marx on ancient families

[araham]

In his "Karl Marx A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism", Lenin has quoted this from Capital :

"It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms."

Will somebody let me know what were the differences among the three ancient forms of the families mentioned by Marx?

[ComradeOm]

See Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm). The relevant chapter is, shocking enough, titled the 'The Family'

Edit: And welcome to the forums

[araham]

Thanks. I had already taken a look at The Origin...However couldn't find the answer.

[Dave B]

The context may be relevant to some hence;
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One

Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry
SECTION 9




So long as Factory legislation is confined to regulating the labour in factories, manufactories, &c., it is regarded as a mere interference with the exploiting rights of capital. But when it comes to regulating the so-called "home-labour,"it is immediately viewed as a direct attack on the patria potestas, on parental authority. The tender-hearted English Parliament long affected to shrink from taking this step.

The force of facts, however, compelled it at last to acknowledge that modern industry, in overturning the economic foundation on which was based the traditional family, and the family labour corresponding to it, had also unloosened all traditional family ties. The rights of the children had to be proclaimed. The final report of the Ch. Empl. Comm. of 1866, states:

"It is unhappily, to a painful degree, apparent throughout the whole of the evidence, that against no persons do the children of both sexes so much require protection as against their parents." The system of unlimited exploitation of children’s labour in general and the so-called home-labour in particular is "maintained only because the parents are able, without check or control, to exercise this arbitrary and mischievous power over their young and tender offspring.... Parents must not possess the absolute power of making their children mere ‘machines to earn so much weekly wage....’ The children and young persons, therefore, in all such cases may justifiably claim from the legislature, as a natural right, that an exemption should be secured to them, from what destroys prematurely their physical strength, and lowers them in the scale of intellectual and moral beings."


It was not, however, the misuse of parental authority that created the capitalistic exploitation, whether direct or indirect, of children’s labour; but, on the contrary, it was the capitalistic mode of exploitation which, by sweeping away the economic basis of parental authority, made its exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power. However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes.

It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historical development.

Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm)

[Dave B]

The Maximilien Lenin quote of course come from a quite interesting passage from;

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Karl Marx

A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism

Socialism

That includes the ‘spinning wheel and the bronze axe’ quote;

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch04.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch04.htm)


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