The birth and demise of marriage
The institution of marriage, like other social institutions, did not always exist. The marriage and family system and the economic system are the original system, and the other systems are all derivative systems of the family system and the economic system.
The marriage and family system is the product of the complementary interests of men and women in material production and population production, which arose after the emergence of private property and died out in the era of great wealth in society. The conditions for the existence of the marriage and family system are: there are differences between men and women in material production and population production, there is exchange; there is a surplus of social wealth but has not developed to an era of great abundance; men in the mainstream population are stronger than women in material production capacity, men have a desire for clear offspring and women cannot satisfy themselves materially. Two forms of society do not have the conditions for marriage: first, the primitive era when there was no surplus wealth and social products had to be distributed equally; the other was the communist era when social wealth was so abundant that there was no material difference between men and women and there was no need to "exchange" resources.
Marriage is a product of the economy. Love can make men and women sexual, but love is volatile, there is no permanent and consistent love, so marriage based on pure love is unstable. Love is not the root cause of the institution of marriage. In layman's terms, men need to make it clear that the inferiority of offspring women to men in material production capacity is the root cause of marriage. Inequality in the economic capacity of men and women is the root cause of marriage. When the era of women in mainstream society who were not dependent on men economically arrived, marriage gradually withdrew from the stage of history.
Primitive society, people live in groups in the form of tribes, marriage is group marriage, and there is no difference between ordinary animals. The extreme scarcity of the means of production compels public ownership among the tribes, with the elderly, the sick and children under the common care of all.
With the development of the productive forces, a natural division of labor emerged within the tribes, and primary private property already existed in society. At this time, men go out hunting, while women can engage in relatively easy harvesting and agricultural production. This has allowed women to have more time to contact their children and a more social mother-child relationship. Because the tribe is still in a state of group marriage, the father of the child cannot be determined, and the mother can form the parental rights for a corresponding long time. We know that social production includes man's own production and the production of material goods. At this time, the social productivity is low, man and nature are in the most primitive state of struggle, and man's production is the first, so society forms a state of matrilineal society. The fertility cult of this period was mostly female worship, and to this day, some fragments of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching are still considered to be remnants of primitive matriarchal society. In the Zhou Dynasty ritual vessels, Huang Chun was used, and the shape of Huang Chun was derived from female genitalia.
The further development of the productive forces finally led to the emergence of private property and the emergence of agrarian civilization. At this time there was a relative surplus of social products, and men, because they had a stronger labor force, gradually became the main possessors of the means and products of production. While men themselves cannot have children, material materials need to be inherited, and objectively some way needs to be invented so that men can judge which is their offspring. Thus the real institution of marriage was born, in the form of a husband-led system of husband and wife. The purpose of the old ethics and morality that stipulates that women should end from one is nothing more than to facilitate the man's judgment of which is his own child. At this time, the worship of fertility was mostly the worship of male genitalia, and there are still stone carvings related to male genitalia worship in some villages in Bashu.
There are three types of conjugal systems in terms of quantitative comparison, "polygamy", "polygamy" and "monogamy". In Friedman's Economics of Life, there is an elaborate analysis of these three forms. In short, according to the theory of supply and demand, the conclusion is that "polygamy" intensifies the competition of men and is economically strong for women, while "polyandry" is beneficial to men. The result of a long period of two-way game is the result of the current "monogamy". The specific way of marriage was also inseparable from the social and natural environment at that time.
There are two main reasons why "polygamy" has been widespread in various countries for a long time. Men have always been the main producer, and have long mastered the means of production, so that women have to rely on men to survive. Second, the frequent wars in ancient times led to a relatively sparse male population, and the asymmetry of the population ratio led to multiple women having to rely on one man to survive. The opposite example comes from an interview program on Central Radio the other day. It introduces a family in Tibet that now does exist in "polygamy." The environment in which the family lived was so harsh that the labor of a man alone was simply not enough to feed a woman and their children, and only multiple husbands could carry out productive activities separately to maintain the daily life of the family.
In feudal society, in order to avoid transitional competition for inheritance, many countries began to "polygamy" based on "monogamy", and often had special rights for one of the women. In China, it is embodied in the "polygamous concubinage system", in which the offspring of the wife have the right to inherit, while others do not. The laws and ethics of societies also began to flourish and develop at this time, the fundamental purpose of which was to facilitate the division of property. The marriage and inheritance laws we use now are the result of this trend.
In capitalist society, this has changed again. Repeated industrial revolutions have led to a high degree of development of production, and social production has gradually shifted from physical to mental labor. Equal employment opportunities for men and women emerged, and a feminist movement erupted. In fact, before this, not all women felt that "polygamy" was an oppression of themselves, but they were more secure in their lives. Equal opportunities for men and women at work eventually led to "monogamy" officially becoming mainstream in society.
But it should be recognized that the marriage system is, after all, a product of social production and a social system, and its purpose is to distribute the means of production, and its essence is anti-human. The increase in the rate of divorce in society and the increase in single-person households are also the result of the development of social production – both men and women can support themselves and their children on their own labor alone, without the help of the other. As a result, people behave more freely, and the development of personality is no longer oppressed by the competition for survival.
After that, the question of "communist wives" is involved. In fact, the reference to "communist wives" was originally a bourgeois argument, because at that time it seemed to people at that time that women were like other means of production, and since all other means of production could be communist, then women's special means of production could also be co-wives. It's a pity that they were right about the outcome and not the right reason.
In communist society, the productive forces develop tremendously, material resources are greatly enriched, and classes, the state, and private property all naturally wither away. The marriage system that has long been associated with private property naturally ceases to exist. The main contradiction of human society will bid farewell to the contradiction between man and nature and transform it into a contradiction of its own development. That is to say, everyone only needs to think about how to meet their various development needs. The problem of procreation, which has always been hampered by marriage, will be transformed into a social problem, not a personal problem. The great abundance of material information ensures that society implements the distribution principle of "each doing his best, taking what he needs", and all children and the elderly are raised by society, so that men and women can be united by equal mutual attraction, and this union is free and arbitrary. In the end, the so-called "communist wife" (which should be a communist couple) was finally realized in form. Now, the world's most productive country, the United States, the adult single rate is 51%, if this data becomes 61%, 71%, 81%, 91%... Is marriage dying out of the mainstream?
It can be seen that the marriage system did not always exist, nor did it exist forever. It arises with the emergence of private property, changes with the development of production, and eventually becomes loose with the demise of private property.