in the ensuing communist period it will be done away with along with class and the state.

Lessons posted:

I don't want to suggest that Engels is a reductionist and thinks that patriarchy is just a subset of class relations. He doesn't, you're correct about that. What I don't understand is how you come out from Origin thinking that the point is that familial relations are somehow independent from and prior too the mode of production which can only "articulate" things, whatever that means. We know that doesn't apply to class relations and the state, what could possibly make you think that he'd say the family was somehow different?

Oh I don't think the family structure is independent, I might have been unclear on that. I meant that it came to exist to serve an economic purpose. That's kinda what I meant when I said its articulated through the mode of production. the family structure changes (gens->monogomy) which interacts with and allows the change in the economic unit (gens->family). i dont really get where youre saying the state comes in to what im saying though, could you expand on that? perhaps I just need to reread the book again.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.