The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified—minus its polygamy—with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all.”

Capitalism represents itself as inevitable, and one of the ways it advances that claim is by treating the social arrangements that it produces as entirely natural, so that any deviation is a perversion. This argument is particularly effective when it comes to marriage and sexual arrangements, where standards of appropriateness are applied with particular rigor. To question the family unit is to open oneself to harsh criticism, and so it is preferable to remain silent and therefore perpetuate the supreme power of capital.

“The whole matter of the dispute [between matriarchy and patriarchy] is briefly summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies. Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain her husband and thus she has also slain his father. Why should the Furies pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty? The answer is striking: ‘She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.’”

Engels's analysis of the Oresteia views the tragedy as representing the moment when ancient Greece shifted from matriarchy to patriarchy and thus set in motion the end of what he calls “the gentile constitution.” For Orestes—whose judgments are still informed by the old order—kinship is the most important form of social bond.

“This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present, so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of development in their main outlines are now determined. That this opens a new epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone.”

The idea of evolution is key to Marx and Engels’s theories. Although a revolution would ultimately be necessary to displace capitalism, this was understood to be an entirely logical and inevitable result of capitalism itself. Just as human beings evolved from primates in response to their environment, human society would likewise evolve into a condition better suited to its essential needs. Demonstrating that the patriarchal form of the family is in fact an evolution from an earlier, matriarchal form indicates that such social transformations are possible.

“The sketch which I have given here, following Morgan, of the development of mankind through savagery and barbarism to the beginnings of civilization, is already rich enough in new features; what is more, they cannot be disputed, since they are drawn directly from the process of production. Yet my sketch will seem flat and feeble compared with the picture to be unrolled at the end of our travels; only then will the transition from barbarism to civilization stand out in full light and in all its striking contrasts.”

Engels’s very brief first chapter lays out a basic outline of the progression from “savagery” to “barbarism” to “civilization,” as determined by major technological advancements and the basic status of human beings as scavengers, hunters, or farmers. In true Marxist form, he characterizes the main phases of history with respect to the prevailing means of production. So far he has withheld the discussion of the family, which will dominate the rest of the text, in order to affirm the fundamental point that humanity itself has evolved, so that the same point can then be applied to specific institutions such as marriage and the family.

“The family [says Morgan] represents an active principle. It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition…Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed. [Morgan, op. cit., p. 444. —Ed.] ‘And,’ adds Marx, ‘the same is true of the political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general.’”

At this point, Engels makes an explicit connection between Morgan’s anthropology and Marx’s dialectical materialism. Humanity progresses in all forms, but that progress is unequal. Just as capitalism has reached its greatest advancements in Europe and the United States, the patriarchal family has likewise advanced much further in some places than others. In both cases, the less advanced systems tend to last a long time, whereas the modern form starts to generate its own set of contradictions, which prompts innovations while also exacerbating its own contradictions and undermining the foundations of its own stability.

“Where the European sees immorality and lawlessness, strict law rules in reality. The women belong to the marriage group of the stranger, and therefore they are his wives by birth; that same law of custom which gives the two to one another forbids under penalty of outlawry all intercourse outside the marriage groups that belong together. Even when wives are captured, as frequently occurs in many places, the law of the exogamous classes is still carefully observed.”

Since modern Europeans have learned to think of the patriarchal family as the only acceptable arrangement, they look to any form of plural marriage as promiscuous and therefore degenerate. In reality, Engels says, such systems were managed by highly elaborate rules rooted in the understanding of marriage a given society had at the time, but because those rules are not the same as contemporary ones, they are dismissed as being no rules at all.

“The overthrow of the mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument of the production of children. This degraded position of the woman…has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.”

In Engels’s summary of the history of the family, women tended to occupy a position of centrality and authority, not least because they were the only confirmed parent of any particular child. Also, in eras that actually valued labor, women’s efforts to raise children and take care of the home granted them considerable social esteem. The triumph of men is in some respects a precursor to the triumph of capitalism, although the former precedes the latter by many centuries because it marks the separation between ownership and labor. Men used the work of women to subjugate them, and enjoy all the rewards, just as capitalism yields the profits by owning the means of production without having to do very much, if any, of the physical labor.

“All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized…It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character.”

Quoting Morgan, Engels uses this passage to defend the gentile constitution as the freest and most noble form of the human family. Brotherhood extended beyond literal shared parentage, as all people within a phratry or tribe saw themselves as family, and the institutions of society were coextensive with these familial relationships. Freedom was therefore more authentic, and life more dignified, because of the certainty that each person had a place within the core unit.

“And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits—and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened—and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization.”

This passage exhibits both the promise and perils of the ‘noble savage’ trope, finding something genuinely admirable and beautiful in Indigenous peoples, while also regarding them condescendingly as children rather than fully fledged human beings. For Engels, Iroquois ways of life offer a vision of what life can be without the institutions of the state which modern peoples have come to take for granted, forgetting what they still retain from their “barbaric” past and what they have lost in foregoing it.

“Under the gentile constitution, the family was never an organizational unit, and could not be so, for man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gentes. The whole gens was incorporated within the phratry, and the whole phratry within the tribe; but the family belonged half to the gens of the man and half to the gens of the woman. In public law the state also does not recognize the family; up to this day, the family only exists for private law. 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.”

People have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into thinking of the family as a single household, that Engels must make an intense effort to redefine the term. For most of human history, the family was the gens, the bloodline, which may have featured some monogamy but not as its guiding principle. In earlier, better days, the family was the unit around which society operated, and indeed there was no governance outside of family structures. It took the state to redefine the family as a private matter, in which the husband wielded a tyranny comparable to that of the kings, nobles, and later capitalists.

“Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter.”

Marxist theory holds that the state is the tool of the ruling classes, but this does not mean that the state is unimportant, or merely one tool among many. It is the key weapon in the arsenal of the propertied elites looking to safeguard their interests against society at large, and it is in fact the establishment of the state that makes possible a society formally divided along the lines of class. Class struggle is responsible for the state, but it cannot endure without it.

“But the Athenians were soon to learn how rapidly the product asserts its mastery over the producer when once exchange between individuals has begun and products have been transformed into commodities. With the coming of commodity production, individuals began to cultivate the soil on their own account, which soon led to individual ownership of land. Money followed, the general commodity with which all others were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power before which the whole of society must bow. And it was this new power, suddenly sprung to life without knowledge or will of its creators, which now, in all the brutality of its youth, gave the Athenians the first taste of its might.”

Money is viewed as a great convenience, a universally agreed-upon principle of exchange that makes commerce far more efficient. This may be true, but it was to the detriment of society more broadly, since money also created an intermediary between the producer and the consumer which allowed for an entire phase of economic activity to arise which subjugated producer and consumer alike to an arbitrary set of rules. Whereas in an earlier period, a producer could know the value of their work, now the only certainty they could find was in accumulating as much money as possible, turning a symbiotic relationship with their fellow economic actors into ferocious competition.

“[W]ith the development of commerce and industry wealth was accumulated and concentrated in a few hands, and the mass of the free citizens were impoverished. Their only alternatives were to compete against slave labor with their own labor as handicraftsman, which was considered base and vulgar and also offered very little prospect of success, or to become social scrap. Necessarily, in the circumstances, they did the latter, and, as they formed the majority, they thereby brought about the downfall of the whole Athenian state. The downfall of Athens was not caused by democracy, as the European lickspittle historians assert to flatter their princes, but by slavery, which banned the labor of free citizens.”

At each step of his review of social institutions, Engels finds people confronting unmanageable dilemmas. The expansion of commerce and industry in Athens seemed to make enslaved labor necessary, but competition from enslaved labor made it nearly impossible to be a free laborer. Historians like to blame the democratic ‘rabble’ for the ultimate failure of free institutions in Greece, but as so often happens, the pursuit of wealth generated contradictions to which there was no resolution so long as the basic principles of the system remained in force.

“The great obscurity which envelops the completely legendary primitive history of Rome—an obscurity considerably deepened by the rationalistically pragmatical interpretations and accounts given of the subject by later authors with legalistic minds—makes it impossible to say anything definite about the time, course, or occasion of the revolution which made an end of the old gentile constitution. All that is certain is that its cause lay in the struggles between plebs and populus.”

Rome is in many respects a more difficult case to probe than those of the Iroquois or the Greeks, in large part because the facts of their origins are concealed beneath layers of myth. Central to this myth is a story of liberty, the overthrow of kings, and the establishment of a republic which ultimately and tragically gave way to an empire. For Engels, the real struggle is between classes, and the upper classes succeed each step of the way, simply swapping out one set of institutions for new ones better suited to their interests.

“Thus in Rome also, even before the abolition of the so-called monarchy, the old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth. Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians.”

Where commerce was the death of liberty in ancient Greece, military expansion was the precipitating agent in ancient Rome. In this case, the swelling of the population caused by expansion confronted the original inhabitants of the city with the dilemma of needing to staff their forces with as many men as possible, while fearing their potential to translate their prowess into military power. The result was a deliberately unrepresentative system that institutionalized the conflict between the wealthy minority and the majority.

“But that formerly mother-right prevailed in Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts succession was in the female line. Among the Scots, as among the Welsh, a relic even of the punaluan family persisted into the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which the head of the clan or the king, as last representative of the former community of husbands, had the right to exercise with every bride, unless it was compounded for money.”

The system of the gens lasted surprisingly long in areas such as Ireland and Scotland that were far less subjected to Roman power. Even early Christian historians like Bede, who might have had an interest in suppressing knowledge of alternative family structures, noted a system of consanguinity not unlike that which was later discovered in the Hawaiian islands. Similarly, while the ritual of ‘first night’ is often taken as evidence of medieval tyranny, a lord taking his pleasure with a man’s wife, Engels sees it as a vestige of a more communal notion of marriage, which lingered on in custom but was effectively rendered hollow by the ability to pay the noblemen off.

“One institution particularly favored the rise of kingship: the retinues. We have already seen among the American Indians how, side by side with the gentile constitution, private associations were formed to carry on wars independently. Among the Germans, these private associations had already become permanent.”

The further one progresses in history, the less likely it is that the radical democracy that prevailed among the Iroquois is to be in evidence. The Germans, for all of their virtues, were “civilized” enough on their own to contribute to the downfall of human freedom, particularly when they lent a portion of their fast-growing population to serve as mercenaries in an overstretched Roman army. With this institution, the old ways of the temporary war chief morphed into the permanent existence of warlords, who would in turn declare themselves kings in the wake of Rome’s collapse.

“The Roman state had become a huge, complicated machine, exclusively for bleeding its subjects, Taxes, state imposts and tributes of every kind pressed the mass of the people always deeper into poverty; the pressure was intensified until the exactions of governors, tax-collectors, and armies made it unbearable. That was what the Roman state had achieved with its world rule. It gave as the justification of its existence that it maintained order within the empire and protected it against the barbarians without. But its order was worse than the worst disorder, and the citizens whom it claimed to protect against the barbarians longed for the barbarians to deliver them.”

The Roman Empire was an early version of what capitalism would accomplish on a global scale. Its bloated bureaucracy, corrupt officials, and stagnant economy were the inevitable outcome for the world’s most “civilized” people, as civilization for Engels is nothing other than class conflict dressed up in attractive garb. In Engels’s day, it is up to the workers to take on the role of the “barbarians,” but in this case by introducing an entirely new form of social organization rather than by appropriating old ones.

“The German peoples, now masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize what they had conquered. But they could neither absorb the mass of Romans into the gentile bodies nor govern them through these bodies. At the head of the Roman local governing bodies, many of which continued for the time being to function, had to be placed a substitute for the Roman state, and this substitute could only be another state.”

In a great historical irony, the fall of the Roman empire was the precondition for the spread and endurance of Roman institutions for many centuries, ultimately taking the form of the modern state. The Germans did not adopt these institutions out of greed or corrupt motives—they had to use what was available to govern, and by using institutions designed to exploit people, they became greedy and corrupt by virtue of running a class-based system.

“But what was the mysterious magic by which the Germans breathed new life into a dying Europe? Was it some miraculous power innate in the Germanic race, such as our chauvinist historians romance about? Not a bit of it. The Germans, especially at that time, were a highly gifted Aryan tribe, and in the full vigor of development. It was not, however, their specific national qualities which rejuvenated Europe, but simply—their barbarism, their gentile constitution.”

A German himself, Engels is conscious of the fact that he might be accused of “chauvinism” by assigning his own people a special role in history, despite Marxism prohibiting any nation from claiming such privileges. He insists that the significance of the Germans has nothing to do with any inherent German-ness; rather, they are simply the people who managed to inject just enough of the “barbarian” spirit into modern Europe to keep the spirit of freedom alive.

“We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry.”

Here Engels makes explicit the connection between what would later be called feminism and the core of the Marxist argument. The emancipation of women and the emancipation of the worker are inseparable parts of the same overall goal. Bringing women out of the home and into the workplace will further build the ranks of the proletariat, the class on which all hopes for revolution are placed. Furthermore, it will weaken the division between public and private which is at the heart of the capitalist order, and restore a condition where family, work, and government are all part of the same sphere.

“At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them.” 

If overthrowing the state seems like a gargantuan task, then there is hope in the knowledge that it has not existed forever, or even terribly long in the grand scheme of human history. If anything, the modern state is more vulnerable than ever because the dislocations at the heart of class conflict have become so unmanageable that it has no choice but to act and make the problem even worse. The revolutionary can thus take comfort in the fact that however difficult the task, the result is preordained.

“With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual—here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.”

Stating a main thesis of the book, Engels avows that civilization has on the whole been terrible for humanity, introducing material comforts at the cost of alienating it from its natural condition. When people describe things like greed and violence as part of human nature, they are making an error. Nature, in Engels’s view, is mostly kind and generous. It is social institutions that have corrupted humanity, and so there is hope for humanity with a new set of social institutions.