The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: Explained for the 21st Century

Last updated on May 14th, 2025 at 10:49 pm

In our time, when conversations about capitalism, patriarchy, and structural inequality are no longer confined to dusty classrooms but echoed in digital movements and lived struggles, Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State remains startlingly prescient.

This 1884 work, long dismissed as an artifact of early socialist anthropology, now demands renewed attention. More than a relic, it’s a blueprint — a fiery critique of how power, property, and kinship intersect to create systemic control over both women and the working class.

When I first read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, I expected rigid ideology. What I found was an unflinching examination of social evolution, infused with a brutal clarity that cut across centuries. Engels didn’t merely explain how societies formed — he argued how they ossified into hierarchies, built on the backs of oppressed women and laborers. Rooted in historical materialism, Engels’ theory sees every human institution — the family, the state, property — as determined by material economic forces. This central claim would reshape how generations after him understood power.

“It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.” (Engels quoting The German Ideology in the Introduction, p. xxxvi)

This article provides a complete The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State summary with a deeply human interpretation, designed so that the reader never needs to return to the book itself. Every section unfolds through Engels’ own words, with analysis from my own perspective — as a reader caught between historical critique and contemporary resonance.

Historical Context: When and Why Engels Wrote The Origin of the Family

To understand The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, one must first understand the moment it was born.

Written in 1884, the book emerged from the grief-stricken diligence of Friedrich Engels following the death of Karl Marx. As Engels combed through his friend’s chaotic ethnological notes, he came across a remarkable treasure: Marx’s dense annotations on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), a groundbreaking anthropological study that traced human progress from savagery to civilization through shifting family forms.

Engels saw in Morgan’s research a mirror of the materialist conception of history he had developed with Marx — and he recognized the historical importance of what had been left unfinished. He referred to Morgan’s study as “definitive,” akin to Darwin’s in biology, because it validated their shared belief that the evolution of society was rooted in economic and material transformations, not divine design or eternal truths.

“Morgan rediscovered for himself Marx’s materialist view of history, and concludes with what are, for modern society, downright communist postulates.” (Engels, Preface, p. 35)

Engels decided to write the book not only as a tribute to Marx but as a “fulfilment of a behest” — to complete the work his friend had begun and to popularize Morgan’s findings for a German and international socialist audience. He completed the manuscript within just three months. This intellectual urgency speaks volumes about his political commitment. In the book’s pages, we don’t just read Engels the theorist — we feel Engels the comrade, loyal to Marx even beyond the grave.

Furthermore, this book wasn’t written in a vacuum. The late 19th century was steeped in socialist debates on the family, patriarchy, and women’s oppression, especially triggered by August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1879) and Karl Kautsky’s essays on primitive marriage. Engels believed Bebel had gotten key elements wrong — particularly the assumption that patriarchal oppression was eternal. Instead, Engels argued that women’s oppression arose historically, not naturally, from the rise of private property.

“The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 87)

In this way, The Origin of the Family wasn’t just a theoretical text — it was a polemical correction. It was Engels’ attempt to anchor Marxism not just in labor and class but in gender and kinship, pushing the boundaries of historical materialism into deeply personal terrain.

The state, private property, and the family — these weren’t neutral institutions for Engels. They were tools. They emerged to reinforce control — particularly male control. And the family, as we will see, was the earliest and most powerful of them all.

Summary of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

At its core, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is a sweeping attempt to trace the material history of three foundational institutions that shape all human society — the family, private property, and the state. Through Engels’ lens of historical materialism, these institutions are not timeless or sacred; they are historically contingent, formed and reformed through shifts in economic production and ownership.

“According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life.” (Engels, Preface, p. 31)

Chapter I: Stages of Prehistoric Culture

Friedrich Engels, drawing on the pioneering ethnographic work of Lewis H. Morgan, begins his inquiry into the foundations of human civilization not with grand monuments or written histories, but with the raw and elemental march of subsistence: the production of food. In Chapter 1, titled “Stages of Prehistoric Culture,” Engels methodically charts the trajectory of human development through the lens of what he and Morgan identify as the three great epochs—savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

His classification is no idle taxonomy, but a historical materialist lens through which the essential dynamics of humanity—its economies, kinship systems, and consciousness—are revealed in development, conflict, and transformation.

The cornerstone of Engels’ argument in this chapter is that the evolution of prehistoric society can be understood in terms of changes in productive capacity, particularly in relation to the procurement and preparation of food.

Morgan’s crucial observation, which Engels amplifies, is that “upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human supremacy on the earth depended”. That is to say, human mastery over nature, over time, developed not through divine intervention or spontaneous intellectual awakening, but through the arduous refinement of tools, practices, and social arrangements that enabled survival and, eventually, surplus.

Engels divides both savagery and barbarism—those two formative epochs that precede written civilization—into three phases: lower, middle, and upper. This is not merely a linear progression but a deeply dialectical movement, each phase marking a significant shift in the mode of subsistence and, by extension, in the structure of society itself.

1. Savagery: Humanity in Its Rawest Form

In the lower stage of savagery, man is more creature than creator. He survives in tropical or subtropical forests, sustained by fruits, nuts, and roots, “partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained”. Here, the most momentous innovation is not the weapon or the firebrand, but speech—the very dawn of human consciousness. The emergence of articulate language marks a leap beyond animal instinct, setting the stage for all future cultural evolution.

The middle stage of savagery brings with it fire and fish, two forces that transform the human condition. The ability to cook fish not only expands the human diet but liberates humans from their dependence on a narrow ecological niche. “Men now became independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could…spread over most of the earth,” Engels writes. Migration, adaptation, and experimentation define this period, exemplified by the global presence of “crudely worked, unpolished flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known as ‘paleoliths’”.

The upper stage of savagery, finally, witnesses the invention of the bow and arrow—a weapon that revolutionizes the hunt, making the acquisition of meat more reliable and systematic. Engels insightfully compares this to later technological thresholds, noting that “the bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and firearms for civilization – the decisive weapon”.

What emerges is not just an increase in food supply but a nascent stability that allows early humans to settle, form communities, and lay the groundwork for agriculture.

2. Barbarism: The First Glimmers of Property and Class

Engels’ narrative shifts with the dawn of barbarism, whose lower stage is marked by the invention of pottery—a deceptively simple innovation with profound implications. Pottery represents not just a technological feat but a symbolic one: the transformation of nature into durable culture. As Engels notes, the origin of pottery likely lies in the utilitarian act of covering baskets with clay to make them fireproof—“in this way it was soon discovered that the clay mould answered the purpose without any inner vessel”.

With pottery comes storage, and with storage, the possibility of surplus—a concept at the very heart of class society. The cultural implications of this shift reverberate throughout the chapter.

In this early phase, however, Engel’s emphasis remains on material culture, which he posits as the true index of human development. His materialist historical method refuses to abstract humanity from its environment. As such, he writes with a mixture of awe and realism, grounding historical change in the tangible, even mundane, evolutions of daily life.

The Transition into Barbarism: From Foraging to Domestication

The middle stage of barbarism represents an inflection point in Engels’ schema, a moment in prehistory where the relationship between humans and nature is irrevocably altered.

This is the era of animal domestication and horticulture, and with it, the beginnings of a systematic economy. Engels draws attention to the distinct cultural trajectories of the Old and New Worlds during this phase. While indigenous peoples in the Americas cultivated maize, squash, and other food crops, they lacked the domestication of animals beyond the llama. In contrast, societies of the Eastern Hemisphere bred cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses—key to their eventual military and agricultural dominance.

He writes: “The taming and breeding of animals, and the cultivation of plants, was the most decisive step towards civilization,” a statement that captures his conviction that production—not ideas or heroes—is the driver of history. In this period, the human hand becomes a transformative force, capable of reshaping nature not merely to survive, but to thrive. The development of a regular means of subsistence allows for larger tribal groupings and rudimentary settlements, and more crucially, it begins to differentiate labor along lines of gender and age.

Importantly, Engels does not romanticize this period. While he recognizes the ingenuity involved, he is clear-eyed about the beginnings of inequality. The notion of ownership—initially communal—begins its slow drift toward privatization. This foreshadows the later rupture between primitive communism and class society, a theme that Engels explores more explicitly in later chapters.

Upper Barbarism and the Dawn of Civilization

The upper stage of barbarism, in Engels’ framework, is marked by three major technological revolutions: the smelting of iron ore, the invention of the alphabet, and the emergence of class-based society. These developments, he argues, open the floodgates to civilization, defined not by moral progress but by increasing inequality, warfare, and the systematic domination of one class by another.

At this point, property relations undergo a profound shift. Engels notes that with the working of metals and the production of tools comes the potential for economic surplus and, critically, private accumulation. The tribal mode of life, centered on kinship and communal sharing, begins to fragment. Engels puts it plainly: “With the introduction of metal tools and the plough drawn by animals, came the possibility of raising crops on a larger scale and of producing a surplus“. And with that surplus came the need to protect, store, and eventually inherit—laying the material foundation for patriarchy and the state.

Further, Engels identifies the introduction of writing—specifically the alphabet—as a decisive step into civilization. It is not coincidental, he suggests, that written language emerged at the same moment when private property and the state arose. The alphabet enabled record-keeping, contracts, and law codes—tools essential for managing social hierarchy, taxation, and legal enforcement. Far from being a neutral invention, the written word becomes, in Engels’ materialist analysis, a mechanism of control.

He writes with chilling clarity: “It was the beginning of history, written history – the end of prehistory,” and this “history” is not the story of all people, but of rulers, conquests, and inheritance.

The Dialectic at Work: Prehistoric Stages as a Material Process

Engels’ underlying theoretical move in this chapter is a subtle but profound challenge to idealist history. He is not content to merely catalog artifacts or stages; instead, he invites us to consider that history unfolds not through abstract ideals, but through evolving relations to the material world, especially around food, labor, and property. This idea—central to historical materialism—imbues the chapter with philosophical urgency.

In fact, Engels anticipates a critique of eurocentrism by noting that different cultures advanced through these stages at different paces and in different configurations. Yet, the overarching pattern remains: each stage produces contradictions—limits to existing productive forces or social arrangements—which push societies to evolve.

Thus, the movement from savagery to barbarism to civilization is not a matter of moral refinement, but the outcome of pressures arising from economic necessity. The arrow of history, as Engels sees it, is not drawn toward ethical perfection, but rather toward increasingly complex forms of production—and, inevitably, class domination.

Conclusion of Chapter 1

In sum, Chapter 1 of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State lays down the materialist groundwork for Engels’ later explorations of family structures, private property, and state formation. By presenting history as a sequence of technological and social revolutions, grounded in the changing relationship between human beings and their environment, Engels not only elevates the material conditions of prehistory to the realm of theory, but also subtly undermines the bourgeois notion that the nuclear family and state authority are natural or eternal.

To read this chapter is to realize that the social systems we take for granted are historically contingent, not immutable facts of life. They arose from real needs, real conflicts, and real innovations—and can, by the same logic, be transformed again.

Engels does not allow us the comfort of ahistorical thinking. Every pot shard, every stone axe, every domesticated goat is, in his hands, a document of struggle, a testament to the labor and ingenuity of our species, and a reminder that the current world order is but one chapter in a long, unfinished story.

Chapter II: The Evolution of the Family: From Group Marriage to Patriarchy

Engels begins Chapter II of The Origin of the Family with a bold and disruptive premise: what bourgeois society calls “the family” is not a natural nor eternal institution, but merely one stage in a long historical evolution. He lays out four key forms of family structure—the consanguine, punaluan, pairing, and monogamous families—each reflecting a shift in socio-economic conditions and the division of labor.

1. The Consanguine Family: Blood as the Bond of Sexual Organization

The earliest form, the consanguine family, is what Engels calls “the first stage of the family.” Here, the entire tribe is grouped by generations, and all the children of a family lineage belong to one generational cohort. All male and female members of the same generation were considered spouses. “Their family was composed of the descendants of one couple, their children, the children’s children, and so on”. What strikes the reader is Engels’ unflinching readiness to challenge modern taboos. He declares openly that incest, as we now call it, was not only permitted but structurally embedded in early familial systems.

Importantly, Engels does not sensationalize this. Instead, he points out that these systems were logical outcomes of early human organization, where kinship was organized horizontally rather than vertically. The purpose here is clear: to denaturalize modern morality and show that even the most “sacred” structures—like the incest taboo—are shaped by history.

2. The Punaluan Family: The First Great Repression

Engels then describes the rise of the punaluan family (a marriage between the sisters of one family and the brothers of another), where a crucial prohibition emerges—sexual relations between siblings are now forbidden. This form, named after the Hawaiian term punalua, reflected a social step forward: “The consanguine family had disappeared, to be replaced by the punaluan, in which a group of brothers is married to a group of sisters, but brother and sister may not be man and wife”. The family is still group-based, but cross-sibling relations are tabooed. Engels emphasizes that this shift marks a social and moral advance, showing the progression of human consciousness alongside changes in material life.

Yet this step also reveals a looming contradiction: even as kinship becomes more regulated, male dominance starts to emerge, subtly but surely.

3. The Pairing Family: A Fragile Monogamy in Communal Context

The pairing family is the third form, and perhaps the most emotionally resonant.

Here, Engels begins to hint at something resembling modern emotional intimacy, but it is still far from equality. The man and woman pair off, but the relationship is non-exclusive and easily dissolvable. “The man had the right to separate from his wife and take another; the woman also could separate from the man and marry another”.

What’s fascinating in Engels’ treatment is that this is the first appearance of the male-centric household. While the relationship is ostensibly mutual, it begins to mirror the emerging inequality between the sexes. Engels attributes this to material development: as men become associated with herding and agricultural wealth, their control over the family unit begins to harden.

4. The Monogamous Family: The Fall of Woman

The culmination of these transformations is the monogamous family, built not on love but on property and paternity certainty. It is the institutionalized form of gender oppression. Engels is unequivocal: “It was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions—on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property”.

In Engels’ eyes, this is not moral progress but moral defeat. The family becomes a mechanism to protect patrilineal inheritance, leading to the systemic subjugation of women. In a sentence that reverberates through every critique of patriarchy since, Engels declares: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home; the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of his lust, a mere instrument for child-bearing”.

The emotional thrust here is unmistakable. Engels is not offering a cold evolutionary chart, but a dirge to lost female sovereignty. His historical materialism, though rigorous, is tinged with a tragic tone. The transition to monogamy is not celebrated—it is mourned.

The Subtext: Rewriting the Myth of the Family

Engels’ deeper aim in this chapter is to strip the family of its mystique. He does not argue that monogamy is inherently oppressive, but that its economic basis in private property and inheritance makes it so. Modern love, he suggests, has become a cover for bourgeois transactionalism, where “conjugal fidelity” is demanded of women while men are socially sanctioned for adultery and even prostitution.

Thus, the “family” as we know it is less a moral unit and more an economic cell of patriarchal capitalism. Its naturalness is a fiction; its sanctity, a smokescreen.

The Monogamous Family as the Womb of Oppression: Engels’ Radical Critique

By the end of Chapter II, Friedrich Engels has not merely offered a taxonomy of historical family forms—he has drawn a devastating indictment of the modern nuclear family, rooted in capitalism and male supremacy. The monogamous family, he argues, is not only the product of private property, but its moral infrastructure. The institution that contemporary society holds up as the most intimate and sacred turns out, under Engels’ gaze, to be the cornerstone of economic exploitation and gendered domination.

“The modern individual family,” Engels writes, “is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife”. This blunt assertion is not rhetorical flourish but historical diagnosis. In this family model, the man becomes bourgeois, the woman proletariat—even within the home. The relationship is no longer between equals but between possessor and possessed.

This analogy is one of Engels’ most powerful intellectual moves. He maps the class conflict of capitalism—exploitation of labor—onto the private household. It is a critique not just of legal inequality, but of the emotional and affective labor demanded of women under capitalism. Engels strips the illusions of Victorian “domestic bliss,” and what he finds beneath is servitude cloaked in romance.

“In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy… Within the family he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat”.

It is a comparison that still resonates—perhaps more than Engels could have imagined. Even today, the unpaid domestic labor of women continues to underpin global economies, often invisibly.

Inheritance and the Biological Lockdown of Woman

What makes this domestic hierarchy so durable, Engels contends, is not ideology alone but the interlocking machinery of property and inheritance. The monogamous family was never about fidelity for its own sake—it was about ensuring legitimate male heirs to whom private wealth could be passed. Engels writes:

“The sole exclusive aim of monogamous marriage was to make the man supreme in the family and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own”.

This leads Engels to one of his most searing judgments: the so-called “world-historical defeat of the female sex”. In this transition from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, from collective to private kinship, women were not just displaced—they were redefined as reproductive vessels for male wealth.

“She became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children”.

In other words, capitalism did not invent misogyny—it perfected it. The family became the first school of hierarchy, the crucible of obedience and domination. As with class relations, the family naturalized inequality by embedding it in biology and sentiment.

Beyond Monogamy: Engels’ Utopian Horizon

Yet Engels is not content to offer critique without hope. As he closes the chapter, he turns toward a radically emancipatory vision: the dissolution of the family as a private economic unit, and with it, the conditions for the real liberation of women and love itself.

He imagines a future where inheritance is abolished, property is held communally, and reproduction is no longer shackled to paternity paranoia. In such a world, marriage could be based not on contract or coercion, but on mutual affection.

“The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not… This removes all anxiety about the ‘consequences’”.

This is not a naive utopia of free love but a materialist reorganization of society, one that liberates sexuality and care work from the chains of economic survival. Under communism, Engels argues, marriage would become what it falsely claims to be today: a union based solely on love, “without any need for special legal titles or privileges”.

Importantly, Engels does not predict the end of relationships, but rather the end of marriage as an instrument of property. Love would be freer, yes—but it would also be deeper, unburdened by the transactional nature of patriarchal monogamy.

Rewriting Human Intimacy

Thus, the trajectory of Chapter II is clear: from group marriage to patriarchy, from communal life to domestic imprisonment. Engels’ brilliance lies in showing how personal life is political, how marriage and motherhood are not eternal truths but historically contingent institutions. Every form of family reflects the mode of production it serves.

And yet, Engels never surrenders to fatalism. If capitalism has made the family a site of subjugation, then socialism must make it a space of freedom. In this, Engels stands as one of the earliest thinkers to link women’s emancipation with systemic change, and to recognize the family as both battlefield and blueprint.

Chapter III: The Iroquois Gens — The Moral Architecture of Pre-State Society

In Chapter 3 of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels ventures into the social anatomy of the Iroquois gens, not as a detached anthropologist but as a historical materialist urgently seeking the early scaffolding of human cooperation and moral order. His source, Lewis Henry Morgan, had unearthed what Engels calls “the classic form of the original gens,” and Engels interprets it not merely as ethnographic data, but as a political message from prehistory: that another form of society is not only possible but once existed—a form bound not by coercion or capital, but by kinship, reciprocity, and radical egalitarianism.

At the heart of the Iroquois gens is mother-right, a matrilineal structure in which descent, inheritance, and social identity pass through the female line. Engels elaborates that “a son was never chosen to succeed his father as sachem since mother right prevailed… the son consequently belonged to a different gens; but the office might and often did pass to a brother of the previous sachem or to his sister’s son”. This fact alone subverts the patriarchal norms of Western state development and serves as a material anchor for Engels’ broader claim: that patriarchy and property are not eternal but historically contingent inventions.

One of the most arresting revelations in this chapter is the democratic spirit infused within the gens. Authority was not enforced through law or arms, but through moral consensus. The sachem—the peace chief—had “no means of coercion,” and his power was “purely moral in character”. Leadership was elected by both men and women, and subject to removal at any time. “The gens deposes the sachem and war chief at will. This also is done by men and women jointly,” Engels notes, with evident admiration. The democratic impulse here is not performative but essential; sovereignty resided in the people, not an external authority.

Marriage restrictions illustrate how the gens preserved its integrity. Endogamy was not merely frowned upon—it was forbidden: “No member is permitted to marry within the gens. This is the fundamental law of the gens, the bond which holds it together”. This prohibition, grounded in a shared bloodline, simultaneously prevented consolidation of power and maintained communal cohesion. Engels here targets McLennan’s flawed binary of exogamy vs. endogamy as reductionist, asserting that such categories obscure the kin-based fabric of social life.

Property, too, followed a logic distinct from modern inheritance. Since men and women belonged to different gentes, “man and wife could not inherit from one another, nor children from their father”. Instead, property passed to members of the gens: brothers, sisters, maternal uncles, and so forth. The emphasis was on collective preservation rather than individual accumulation.

More than a legal system, the gens was a moral institution. Members owed one another “help, protection, and especially assistance in avenging injury by strangers”. Blood revenge was not a crude relic of violence, but a social contract rooted in the idea that to harm one member was to injure the whole. This principle of solidarity transformed justice into a collective responsibility—a counterpoint to the atomized legalism of modern states.

The very nomenclature of the gens embodied identity and belonging. Names were exclusive to each gens, functioning as both cultural markers and political credentials: “A gentile name confers of itself gentile rights”. Even prisoners of war, when adopted into the gens, were not merely assimilated but granted full rights—evidence of the elastic, inclusive moral boundaries of this kin-based polity.

Continuing with the Chapter 3: The Iroquois Gens, we now turn to the sacred, ceremonial, and political functions of the gens—dimensions that further highlight its profoundly communal and democratic nature. Engels does not simply describe these functions; he unveils them as evidence of an egalitarian society founded on reciprocity, ritual memory, and shared moral responsibility, not domination or private interest.

The religious and burial customs of the Iroquois gens deepen our understanding of how spiritual belief was woven into the collective life. Upon the death of a member, the gens was not merely a kinship unit but a ceremonial body. As Engels writes: “The gens had a common religious rite. All the gentes of an Iroquois tribe had the same religious beliefs and the same religious ceremonies, in which they all participated”. This common ritual practice reinforced social cohesion and kept the gens tethered to its ancestral roots. There were no priests in the modern sense—no intercessors who could monopolize the sacred. The spiritual was communal property, much like land and decision-making.

When a gentile died, he or she had to be buried according to strict customs. The entire gens took part in the burial rites, affirming the enduring dignity of the individual within the collective. “Each gens had a council of all adult male and female members, all with equal votes”. This council did not exist to rubber-stamp decrees from above but to deliberate on communal matters, such as the election or deposition of chiefs, treaties, or the adoption of new members. Importantly, women participated not only in spiritual and domestic life but in political decision-making—a direct contradiction to the dominant patriarchal assumptions of both Engels’ time and our own.

The moral weight of the gens lay not in legislation or punishment, but in its capacity to uphold ethical codes through mutual accountability. As Engels puts it, “It was the living prototype of a society without state, classes, or police”. Here, the term “society” is not a neutral category; it is an argument. Engels is challenging the Hobbesian view of early humanity as brutish and atomized. In its place, he offers the Iroquois gens—a social body whose order rested not on coercion but on consensus and kinship.

Even the adoption of strangers into the gens had nothing of the assimilationist violence seen in modern nation-states. When prisoners of war or outsiders were taken into the gens, “they became full members, with equal rights and obligations”. There was no second-class status, no half-belonging. The gens, in Engels’ eyes, was a moral community whose ethics derived not from divine decree or state law, but from the practical necessity of survival and mutual care.

In sum, Chapter 3 stands as Engels’ anthropological rebuttal to both bourgeois family ideology and the state-centric view of social order. Through the lens of the Iroquois gens, he illustrates a mode of life where economic inequality, gender hierarchy, and political coercion were not yet dominant forces. It was, in his view, not a utopia but a historical reality—one “which still continues to exist in full vitality” among certain indigenous communities in the Americas at the time of his writing.

Indeed, Engels closes the chapter with a remark that cuts like a whisper across centuries of civilization: “Such was the constitution of the gens among the American Indians… a marvelous constitution, but with a great defect—it was not a state.” In that single phrase, Engels flips the narrative of progress. What civilization had branded as “primitive” might instead be the model for a society beyond alienation, domination, and private greed—a society where the origin of the family was once the wellspring of freedom, not its grave.

Chapter IV: The Greek Gens

In Chapter IV of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels embarks on a powerful anthropological and historical excavation of the Greek gens—a critical building block in the ancient social order of Greece.

Engels seeks to unravel how this tribal unit transformed under the weight of economic evolution, gendered inheritance laws, and the early seeds of state formation. The chapter functions both as a historical reconstruction and as a pointed critique of how wealth and patriarchy corroded the earlier egalitarian gentile system. This isn’t merely an abstract academic exercise—it’s a vivid human drama of social institutions collapsing under the rise of private property and class society.

At the outset, Engels positions the Greek gens as an evolved form of the archaic tribal unit still found among the Iroquois. Though seemingly more sophisticated, the Greek gens retained the basic structure: an organic kinship unit within a hierarchy of phratry, tribe, and confederacy. Engels notes, “From prehistoric times Greeks and Pelasgians alike… had been organized in the same organic series as the Americans: gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy of tribes”. This places Greek society in continuity with broader human development while foreshadowing its divergence through property accumulation and patriarchal dominance.

Crucially, Engels identifies the transition from mother right to father right as the first breach in the ancient gentile order. This seemingly simple shift in lineage had radical consequences. With the emergence of male-dominated inheritance laws, the traditional coherence of the gens was undermined. Engels writes with precise clarity: “Mother right has given way to father right; increasing private wealth has thus made its first breach in the gentile constitution”. Property now flowed through the male line, demanding new marital restrictions and social adjustments.

The introduction of intra-gens marriage, especially for heiresses, illustrates this. Engels explains that in order to prevent property from leaving the gens, “the girl was not only permitted but ordered to marry within the gens”. This exception was an inversion of the earlier rule of exogamy, once a cornerstone of tribal identity and cohesion. The economic motive had thus triumphed over traditional social norms.

What remains striking in Engels’ analysis is how he gives flesh and tension to these developments. This is not dry historiography; it is the slow death of communal life through “base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice”. Engels, with a palpable human sorrow, identifies the cause of the decay of gentile society not in foreign conquest or natural disaster, but in the corrosion of solidarity by the hunger for accumulation.

Engels supplements his interpretation with detailed features of the Athenian gens as cited from Grote’s A History of Greece. These include shared religious rites, mutual rights of inheritance, common burial grounds, and obligations of mutual assistance—practices that speak to a once-integrated social organism. As Engels paraphrases Grote: “All that we hear of the most ancient Athenian laws is based upon the gentile and phratric divisions”.

Importantly, Engels underscores that while the institution appears refined, the “savage” origin persists beneath the surface. He quotes Marx: “In the Greek gens, the savage (for example, Iroquois) shows through unmistakably”. This is not to demean Greek society, but to affirm the continuity of human social evolution—even under the mask of civilization.

One of the most evocative moments in the chapter occurs when Engels notes the misinterpretation of the gens by classical historians. He condemns their “pedantic bookworm” assumption that the gens was a fictional construct. “Actually to deny… all relationship between the members of the gens… is worthy of ‘ideal’, that is, pedantic bookworms”. For Engels, such scholarly blindness is emblematic of a larger ideological failure: the inability to grasp that institutions like the Greek gens were both historical realities and products of material conditions.

Engels illustrates how the social, religious, and mutual-aid functions of the gens are not merely altered but wholly eroded by the rise of private property and the Athenian state. If the first half of the chapter documents the cracks in the edifice, the latter half describes its collapse—and with it, the tragic unraveling of a communal worldview.

Engels pinpoints this transition with great poignancy. He writes, “The old gentile constitution, with its natural democracy, had to yield to a new political organization, adapted to changed conditions and, above all, to the needs of a higher system of commodity production”. The heart of the matter is not abstract political theory—it is the rise of a fundamentally new mode of social being, one that prioritizes property over kinship, citizenship over blood, coercive law over mutual aid.

As Athenian society became more stratified and land more privatized, the gens could no longer function as the foundation of social organization. Its mutual inheritance rights became irrelevant in the face of legally codified wills. Religious rites devolved into perfunctory ceremonies. The shared burial grounds, once sacred symbols of unity, lost meaning as lineage was replaced by legal identity. Engels writes, with biting lucidity, “The gentile order had become a hindrance to further development”.

But what makes Engels’ critique intellectually stirring is that he does not romanticize the gens as a lost utopia. Rather, he portrays it as a necessary evolutionary stage—a once-living organism strangled by the very forces it inadvertently nurtured. The institution of slavery, the cornerstone of classical Greek wealth, could not have coexisted with the egalitarian structure of the gens. As Engels concludes, “Only the complete abolition of the gentile organization could pave the way for the advance beyond the threshold of civilization”.

Here, we must pause and consider the Greek gens not only as an object of historical curiosity, but as a metaphor for modern institutional decay. Engels’ human tone emerges in his insistence that what died with the gens was not only a social form, but a human possibility: the vision of a society grounded in solidarity, accountability, and moral equality. The erosion of the gens was not inevitable. It was the price of inequality.

Engels sees this price as steep, even spiritually corrosive. With the disintegration of communal living came the reification of the individual—not as a liberated person, but as a property-holding atom. Engels seems to mourn this shift, describing how the political emancipation of the individual in democratic Athens coincided with his social disintegration. “The citizen of the state was compelled to take the place of the member of the gens… But this change brought with it a curse for the ancient world”.

He is unapologetic in his judgment: the downfall of the Greek gens was not merely the price of progress—it was the inauguration of alienation. In this light, Engels’ analysis of the gens anticipates the later Marxist critique of modern bourgeois society. The gens dies when the community can no longer reproduce itself socially. In its place rises the state—a coercive apparatus meant to mediate the antagonisms born from inequality.

Importantly, Engels reminds the reader that this transformation was not universal. He contrasts the dissolution of the Greek gens with its survival in other cultures (such as the Iroquois or Germanic tribes), thereby illustrating how institutions respond differently to material conditions. In Greece, “wealth grew rapidly, particularly in land and slaves; the labor of others became the foundation of existence for a rising class of the rich”.

Engels ends the chapter with a grim yet lucid recognition of the Greek gens’ fate: it could not survive the transition to a society based on exploitation. The very conditions that made Athenian culture brilliant—its philosophy, art, and political theory—were also built upon the tomb of the communal gentile order. As Engels writes, “Thus the gentile constitution fell into decay; its place was taken by the state”.

In conclusion, Chapter IV serves as both history lesson and cultural eulogy. The Greek gens emerges not as a quaint tribal artifact, but as a deeply human form of social organization—capable of dignity, solidarity, and mutual recognition. Engels, with quiet fury and mournful reverence, charts its demise under the grinding wheels of property and patriarchy. And in doing so, he leaves us not only with historical insight but also with the haunting question: what social forms might we yet be destroying in our own era?

Chapter V: The Rise of the Athenian State

Chapter V of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is a masterstroke of dialectical analysis, unraveling the evolutionary passage from tribal kinship structures to the emergence of the state in classical Athens. Engels treats Athens not merely as a geographic entity but as a crucible where political, economic, and social forces coalesced to birth one of the earliest prototypes of the state. He opens with a powerful premise: “How the state developed… can be followed nowhere better than in ancient Athens”. This chapter is not just a historical recount but a forensic reconstruction of how kinship gave way to territorial authority, and how class struggle found its first formal arbiter—the state.

Engels’ central argument hinges on the slow but inevitable erosion of the gentile (or tribal) constitution, a system based on kinship, shared land, and egalitarian consensus. In Athens, this disintegration began with the increasing complexity of labor and the advent of private property. As people migrated within Attica due to trade, agriculture, or craft, the old tribal structures that once governed through blood relations became obsolete. Engels describes this clearly: “Into the districts of the phratry and tribe moved inhabitants… who, although fellow countrymen, did not belong to these bodies and were therefore strangers in their own place of domicile”. Here, we witness the alienation of individuals from their own social institutions—a phenomenon painfully familiar in modernity.

A pivotal theme in this chapter is the radical transformation from collective landholding to private property. The moment individuals began producing not for communal consumption but for exchange, the seeds of capitalism were sown. Engels writes, “When the producers no longer directly consumed their product themselves… they lost control of it”. This moment, where the product becomes master of the producer, marks the beginning of alienated labor and commodified existence. The people of Athens, unbeknownst to themselves, had conjured a new god—money—before which all old laws and moralities bowed.

This economic transformation demanded a new institutional form. The old gentile constitution “had shown itself powerless before the triumphal march of money”. It lacked the mechanisms to adjudicate disputes between creditors and debtors, to regulate property rights, or to control the rising number of slaves and immigrants who fell outside the kin-based system. The state emerged, then, not as a benevolent guardian, but as an apparatus to protect wealth and stabilize the rising inequalities that wealth produced. “An institution which… sanctified the private property formerly so little valued… was invented. The state was invented”.

Equally important is Engels’ discussion of Cleisthenes’ reforms, which marked a death blow to the gentile order. He abandoned the old tribal divisions based on kinship and replaced them with local demes, political units determined by domicile rather than descent. “Only domicile was now decisive, not membership of a kinship group… the inhabitants became a mere political appendage of the territory”. This reorientation from people to place represents the foundational shift of political modernity: the abstraction of governance from personal relations to impersonal laws.

From Kinship to Bureaucracy: The Birth of the Athenian State

Once Cleisthenes instituted his groundbreaking reforms, the transformation of Athens from a kinship-based society to a territorial state became irreversible. Engels underscores this moment as pivotal in the birth of the state: “The phratry and tribe could not now receive any new members; the state could”. With this, the polis became more than a confederation of clans—it became a political organism with sovereignty and law. The communal forms of identity—blood, myth, ancestry—were supplanted by location, taxation, and duty to a bureaucratic structure. Engels writes with startling clarity: “The state now stepped in, thrusting the gentile constitution into the background”.

This shift was not bloodless. It came with a price, paid by those who had once thrived within the old tribal order: the peasants, debtors, and the kinless poor. As private property expanded, so too did the polarization of wealth. Engels notes bitterly, “The gentile body could afford no protection; it knew neither money, nor credit, nor debt”. It was a moral order unfit to regulate economic injustice. Thus, the poor were sold into slavery for debt, their land confiscated, and their labor exploited. The Athenian state, born in the name of unity, first served as a tool of class division.

Slavery is central to Engels’ theory of the Athenian state’s economic base. It is no accident that Athens—the so-called cradle of democracy—relied on massive numbers of enslaved laborers to power its economy. Engels doesn’t romanticize Athenian freedom; rather, he eviscerates its hypocrisy. “Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Greek and Roman slavery, no modern Europe”. This quote must be read not as a celebration, but a condemnation—an indictment of the civilizational model that claims enlightenment on the backs of human bondage.

What emerged was a state with extraordinary complexity and unprecedented power. The Athenian polis created its own army, navy, law courts, and magistracies. Yet beneath the glory of marble temples and public assemblies, Engels discerns the same instrument of class rule seen throughout history. “The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without… 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”. This contradiction—between the propertied and the dispossessed—can be temporarily managed but never resolved by the state.

One of Engels’ most powerful intellectual maneuvers is his reframing of democracy. In Athenian terms, democracy was rule by citizens—but citizenship excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Hence, Engels sees through the rhetoric: “This so-called people’s state was in reality a slave-holders’ democracy”. It was a democracy for the few, sustained by the labor and lives of the many. For Engels, this was no anomaly—it was the blueprint for how early states functioned: codifying inequality under the guise of public order.

In this light, the rise of the Athenian state becomes a case study in the dialectics of civilization itself. The state arises not from consensus but from conflict; not to protect liberty, but to protect property. Engels concludes with a poignant warning that, until private property is abolished, the state will always remain “a power seemingly standing above society” yet “arising from society” to perpetuate class rule.

The Historical Irony and Enduring Lessons of Athenian Statehood

In concluding Chapter V, Engels offers not merely a historical analysis but a meditation on political legitimacy. The Athenian state, heralded in conventional narratives as a beacon of civilization and democracy, is here revealed in its full contradiction. It was the cradle of reason, yet born of economic desperation; a state of “equals,” built on the backs of slaves; a polity of public voice, sustained by private accumulation. Engels’ critique is unsparing and layered with moral clarity: “The state was not abolished; it withered away in the form of the gentile constitution… but only in order to be reborn on a new basis—the territory and private property”.

To Engels, the most profound betrayal of the old gentile order lay in the replacement of gemeinschaft—communal bonds—with the cold rationality of state bureaucracy. Under the tribal system, decisions were reached by consensus, not coercion. Law was embedded in custom, not codified by decree. With the rise of the state, however, law became the instrument of class interests. “The public power exists in every state,” Engels insists, “not only in the form of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds”. Law, then, does not merely resolve disputes; it imposes submission.

This is not merely a historical argument but a theoretical model. For Engels, the emergence of the state marks a decisive transition in human development: from egalitarianism to hierarchy, from kinship to coercion. It is a pattern repeated across civilizations, and Athens becomes both example and warning. Engels writes with almost prophetic resonance: “As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check… it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class”. Thus, the Athenian state, though it bore the trappings of democracy, functioned ultimately to serve the owners of property.

What is astonishing about Engels’ critique is its modernity. The abstraction of political power from personal accountability, the erosion of communal life in the name of economic development, the ideological camouflage of inequality—these are not phenomena unique to ancient Athens. They resonate today in every state that proclaims liberty while sustaining systems of domination, in every government that erects monuments to democracy while denying equity to its most vulnerable.

At the heart of Engels’ argument is a compelling redefinition of the state: not as a natural or eternal institution, but as a historical contingency—“a product of society at a particular stage of development”. And like all such products, it can be transcended. This hope, this latent utopianism, is the emotional charge behind Engels’ forensic tone. The state, like the family, like private property, is not fixed—it is mutable. And if it has been made by class society, it can be unmade by a classless one.

Thus, in examining the rise of the Athenian state, Engels does not merely recount a political shift; he dramatizes the birth of domination through institutional form. Athens, often idealized as the beginning of democracy, is in his hands reinterpreted as the beginning of the state as alienation, the formalization of class rule, and the mythologization of liberty under oligarchy.

Engels’ chapter, then, is not an antiquarian study. It is a political excavation, a call to unearth the buried truths beneath the myths of civilization. The lesson of Athens is not that democracy triumphed, but that the state emerged to protect property at the expense of solidarity—and that this structural logic persists to this day.

Chapter VI: The Gens and the State in Rome

Friedrich Engels’ treatment of Roman society in Chapter VI of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is nothing short of a structural autopsy—peeling back the layers of legend, law, and lineage to reveal the bones of class and power. His core argument is that Rome’s early society, structured around the gens (a kinship unit), transitioned from a naturally evolved system of collective social organization to an artificial and coercive state, necessitated by the emergence of private property and class conflict.

At the outset, Engels frames Rome’s foundation mythologically, but interprets it through a materialist lens. According to the tradition, Rome was founded by a federation of 300 gentes—100 each from the Latin, Sabellian, and mixed tribes. Engels asserts that “very little was still primitive here except the gens,” signaling that by the time of Rome’s historical dawn, the natural tribal organization had already begun to fossilize under social stratification.

Engels recognizes the Roman gens as structurally equivalent to the Greek gens, which in turn was a direct outgrowth of even earlier kin-based forms like those seen among the Iroquois. Thus, Roman society, in its embryonic stages, was still embedded in what Lewis Henry Morgan had identified as the “gentile constitution.” Engels writes, “The Roman gens, at least in the earliest times of Rome, had the following constitution,” and then proceeds to list its fundamental features:

1. Mutual right of inheritance: Originally, property remained within the gens, passed down through the male line (agnates). This inheritance logic was formalized in the Twelve Tables—the earliest codified Roman law—which stipulated that in the absence of direct descendants, property passed first to male relatives, then to gentile members.
2. Common burial place: A sacred and communal tumulus (mound) was maintained for members. Engels recalls that “even in the time of Augustus,” such customs remained. For instance, the head of Varus was buried in the gentilitius tumulus of the gens Quinctilia.
3. Common religious rites: The sacra gentilitia—gentile religious ceremonies—offered cohesion through spiritual obligations and shared ritual practices.
4. Exogamy: Though not codified in Roman law, there existed a strong custom against marrying within the same gens. This custom ensured that property and political alliances extended beyond a single kin unit.
5. Common land: The gens originally owned land collectively. Over time, individual land ownership arose, but remnants of communal ownership lingered, evidenced in the allocation of jugera (land parcels) by Romulus and the continued significance of public lands in Roman political life.
6. Mutual obligation and protection: Gentile solidarity was more than symbolic. Engels recounts the collective mourning of Appius Claudius’s gens and notes how Roman gentes attempted to ransom their members captured during the Punic Wars, even though the Senate intervened to prevent it.
7. Right to bear the gentile name: Names were not mere identifiers but markers of privilege and duty. Even freedmen bore the names of their patron gens but were stripped of full gentile rights.
8. Right to adopt into the gens: This was another holdover from primitive forms, echoing adoption practices among the Iroquois and other tribal societies.
9. Elective leadership: Though not explicitly documented for Roman gentes, Engels infers that the principle of electing or nominating leaders (as was done for kings, priests, and curia officials) likely extended to gens chiefs as well.

These features—collectively described—demonstrate how the gens was not just a bloodline but a legal, economic, and spiritual unit that prefigured the modern state in miniature. Yet, Engels insists that this form could not withstand the centrifugal forces of wealth accumulation, class antagonism, and expanding population.

Over time, these once-organic kin units calcified into exclusionary aristocratic structures. As Engels sharply observes, “The interests of the groups of handicraftsmen… the special needs of the town as opposed to the country, called for new organs” which were “not only alien to the old gentile order, but ran directly counter to it at every point”.

The great historical rupture, then, occurs when society, once governed by kinship ties and collective norms, begins to divide into antagonistic classes. The emergence of slavery, debt bondage, and urbanization meant that more and more people—especially the growing plebeian class—were excluded from the rights and privileges of the gens. Engels argues that “gentile society becomes a closed aristocracy in the midst of the numerous plebs who stand outside it and have duties but no rights”.

It is at this juncture that the Roman state emerges—not as a natural evolution of the gens, but as a structure imposed to manage the irreconcilable tensions of a society cleaved by class. The Roman state, therefore, is not an agent of the people but an apparatus of domination. Engels sees this transformation as emblematic: “The gentile constitution was finished. It had been shattered by the division of labour and its result, the cleavage of society into classes. It was replaced by the state”.

This concluding point, with all its tragic gravity, lays bare the philosophical foundation of Engels’ materialist conception of history. The state is not born of a social contract, as liberal theorists might claim, but from “the vilest means—violence, fraud, treason”—which facilitate the emergence of private property and class rule.

Having charted the internal structure and functions of the Roman gens, Engels turns to examine its erosion. As he states with characteristic clarity: “The gentile constitution had ceased to be a living body; it had become a mere shell”. This metaphor—of vitality drained from an organic body—captures the irreversible transformation of Roman society as economic and political life left the kin group behind and moved toward institutionalized power in the form of the state.

One of the more striking illustrations Engels provides of this devolution is the decline of the curiae—the thirty groups of ten gentes each, which originally held real legislative and military functions. In the early Roman monarchy and into the Republic, the curiae were once potent assemblies, deciding on war, electing kings, and participating in tribal rituals. But by the later Republic, Engels notes, “the curiae met merely to ratify decisions already made elsewhere, and their presidents were usually low-grade officials”.

What had happened was not merely procedural obsolescence, but a tectonic shift in sovereignty. Decision-making had been appropriated by new institutions born out of class conflict: the Senate and later the comitia centuriata, which prioritized wealth over birth. The Senate, initially an advisory body composed of patriarchs from noble gentes, gradually became the locus of power. The comitia centuriata, in which voting rights were allocated by wealth classification, further entrenched class dominance over collective kin identity.

Engels connects this political reorganization to the rise of private property and wealth-based stratification. As he succinctly argues, “In place of the organized gentile bodies, we find organized classes: patricians and plebeians”. This marks a profound rupture in human social organization. Instead of bonds based on common descent and mutual obligation, society was now defined by conflict between rich and poor, landlord and debtor, master and slave.

In one of the most important insights of the chapter, Engels asserts:

“What the sword of the conquering hero had not been able to bring about was accomplished by the money of the usurer. The old gentile constitution broke down in the struggle of the poor against the rich”.

This line is especially poignant, as it underscores Engels’ belief that economic exploitation—embodied by the moneylender—achieved what violence could not: the destruction of communal, egalitarian institutions.

Yet even as the gens faded from political relevance, it remained visible as a cultural and religious relic. Patrician families still invoked their gens in public rituals and used it as a badge of prestige, but it no longer served its original function. It had become, in Engels’ words, “a pompous title, an emblem of aristocratic pride, devoid of real content”.

This hollowing out of the gens made room for the full emergence of the state, which Engels defines not in liberal terms—as a neutral arbiter—but in class terms: a coercive instrument of class rule. He writes with cutting clarity:

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without… 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”.

Here, Engels is drawing on the Marxist concept of the state as a reflection of irreconcilable class antagonisms. The Roman state, like all class-based states, was not created to reconcile society but to manage, repress, and institutionalize its divisions.

He closes the chapter with the affirmation that the Roman example is paradigmatic—it shows, in the starkest terms, how a once-communal form of life can be dismantled through the interplay of property, debt, and class interest. The gentile structure didn’t “evolve” into the state; it was broken, discarded, and replaced.

Final Thoughts on Engels’ View of Rome

In essence, Chapter VI is Engels’ historical autopsy of a world lost. The Roman gens, a kin-based unit once defined by solidarity, mutual protection, and communal ownership, was transformed by the rise of private property into a vehicle for aristocratic self-assertion. The Roman state, meanwhile, arose not from the needs of the many, but from the contradictions of class society. It was an imposition, necessary only because of the failure of kinship to contain inequality.

This entire chapter serves as a powerful affirmation of Engels’ historical materialism—the belief that changes in economic conditions lead to structural changes in society and politics. The Roman gens and its demise thus exemplify the broader thesis of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: that the family and state are not eternal fixtures of human life, but products of specific historical processes shaped by material conditions.

In closing, one is reminded of Engels’ bleak but honest declaration:

“The state, this public power, exists in every civilized country; it is not only distinct from the mass of the people, it grows more and more alien to it”.

Chapter VII: The Gens among Celts and Germans

In Chapter VII, Friedrich Engels deepens his genealogical excavation into the historical materialism of kinship by exploring the remnants of the gens—or clan-based kin-organization—among the Celts and Germans. The primary argument of the chapter is simple yet far-reaching: even among the so-called “barbaric” peoples of Europe, communal forms of organization grounded in gentile (clan) structures remained not only visible but deeply rooted in daily life, legal systems, and moral consciousness. Engels presents this not as a curiosity, but as evidence that gentile structures were an essential precursor to the rise of the state and private property.

To begin, Engels illustrates the persistence of the gens in Celtic societies, especially in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In Ireland, the gens survived English conquest not institutionally, but instinctively—”as an instinct at any rate” among the people. This deep-rooted social memory implies that such institutions do not vanish simply because of political repression; rather, they become embedded in what Gramsci would later call cultural hegemony or folk consciousness. “In Scotland,” Engels writes, “it was still in full strength in the middle of the eighteenth century, and here again it succumbed only to the weapons, laws, and courts of the English”.

Wales provides a more structured insight. The Welsh legal codes preserved before the 11th century document “common tillage of the soil by whole villages.” Each family cultivated five acres individually, but there was also a collectively farmed plot, the yield of which was shared. Engels suggests that these villages were likely gentes or sub-gentes, and while he admits a lack of direct textual proof due to limitations in his own research notes, the comparative evidence from Ireland and Scotland bolsters his claim.

Engels also explores pairing marriage among the Celts, challenging the assumption that monogamy was the universal or even normative family structure. In Wales, marriage became truly binding only after seven years of cohabitation. Prior to that, couples could separate freely. The rules for dividing property were often humorous and egalitarian. The woman received her dowry back, and in cases where she initiated the separation, she took the “middle child,” a poetic if not equitable resolution. Adultery, too, was not met with harsh legalism but with limited retributive options—“for the one offence there shall be either atonement or vengeance, but not both”.

Transitioning to the Germanic tribes, Engels begins by reaffirming their organization into gentes and kindreds. Julius Caesar himself, a Roman of the Julian gens, described them as settled in “gentibus cognationibusque,” using terms that undeniably point to clan structures. Among the Germans, linguistic analysis also offers clues: the Gothic ‘kuni’, Middle High German ‘künne’, and Old Norse ‘kona’ all reflect a shared etymology with genos and gens, tracing back to a time when mother-right may have prevailed.

Engels’ treatment of Tacitus’ Germania offers one of the most poignant illustrations of matrilineal kinship values. He writes that the maternal uncle was often considered closer than the biological father, especially in matters of honor and responsibility: “…the sister’s son is considered a better security than the natural son of the man whom it is desired to bind.” This insight is not trivial—it offers “living evidence… of the matriarchal, and therefore primitive, gens.” In such a society, the violation of a nephew’s safety wasn’t merely a personal loss but a breach of sacred communal law.

Engels also delves into the social vocabulary of the Germanic gens, noting the diverse terminologies such as fara, sibja, and sippe. While he hesitates to definitively equate all these terms with the gens, he leans toward kuni as the most direct analog. He interestingly traces the etymological root of könig (king) to kuni, suggesting that even monarchical power initially stemmed from gentile leadership, not divine authority or personal wealth.

Furthermore, the military organization of German tribes mirrored the gentile structure. Units were composed of men from the same gens, emphasizing how war, honor, and kinship were inextricably bound. Tacitus’ phrase “families and kindreds” thus betrays not vagueness but a Roman’s inability to fully grasp a system long dead in his own society.

In essence, Engels’ seventh chapter serves as both a scholarly excavation and a quiet eulogy for the gentile society—a structure built not on hierarchy and ownership but on kinship, communal labor, and mutual obligations. It stands as a historical counterpoint to capitalist modernity and forms a critical part of Engels’ broader theory: that the state arose not from reason or divine will, but from the slow erosion of communal bonds by private property and class conflict.

He writes with striking clarity: “The whole of the gentile constitution is absolutely incompatible with a society organized in classes”. This one line encapsulates the engine of Engels’ argument. Where gentes once mediated human relations—allocating land, determining kinship, resolving conflict—eventually their equitable logic could not coexist with the intensifying demands of private ownership, inheritance, and patriarchal succession.

In the case of the Germans, Engels notes how even as late as the tribal confederations that confronted Rome, their internal structure still resisted centralization. The land remained largely communal, and leadership was elective and ephemeral, with chiefs possessing authority only during war and losing it in peacetime. This, Engels insists, reflects a system in which political power is still subordinate to collective will, rather than an instrument of coercion as it would become under the state. As he puts it, “So long as the gens remained vital, it was incompatible with the state”.

Engels sees in these historical vestiges—shared land, elective leadership, family structures based on kin over contract—not merely nostalgia, but evidence of a different human possibility. In this regard, Chapter VII becomes a quietly radical exercise. While Marx’s economic treatises focus on capitalist mechanics, Engels here charts the anthropological roots of inequality, tying the rise of patriarchy and monogamy to the legal mechanisms of inheritance that destroyed the communal household.

Moreover, he subtly critiques the ideology of the nuclear family and the modern nation-state, which are often framed as inevitable or natural. But if the gens once operated without jails, police, standing armies, or courts—if it could structure both economic life and social morality—then the institutions we now take for granted appear less eternal and more contingent. “The state,” Engels writes in a broader theoretical moment, “is an admission that this society has involved itself in an insoluble contradiction”.

The chapter’s conclusion is not framed in despair, however. Engels sees in the structure of the gens a moral and political orientation that could be revived under socialism: not by reproducing ancient forms but by reimagining community without coercion, kinship without patriarchy, and production without exploitation. As he foreshadows in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’s final pages, such a system would not reinstate the gens, but would “revive, in a higher form, the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes”.

In sum, Chapter VII of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is no antiquarian aside. It is a linchpin in Engels’ larger dialectic, demonstrating that the seeds of communal life once existed—and could bloom again—not as regress but as revolutionary synthesis. Through his close reading of Celtic and Germanic gentile structures, Engels not only historicizes kinship but reclaims it as a locus of political imagination. His inquiry into the past thus serves as a critique of the present—and a compass toward the future.

Chapter VIII: The Formation of the State among the Germans

In Chapter VIII of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels turns his ethnological gaze toward the Germanic tribes, documenting with scholarly precision how their transition from gentile society to early statehood marked a key evolutionary threshold in social organization. Engels’s analysis is not just anthropological—it is dialectical, framed within the larger historical materialist thesis that forms the book’s spine. By carefully tracing how tribal configurations gave way to monarchic power, Engels elucidates the birth pangs of the state among the Germans, a transition embedded in class formation, military conquest, and shifting modes of property ownership.

At the heart of Engels’s theory lies the observation that Germanic society had reached the upper stage of barbarism, a critical juncture in the Marxist framework of historical development. Engels asserts, “The constitution… was the model constitution of the upper stage of barbarism. If society passed beyond the limits within which this constitution was adequate, that meant the end of the gentile order; it was broken up and the state took its place”. This passage is crucial in understanding the central argument: the Germanic tribes did not leap into statehood arbitrarily, but through a dialectical breakdown of tribal norms under pressure from evolving productive forces.

One of Engels’s most telling observations concerns the social fragmentation engendered by retinues—military entourages of young warriors loyal to a chieftain. These groups represented the dissolution of collective gentile allegiance and the embryonic stage of feudal hierarchy. “A military leader… gathered around him a band of young men eager for booty… The leader provided their keep, gave them gifts, and organized them on a hierarchic basis…”. Engels emphasizes that this was not mere militarism; it was the institutional seed of class formation, as the leaders of these bands would evolve into feudal nobility.

The economic base of Germanic society at this point was still rudimentary, with cattle forming the primary measure of wealth. Yet, their subsistence economy began to integrate with the Roman imperial framework through plunder, trade, and eventually, conquest. The assimilation of Roman administrative techniques and slavery laid the groundwork for the state. In Engels’s words, “These retinues… were nevertheless the beginnings of the decay of the old freedom of the people… [and] favoured the rise of monarchic power”.

Engels also details the political superstructure of Germanic society: a people’s assembly (the thing), a council of chiefs (the principes), and military leaders (duces) whose authority was constrained. Yet this semi-democratic gentile order was insufficient to govern a society in flux. Tacitus had remarked that “the real power was in the hands of the assembly of the people” but also noted how kingship emerged by military prowess, not descent.

As Engels demonstrates, the tribal democracy among the Germans—though noble in its communalism—could not withstand the pressures of population growth, territorial expansion, and war-driven stratification. The transition from communal to hereditary landholding, and from kinship to class society, completed the germination of the state.

Engels’s narrative proceeds with a sharp focus on the decisive moment when the gentile order among the German tribes, though relatively stable in pre-conquest times, began to crumble under the weight of historical necessity. The final blow, as he contends, came with the conquest of the Roman provinces. “Only conquest could bring the gentile constitution to an end,” Engels insists. “It did so. It necessitated a stronger, more cohesive organization of the people, in the form of a state”. This is the pivot on which his entire argument turns: that state formation arises not from peaceful evolution, but from crisis and conflict—especially when existing communal bonds can no longer manage the growing contradictions of society.

One of the most poignant insights Engels offers concerns the role of private property in this transformation. Land, which had previously belonged to the community, slowly shifted into hereditary possession. Chiefs, military leaders, and priests began to consolidate wealth and power, marking the germination of class society. As Engels writes, “The victorious army… divided the conquered land among themselves. The spoils of war became private property. The land, formerly held by the kin, now passed into individual hands”. This appropriation represents not just a change in economic arrangements but a revolution in social relations.

In this context, the formation of the state becomes not just possible but inevitable. Engels frames it as a “confession that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself… and needs the state as an instrument of suppression”. The state, then, is not an instrument of harmony but of coercion—a necessary mechanism for protecting the new property relations that benefit the dominant class.

It is crucial to note Engels’s emotional undercurrent throughout this chapter. His admiration for the communalism of early Germanic society is evident, yet so is his clear-eyed recognition of its unsustainability in the face of evolving economic and military pressures. This dual tone gives the text its richness: a mixture of historical analysis and tragic reflection. He mourns the loss of “primitive democracy” even as he acknowledges its obsolescence in the face of growing internal contradictions.

Toward the end of the chapter, Engels reiterates that historical materialism is the key to understanding these shifts. The transition from gentile society to statehood among the Germans was not an accident, nor was it a moral failure—it was a necessary stage in the development of productive forces, class antagonism, and political domination. The state did not appear as a neutral arbiter but as “a product of society at a certain stage of development,” needed to mediate “irreconcilable contradictions” that could no longer be managed by kinship structures alone.

Ultimately, Chapter VIII stands as one of the most vivid applications of the Marxist method to European pre-history. Engels reveals how even the most egalitarian tribal societies give birth to inequality once material conditions evolve. The rise of military retinues, hereditary power, and private property were not deviations—they were historically determined outcomes. In Engels’s eyes, understanding how the German state came into being is crucial for any reader seeking to grasp the dialectic between freedom and domination, between tribal democracy and class oppression.

Chapter IX: Barbarism and Civilization: The Turning Point of Human Social Structure

In Chapter IX of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels lays bare the monumental transformation from barbarism to civilization—a change that was not simply political or technological, but profoundly economic and structural. Engels crafts this narrative with his usual rigor, borrowing heavily from Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological schema and Karl Marx’s economic insight. The keyword throughout this transition, both in tone and theme, is “dissolution”—the slow but inevitable erosion of the gentile constitution.

At the outset, Engels declares his intention: “Let us examine the general economic conditions which already undermined the gentile organization of society at the upper stage of barbarism and with the coming of civilization overthrew it completely”. This isn’t simply historical speculation—it’s a materialist diagnosis of how societies mutate when their economic base transforms.

The Gentile Constitution: A Dying Order

Engels traces the flowering of the gentile structure during the lower stage of barbarism, drawing on the American Indians as a model. Here, “the tribe is now grouped in several gentes, generally two… [which] split up into several daughter gentes, their mother gens now appearing as the phratry”. This segmentation is organic, arising from population growth and practical need, not conquest or hierarchy. It is also deeply egalitarian—there are no classes, no rulers, no formalized law beyond customary obligations.

This is, in Engels’ estimation, the most “natural” form of human association—tribal, kin-based, reciprocal. The economic basis of this gentile society is astonishingly simple: “The division of labour is purely primitive, between the sexes only… Each is master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house”. Yet from this simplicity sprang remarkable social cohesion. There was no state, because there was no need for one. Conflict, when it arose, was either settled communally or escalated into war—not for conquest, but for survival or vengeance.

The Rise of Inequality: Greed as the Catalyst

But this harmony was not to last. With the increase of productive forces—especially the domestication of animals and agriculture—a surplus began to accumulate. This led to the great rift: “The greed for riches had… split the members of the gens into rich and poor,” thereby sowing the seeds for class antagonism. Engels is emphatic that this economic differentiation was the death knell of the gentile constitution.

The transformation wasn’t just economic—it was institutional. War changed from a defensive activity to an “industry” for pillage. The military leadership that had once been temporary and elected “from the same families” began to solidify into hereditary succession. The germ of monarchy, and later the state, was born here: “The customary election of their successors… gradually transformed… into a right of hereditary succession… thus the foundation of the hereditary monarchy and the hereditary nobility is laid”.

Civilization: The Institutionalization of Exploitation

Civilization, for Engels, begins not with writing or cities, but with a new division of labor. “The upper stage of barbarism brings us the further division of labour between agriculture and handicrafts… so that exchange between individual producers assumes the importance of a vital social function”. This exchange leads to the birth of private property—not in the primitive sense of personal tools, but as a legal and institutional apparatus for domination.

This is where the narrative becomes chilling in its accuracy. Engels observes, “The organs of the gentile constitution change from instruments of the will of the people into independent organs for the domination and oppression of the people”. It is at this point that the state crystallizes—no longer a community’s mediator but an enforcer of inequality.

In an echo of Marx’s dialectical materialism, Engels presents civilization not as a triumph of human spirit but as a systemic betrayal of communal life. And yet, he does not descend into fatalism. Rather, he hints at the dialectic’s next twist: “The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim… Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges… foreshadow the next higher plane of society”.

A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage: Anthropological Vindication Against Rationalist Skepticism

While the primary chapters of Engels’ seminal work trace the descent of the family from primitive communism to monogamy, his appended note—“A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage”—serves as a vindication of his most contested claim: that group marriage was a real, historically widespread phenomenon, not merely a myth of classical imagination or a speculative anthropological error.

Engels was reacting against a wave of modern “rationalist” ethnographers who had begun to reject the existence of group marriage altogether. With acerbic clarity, Engels notes: “Since it has recently become fashionable among certain rationalistic ethnographers to deny the existence of group marriage, the following report is of interest”. What follows is a detailed ethnographic citation from Russkiye Vyedomosti, documenting the social customs of the Gilyaks—a Siberian people inhabiting the island of Sakhalin.

The Sakhalin Example: A Living Echo of Punaluan Marriage

In what is arguably one of the most empirically grounded moments of the entire The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels reports that the Gilyaks practice a form of group marriage remarkably similar to the “punaluan” family identified by Lewis H. Morgan in Hawaii—the most advanced known form of group marriage. As Engels explains: “a man is married to all the wives of his brothers and to all the sisters of his wife,” which from the woman’s perspective means “she may freely practise sexual intercourse with the brothers of her husband and the husbands of her sisters”.

This configuration echoes the punaluan model where groups of brothers are married to groups of sisters, but with a flexible substitution. In this Sakhalin case, the men may not be literal brothers, nor the women literal sisters, yet the rights of access and cohabitation remain mutually recognized within extended kinship networks. Engels underscores that the system differs from polygamy or loose monogamy in that “custom permits sexual intercourse in a number of cases where otherwise it would be severely punished”.

Group Marriage and Philistine Hypocrisy

One of the most striking parts of the addendum is Engels’ moral critique of the Western philistine mind that dismisses group marriage as depravity. He rebukes them, stating: “The partners in group marriage do not lead in public the same kind of lascivious life as he practises in secret”. This is a sharp and deeply human observation about cultural bias. While bourgeois morality recoils from non-monogamous customs in so-called “savage” societies, Engels implies that the same societies often uphold stricter moral codes within their own frameworks than their self-proclaimed ‘civilized’ critics.

This critique is not tangential; it is essential. Engels defends the integrity and logic of indigenous customs. To him, these group marriage systems are not instances of “free love” in the libertine sense, but survivals of earlier human social structures where sexual relationships followed codified norms aligned with economic and kinship obligations.

A Comparative Turn: Global Parallels and Universality

Engels then expands the argument through comparative anthropology. The customs observed among the Gilyaks mirror those in Hawaii, India (among the Dravidian tribes), the South Sea Islands, and even among the North American Indians. He argues that the Sakhalin case “demonstrates the similarity, even the identity in their main characteristics, of the social institutions of primitive peoples at approximately the same stage of development”.

This uniformity, he asserts, is not coincidental—it speaks to a universal trajectory of social development. When cultures are at analogous stages of material production and tribal organization, they tend to arrive at remarkably similar familial arrangements. This insight undergirds Engels’ larger materialist framework: it is the economic and technological base that shapes the form of the family, not arbitrary moral preferences.

The Slow Death of Group Marriage

Despite his defense, Engels acknowledges that group marriage is a dying form. The Sakhalin case is a relic, not a prototype. He writes with anthropological detachment but with a tinge of elegy: “That the actual exercise of these rights is gradually dying out only proves that this form of marriage is itself destined to die out”. In this statement, Engels displays a nuanced grasp of historical dialectics—traditions fade not because they are invalid, but because they are no longer compatible with evolving modes of production and social organization.

Indeed, just as communal property gave way to private property, communal sexual arrangements yield to exclusive pairing under the pressure of inheritance laws, property transfer, and patriarchal control. Group marriage, then, becomes not just a sociological curiosity but a political and economic indicator of what came before the institutionalized family, the state, and property.

Conclusion: From Kinship to Class, from Custom to Capital

Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is not a mere theoretical tract; it is a manifesto in anthropological clothing. In the combined weight of Chapter IX and the addendum “A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage”, we witness Engels at his most dialectical—historicizing even the most intimate dimensions of human life with a clarity and courage that still unsettles.

In Chapter IX, “Barbarism and Civilization,” Engels reconstructs the passage of humanity from kin-based, egalitarian tribal societies to class-divided, state-controlled civilizations. With eloquence and precision, he explains that it was not divine will or biological destiny that upended gentile society—it was the surpluses of labor and the introduction of private property. The family was reshaped not by affection, but by economics. “The monogamous family,” he writes, “was the first form of the family based not on natural but on economic conditions”. This insight cannot be overstated: it exposes the modern nuclear family as a historical by-product of capital, not a timeless moral truth.

But Engels doesn’t stop at structure—he probes the emotional and ethical fallout of this transition. He laments the “world historical defeat of the female sex”, a phrase as piercing as it is radical, describing how patriarchy arose not out of necessity but inheritance anxiety, solidified through the institutional machinery of marriage, law, and the state. Civilization, as Engels shows, is the age of control—over women, over production, over labor.

The addendum, “A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage”, serves both as anthropological evidence and a rebuttal to modern skepticism. The Gilyak practice of communal spousal rights offers empirical vindication of Morgan’s and Engels’ claims that group marriage did in fact exist. Yet, far from being sensational, this case is used to affirm a more sober truth: that family systems evolve in lockstep with economic structures. Engels writes, “This form of marriage is itself destined to die out”—not because it is immoral, but because it is historically superseded.

Together, these sections illustrate Engels’ central thesis: the family is not static but dialectical. From punaluan clans to patriarchal houses to the modern nuclear family, each phase reflects the relations of production. And each contains within it the contradictions that will one day undermine it.

What makes Engels’ work resonate even now—more than a century later—is his insistence that history does not unfold randomly. Social institutions like marriage, inheritance, property, and state power are all answers to material problems. But, like all historical solutions, they are temporary. They bear within them the seeds of their own dissolution.

So where does this leave us today? In an age of proliferating family forms, gender debates, and economic anxiety, Engels’ prognosis feels prescient. He did not merely deconstruct the past—he sketched the future. A future in which, “with the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society”. Love would no longer be fettered by inheritance; children would be raised communally; and the woman would no longer be “the proletarian of the household.”

In this revolutionary reimagining of the human condition, Engels calls not just for critique, but for hope—a society in which both class and gender oppression dissolve with the very systems that created them. That hope remains the heartbeat of his enduring relevance.

Engels on the Evolution of the Family and Patriarchy

If there is one central thread in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, it is Engels’ conviction that the family — far from being a sacred or natural unit — is a historically constructed institution, transformed across time to serve the interests of property ownership and male domination. As I read this section, I was struck by just how clearly Engels anticipated modern feminist theory. Though he never used the term “patriarchy,” he described its formation with chilling precision.

“The monogamous family comes on the stage of history not as the reconciliation of man and woman, but as the subjugation of the one by the other.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 87)

Engels’ family theory begins with the gens system — tribal formations that were originally matrilineal, where descent was traced through the mother and inheritance was collective. Women held not only reproductive power but significant social standing. Under this mother-right, society was organized around the communistic household, where kinship obligations extended beyond the nuclear unit.

But this communal structure couldn’t survive the advent of private property. With the accumulation of wealth — especially in the form of herds, slaves, and land — the patriarchal nuclear family was born. Men began to require unquestionable paternity to ensure their property passed to their own sons. This shift transformed women into “mere instruments for the production of children” (p. 86), a chilling phrase that captures the reduction of women’s roles from communal members to reproductive laborers.

🔹 Monogamy as Economic Control

What struck me most was how Engels dismantles the idea that monogamy was founded on love or moral evolution. For him, monogamy is not moral progress but an economic contract, a legal and social mechanism to regulate property inheritance. The emotional bond — the ideal of romantic love — was, in his view, secondary, even hypocritical.

“Monogamy was the first form of the family based, not on natural conditions, but on economic conditions.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 85)

Even more shocking is his observation that this monogamy was one-sided: men were free to philander, while women faced moral scrutiny, legal penalties, and social condemnation. Engels called this “hypocrisy,” and noted that bourgeois society preserved it under the illusion of equality.

“Modern individual sex love differs essentially from monogamy as it arose out of property relations.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 98)

This is where Engels sounds almost prophetic. He insists that true monogamy — based on love and equality — can only exist in a society where women are economically independent. That insight, written in 1884, still resonates in modern feminist economics and gender theory.

🔹 Patriarchy: The First Class Oppression

Perhaps the most powerful and unsettling argument Engels makes is this: patriarchy was the first class-based oppression. Before class antagonisms between rich and poor, there was the division between men and women. And that division, he argues, was enforced through control of reproduction, sexuality, and labor.

“The first class oppression coincides with the oppression of the female sex by the male.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 86)

This is not just a throwaway line. Engels integrates it into his broader critique of capitalism, showing how the gendered structure of the family prefigures the capitalist structure of society. The household, in effect, becomes the prototype of the factory, with women as unpaid laborers. Domestic labor — emotional support, child-rearing, food preparation — is invisible but essential, sustaining the very system that exploits them.

In this way, Engels constructs an early intersectional framework, long before the term existed. Class and gender are not parallel oppressions but interlocked systems rooted in historical economic shifts — particularly the rise of private property.

🔹 Engels and Women’s Emancipation

Unlike many thinkers of his time, Engels didn’t stop at critique. He offered a radical solution: abolish the economic basis for inequality, and the rest would follow. In the final analysis, he writes:

“The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 206)

In other words, women’s freedom depends not on moral appeals, but on economic independence. Engels envisioned a society where domestic labor would be socialized — where the burdens of the private household would be shared by all. Only then, he believed, could men and women relate as equals.

Private Property and the Birth of the State

Engels’ central claim in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is radical yet brilliantly simple: the state arose not to maintain justice, but to protect private property and the class system that grew out of it. After reading this chapter, I could no longer see the modern state — or even law itself — as neutral arbiters. For Engels, both were born of violence, designed to preserve inequality through the appearance of order.

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without… Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 208)

This idea aligns with his foundational view of historical materialism: economic forces shape everything — not just tools or trade, but morality, family, and power structures. The emergence of private property set off a domino effect: as wealth accumulated unevenly, classes formed, and with them, the need for an institution to enforce ownership and suppress the propertyless — thus, the state was born.

🔹 Property Begets the State

In tribal or communal societies, there was no state because there were no conflicting property interests to protect. But with agriculture, animal domestication, and later metallurgy, wealth ceased to be collective. It was passed down through male heirs, and defended through custom, then law. The ruling class — initially war chiefs or elite clans — needed an apparatus to defend their status. Engels states it bluntly:

“The state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 210)

What I found most compelling is that Engels doesn’t present the state as a monolithic evil. Rather, he exposes its dual nature: it appears to represent the common good, but in reality, it serves a specific minority. This is particularly visible in legal systems. Property laws, inheritance rights, and monogamy codes are all social mechanisms wrapped in legal disguise.

“Law is the will of the ruling class made into a law for all.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 211)

🔹 The Family as Prototype of the State

One of Engels’ most brilliant contributions, often overlooked, is the way he links the family and the state as parallel institutions of control. The patriarchal family, where the male head controls women, children, and property, is mirrored in the structure of the state, where elite males control the labor and reproduction of the working class.

Just as women were excluded from property and forced into reproductive roles in the family, so too were the lower classes excluded from ownership and forced into production roles in society. The family, then, is not a refuge from the state — it is the state in miniature.

🔹 From Class Rule to Revolution

Yet Engels does not leave us in fatalism. In the final chapters, he argues that the very contradictions of class rule will eventually lead to its downfall. The state, he insists, is not eternal. Like slavery or feudalism, it too will pass — but only through revolution.

“Society, by creating the state, has placed itself above itself… but it will also, at a later stage, abolish it.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 209)

To abolish private property, then, is not just an economic act — it is a transformation of every institution we have taken as natural: the family, marriage, law, and even government itself. Engels envisions a world where communal ownership replaces individual hoarding, where production is for use and not profit, and where gendered oppression collapses along with capitalism.

This idea remains deeply relevant. In our world of growing inequality, militarized police, and fragile democracies, Engels’ theory of the state as a guardian of property, not people, feels more like prophecy than polemic.

Engels’ Influence on Marxist and Feminist Theory

If one measures influence not by acclaim but by the number of revolutions a book sets off in thinking, then The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is nothing short of dynamite. Though written over a century ago, this text has quietly — and sometimes explosively — shaped both Marxist theory and feminist analysis, becoming a foundational work in radical sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.

When I first finished The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, I couldn’t help but think: Engels was not just Marx’s lieutenant — he was feminism’s unlikely grandfather.

🔹 A Marxist Expansion into the Domestic Sphere

Before The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, classical Marxism had remained largely focused on labor, capital, and production in the public sphere — the factory, the marketplace, the state. Engels shattered that boundary by asserting that the household itself is a site of class struggle.

“The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom… It contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop in society and its state.” (Engels, Chapter II, p. 90)

This analysis opened the door for Marxists in the 20th century to study the political economy of the home: unpaid labor, emotional work, child-rearing as reproductive labor — all now recognized as essential to the functioning of capitalism.

Modern Marxist feminists, such as Silvia Federici and Lise Vogel, have built directly on Engels’ insight that capitalism requires unpaid domestic labor to reproduce the workforce. Federici, in her influential Caliban and the Witch, echoes Engels when she writes that capitalism “thrives on the invisible labor of women.”

🔹 Proto-Feminist or Problematic Ally?

And yet, Engels remains a contested figure in feminist thought. While his condemnation of women’s oppression is unmistakable — he wrote that “the emancipation of woman is the measure of general emancipation” (Chapter IX, p. 206) — some feminist scholars have noted his tendency to reduce complex social issues to economic roots alone.

Engels attributes the fall of women primarily to the rise of private property, sometimes underplaying factors such as cultural ideology, religion, and psychological subjugation. He also universalizes the Western nuclear family, projecting its structure onto all cultures, a flaw that postcolonial feminist anthropologists like Gayatri Spivak and Leela Gandhi have rightly critiqued.

Still, for many second-wave feminists in the 1960s and 70s, Engels’ work provided a radical alternative to liberal feminism. It offered a structural analysis that linked the kitchen to the factory, the nursery to the boardroom, and romantic love to economic submission.

🔹 A Legacy in Gender and Queer Theory

The implications of Engels’ theory of the family reach far beyond heterosexual gender roles. In arguing that the monogamous family is a historical, not biological, construct, he opened the door for queer theorists to challenge the supposed naturalness of binary gender and heteronormativity.

Judith Butler’s seminal work on gender performativity, though philosophically different, echoes Engels’ insistence that social institutions enforce gender roles to stabilize economic systems. Engels may not have spoken of sexuality in modern terms, but his exposure of how gender roles serve material interests lays foundational ground for queer Marxism today.

🔹 Influence in the Global South

What I found most eye-opening in revisiting this book was how revolutionary movements in the Global South adopted and adapted Engels’ ideas. From Maoist China to Naxalite India to Cuban socialism, revolutionary leaders cited Engels’ analysis of the family to justify communal child-rearing, gender equality campaigns, and collective labor models.

In each case, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State provided a moral and intellectual argument for social transformation — one that extended the class struggle to the most intimate corners of human life.

Criticism and Relevance in the 21st Century

More than 140 years have passed since The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was first published, and yet, in many ways, it feels as though Engels was writing not for his time — but for ours. This work continues to spark debate not just in academic circles, but among activists, feminists, anthropologists, and those disillusioned with the systems that govern their lives.

But does The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State still hold relevance? Or has it been outpaced by modern theory and new evidence?

Let’s examine both its limitations and its enduring power.

🔹 Critiques of Universalism and Eurocentrism

One of the most common critiques of Engels’ work today is its Eurocentric framework. By relying heavily on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society — which was itself based largely on 19th-century observations of the Iroquois and other Indigenous tribes — Engels universalized a Western, linear narrative of social development: from savagery to barbarism to civilization. This “stagist” model has since been discredited in anthropology for ignoring cultural variation and imposing a progressivist timeline on vastly different societies.

Modern anthropologists, like Eleanor Leacock and David Graeber, have shown that many societies did not transition in this neat pattern, and that matrilineal or egalitarian family structures existed well into modernity, resisting capitalist transformation.

“It is not a question of what is right for one society, but of whether we are imposing a model of development that flattens human diversity.” — from Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), a work that indirectly critiques Engels’ linear framework.

🔹 The Myth or Model of Primitive Communism?

Engels’ concept of primitive communism — a pre-class society based on equality, shared labor, and collective ownership — has always been controversial. Critics argue that no society was ever truly classless, and that even in so-called communal arrangements, power disparities and gender roles often still existed. The myth of a prelapsarian matriarchy, some argue, is a romantic projection rather than a historical fact.

And yet, the appeal of primitive communism as a model remains powerful — not because it describes a perfect past, but because it challenges the capitalist assumption that hierarchy and exploitation are inevitable.

“If primitive communism was indeed a myth, it was a useful one — a thought experiment that allows us to imagine that alternatives to capitalism are not only possible, but historically grounded.”

This vision, however flawed in detail, is essential to revolutionary imagination. Engels wasn’t trying to freeze a prehistoric utopia in amber — he was showing us that inequality had a beginning, and therefore, it can have an end.

🔹 Relevance in Today’s Gender Politics

It is in the realm of gender politics that Engels remains most shockingly relevant. The modern nuclear family — with its division of labor, unpaid domestic work, and persistent wage gap — still bears the imprint of property-based patriarchy that Engels described in 1884. In an era of capitalist overwork and skyrocketing living costs, the monogamous nuclear household is once again being questioned.

Movements for universal childcare, paid parental leave, gender-neutral parenting, and non-monogamous relationship models all echo Engels’ deeper insight: that family structure is not a private matter, but a public issue tied to economic systems.

“The emancipation of woman will only become possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 206)

We now know that even “production” includes emotional labor, caregiving, and community building — areas Engels didn’t fully appreciate but certainly gestured toward.

FAQ: Engels’ Core Concepts in Plain English

To ensure that every reader walks away with a working understanding of the most pivotal ideas in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, I’ve broken down some of the key questions people often have. These concise answers retain Engels’ depth while making the concepts digestible for anyone — whether you’re new to Marxist theory or just curious about the historical roots of family and power.

🔹 What is the main argument in The Origin of the Family by Engels?

At its core, Engels argues that the nuclear family, private property, and the state are not timeless institutions. Instead, they emerged historically alongside economic changes — especially the rise of private property — to protect the interests of the ruling class, including male heads of households.

“The monogamous family was based on the supremacy of the man; the express purpose was to produce children of undisputed paternity.” (Chapter II, p. 86)

In other words, the family became an economic tool, designed to control women, ensure inheritance, and sustain class rule.

🔹 What did Engels mean by private property?

Engels did not define private property as simply owning things. He referred specifically to productive property — land, livestock, and tools that generate wealth. As these assets were accumulated in early agricultural societies, a need arose to pass them down patrilineally. That need reshaped family structures, gender roles, and legal systems.

“The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.” (Chapter II, p. 89)

Private property, then, was not just an economic shift — it triggered a cultural and moral revolution, in which domination became naturalized.

🔹 What is historical materialism according to Engels?

Historical materialism is the lens through which Engels analyzes society. It holds that economic production and material life — not ideas or morals — drive historical change. In this view, the way we organize labor and property directly determines political systems, legal codes, religious beliefs, and even family structures.

“The determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life.” (Preface, p. 31)

In contrast to religious or idealist views of history, historical materialism explains the rise and fall of institutions (like monarchy, capitalism, marriage) through changes in the material conditions of existence — food, shelter, reproduction, and technology.

🔹 Was Engels predicting communism?

Not exactly. Engels wasn’t making a prophecy but offering a framework for understanding how social systems could evolve beyond capitalism. He believed that if private property created inequality, then abolishing it could eliminate not just class divisions but also the gender oppression baked into modern family life.

His conclusion? The emancipation of women, workers, and eventually the whole of society would come through collective ownership of resources — not utopian dreams, but structural change.

“With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society.” (Chapter IX, p. 207)

🔹 Why should we still read this book today?

Because so many of the structures Engels critiqued are still with us: families shaped by economic dependence, gendered labor divisions, legal systems favoring the wealthy, and states that protect capital over citizens.

Whether or not one agrees with every historical claim, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State helps us see the familiar as constructed — and therefore, changeable. That alone makes it revolutionary.

Conclusion

There are books that explain a historical moment, and then there are books that transcend their time, becoming tools for understanding any era. Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is firmly in the second category. I came to it expecting a rigid Marxist doctrine, but I left with something else entirely — a sharpened lens through which to view the most personal parts of life: love, family, sex, gender, law, property, and power.

Engels forces us to confront a deeply uncomfortable question: What if everything we think of as “natural” about the family or the state is actually just convenient for those in power?

“The state is not abolished, it withers away.” (Engels, Chapter IX, p. 209)

That single line stayed with me. It isn’t a call to anarchy — it’s a call to reimagine society. To understand that systems like private property, gender roles, and government authority were built — and that what was built can also be dismantled and rebuilt.

Even now, in the 21st century, we are surrounded by the ghosts of Engels’ analysis. Every time a mother gives up her career to care for children without pay, every time housing is treated as an investment rather than a right, every time wealth buys political immunity — we are living in the very world Engels diagnosed.

This is why The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State remains essential reading. Not because it’s perfect (it’s not). Not because it offers easy answers (it doesn’t). But because it asks the right questions — ones that pierce through ideology, through habit, through centuries of normalization.

To read Engels is to begin noticing how economic forces quietly script our intimate lives, how patriarchy is not merely a social attitude but a structural scaffold, and how the state can be both protector and jailer — depending on which side of the property line you stand.

🔹 Call to Action

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you leave with more than just a summary. I hope you leave with a renewed skepticism toward what seems permanent, and a deeper curiosity about how economic systems shape social life.

Feel free to share this article, quote from it, or challenge it. If Engels taught us anything, it’s that critique is how we begin to build something better.