Engels' materialist analysis of how the family, private property, and the state arose together from the dissolution of primitive communism — and why all three will disappear with the abolition of class society
Friedrich Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, the year after Marx's death. The book was based in part on Marx's extensive ethnological notebooks, particularly his detailed notes on the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Ancient Society (1877) had provided a materialist framework for understanding the development of human social organisation.
Engels' purpose was revolutionary. He set out to demonstrate that the institutions which bourgeois ideology presents as eternal and natural — the monogamous family, private property, and the state — are in fact historical products. They arose at a definite stage of social development, they serve definite class interests, and they will be superseded when the material conditions that sustain them are abolished.
This was not an exercise in abstract scholarship. Engels wrote the book as a weapon in the class struggle, providing the working class with a scientific understanding of the origins of its oppression and the material basis for its liberation.
The Origin of the Family demonstrated that the monogamous family, private property, and the state are not natural or eternal institutions. They arose together with class society and will be transformed when class society is abolished. This is the materialist conception of history applied to the most fundamental institutions of human life.
"According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life."
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)The central methodological achievement of Engels' work was the application of historical materialism to the history of the family. Bourgeois scholars had always treated the family as a given — as something rooted in human nature or divine law, essentially unchanging across the ages. Engels demolished this illusion.
Drawing on Morgan's research into the social organisation of the Iroquois and other peoples, Engels traced the development of the family through several distinct historical forms:
The earliest form of group marriage, in which marriage groups were divided by generation. This form, reconstructed from kinship systems, reflected a stage of social development in which productive relations were entirely communal.
A more developed form of group marriage in which certain close relations were progressively excluded. This stage was associated with the development of the gens (clan) as the basic unit of social organisation under primitive communism.
The transitional form in which one man and one woman formed a more or less stable pair within the broader group, but without exclusive monogamy and without the economic dependence of women on men. Separation was easy and women retained their social standing.
The form that arose with private property and the overthrow of mother-right. Monogamy was imposed not by mutual love but by economic necessity — the need of men to transmit property to their own biological heirs. It was monogamy for the woman, not for the man.
The decisive point is that each form of the family corresponded to a definite stage in the development of the productive forces and the social relations of production. The family was not shaped by ideas, morality, or religion — it was shaped by the material conditions of life.
One of the most important contributions of The Origin of the Family was Engels' analysis of the historical origins of the oppression of women. In the gentile (clan-based) societies of primitive communism, descent was traced through the mother — the system known as mother-right. Women held a position of genuine social authority. The household was communal, and the domestic economy was a public, social affair, not a private burden.
The development of cattle-breeding, agriculture, metalworking, and eventually surplus production created the material basis for private property. As wealth accumulated in the hands of men — who controlled the herds and tools that produced this surplus — the old system of mother-right became an obstacle. Men could not pass their accumulated property to their own children under a system where descent was traced through the mother.
The overthrow of mother-right and its replacement by father-right — patrilineal descent — was, in Engels' words, the world-historic defeat of the female sex. Women were degraded from their position as heads of the communal household to become, under monogamy, the private servants of their husbands, mere instruments for the production of legitimate heirs.
The oppression of women is not natural, biological, or eternal. It arose at a specific historical moment — the transition from primitive communism to class society — and is rooted in the institution of private property. The liberation of women therefore requires the abolition of private property and the re-socialisation of domestic labour.
"The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex."
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)Engels demonstrated that monogamy, far from being the highest expression of romantic love, arose from purely economic causes — the concentration of wealth in the hands of the man and the desire to transmit this wealth to his biological heirs. Monogamy was the first form of the family based not on natural conditions but on economic conditions: the victory of private property over primitive communal ownership.
This had profound consequences. Within the monogamous family, the first class oppression appeared: the oppression of the female sex by the male. Engels insisted that the individual monogamous family was, in miniature, a picture of the contradictions and antagonisms of class society itself. The husband was the bourgeois; the wife, the proletarian.
Bourgeois monogamy was never truly monogamous. It was supplemented by adultery and prostitution — the inevitable accompaniments of a system in which marriage was based on property rather than mutual affection. For the ruling classes, marriage was an economic transaction, an arrangement for the consolidation of wealth and power. For the proletariat, marriage lacked the economic basis of bourgeois monogamy — the proletarian had no property to transmit — and therefore contained the seed of genuine relations between equals.
Engels argued that true monogamy — based on individual sex-love and mutual respect, free from economic coercion — could only become general when the capitalist mode of production was abolished, when women entered social production on an equal footing with men, and when the private household was transformed into a social institution.
Engels traced the development of private property from its earliest beginnings to its triumph as the organising principle of class society. Under primitive communism, the means of production — land, tools, dwellings — were held in common by the gens or tribe. There was no private property in the means of production, no classes, no exploitation, and no state.
The development of the productive forces — the domestication of animals, the invention of agriculture, the discovery of metalworking — created for the first time a social surplus product: more than was immediately needed for the subsistence of the producers. This surplus became the material basis for the emergence of private property.
At first, this surplus was modest and was distributed according to communal norms. But as the surplus grew, it became concentrated in the hands of those who controlled the key means of production — principally the herds and the land. The old communal property relations became a fetter on the new productive forces. Private property arose as the form of appropriation corresponding to the new level of productive development.
Private property did not arise from human greed or individual genius. It arose from the development of the productive forces to a level where a surplus product existed and where individual appropriation became possible and, from the standpoint of further productive development, necessary.
The accumulation of private property divided society into classes: those who owned the means of production and those who did not, those who could appropriate the surplus and those whose labour produced it. This was the birth of exploitation — and with it, the need for a state to enforce the new property relations.
"The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage."
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)The third pillar of Engels' analysis was the state. Just as the monogamous family arose with private property, so too did the state. The state is not an eternal institution imposed from above by divine will or social contract. It is a product of society at a definite stage of development: the stage at which society has split into irreconcilable class antagonisms that it is powerless to resolve.
In the gentile constitution of primitive communism, social order was maintained without a state. There were no police, no prisons, no standing armies, no bureaucrats. Decisions were made collectively by the assembled members of the gens or tribe. Leaders held authority by virtue of personal qualities and the confidence of the community, not by virtue of any coercive apparatus.
With the emergence of private property and class divisions, this system became impossible. The exploiting class needed an organised force to protect its property and suppress the resistance of the exploited. The state arose as this organised force — as a power that appeared to stand above society but in reality served the interests of the dominant class.
Engels identified the key features of the state that distinguished it from the gentile constitution:
The state organises its subjects by territory rather than by kinship. The old bonds of blood and clan are replaced by the purely administrative division of citizens into districts and provinces.
The state establishes a public power that no longer directly coincides with the armed population. Standing armies, police forces, prisons, and courts replace the self-armed people of the gentile constitution.
To maintain its coercive apparatus, the state levies taxes — unknown in gentile society. The maintenance of the public power and the bureaucracy requires compulsory contributions extracted from the population.
The state develops ideological and legal superstructures — religion, law, philosophy — to legitimise the existing property relations and present the rule of one class over another as natural, just, or divinely ordained.
Engels' analysis of the origins of women's oppression has profound implications for revolutionary strategy. If the subjugation of women is rooted in private property and the class division of society, then the liberation of women is inseparable from the abolition of class society. Feminism that does not attack the material basis of women's oppression — the capitalist mode of production and the private ownership of the means of production — can never achieve genuine liberation.
This does not mean that the struggle for women's rights must wait until after the revolution. On the contrary, the struggle for women's emancipation is an integral part of the class struggle. Every advance in women's rights weakens bourgeois ideology and strengthens the fighting capacity of the working class. But it does mean that the final and complete emancipation of women is possible only under socialism and communism.
The socialist programme for women's liberation, drawn from Engels' analysis, includes:
The socialist states proved Engels correct in practice. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other socialist countries made enormous advances in women's rights — universal education, employment, healthcare, maternity protections, and political participation — precisely because they attacked the material roots of women's oppression, not merely its ideological symptoms.
A central thread of Engels' argument is the contrast between the gentile constitution of primitive communism and the class societies that replaced it. This contrast is not romantic nostalgia — it is a scientific demonstration that class society, private property, and the state are not inherent in human nature but are products of specific historical conditions.
Under the gentile constitution, society was organised on the basis of kinship, communal ownership, and collective decision-making. There was genuine equality between the sexes within the framework of the division of labour that existed. There was no exploitation, no standing army, no prisons. Social conflicts were resolved by the community itself, not by a specialised apparatus of coercion standing above it.
Engels was clear-eyed about the limitations of primitive communism. It existed at a low level of productive development, with limited mastery over nature. The dissolution of primitive communism was not a fall from grace but a necessary stage in the development of human productive powers. Class society, for all its horrors, developed the productive forces to a level that makes a return to communal ownership possible on a higher plane — with modern industry, science, and technology at the service of all.
This is the dialectical understanding. Primitive communism was the thesis; class society, with its private property, monogamous family, and state, was the antithesis; communist society will be the synthesis — the return to communal ownership and social equality, but at a vastly higher level of material and cultural development.
"The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities."
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)If the monogamous family, private property, and the state arose together with class society, then the abolition of class society will necessarily transform all three. This is not a utopian wish but a scientific conclusion drawn from the materialist analysis of history.
The state will wither away as class antagonisms disappear. When there are no longer exploiters to suppress, the coercive apparatus of the state becomes superfluous. The administration of things replaces the government of persons.
Private property in the means of production will be abolished and replaced by social ownership. The productive forces, developed to their full potential under socialised production, will serve the needs of all rather than the profit of the few.
The family will be transformed as its economic foundations change. When domestic labour is socialised, when women participate fully in social production, when economic dependence within the household is eliminated, the conditions will exist for genuinely free relations between men and women. What form the family will take under communism cannot be prescribed in advance — it will be determined by the people living under those conditions, freed from economic coercion and bourgeois morality.
Marxism-Leninism does not call for the "destruction" of the family in the anarchist or nihilist sense. It calls for the removal of the economic coercion that underlies the bourgeois family. When marriage ceases to be an economic arrangement and becomes a free association of equals, the family will be transformed — not destroyed but liberated.
The state, along with the spinning wheel and the bronze axe, belongs to a definite stage of human development. When that stage is surpassed — when class antagonisms are abolished and production is socialised — the state will take its place among the relics of history.
Although some of the specific ethnological data that Engels relied upon has been revised by subsequent research, the fundamental theoretical framework of The Origin of the Family remains scientifically valid and politically indispensable. Modern anthropology and archaeology have confirmed the essential outlines of Engels' argument: that human societies existed for tens of thousands of years without private property, without class divisions, without the state, and without the systematic subordination of women.
The book remains essential reading for several reasons:
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