2. To Joseph Bloch, 21–22 September 1890

London, 21 September 1890

Dear Sir,

Your letter of the 3rd of this month was forwarded to me at Folkestone; but as I did not have the book in question with me there, I could not answer it. When I got home again on the 12th I found such a pile of urgent work waiting that only today do I get round to writing you a few lines. I say this to explain the delay, and ask you kindly to excuse it.

As to I. First, you will see on page 19 of the Origin that the process by which the punaluan family grew up is described as so gradual that even in this century marriages between brother and sister (of one mother) still occurred in the royal family of Hawaii. And throughout antiquity we find examples of marriages between brothers and sisters, among the Ptolemies, for instance. But here, secondly, a distinction must be made between siblings on the mother’s side and siblings on the father’s side only. Adelphos, adelphē (ἀδελφός, ἀδελφή, brother, sister) come from delphys (δελφύς), womb, and so originally meant only siblings on the mother’s side. And from the period of mother-right the feeling long survived that children of one mother, even of different fathers, are closer to one another than children of one father but of different mothers. The punaluan form of the family excludes only marriages between the former, in no way between the latter, who according to the corresponding idea are not even related (since mother-right holds). Now, so far as I know, the cases of marriage between brother and sister in Greek antiquity are confined to those where the parties either have different mothers or where this is not known and so not excluded; they are therefore in no way contrary to punaluan custom. What you have overlooked is that between the punaluan age and Greek monogamy lies the leap from matriarchy to patriarchy, which alters the matter considerably.

According to Wachsmuth’s Hellenische Alterthümer, in the heroic age of the Greeks “there is no trace of misgivings about too close a relationship between husband and wife, apart from the relation of parents and children” (III, p. 157). “Marriage with one’s own sister was not offensive in Crete” (ibid., p. 170). The latter is from Strabo, book X, but for the moment I cannot find the passage, because there is no division into chapters. By “own sister” I understand, until there is proof to the contrary, sisters on the father’s side.

As to II, I would qualify your first main proposition as follows. According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. If somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure (political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle; forms of law; and then even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juridical and philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogma) 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 connection is so remote or so impossible to prove that we can regard it as non-existent and neglect it), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history one chose 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 presuppositions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the tradition that haunts people’s heads, also play a part, though not the decisive one. The Prussian state too arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could hardly be maintained without pedantry that, among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was destined by economic necessity alone, and not by other factors as well (above all its entanglement, through its possession of Prussia, with Poland and thereby with international political relations, which were also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power), to become the great power in which the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also religious difference between North and South was embodied. One will hardly succeed in explaining economically, without making oneself ridiculous, the existence of every small German state, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant shift, which widened the geographical partition formed by the mountains from the Sudetes to the Taunus into a regular fissure running across Germany.

In the second place, however, history makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which is in turn 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, and this may itself again be regarded as the product of a power that 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 up to now proceeds in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the individual wills (each of which desires what it is impelled to by its physical constitution and by external, ultimately economic, circumstances, either its own personal circumstances or those of society in general) do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective 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 the original sources and not at second hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it does not play a part. But The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in particular is a quite excellent example of its application. There are also many references to it in Capital. Then I may also refer you to my writings Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, where I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism that exists, so far as I know.

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 against our adversaries, who denied it, and we did not always have the time, the place or the opportunity to do justice to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to practical application, it was a different matter, and there no error was possible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado as soon as they have mastered its main propositions, and those not always correctly. And I cannot spare many of the more recent “Marxists” this reproach; some wonderful stuff has indeed been turned out in that quarter.

As to I, yesterday (I am writing this on 22 September) I found the following decisive passage, which fully confirms my account above, in Schoemann, Griechische Alterthümer, Berlin 1855, I, p. 52: “But it is well known that marriages between half-brothers and half-sisters of different mothers were not regarded as incest in later Greece.”

I hope the frightful parentheses that have slipped from my pen for the sake of brevity will not put you off too much, and remain

Yours faithfully, F. Engels