The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Morgan lived among the Iroquois people of North America, whose marriages were far more flexible, and who identified familial relations more in terms of shared gender than actual blood relation: for example, girls calling uncles “uncle” but aunts “mother” (58). This system of “consanguinity” is also practiced among many peoples across Asia. Morgan cites a family structure in Hawaii that regards all cousins as brothers and sisters. For Morgan, this proves that the family “is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition” (60). In this respect, Marx compares family structures to political and economic systems, which likewise evolve. Morgan treats monogamy as the endpoint of this teleology of the family, showing how various forms of polygamy are gradually phased out in favor of monogamous pairings. However, he does not depict this as a movement from sexual chaos to sexual order. Rather, history shows a range of different orders, including group marriage which did not proceed from a more promiscuous system before it. People want to deny the “shame” of a more promiscuous past (62), but all animals have exhibited a wide range of behaviors toward sex and partnerships, none of which closely correlate with levels of intellect or development. Among many animals, arrangements have more to do with the penchant among males for violence against sexual rivals, which “sets the animal family in opposition to the herd” (64). Human beings were too weak for such isolation, and so a more herd-like approach was surely necessary among primitive humans.

For Engels, to speculate about a more promiscuous culture is to imagine “the absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force” (65). Drawing on Morgan’s research, he claims that for many cultures, no such restrictions ever existed in the first place, even on incest, at least as that term is currently understood. It is unfair to look back at earlier periods, which by contemporary standards might be viewed as promiscuous, and judge them according to contemporary European sexual morality. In the most “primitive” stage, it was assumed that family members of the same generation, even brothers and sisters, would be expected to reproduce together. This form of family does not exist in practice anywhere anymore. The next step was to preclude relations among brothers and sisters, and then between cousins. At this point, Hawaii appears to have developed a system where groups of men and women held each other while excluding their blood relatives. It most likely spread more widely but was then suppressed by Spanish missionaries who saw it as merely an “abomination” (70). In all such group arrangements, the mother is the only certain parent of a particular child, leading to matrilineal family structures. Engels then speculates that nearly all modern cultures had these kinds of family structures at some point in their history.

There has been much anthropological research among various tribes, confirming the existence of various systems of marriage. Some tighten the criteria of eligibility by generation, for example, allowing first cousins for one generation and second cousins for the next. Group marriage, far from being a license for sexual anarchy, was largely an extension of tribal alliances, a means of welcoming certain strangers into the community. In between a more primitive system of total group marriage, and the more specific definitions of consanguinity, there is a system of hierarchies within plural marriages. These modified plural marriages eventually stabilized into one-on-one marriages with some room for polygamy or infidelity, and easy terms of separation. As people married outside their bloodline, their genetic stock became stronger and they thus earned competitive advantages over their rivals. This encouraged other societies to restrict the conditions of marriage within bloodlines, but the scarcity of females meant that marriage often had to be secured by either capture or purchase, the latter entailing negotiations with the betrothed’s parents. In such conditions, a woman enjoyed esteem as the only certain parent and as keeper of the home, whose intense, nonstop work marked her as a “real lady” (80).

Engels cites Bachofen’s discovery that in some cultures, women were consigned to marriage with a single man, as opposed to the group, as a form of penance for violating divine laws. In other cases, “girls enjoy the greatest sexual freedom up to the time of their marriage” (81), and in still others the bride herself offered herself to the groom only after satisfying the claims of relatives and friends. Feudal lords exercised such rights in Europe until as late as the 15th century. According to Engels, the move to strict monogamy arose in part from the establishment of private property. For a long time, property could only be held in common, but as group marriages started to break apart into distinct families, those families gained more control, at the same time that men gained more control since as hunters they claimed ownership over the means of acquiring food. In a matrilineal society, a dead man’s possessions would go to his siblings and other relatives rather than his children, since they derived rights from their mother. However, eventually “mother right…had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was” (86). This was accomplished by designating women as children of their fathers rather than their mothers. All it took was to give children a name from their paternal lineage, and therein lay the “world historical defeat of the female sex” (87). This meant at first the general subordination of an entire household to the power of the father, with wives and children basically sharing the status of enslaved persons (an arrangement prominently featured in ancient Rome). Some Slavic peoples have exhibited a kind of middle stage between group marriage and complete patriarchy, where there are husbands and wives, but all families live communally and are governed by councils comprising both men and women.

Various cultures have practiced both polygyny (one man having multiple wives and polyandry (one woman having multiple husbands), but it could never be a universal practice due to gender imbalances. For men, having multiple wives was “the privilege of the wealthy and the nobility” (91), and in other cases, the two institutions overlapped, so that a man who shared a woman with other husbands also had his own wives, and so forth. Monogamy marks the next step in social development, not only establishing two partners within a marriage but also raising the barriers to separation. It also tends to permit infidelity to men, at least tacitly, while punishing women for the same. In the Homeric era, men were free to take women into sexual slavery, which for Engels suggests “the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy” (93). Women in Athens spent their whole lives cloistered, suitable only for producing legitimate heirs. Engels then reiterates that monogamy arose with private property, as the purpose of monogamy was to preserve wealth for the heirs of the father. In keeping with Marxist theory, he notes that “prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others” (96). Men, especially powerful men, retain some sexual freedom, as censure falls not on them but on the women with whom they consort. Monogamy—with strict prohibitions on extramarital sex for women—serves to guarantee the legitimacy of patrilineal descent, as it cannot otherwise be proven that the mother’s husband is the child’s father. The Germans, Engels notes, were relatively freer in their monogamy, with women enjoying the right to separate unions and a greater role in public affairs.

Within monogamous marriages, affection between the partners was not a major consideration. The result is a “domestic partnership of leaden boredom” (101-02), a product of convenience and economic interests. Further proof of this lies in a study of marriage among the proletariat, which is no longer truly monogamous since the need for a double income invalidates the father’s control over his household. In Engels’s view, marriage reflects a kind of contract between labor and management, in which promises of protection turn into a reality of dependence on a cruel and arbitrary authority. As capitalism evolves, and the contradictions within it become more manifest, monogamy will fall just as previous arrangements succumbed to major social and economic trends. When the workers come to control the means of production, the family as presently constituted will make no sense, as there is no need to concentrate wealth by hoarding it away from others. Society itself will look after children, freeing women from this onerous burden and hopefully restoring their long-lost social esteem. Whoever loves another person will be free to pursue them and have sex with them, as sentiment will be more important than legal arrangements. In the ancient and medieval worlds, passion was largely equated with adultery, but now that capitalism has turned everything into a commodity, so that the whole world is now a marketplace, it makes sense for every person to be a free and rational consumer of sex as much as any good or service. Capitalism must be abolished so that people are entirely free to form bonds with whomever they wish, without the bias of economic considerations. Women will then gain more power, and if they wish, might be able to compel men to be more monogamous than they actually are in a formally monogamous system. Unions should form easily, and dissolve easily as sentiments change. This system will require a change in attitudes, of people who “care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it” (114).