Letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21, 1890

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To Joseph Bloch in Königsberg

London, September 21[-22], 1890

Dear Sir,

Your letter of the 3rd of this month was forwarded to me in Folkestone; but since I did not have the book in question with me I was not able to reply to it. After arriving home on the 12th, I found such an accumulation of urgent work awaiting me that I have been unable until today to get round to writing you a line or two. This, merely by way of explanation for the delay which I trust you will be good enough to excuse.

Ad I. First, on p. 19 of the Origin you will see that the process of growth of the punaluan family is shown as taking place so gradually that even in this century there have been marriages between brothers and sisters (born of one mother) in the Hawaian royal family. And throughout antiquity we find examples of intermarriage between siblings, e.g. amongst the Ptolemaeans. Here, however,— secondly — we must distinguish between siblings by the same mother and siblings merely by the same father, ‘ἀδελφός, ‘ἀδελφή derive from δελφύς uterus, and hence originally denoted only siblings by the same mother. And a feeling has long persisted from the period of mother right that the children of one mother, even if by different fathers, are more closely related than the children of one father but by different mothers. The punaluan form of family precludes marriage only between the former, but not at all between the latter who, according to the above conception, are not related at all (since mother right is in force). Now, so far as I know, cases of sibling marriage in Greek antiquity are confined to those in which the pair either have different mothers or at any rate to those in which this is not known and is therefore not ruled out; hence it is by no means inconsistent with punaluan custom. What you have overlooked is the fact that, between the punaluan period and Greek monogamy, the change-over from matriarchy to patriarchy took place, which puts quite a different complexion on the matter.

According to Wachsmuth’s Hellenische Alterthümer there is, among the Greeks of the Heroic Period,

‘no trace of reservations regarding unduly close kinship between married partners, aside from relations between parent and child’ (III, p. 157). ‘In Crete, marriage to a full sister was not considered an offence’ (ibid., p. 170).

This last from Strabo, Book X ; however, I cannot find the passage at this moment because of the absence of proper chapter divisions.— Full sisters — failing proof to the contrary — I assume to be sisters by the same father.

Ad II. I would qualify the first of your main propositions as follows: According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideology was not published in Marx or Engels lifetime]

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too.

Ad I, I yesterday discovered (I am writing this on 22 September) in Schoemann’s Griechische Alterthümer, Berlin, 1855, I, p. 52, the following vital passage which fully substantiates what I have said above. It runs:

‘It is known, however, that marriage between half-brothers and sisters born of different mothers was not subsequently regarded as incest in Greece.’

Trusting that you will not be too much put off by the appalling convolutions to which my pen has, for brevity’s sake, succumbed, I remain

Yours faithfully,

F. Engels