The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The Formation of the German State (VIII)

Friedrich. Engels

　　According to Tacitus, the Germans were a populous people. From Caesar's writings we can derive a general idea of the number of German nationalities; he considers that the population of the Uzipet and Dunktai peoples, including women and children, who lived on the left bank of the Rhine, amounted to 180,000 people. Thus, there are about 100,000 people per people [Note: The figures given here can be confirmed in the section on the Celtics of Gaul by Theodolos.] "In Gaul live many ethnic groups with diverse populations, the largest of which is about 200,000 and the smallest is about 50,000,000," he said. (Diodorus Siculus, V, 25,) Thus, on average, 125,000 people: the various Gaulic peoples, because of their higher degree of development, must have a more populous population than the Germans. This has far exceeded, for example, the total number of Iroquois in its heyday, when the Iroquois numbered less than 20,000, but had become a terrible force for the entire region from the Great Lakes to the Ohio and Potomac rivers. If we draw on a map the location of the more famous peoples who settled near the Rhine on the basis of available materials, each such people occupies an area which is, on average, about an administrative region of Prussia, i.e. about 10,000 square kilometers, or 182 square kilometers. However, the Romans' Germania Magna [Greater Germania], up to the Visla River, occupied an area of 500,000 square kilometers in total. If the average population of a people is 100,000, then the total population of the entire Germania Magna should be 5 million; for the national groups of the barbaric age, this is a very large number, although in today's conditions - 10 people in a square kilometer, or 550 people in a square geography - this is a very small number. But this did not include all germans living at that time. We know that along the Carpathians up to the mouth of the Danube, there were Gothic German peoples—the Bastars, the Pevkins, and others,———and their numbers were so large that Pliny considered them to be the fifth basic group of Germans, and that these tribes, which had been mercenaries for the Macedonian king Perseus in 180 B.C., had already penetrated near Adrianople in the early years of Augustus's reign. Assuming that their number was only 1 million, the approximate number of Germans by the beginning of the Common Era would have been at least 6 million.

　　After their settlement in Germania, the population must have grown rapidly and day by day; the industrial advances mentioned above alone are sufficient to prove this. The antiquities found in the Shreesvich Moor, judging by the Roman coins in them, belong to the third century. It can be seen that by this time, the metal industry and textile industry on the Baltic coast were already very developed, there were frequent business contacts with the Roman Empire, and the richer people had enjoyed certain luxury goods,—— all of which were signs of a more dense population. During this period, the Germans also began a general offensive on the rhine, the Roman border wall and the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea,—— which is a direct proof of the growing population and the effort to expand outward. The struggle lasted three hundred years, during which the whole basic part of the Gothic nation (with the exception of the Scandinavian Goths and Burgundians) advanced to the southeast, forming the left wing of a long offensive line; at the center of the offensive line were the Highland Germans (Hermionens), who made a breakthrough towards the upper Danube; on the right flank were the Iskavonians, now known as the Franks, who were advancing along the Rhine; and the task of conquering Britain fell on the Inglevonians. By the end of the fifth century, the Roman Empire was so weak, lifeless and helpless that it opened its doors to a German invasion.

　　Above we stand next to the cradle of ancient Greco-Roman civilization. Here we stand next to the grave of this civilization. The planers of Rome's world hegemony had been planing all the regions of the Mediterranean basin for hundreds of years. Wherever the Greek language was not resisted, all national languages had to give way to the misguided Latin; all ethnic differences disappeared, and the Gauls, Iberians, Ligurians, norrics ceased to exist, they all became Romans. Roman administration and Roman law destroyed the ancient blood community everywhere, and thus the last vestiges of local and national autonomy. The newly granted Roman citizenship did not provide any compensation; it did not express any national character, it was only an expression of the lack of national character. The elements of the new nation [neue Nationen] were available everywhere; the Latin dialects of the provinces were increasingly divergent; and the natural boundaries that once made Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Afrikace independent regions still existed and were still felt. But nowhere is there the power to form these elements into a new nation, and nowhere has there been any sign of development or resistance, let alone creativity. For the vast masses of people in the vast territory, there was only one bond that united them, and that was the Roman state, which over time became their fiercest enemy and oppressor. The provinces destroyed Rome, and Rome itself became a city of the provinces, like the other cities; it, though privileged, was no longer the ruler, no longer the center of the world empire, and no longer even the seat of the emperor and the deputy emperor, who now lived in Constantinople, Terry, Milan. The Roman state became a vast and complex machine dedicated to extracting the anointed blood of its subjects. Taxes, state service and various kinds of rents for constituencies plunged the masses of the people into the abyss of poverty, and extortion by magistrates, tax collectors and soldiers aggravated oppression to an intolerable level. The Roman state and its world hegemony produced the result that it based its right to exist on maintaining order internally and defending against barbarians externally; yet its order was worse than the worst of disorder, and it said that it protected citizens against barbarians, who worshipped barbarians as saviors.

　　The social situation is equally desperate. From the end of the republic, Roman rule had been based on the brutal exploitation of the conquered provinces; instead of eliminating this exploitation, the imperial system had made it a norm. The more the empire declined, the more taxes and conscription increased, and the more shamelessly the officials plundered and extorted. Commerce and industry have never been the livelihood of the Romans, who ruled over the peoples; it was only in the case of usury that they surpassed these peoples and nevertheless, and what commerce received was destroyed by the extortion of the officials; and what remained was found only in Greece in the eastern part of the empire, but this part was not within the scope of our study. Widespread impoverishment, the decline of commerce, handicrafts and the arts, the decline of the population, the decay of the cities, the retreat of agriculture to lower levels – this was the end result of the Roman domination of the world.

　　Agriculture was the decisive productive sector of the whole ancient world, and now it is even more so. In Italy, the large estates (Latifundiens), which had spread almost all over the territory since the time of the decline of the republic, were exploited in two ways: either as pastures, where the inhabitants were replaced by cattle and sheep, for the care of cattle and sheep was done with only a few slaves; or as a granary, where a large number of slaves were used to run a large-scale horticultural industry,—— partly to satisfy the lavish life of the lords, and partly to be sold in the city market. The great pastures were preserved, and even enlarged; but the estates and their horticulture declined with the poverty of the lords and the decline of the city. The large estate economy based on slave labor was no longer profitable; at that time it was the only possible form of large-scale agriculture. Small-scale operations are now the only advantageous form of farming. The farms were divided into small plots of land, rented to hereditary sharecroppers who paid a certain amount, or to partiarii [divided peasants], who received only one-sixth, or only one-ninth, of the products of their annual labor, and they were not so much sharecroppers as caretakers of the fields. But this small plot of land is mainly leased to the peasants, who pay a certain amount of money each year, attach to the land, and can be sold with that land; although this peasant is not a slave, he is not considered a free man, he cannot intermarry with a free man, and their marriage to each other is not considered legal, but like a slave marriage, it is regarded only as simple contubernium. They were the predecessors of medieval serfs.

　　Slavery in ancient times was outdated. It is no longer sufficient to provide a sufficient gain to compensate for the labour consumed, both in the large-scale agriculture of the countryside and in the handicraft industry in the cities, for the market for the sale of its products has disappeared. The enormous production of the prosperous era of the Empire had shrunk to small agriculture and small handicrafts, which could no longer accommodate large numbers of slaves. Only the slaves who did the housework for the rich and for his lavish life remained in society. But the decaying system of slavery can still lead to the idea that all productive labour is a matter of slavery and is not worthy of being done by free Romans, and that everyone is now a free Roman. Thus, on the one hand, the number of surplus and burdensome freed slaves is increasing; on the other hand, the number of peasants and impoverished free men (as in the former slave states of the United States was the powwhites [white poor]) is also increasing. Christianity has nothing to do with the gradual demise of slavery in ancient times. It lived in harmony with slavery in the Roman Empire for centuries, and never hindered the Christian trade in slaves,—— neither the Germans nor the Venetians in the Mediterranean, nor the black slave trade in later generations. [Note: According to Bishop Liuterplande of Cremona, in the tenth century in Verdun, that is to say, in the Holy German Empire, the manufacture of eunuchs became a major trade, because the import of these eunuchs into Spain for the use of the Moorish harem was profitable. Slavery was no longer advantageous and perished. But dying slavery left its poisonous thorns, that is, contempt for the productive labor of free men. The Roman world was thus plunged into a desperate situation: slavery was economically impossible, while the labor of free men was morally despised. The former is no longer the basic form of social production, and the latter cannot yet be this form. Only a radical revolution can break this desperate situation.

　　The situation in the provinces is not necessarily better. All our materials are the most about Gaul. Here, along with the subordinate peasants, there are also free small farmers. In order not to be brutally abused by officials, judges, and usurers, they often resorted to the powerful for protection; not only individual peasants, but also the commune as a whole, so that the emperors of the fourth century repeatedly issued orders prohibiting such behavior. But what benefits do those seeking protection get in doing so? The Protectors made it a condition that they would transfer ownership of their land to him, and he would guarantee them the use of the land for life,—— a ruse that the Holy Church had noticed and had sought to expand God's rule and ecclesiastical estates in the ninth and tenth centuries. To be sure, at that time, around 475 A.D., the Bishop of Marseille, Salvian, angrily opposed this plunder, saying that the oppression of the Roman officials and large landowners had reached an intolerable level, so much so that many "Romans" fled to the places occupied by the barbarians, and the Roman citizens who emigrated there feared most of all falling back under Roman rule. At that time, it was common for parents to sell their children into slavery because of poverty, as evidenced by the laws enacted to prohibit such acts.

　　The German barbarians liberated the Romans from their own country, and for this reason they seized two-thirds of the romans' total land to distribute themselves. This distribution was carried out in accordance with the clan system; since the number of conquerors was relatively small, vast tracts of land were not distributed, but were partly owned by the whole people and partly by the tribes and clans. Within each clan, the arable land and the meadow were divided equally among the households by drawing lots; whether it was subsequently redistributed is unknown, but in any case it was soon abolished in the Roman provinces, and the single share of the land became transferable private property, i.e. autonomously. Forests and pastures are used together without distribution; this use, and the way in which the arable land is allotted, is adjusted in accordance with ancient customs and decisions of the whole. The longer the clans settled in their villages, the more the Germans and Romans gradually merged, the more kinship ties gave way to regional ties; clans disappeared into the Marc commune, but within the Marc communes the traces of the original kinship between their members were often significant. Thus, at least in the countries preserved in the Malk Commune—in northern France, in England, in Germany, in Scandinavia,—— clan organizations were unconsciously transformed into regional organizations, and thus adapted to the state. But it still retains its naturally formed democratic character peculiar to the clan system as a whole; even when it was later forced to metamorphose, it left fragments of the clan system, thus leaving a weapon in the hands of the oppressed, and its vitality until modern times.

　　Thus, if the kinship in the clan soon loses its meaning, it is the result of the transformation of the organs of the clan system into conquest within the tribe and the whole nation [Volk]. We know that the rule of the conquered is incompatible with the clan system. Here we can see this on a large scale. The German nations, as masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize the conquered areas. But they could neither absorb large numbers of Romans into the clan groups, nor could they rule over them through clan groups. A substitute must be created to replace the Roman state in order to lead the Roman local administration, which at first mostly continued to exist, and which only another state could be competent for. Therefore, the organs of the clan system must be transformed into state organs, and by the times, this transformation must be carried out very rapidly. However, the most recent representative of the conqueror nation is the military chief. The internal and external security of the conquered areas demanded an increase in his power. So the time came for the power of the military chiefs to become kingly, and this transformation was finally realized.

　　Take the Frankish Kingdom, for example. Here, the victorious Salifari franks not only completely occupied the vast Roman territories, but also completely occupied all the large tracts of land that had not been allocated to regional communes and Malc communes, large and small, especially all the larger forest areas. The first thing the Frankish king, who had gone from being an ordinary supreme military chief to a true monarch, was to turn the property of the people into the property of the royal family, to steal it from the people and distribute it to his vassals in the form of gifts or gifts. This detachment, which at first consisted of his personal subordinates and the rest of the subordinate military chiefs, soon swelled up, not only because of the addition of the Romans, the Romanized Gauls, who, by virtue of their ability to write, be cultured, and who knew Romanic, Latin, and local law, but also because they were supplemented by slaves, serfs, and freed slaves, who constituted his court, and from among whom he chose his own favorees. All these people were given large tracts of land by the people, most of which were first given to them as gifts, and later given to them in the form of a harvester—mostly at first until the death of the king. Thus, the foundation of the new aristocracy was created at the expense of the people.

　　Not only that. Because of the vast size of the country, it was no longer possible to manage it by the tools of the old clan system; the council of clan chiefs could no longer be convened, if not disappeared prematurely; it was soon replaced by the king's fixed cronies; the old people's assembly continued to exist as a model, but increasingly became a meeting of purely subordinate military chiefs and new nobles. Like the peasants of Rome at the end of the former republic, the Frankish masses, the free peasants who owned the land, were exhausted and utterly bankrupt by successive civil wars of civil war and conquest, especially during the time of Charlemagne. By the beginning of the ninth century, the peasants, who at first constituted the whole army and, after the conquest of the French region, formed the core of the army, were so poor that it was rare to draw one out of five people to go out to fight. The self-defense forces of the free peasants, previously assembled directly by the king, were now replaced by an army of domestic servants of the nouveau riche. Among these domestic servants were also dependent peasants, who were the descendants of peasants who had previously known only that there was a king and not of other masters, and earlier did not know of any masters or even of kings. During the reign of Charlemagne's descendants, the Frankish peasant hierarchy was completely bankrupt due to civil war, the weakening of the royal power, and the corresponding stubbornness of the nobles (with the addition of those appointed by Charlemagne who sought to turn their positions into hereditary sheers), and finally, because of the invasion of the Normans. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, the Frankish kingdom fell weakly at the feet of the Normans, just as the Roman Empire had fallen at the feet of the Franks four hundred years earlier.

　　This is true not only in terms of inability to resist foreign enemies, but also in terms of the order of internal society (rather, the disorder of society). The free Frankish peasants were in the same situation as their predecessors, the Roman peasants. Bankrupted by war and plunder, they had to beg for the protection of the nouveau riche or the church, for the power of the king was too weak to protect them; but this protection forced them to pay a high price. As the Gallic peasants had done in the past, they had to give ownership of their land to the protector and lease the land back from him in various and constantly changing forms of rent, but always in the form of force and slave rent. As soon as they fell into this form of attachment, they gradually lost their personal freedom; after several generations, most of them became serfs. How quickly the free peasant hierarchy was wiped out is evidenced by the register of the estates of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-de-Pré compiled by Irminon (then near Paris, now in the city of Paris). The estate of this monastery is scattered around and is extremely large. During the lifetime of Charlemagne, there were 2,788 households, almost all of whom were Frankish by German names. Of these, 2,080 were subordinate peasants, 35 were semi-serfs, 220 were slaves, and only 8 were free sharecroppers! The protector had the peasants give him their land, and then gave it to the peasant for life, a custom that Sarviian had declared to be a deviance, and was now being imposed on the peasants by the church everywhere. The now growing popular form of servitude was based on both the Roman Angari, the forced labor of the state, and the labour of the members of the German Commune of Marc for bridges, roads, and other common purposes. In this way, the broad masses of the people seem to have returned to their original state of affairs after four hundred years.

　　This, however, only proves that, first, the social differentiation and the distribution of property in the Roman Empire during the period of decline were completely compatible with the level of production of agriculture and industry at that time, and were therefore inevitable; secondly, this level of production did not fundamentally decline and rise in the next four hundred years, and thus the same distribution of property and the same class of inhabitants were reproduced with the same necessity. In the last hundred years of the Roman Empire's existence, the city lost its former rule over the countryside, and it did not restore it during the first hundred years of German dominance. This presupposes the low level of development of agriculture and industry. Such a general situation inevitably produces large landowners who dominate and small peasants who are dependent. How impossible it was to graft on such a society the roman hacienda economy using slave labor or the new large-scale operation of servitude, as evidenced by Charlemagne's experiments with the sheer scale of the famous royal granary estates that left little trace. Only the monasteries have continued this experiment, and it is only for the monastery that it has had some effect; but the monasteries are an abnormal social organization based on celibacy; they may have exceptional achievements, but it is precisely because of this that they cannot but be an exception.

　　But in these four hundred years, after all, it is a step forward. Even though the main classes we see at the end of this period are almost the same as in the early days, the people who make up these classes are different after all. Slavery of antiquity has disappeared; the bankrupt, the poor, the free people who regard labor as a slave's unworthiness have also disappeared. Between the Roman peasants and the new serfs were the free Frankish peasants. The essence of the Roman state in its demise, its "futile memories and futile struggles" have died and been buried. The social classes of the ninth century were formed not in the decline of a dying civilization, but in the throes of the birth of a new civilization. The new generation, whether masters or servants, was already an adult generation compared to their Roman predecessors. The relationship between powerful landlords and peasants in servitude, once for the Romans a form of decline in the ancient world, is now a new starting point for development for the new generations. Secondly, no matter how much these four hundred years may seem like a wasted life, they have left behind a great result: the new formation and new combination of modern nations (moderne Nationalitäten), that is, the new formations and new combinations that Western European mankind has achieved for the sake of future history. The Germans did revitalize Europe, and thus the process of state destruction in the Germanic period ended not with the conquest of the Norman-Sarachins, but with the further development of the system of dependency into feudalism, and the population grew so much that it was able to withstand the shedding of the Crusades less than two hundred years later. [Note: From "And the population has also grown so greatly" until the end of the sentence, it was added by Engels in the 1891 edition.] ］

　　But what panacea did the Germans use to breathe new life into dying Europe? Is it that the German race was born with a special magic, as our chauvinistic historical writings have fictionalized? Absolutely not. The Germans, especially at the time, were a gifted Aryan tribe and were in the midst of a life-threatening development. But what brought Europe back to life was not their particular national characteristics, but only their barbaric state, their clan system.

　　Their individual talents and bravery, their love of freedom, and their democratic instinct to regard all public things as their own, in short, all the qualities lost by the Romans,—— and only these qualities can create a new state from the sludge of the Roman world, a new nation [neue Nationaliäten]—all of this, if not the characteristics of the barbarians of the higher stages, if not the fruit of their clan system, what is it?

　　If the Germans reformed the ancient forms of monogamy, eased the rule of men in the family, and gave women a higher status than at any time in the classical world, what enabled them to do so, if not by their barbaric state, by their clan customs, if not by their legacy of the matriarchy era?

　　If they have preserved a part of the real clan system in the form of the Marc Commune in at least three of the most important countries— Germany, northern France, and England— and brought it to the feudal states, so that the oppressed classes, the peasantry, can have local means of solidarity and resistance even under the most brutal conditions of medieval serfdom, and these two things are not so readily available either in the slaves of antiquity or in the proletariat of modern times, If it is not their barbaric state, if it is not their pure barbarian way of settling by clan, what is it?

　　Finally, if they can develop and raise to the level of universality the more moderate form of subordination which has been practised in their homeland, into which slavery in the Roman Empire was increasingly transformed, which, as Fourier first pointed out, provides the enslaved with a means of gradual emancipation as a class (fournitaux cultivateurs des moyens).　d'affranchisse-ment collectif et progressif [Note: It provides a means for land cultivators to gain collective and gradual emancipation. For this reason, this form is greatly superior to slavery, under which only a single person can be immediately released without going through a transitional state (slavery was not abolished in ancient times by means of a victorious uprising), while the medieval serfs actually gradually achieved their emancipation as a class,—— if so, all this is not due to their barbaric state (because of this barbarism, They have not yet attained fully developed slavery: neither the slavery of labour in antiquity nor the slavery of the Family in the East), and what is the credit?

　　Everything that the Germans injected into the Roman world with vitality and life was the stuff of the Barbaric Age. Indeed, only barbarians can make a world struggling with a dying civilization young. The advanced stage of the barbaric epoch that the Germans had tried to reach and had reached before the Great Migration of Nations was the most suitable for this process. That says it all.