BOTH Marx and Engels were acutely aware of the family as a site of gender oppression. But their views on the future of family as a socio-economic institution evolved over time. The Communist Manifesto (1848) flatly announced that “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course” with the disappearance of capitalism. Probably this referred to the existing bourgeois form of family. In Principles of Communism (1847) Engels had been a bit more elaborate:

“It [communist society] will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage, the dependence, rooted in private property, of the woman on the man and of the children on the parents.”

It was, however, only in Origin that one gets a deep, thoroughgoing discussion of the question:

“We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Between pairing marriage and monogamy intervenes a period in the upper stage of barbarism when men have female slaves at their command and polygamy is practiced.

“As our whole presentation has shown, the progress which manifests itself in these successive forms is connected with the peculiarity that women, but not men, are increasingly deprived of the sexual freedom of group marriage. In fact, for men group marriage actually still exists even to this day. Paradoxically, however, it demoralizes men far more than women. Among women, prostitution degrades only the unfortunate ones who become its victims, and even these by no means to the extent commonly believed. But it degrades the character of the whole male world.

“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement — prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual — and a man at that — and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. But by transforming by far the greater portion of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production – into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Since monogamy arose from economic causes, will it disappear when these causes disappear?

“One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property will also disappear wage-labour, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality –for men as well.”

And it is not only the position of men that will be radically altered. “...the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. 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 the anxiety about the ‘consequences,’ which today is the most essential social – moral as well as economic – factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honour and a woman’s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?”

Abolition of monogamy — of marriage as such — is thus a real possibility. We may remember that the Communist Manifesto had flatly announced this. But in Origin Engels, while emphasising that there is bound to be a radical change in the nature of the man-woman relationship, refuses to be very definitive about the future. He weighs another possibility:

“Here a new element comes into play, an element which, at the time when monogamy was developing, existed at most in embryo: individual sex-love.

Our sex love differs essentially from the simple sexual desire, the Eros, of the ancients. In the first place, it assumes that the person loved returns the love; to this extent the woman is on an equal footing with the man, whereas in the Eros of antiquity she was often not even asked. Secondly, our sexual love has a degree of intensity and duration which makes both lovers feel that non-possession and separation are a great, if not the greatest, calamity; to possess one another, they risk high stakes, even life itself. In the ancient world this happened only, if at all, in adultery. And, finally, there arises a new moral standard in the judgment of a sexual relationship. We do not only ask, was it within or outside marriage? But also, did it spring from love and reciprocated love or not? Seldom practised though, the moral standard is at least recognized in theory, on paper. And for the present more than this cannot be expected.”