Ritika Beniwal

MA Psychology
S213CPS33

FAMILY AND IDENTITY IN THE INDIAN CONTEXT

REFLECTIONS ON ORIGIN OF FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND STATE

Frederick Engel’s origins of family, private property and state is a materialist account of how
these phenomena naturally developed over the course of human evolution. The growth
of private property is inextricably associated with the establishment of monogamous families.
As capitalism progressed, the question of inheritance and labour allocation became more
significant to the family.

Men gain power over women and systematic inequality begins as the transition from the
pairing family to monogamous family happens. The seemingly minor subject of "sex love" as
opposed to love, and what that basic human experience and activity brings to bear on man's
sensory involvement with the universe, is the defining moment in this transformation.

Sensuous activity constitutes man's materialist basis when considered as an accessory to the
irreducibly fundamental phenomenological interaction between men as social activity.
Infidelity by men is excused while on the other hand women are severely punished for the
sexual liberty practiced in traditional cultures.
Monogamous marriages had a sole purpose tied to economics, making the man
the head of the family, proliferation, and passing down the family inheritance exclusively to
his heirs selected from his own lineage, hence removing what was once referred to as
the mother-right.

Women would be able to have a much freer relationship if private property did not exist as
they would be no longer dependent on any man.
The stigma on masculinity becomes aggressively synonymous to recognizing a
woman's value, and this is then carried out with today's egoistic male dominance.

The paper does not give much attention to the other aspect of women oppression outside of
the material historical accounts; rather, it just presents a description of how private ownership
led to oppression and eventually, to the oppression of the female gender.
Engels pointed out that this transition to monogamy was also a milestone in the progress of
civilization as well as a historic defeat for the female gender.

There is an understanding of progress of society as the movement from natural to ordered.

The idea that unregulated sexuality is uncivilised runs through Engel’s paper. However, men
seem to be enjoying the best of both worlds and it is only the women’s sexuality which is
being policed. There is an assumption of sexuality as connected to love as somehow superior
to promiscuity.

Private property and capitalism come hand in hand with an underlying structure. Perhaps, it
was the need of this control and structure that reflected in the transition from pairing families
to monogamy.
The idea of possession of women is evident in the discussion about cuckoldry. Women are
the property of men and thus don’t have the freedom to choose adultery. In terms of
emotional fulfilment, women can neither claim it from their husbands, nor can they seek it
elsewhere. the way in which Engels write has a sense of irony in it. Engels is criticising the
private domestic sphere as oppressive.

Engels continued the socialist tradition started by utopian socialists by directly challenging
"monogamy's" oppressive character, at least in the ruling classes. Furthermore, Engels
directly connected women's fate with that of all oppressed people by identifying private
property in the means of production as the root of all exploitation.

Despite the parallel rise of infidelity and prostitution with the insistence on monogamy,
Engels openly admits that prudishness and squeamishness remain around the discourse of
sex. The truest manifestation of sex love in the social arena, then, is banished to the
communist horizon.
While Engels stressed individual sexual love, this did not mean he advocated for unrestricted
sexual encounters or thought that they were common in communist cultures.

He attested that sexual love isn't flighty, however is portrayed by a degree of power and
length that makes sweethearts view partition as a mishap. It includes a commitment that
would make lovers hazard anything up to their own lives to have one another. Sex love's
work exists in a transitional area around historical materialism.

In the idea of monogamy as expressed by Engels, the wife seems to have the power to
emasculate, even if she is positioned as a “slave”. Women become the vehicles of inspiration
and humiliation. The power dynamic in the social sector between the “master’’ and the
“slave’’ seems to shift a little. Sexual fidelity of women is of such a paramount importance
in such production-oriented state that adultery also becomes a construct.

The natural event of forming family, property ownership, and the state reflects an era of
inequity and patriarchy that continues to this day. In such a circumstance, these ties are
unlikely to die down until today's children are educated in the structures that historically
accounted for Marxism, gender inequalities, and structures based purely on men's
conceptions of the world, as Engels envisioned them. However, when world advances and
modifies the existing socialist structure, moving away from the typical entrenched social
system towards a more developed one, stressing independence and justice to a degree that
compromises each other's liberty and lifestyles, a much more evolved society can emerge.
Despite the fact that it may solely exist in a perfect scenario under the prevailing conditions,
it is considered unlikely.