From The First Day To This

From The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels's historical anthropology of how class society emerged. Drawing on Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), Engels argued that the transition from communal to private property — and the state apparatus that protected it — was driven not by rational design but by accumulating self-interest. The claim that greed was the driving spirit of civilization was a direct inversion of bourgeois historiography, which celebrated private property and commerce as the foundations of progress. Karl Marx had outlined similar arguments in his notebooks before his death in 1883; Engels completed the work from those notes.