Property and Desire
Private Property, Patriarchy and the Political Economy of the Family
Morning Comrades.
An important preface to today’s subject, this predominately a philosophical conversation rooted in my own experiences and isn’t an “attack” on anyone’s person, let alone their choices. At the end of the essay I will get into it in more detail but essentially “..the communist horizon implied here is not one of bureaucratic control over private life, as reactionaries often claim. It is the opposite. It is the possibility of relationships freed from economic compulsion. A world in which care is socialised, survival guaranteed and human beings no longer forced to organise intimacy around property and dependence.”
I’ve re-read Engels “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” over the last few weeks and equally as I did in my youth I still find out fascinating and one of his and theirs most important texts they’ve produced, and a lot of the below is based on what I took from it, combined with both Marx and his insight into private property as it pertains to our consciousness and subsequent actions and inactions.
The history of private property is not merely the history of economics. It is the history of how human beings came to relate to one another through ownership, hierarchy and control. When Karl Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that “private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it”, he was not simply criticising greed in a moral sense but he was also identifying a civilisational logic. Under capitalism and the forms of class society that preceded it, human relations become mediated through possession. We no longer experience the world collectively or sensuously; instead, we encounter it as something to own, dominate, exchange, consume and accumulate. The tragedy of private property is therefore not only inequality, but mutilation and that it reshapes consciousness itself.
This logic extends far beyond commodities and workplaces. It penetrates intimacy, sexuality, family structures and gender relations. It determines who belongs to whom, who inherits what, who performs reproductive labour, who controls sexuality, and which forms of love are considered legitimate or deviant. It is precisely this extension of Marx’s insight that Friedrich Engels undertook in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”. Engels argued that the modern monogamous family did not emerge naturally from timeless human instincts, nor from divine law, nor from biological inevitability. Rather, it emerged historically alongside the development of private property, inheritance and class society. The bourgeois nuclear family, especially in its heteronormative and patriarchal form, became the mechanism through which property, lineage and labour power could be reproduced across generations.
For many readers encountering this part of their pholosophy for the first time, this argument remains startling because capitalism presents the family as eternal and apolitical. Liberal ideology insists that marriage is simply about love, that monogamy is a purely moral arrangement, and that the household is a private sphere standing outside politics and economics. Yet Marxism insists on the opposite. The family is economic, marriage is political and sexuality is historical. Additionally, domestic life is structured by material relations and class power no less than the factory or the market.
Engels’ intervention remains foundational because it reveals that patriarchy and capitalism cannot be understood separately. The oppression of women is not only reducible to bad attitudes or individual prejudice, nor is it simply a leftover from the past that capitalism accidentally inherited. Rather, capitalism depends upon gendered divisions of labour and forms of social reproduction rooted in the family. Women’s unpaid domestic labour, cooking, cleaning, emotional care, child-rearing and the reproduction of workers themselves, remains indispensable to capitalist society while simultaneously being devalued and hidden. The household appears “private” precisely so that this labour can remain unpaid.
This insight has been enormously expanded by modern Marxist feminists. Writers such as Silvia Federici, Lise Vogel, Angela Davis, Nancy Fraser and Tithi Bhattacharya have demonstrated that capitalism continuously reorganises the family in order to stabilise accumulation and social order. The nuclear family is not static. It changes according to the needs of capital, but always retains its central function as a site of reproduction, discipline and ownership.
To understand this fully, it is necessary to begin where Engels began: with the historical emergence of class society itself.
