On Marx And Engels’ Theory Of The Origin Of The State

The emergence of the state is a sign of human entering into the period of civilization.The origin of the state means that the society has entered a historical stage in which population,wealth is increasing,social stratification,class differentiation becomes increasingly obvious,and the role of political activity is becoming increasingly important.As a form of political organization,the state origins in what way,at what time,has always been one of the core issues concerned by anthropologists,historians and political scientists.This article aims to study Marx and Engels’ views and theories on the origin of the state.The theory of the origin of the state is an important part of the Marxist theory system.In recent years,with the publication of Marx’s old-age notes,why did Marx put aside the writing of the second volume of Capital,how he had relations with Morgan,whether Engels inherited the Marx’s remains and other issues became the focus of the foreign academy.At the same time,since the eighties of last century,the"new evolutionism",represented by Service,has had a great influence in our country.Some researchers rushed to claim that Marx and Engels’ theory were out of date.In order to solve the above theoretical problems and to refute some people’s questioning,we need to examine the connotation of Marx and Engels’ theory of the origin of the state on the basis of concrete text,and sum up the characteristics and contemporary significance of this theory.The social contract theorist of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the first to make a substantive study of the origin of the state.After they have ruled out the theological authority,they must provide a new set of discourse for human society.They first introduced the theory of human nature to the study of the state(political society).Rousseau began from the nature of people to examine why people come from the "natural state" to a civilized society.He described the conflict between civilization and freedom,revealed the link between state and private ownership,and criticized that arguments of the sanctification of the state.In the nineteenth century,with the accumulation of ethnographic data,people gradually realized that:the evolution of human political organizations is not from the"natural state" to the political society,but from the extended family to the state.For the first time,Maine explored the transformation of the organizational basis of society from the blood to the geography.He pointed out that the Romanian patriarchal family is the earliest family form.The internal rule of this kind of family is based on the"patriarch".the patriarch of the group’s has the power to handle other member’s person right and property ownership.Married women are no longer family members.Patriarch is the "legal representative" of the whole group.He has a great power,but also bear the corresponding obligations.The family’s overall honor is greater than the individual.The family pursue public ownership of property and the policy of the average distribution of implementation.Family property cannot be free to buy and sell,can be inter-generational redistributed.Patriarchal personal death is not related to the survival of the family,the group is immortal.Patriarch position will be passed to the designated male heir.In order to ensure the stability of the group,the family pursues the eldest son inheritance system.After the death of group members,their property will be distributed in the humble relatives.Maine believes that the family,the gens,the tribe and the state are the result of the enlargement of the patriarchal family.These four social organizations are structurally consistent,the power of the state leader is the further develop of "the patriarch".The role of blood groups in the political life tends to be declining as the national law gradually breaks the hard shell of the family,and it will play a role as a private organization.Morgan based on the north American Iroquois clan system claims that the kinship system is an indicator of family form,the family is a dynamic factor between family and kinship.As the family form changes,the kinship system is often fixed.Hybridization,consanguineous marriage,pair marriage,and monogamy marriage are the four forms of marriage that have appeared in history.The patriarchal family is the family after the collapse of the clan.In the clan,members are equality,property is public,and institutions are democracy,no oppression and confrontation,no gap between rich and poor and no hierarchical distinction.The clan leader is not a modern autocratic monarch.He has no right to deal with the personal and property rights of the members.The clan does not set up public authority.There is no permanent army,military officers only play a role in wartime.With the development of economy and the rise of private ownership,the clan system gradually disintegrated.Morgan called the form of government after the dissolution of the clan system as "state".In his view,the state and the clan has obvious differences:in clan society,the link between people is a personal attachment,the government of the clan society does not directly manage the individual,the community is related by the blood organizations.In the state,the primary identity of the members is a citizen,is a member of the state,the previous blood organization has been degraded into a private organization.The state control citizens by geographical means,geographical relation has become the most important link.Marx and Engels criticized and absorbed the modern theory of the origin of the state.As early as youth,they put considerable attention to the formation of modern states and the early history of mankind.By criticizing Hegel’s philosophy of law,young Marx elaborated the relationship between state and society.He pointed out that civil society and individuals are the real elements of history,and "rational state" is only the idea of things,not realistic.Individuals engage in emotional material activities,and in this activities they reflect their own will and freedom.In essence,there is no civil society,there is no existence of state,because individuals must first survive,to solve the problem of life and these services can only be completed in the civil society.If there is no civil society,it does not matter constitute the state’s individual.Civil society is based on private economic activities and independent from the political state,it is opposed to the political state.This is the basic characteristics of modern states.Hegel explain the relationship between the two with abstract logic,emphasize that the state is the foundation of the family and the civil society.Since the reality of things is explained by unrealistic things,then the reality of things is no longer realistic.In Marx’s view,members of civil society and citizens of the state are two very different concepts,the former is specific,emotional,is to survive for the purpose,while the latter is man-made,constructed.Real person,that is the main body of civil society,takes egoism as the highest principle,and the state abandon these infinite chances of individuals,only to recognize the formation of abstract citizenship.In German ideology,Marx and Engels through the establishment of historical materialism to build the research methodology to explain the formation of the state.Marx and Engels pointed out that the individual is a prerequisite for history.The individual is exited in practice,really engaged in material production,is living in reality.So this individual must be specific,is in a certain social conditions.In their view,the origin of history is not a political person.History is a description of human practice and its consequences.It is a true record of the process of development.This empirical science is the real knowledge,the greatest enemy of false and independent philosophy.Philosophy cannot leave history and exist.The meaning of philosophy is to point out the truths contained in historical materials.Historical materialism holds that the division of labor is the driving force of historical development.The reproduction of the means of subsistence is the main line of history,the contradiction between the level of productive forces and the existing relations of production is the driving force of historical development.On the basis of division of labor,The formation of the state is possible,the opposition between the city and the village began to appear,which means that mankind began to transition from the brutal to civilization,began to go out of the original blood relationship to join the new political state,began to get rid of small geographical restrictions to get into a wide range of regional groups.Within the state,a class ruled all other classes,the ruling class makes their own special interests rise to common interests,to develop their own rules and regulations to law.The state is always an illusory form of the community,is a fuzzy group of its own political basis.In fact,the state is built on the confrontation of class.In the mid-seventies of the nineteen seventies,in the writing of the second volume of Capital,in the need of studying land relations,Marx in particular strengthen the research of various pre-capitalist social form.During this period,he commented on a series of anthropological works.After the death of Marx,Engels on the basis of Marx’s research created family,private ownership and the origin of the state.Marx and Engels argued that hybridization,consanguineous marriage,pair marriage and monogamy marriage are the four stages of the evolution of the family form.The monogamy marriage represented by patriarchy is a kind of system connected with agriculture,private ownership and slavery,is the most important social organization before the formation of the state.In the pair marriage included all the subsequent exploitation and oppression of the bud.Morgan’s clan theory was accepted by Marx and Engels and became an important theoretical tool for refuting Maine and Phil.In their view,the three major social division of labor and private ownership is the destruction of freedom and equality of the clan system.The first social division of labor occurred in the late primitive society,is the nomadic tribe separated from other tribes.Prior to this,the exchange is only accidental phenomenon.The emergence of nomadic tribes brought great progress in productivity.They first of all produced more material in a variety of types,which makes the exchange of molding frequent,but also for private ownership.The second division of labor is the separation of handicraft industry from agriculture.With the development of productive forces,coupled with more and more iron tools are produced for use,made such as textile,Wine,oil and other handicrafts in turn stripped out.The emergence of this division of labor directly bring the exchange for the purpose of commodity production and accelerated the emergence of private ownership and the destruction of primitive society.Do not engage in production and only concerned about the exchange,businessmen is the third division labor of society.With the emergence of this class,there has the metal currency,the currency can buy goods which naturally produced loans,interest and usury and other economic phenomena.The debtor was thus tightly tied to the foot of the creditors.With private property,wealth quickly accumulated and concentrated in the hands of a small number of classes,the new wealth noble classes are different from the previous tribal dignitaries.The conflict between they and other members,especially between the slaves is based on the establishment of the differentiation of the confrontation.Marx pointed out that the process of disintegration of public ownership can be divided into several stages.The Indian and Russian rural commune is in the transition from public ownership to private ownership.The state of economic transformation before the origins of the country is being staged in these villages.Some people call this process feudalization.In their view,the original free landowners now become the leader of the dependent farmers,the previous group members of the production of the product owned by the group.After that,the land is distributed in accordance with the status or farming situation.Marx pointed out that this situation of the rural commune cannot be unconditionally analogous to the historical experience of Western Europe,the commune land ownership system is misinterpreted as the process of feudalism in Western Europe.The elements of the feudal system in Western Europe are:feoff system,the serfdom,the highest esteem of land and the hereditary jurisdiction of civil law,the rural commune only has the first two.Colonists are willing to analogy the colony land system for the feudal land system,is to plunder more land.According to their logic,since the land is owned by the king and the king is the loser,then the land will be transferred from the king to the colonists in the form of trophies.In the 1850s,Marx and Engels argued that the Indian village was a static,non-historical social organization that was a major factor in the long-standing of Eastern society.Despite the British colonial rule in India bring many sinful disasters,but it also completed the dual mission of destruction and reconstruction,the former refers to the collapse of the old Eastern society,while the latter refers to the establishment of a European-style society laid the material basis.And this also shows that at this time Marx and Engels is still in a negative attitude to look at the Indian village community.Their analysis is mainly focused on its function,structure and its changes under the British colonial rule,but not its origin and history,not make their research combine with the socio-economic evolution.After reading the Russian information,Marx and Engels modified their view.They turned to believe that the colonial sovereigns were anxious to destroy the commune land ownership,to establish private ownership is to seek their own private interests,and capital come into the rural commune is the reason of a large number of small landowners bankruptcy,the land gradually concentrated in the foreign usury capitalists.For the prospect of the Russian rural commune,Marx expressed optimism.He believed that by placing the Russian commune under normal conditions,it would be able to create conditions for the mass production of the machine,rather than letting it become the object of foreign capital and the domestic burial of the bourgeoisie,and that it would not go through the suffering of capitalism and directly enjoy the benefits of capitalism.Marx and Engels pointed out that there are two criteria for the formation of the state:first,the basis of social organization from the blood to the edge;second,the establishment of public power.War and commodity trade makes the people flow up in the clan’s traditional residence,a lot of immigration people who do not belong to the original group cannot participate in the daily affairs of the clan,there is no clan given the rights to them until the foreign population and the contradiction between the local residents cannot be reconciled,the community need to completely abandon the clan identity,and directly to manage their own people,and with a set of public authority to replace the previous clan meeting.Engels pointed out that Greece,Rome and the Germans are the three main ways of the origin of the country,the classical period of Greece is the most primitive way of formation,because it does not have the intervention of foreign war,and Rome,the German state is the result of internal change and war.By studying the origins of the state,Marx and Engels summed up the essence of the state:the state was a political superstructure adapted to a certain social form,a product that was developed when society is difficult to get rid of it,and society was to protect itself from the devastating consequences of the struggle between the various opposing classes;the state is the ruling instrument of the class with the most powerful and economic dominance,and is a generalization of the so-called civilized society.The theoretical traits of Marx and Engels’ theory can be summarized as follows:First,the origin of the state is discussed from the perspective of social development.Marx and Engels insisted that the state is the tumor of the social body.Only from the society itself,we can recognize the origin,development and prospects of the state.The reason why the state seems to be the political organization above the society,because once formed,it will use the ideological tools to declare their own eternal,thus obscuring its relationship with the economic base.Second,the internal causes of the origin of the state are explained by an internal conflict theory.The core of Marx and Engels’ theory is social division of labor and class theory.Even in the original communist clan,Marx and Engels also found the phenomenon of social differentiation and opposition.Third,by examining the origin of the state to reveal the essence of the state.Marx and Engels stressed that the nature of the original state will be in a more obvious way in the bourgeois society.In their view,in order to highlight the nature of the state,the most direct way is to compare it with the clan.Compared with the state,the clan is not exploited and oppressed,there is no economic,political differentiation and confrontation,no public power and the tax system for the maintenance of this public power normal operation,there is no modern sense of autocratic monarch;clan members co-operate and labor,share of material production products equally,the community does not exist property private ownership.Marx and Engels’ theory of the origin of the state has attracted considerable attention in the past 100 years.It is the foundation of the Marxist theory of the origin of the state.Confined to the limitations of the times,in the specific conclusions and the use of materials,there is indeed inadequate.The group marriage system and matriarchal clan are still the cases of different litigation.But today it is still recognized as a very strong interpretation of the theory of formation of the state.The analysis of the relationship between state and society,the discussion of state and private ownership,its depth is far from the "chief theory".At the same time,it has important guiding significance for us to grasp the essence of the state and master the relationship between the state and the society,it is of great significance to our construction of the ideal society in the future.