Friedrich Engels

Tristram Hunt

Discusses private property and its relationship to the subjugation of women and analyzes the rise of the territorial state, in a new edition of a classic work of 19th-century socialist thought. Reissue.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

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In an article, ‘The true socialists’, he critiqued the act of prostitution as symbolic of the corruption of human relations brought about by the capitalist mode of production: ‘the most tangible exploitation – one directly attacking the physical body – of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, one of the more interesting developments of recent years has been the explicit use of an ideology of ‘women’s rights’ to justify ‘liberal interventionist’ actions by Western powers. From the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan onwards, part of the creed of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair was a battle for the liberation of women from the backward, feudal clutches of the ruling Taliban. All this, despite the obvious irony that what American and British forces were seeking to do was return Afghanistan to the policies of female education, literacy and enfranchisement previously adopted by the communist-inspired and Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party during the 1980s.

Whereas in the earlier forms of the family, men never lacked women but, on the contrary, had too many rather than too few, women had now become scarce and highly sought after. Hence it is with the pairing marriage that there begins the capture and purchase of women – widespread symptoms, but no more than symptoms, of the much deeper change that had occurred. These symptoms, mere methods of procuring wives, the pedantic Scot McLennan has transmogrified into special classes of families under the names of ‘marriage by capture’ and ‘marriage by purchase’.

Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women – the mothers – are held in high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honourable.

It was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own. Otherwise, marriage was a burden, a duty which had to be performed whether one liked it or not to gods, state, and one’s ancestors.

With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene – the wife’s attendant lover and the cuckold husband. The husbands had won the victory over the wives, but the vanquished magnanimously provided the crown. Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable social institution – denounced, severely penalized, but impossible to suppress.

The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.

And when, with the preponderance of private over communal property and the interest in its bequeathal father right and monogamy gained supremacy, the dependence of marriages on economic considerations became complete. The form of marriage by purchase disappears; the actual practice is steadily extended until not only the woman but also the man acquires a price – not according to his personal qualities but according to his property. That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance – or among the oppressed classes, who did not count.

Full freedom of marriage can therefore only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. For then there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.

And yet all our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, which since the eighteenth century in particular has become inviolable, that the monogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is the core around which society and state have gradually crystallized.

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