The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State is one of the few texts by Marx or Engels not to focus on economics, although its analysis does rest on the economic studies that they conduct in other key tracts such as “The Communist Manifesto” or The German Ideology. Writing in the mid-to-late 19th century, Marx and Engels were reckoning with what is now called the First Industrial Revolution, during which the explosion of manufacturing turned cities like London and Paris into massive metropolises crammed with factories and workers, many of whom worked long and grueling hours for low pay and endured hazardous conditions both at work and at home. There had long been calls for reforms to this system, such as trade unions which could negotiate for better conditions, or democratic movements which would give the majority a greater say in government. Marxists went a step further by arguing that the system could only be changed through a revolutionary upheaval, whereby the oppressed (the workers, or the “proletariat”) would seize power from the oppressors (generally called the “bourgeoisie”) and rule in their own interest.

A complete change in social power might seem a daunting task, but Marx and Engels insisted that such change was inevitable, because capitalism (the name given to a system where the holders of private property could extract wealth from those who did the actual labor) bore the seeds of its own destruction. By enriching the few at the expense of the many, it created a large mass of desperate people who would have no stake in preserving the status quo. Capitalists would use their wealth to invest in technologies that produced more goods with fewer labor costs, driving ever more people into the ranks of the downtrodden, including many who had previously been among the upper class. The struggle to survive would interfere with the task of developing a revolutionary attitude, but eventually it would become impossible to ignore the injustices of the system and the hidden advantages of overwhelming numerical superiority.

The task in the meantime was to help the proletariat develop class consciousness. One of the tools that the capitalists used to forestall the revolution was to create social institutions that concealed the exploitative nature of society. These included the state, which held itself as a neutral arbiter of the law and protector of patriotic values while in fact defending propertied interests; and religion, which in the Marxist view sought to distract from the woes of the world with dreams of a bountiful afterlife. Marxists admitted that family was itself a natural concept, but that it had been perverted in the modern day to suit the needs of capitalism, so that its primary purpose was to accrue and protect property rather than provide a supportive and loving environment for its members. Exposing the real nature of the contemporary family, and using anthropological history to show how a different alternative was possible, would open up a sense of possibilities which in turn would help make the revolution not only inevitable but imminent.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels seeks to synthesize Marxian theory with Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of social evolution. Though this theory relies on ideas that have since been discredited—particularly the assumption that urbanized and industrialized societies are more advanced than agrarian ones, which in turn are more advanced than hunter-gatherer societies—it was enormously influential in the mid-to-late 19th century, and Engels saw it as an important scaffolding for his core argument: that the seemingly natural social institutions named in his title have in fact been constructed in relatively recent times for the purposes of capital.