Classics The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument¶

Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State argues that the family, private property, and the state are not eternal or natural institutions but historical products of specific economic and social conditions. Drawing on Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological research, Engels demonstrates that early human societies were organised around the gens — a communistic kinship structure without class divisions, private property, or state apparatus. The emergence of a surplus, the development of exchange, and the rise of class society transformed the gens into the state, a body of armed men serving the interests of the ruling class. Simultaneously, the position of women was degraded from relative equality to systematic oppression, as monogamous marriage became a mechanism for ensuring paternity and transmitting private wealth. The central thesis is that the state is not a neutral arbiter but an instrument of class rule, and that women’s oppression is rooted in the class character of society, not in biology or nature.

Theoretical Grounding¶

The work is a foundational application of historical materialism to pre-class societies and the transition to civilisation. Engels extends Marx’s method beyond the analysis of capitalism to the entire span of human history, showing that the mode of production determines the forms of social organisation, including kinship and gender relations. The analysis draws on Morgan’s stadial theory of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, but Engels reworks it through a class lens: civilisation is defined by the emergence of class antagonism and the state. The text also engages with the Marxist theory of the state as a product of irreconcilable class contradictions — a position later elaborated by Lenin in The State and Revolution. Engels’s treatment of women’s oppression anticipates later Marxist-feminist debates by grounding the subordination of women in the shift from communal to private property, rather than in a transhistorical patriarchy. The work sits within the classical Marxist tradition’s insistence that all social institutions, including those thought most natural, are historically contingent and transformable through revolutionary change.

Conjunctural Relevance¶

Although written in 1884, the text remains directly relevant to the current conjuncture. The intensification of attacks on women’s rights — including the rollback of abortion access in the United States, the resurgence of anti-feminist ideologies, and the global rise of the far right — underscores the continued need for a materialist analysis of women’s oppression. Engels’s argument that the nuclear family functions as a unit of private property transmission and a site of women’s unpaid labour is borne out by the persistence of the gender pay gap, the disproportionate burden of domestic and care work on women, and the crisis of social reproduction intensified by austerity. The state’s role as an instrument of class rule is visible in the response to the cost-of-living crisis, where governments prioritise corporate profits and debt repayment over working-class needs, and in the militarisation of borders and policing. Geopolitically, the return of great-power rivalry and the fragmentation of global supply chains reflect the intensifying contradictions of capitalism that Engels’s method is designed to analyse. The text also speaks to debates within the left about the relationship between class and gender oppression, offering a framework that rejects both economism and identity politics in favour of a unified materialist analysis.

Where the Argument Continues¶

The article itself is a republication of Engels’s full text, so the argument is complete within its own terms. However, the Marxist.com edition includes an introduction by Rob Sewell that situates the text in its historical context and defends its method against later anthropological critiques. The IDOM website also hosts supplementary articles — The Origins of the Family and Origin of the family: In Defence of Engels and Morgan — which address challenges to Engels’s empirical claims and reaffirm the theoretical core. A video discussion on the same subject is also available. The broader corpus of Marxist theory continues the argument through Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which develops Engels’s theory of the state, and through contemporary Marxist-feminist work on social reproduction, which extends Engels’s analysis of women’s labour under capitalism. The RCI’s own publications and Against the Stream episodes regularly return to these themes in the context of current struggles over reproductive rights, the family, and the state.

Connections¶

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England — Engels’s earlier empirical study of class society, providing the materialist method applied to pre-class societies in Origin.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology — The foundational text of historical materialism, which establishes the primacy of the mode of production and the historical character of social institutions.
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution — Directly builds on Engels’s theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, arguing for its abolition under communism.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society — The anthropological source that Engels reworks through a Marxist lens; reading it alongside Origin reveals Engels’s theoretical intervention.
Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Woman Question — A Bolshevik feminist text that extends Engels’s analysis of women’s oppression into the revolutionary period.
Contemporary Marxist-feminist work on social reproduction — Authors such as Silvia Federici, Lise Vogel, and Cinzia Arruzza develop Engels’s insights into the role of unpaid domestic labour under capitalism.

Key Quotes¶

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the ethical idea,’ ‘the image and reality of reason,’ as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.”
“The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.”
“The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also; the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for the production of children.”
“The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
“Civilisation is the stage of development in which the division of labour, the exchange between individuals, and the commodity production which combines them into one society, have reached their full development and have overthrown all earlier forms of society.”
“The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of individual families as its molecules.”