Yang Xiangkui Collection - Selected Writings of Scholars from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Author: Research Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: This is a classic work of Marxism. Lenin mentioned it several times and highly praised it. In his work On the State, he said: "I hope you will read Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State when studying the issue of the state. This is one of the fundamental works of modern socialism, and every sentence in it is trustworthy. Every sentence is not spoken out of thin air but is written based on extensive historical and political materials." Therefore, I read this book with great trust. Every word is a classic instruction for me. When taking notes, I hope to focus on the issues that are still unclear to me in terms of concepts, to copy similar statements from the original book together, and to help myself gain a deeper understanding. Without my own interpretation, I cannot have any interpretation. Although Lenin fully affirmed the value of this book, there were different opinions about one of its arguments. In the preface to the original book's 1884 edition, Engels wrote: According to the materialist understanding, the decisive factor in history, in the final analysis, is the direct production and reproduction of life. However, production itself is dual: on the one hand, it is the production of means of subsistence—food, clothing, shelter, and the tools necessary for them; on the other hand, it is the production of human beings themselves, i.e., procreation. The social system under which people of a certain historical era and in a certain region live is determined by these two forms of production: on the one hand, the stage of labor development, and on the other, the stage of family development. The more underdeveloped labor is, the smaller the quantity of its products, and thus the more limited the wealth of society, the stronger the influence of kinship ties on the social system. This argument about the duality of production was later refuted by the preface written for this book by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Chinese Communist Party. The preface states: It must be pointed out that there is an inexactness in the preface to the original edition of Engels' work, and this inexactness can lead to a wrong view of the role of material living conditions in social development. In the preface to the original edition of his work, Engels wrote: (omitted) However, the family cannot be compared with labor or with material production, which is the decisive factor in social development. Obviously, the relationship between the two sexes in the process of "human production," or procreation, affects social development in one way or another, as they constitute necessary conditions for the material life of society. But the main and decisive conditions of people's material life, which determine the entire face of society (including the relationship between the two sexes, the forms of the family and marriage), are the ways of obtaining means of subsistence, the mode of production of material means necessary for survival and the propagation of the species. This clear, perfect, and exemplary formula of the fundamental proposition of historical materialism theory was proposed by Comrade Stalin in his work Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism. This means that there is an inexactness in Engels' preface, which can lead to a wrong view, but it also points out that Engels in his work still "pointed out that changes in the relationship between the two sexes in the forms of family and marriage are caused by the development of material production, by the development of material productive forces." Therefore, a saying has become popular: although there is an inexactness in Engels' preface, this argument is not used in the original text of the work. P3-4