2. The Family¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 2: The Family¶
Engels, drawing on Morgan’s pioneering research among the Iroquois, reveals a fundamental contradiction between living systems of kinship and the actual family forms that produce them. The Iroquois system of consanguinity, which classifies brothers’ and sisters’ children differently, corresponds not to their existing pairing families but to an earlier, extinct form of group marriage. This same system reappears among Dravidian tribes in India and in Hawaii, where the kinship terminology presupposes a still more primitive family structure now vanished. Morgan’s crucial theoretical insight is that the family is active and advances, while systems of consanguinity are passive, recording change only after the family has radically altered. Marx adds that the same holds for political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems.
The history of the primitive family is thus a progressive narrowing of the conjugal circle, from an original state of unrestricted sexual freedom through group marriage to the single pair. The oldest provable family form is the consanguine family, which separated marriage groups by generations, excluding only ancestors and progeny. The second great advance was the exclusion of brother and sister from sexual intercourse, beginning with own siblings and ending with the prohibition of marriage between collateral relatives. Morgan saw this as illustrating natural selection: tribes restricting inbreeding developed more quickly. This advance directly gave rise to the punaluan family, where a group of sisters were common wives of a group of husbands from whom their brothers were excluded, and vice versa. From this form the gens originated, with descent traced through the mother—hence ‘mother right’, a term first used by Bachofen.
The overthrow of mother right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex. Domestication of animals created new wealth, privately owned by heads of families, and slavery was invented as labour power produced a surplus. Under mother right, a man’s children could not inherit his property, which remained within his gens. Men therefore took command in the home; women were degraded, reduced to servitude, and became instruments for producing children. Monogamy developed with this overthrow, based on male supremacy to ensure undisputed paternity for inheritance. It was monogamy for the woman only, not the man, stamped from the beginning by the existence of slavery and female slaves. Among the Greeks, the Athenian family confined women to the house while men enjoyed athletics, public life, and an extensive state-favoured prostitution system; the degradation of women was avenged by the practice of boy-love.
Monogamy originated not from individual sex love but from economic conditions—the victory of private property over communal property. Its sole aims were male supremacy and the production of indisputable heirs to inherited wealth. It thus appears historically as the subjugation of one sex by the other, the first class opposition coinciding with the antagonism between man and woman. Monogamy opens the period where every step forward for some is won through the misery of others; it is the cellular form of civilised society, containing its oppositions and contradictions. In bourgeois marriage, marriage remains a class-conditioned convenience. Among the proletariat, lacking property to preserve, the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away, but the modern family still rests on the domestic slavery of the wife. The liberation of women requires bringing the whole female sex back into public industry and abolishing the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. The coming social revolution will transform the means of production into social property, removing the economic need for monogamy based on inheritance. Prostitution will disappear, and monogamy will become a reality for men. Private housekeeping becomes a social industry; children’s care becomes public. Individual sex love, absent in antiquity, emerges as a new moral standard. Only marriage based on continuing love is moral.