When Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, it struck at the heart of Victorian assumptions about domestic life. Far from being a timeless institution, he argued, the monogamous nuclear family was a recent invention — one born of capitalist society and its need to consolidate private property and male inheritance. Within this patriarchal arrangement, women were reduced to the status of servants and, in effect, prostitutes. Engels’s provocative conclusion was that only Communism could bring about genuine sexual freedom and communal ways of living, rendering the coercive machinery of the state ultimately redundant. Profoundly influential and still fiercely debated, this remains one of the most challenging works in the Marxist canon.
ISBN 13: 9780141191119
Author: Friedrich Engels
