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

“The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes.”
― Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual –and that will be the end of it.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“But the degradation of the women was avenged in the men and degraded them also, until they sank into the abomination of boy-love.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat.”
― Engels Friedrich 1820-1895, Der Ursprung Der Familie Des Privateigenthums Und Des Staats

“The word Familia did not originally signify the ideal of our modern philistine, which is a compound of sentimentality and domestic discord. Among the Romans, in the beginning, it did not even refer to the married couple and their children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. The expression was invented by the romans to describe a new social organism, the head of which had under him wife and children and a number of slaves, under Roman paternal power, with power of life and death over them all.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“In the Semitic patriarchal family, only the patriarch himself, or at best a few of his sons, practice polygamy, the others must be satisfied with one wife.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous historic period. In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in 1846 I find the words:

The first division of labour is that between man and woman for the propagation of children

And today I can add: The first class antagonism that appears in history coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opened the epoch that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“That the mutual affection of the people concerned should be the one paramount reason for marriage, outweighing everything else, was and always had been absolutely unheard of in the practice of the ruling classes; that sort of thing only happened in romance – or among the oppressed classes, which did not count.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The state, then, is by no means a power forced on society from outside; neither is it the "realization of the ethical idea," "the image and the realization of reason," as Hegel maintains. It is simply a product of society at a certain stage of evolution. It is the confession that this society has become hopelessly divided against itself, has entangled itself in irreconcilable contradictions which it is powerless to banish. In”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Here monogamy, there hetaerism and its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual freedom—for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but also assiduously practised by the ruling class, it is denounced only nominally. Still in practice this denunciation strikes by no means the men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast out by society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of unconditional male supremacy over the female sex. However,”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“With the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women began—widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more profound change.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“This police force consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Assim, o casamento monogâmico de modo algum entra na história como a reconciliação entre homem e mulher, muito menos como sua forma suprema. Pelo contrário. Ele entra em cena como a subjugação de um sexo pelo outro, como proclamação de um conflito entre os sexos, desconhecido em toda a história pregressa. Em um antigo manuscrito inédito, elaborado por Marx e por mim em 1846, encontro o seguinte: “A primeira divisão do trabalho foi a que ocorreu entre homem e mulher visando à geração de filhos”. E hoje posso acrescentar: o primeiro antagonismo de classes que apareceu na história coincide com o desenvolvimento do antagonismo entre homem e mulher no casamento monogâmico, e a primeira opressão de classe coincide com a do sexo feminino pelo sexo masculino. O casamento monogâmico foi um grande progresso histórico, mas, ao mesmo tempo, inaugura, ao lado da escravidão e da riqueza privada, a época que perdura até hoje, em que cada progresso constitui simultaneamente um retrocesso relativo, em que o bem-estar e o desenvolvimento de uns se impõem pela dor e pela opressão de outros. É a forma celular da sociedade civilizada, na qual já podemos estudar a natureza dos antagonismos e das contradições que nela se desdobrarão plenamente.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The original meaning of the word "family" (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man.”
― Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State

“Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The Athenians, then, provided for a police in their new state, a veritable "force" of bowmen on foot and horseback. This police force consisted—of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. That was still a sign of the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without a police, but as yet it was too young and did not command sufficient moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared ignominious to the old gentiles. How”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Love affairs in a modern sense occurred in classical times only outside of official society. The shepherds whose happiness and woe in love is sung by Theocritos and Moschus, such as Daphnis and Chloë of Longos, all these were slaves who had no share in the state and in the daily sphere of the free citizen. Outside of slave circles we find love affairs only as products of disintegration of the sinking old world. Their objects are women who also are standing outside of official society, hetaerae that are either foreigners or liberated slaves: in Athens since the beginning of its decline, in Rome at the time of the emperors. If love affairs really occurred between free male and female citizens, it was only in the form of adultery.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“And the first historical form of sexlove as a passion, as an attribute of every human being (at least of the ruling classes), the specific character of the highest form of the sexual impulse, this first form, the love of the knights in the middle ages, was by no means matrimonial love, but quite the contrary.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“the organization of a certain number of free and unfree persons into one family under the paternal authority of the head of the family. In the Semitic form this head of the family lives in polygamy, the unfree members have wife and children, and the purpose of the whole organization is the tending of herds in a limited territory.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“The Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares follow the custom of placing their children into the male gens by giving them a gentile name belonging to the father's gens, so that they may be entitled to inherit. "Innate casuistry of man, to change the objects by changing their names, and to find loopholes for breaking tradition inside of tradition where a direct interest was a sufficient motive." (Marx.)”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Nesse contexto, além do feminismo (ou, ainda, talvez por causa dele), outro movimento político que merece atenção (ainda que breve) em sua relação histórica e historicamente apagada com o marxismo, e que deve diretamente a Engels boa parte de suas possibilidades de questionamento hoje, é o movimento organizado de grupos que praticam e reivindicam relações não-monogâmicas. Popularmente conhecidos como “poliamor” ou “amor livre” no Brasil, esses grupos apresentam uma enorme variedade de formas de conceber e pensar a Monogamia (enquanto estrutura, em maiúscula) e a não-monogamia (enquanto prática de resistência, em minúscula), algumas declaradamente mais politizadas do que outras. Grupos que se reivindicam “anarquistas relacionais” ou “relações livres”, por exemplo, concebem que se trata, antes, de relações sociais – e não de um sentimento, o amor –, por isso essa crítica é indissociável de uma crítica estrutural anticapitalista anarquista, comunista ou socialista. Pensa-se a reestruturação revolucionária das famílias (ou sua extinção enquanto instituição), do sistema de parentesco, das relações afetivas e sexuais e até mesmo dos esquemas de sentimentos como parte fundamental da reestruturação também revolucionária, econômica e política, de nossa sociedade. Nos moldes do que já havia sido escrito e reivindicado por Aleksandra Kollontai ao descrever o amor-camarada, esses grupos se opõem politicamente, no campo da não-monogamia, àqueles que preferem manter a estrutura intacta e acreditar que se trata apenas de escolhas individuais, feitas com base em sentimentos espontâneos, ainda que com contornos culturais.”
― Marília Moschkovich, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“O Estado, portanto, não existe desde a eternidade. Houve sociedades que passaram muito bem sem ele, que não tinham noção alguma de Estado e poder estatal. Em determinado estágio do desenvolvimento econômico, necessariamente ligado à cisão da sociedade em classes, essa mesma cisão fez do Estado uma necessidade. Hoje estamos nos aproximando a passos largos de um estágio do desenvolvimento da produção em que a existência dessas classes não só deixou de ser uma necessidade como já se tornou um estorvo concreto à produção. Elas cairão tão inevitavelmente quanto surgiram. Com elas, cairá inevitavelmente o Estado. A sociedade que organizará a produção de uma forma nova, com base na associação livre e igualitária dos produtores, mandará a máquina estatal para o lugar que lhe é devido: o museu das antiguidades, ao lado da roda de fiar e do machado de bronze.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Dado que o Estado surgiu da necessidade de manter os antagonismos de classe sob controle, mas dado que surgiu, ao mesmo tempo, em meio ao conflito dessas classes, ele é, via de regra, Estado da classe mais poderosa, economicamente dominante, que se torna também, por intermédio dele, a classe politicamente dominante e assim adquire novos meios para subjugar e espoliar a classe oprimida. Assim, o Estado antigo foi sobretudo o Estado dos donos de escravos para manter os escravos sob controle, como o Estado feudal foi o órgão da nobreza para manter sob controle os camponeses servis e o Estado representativo moderno é o instrumento de espoliação do trabalho assalariado pelo capital.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“Assim, os órgãos da constituição gentílica gradativamente se desarraigam do povo, da gens , fratria, tribo, e toda a constituição gentílica se converte em seu oposto: de uma organização de tribos que visa à livre regulação de seus assuntos internos em uma organização que visa à pilhagem e à opressão de povos vizinhos; de modo correspondente, seus órgãos se convertem de instrumentos da vontade do povo em órgãos autônomos de dominação e opressão de seu próprio povo. Isso, porém, jamais teria sido possível se a avidez por riqueza não tivesse dividido os integrantes da gens em ricos e pobres, se a “diferença de propriedade dentro da mesma gens não tivesse transformado a unidade dos interesses em antagonismo dos integrantes da gens ” (Marx) e a expansão da escravidão já não tivesse começado a fazer com que o trabalho para o sustento da vida passasse a ser considerado uma atividade digna de escravos e mais infame do que a rapina.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

“A divisão de trabalho na família regulou a repartição da propriedade entre homem e mulher; a divisão permaneceu a mesma; não obstante, ela inverteu a relação doméstica até ali vigente, apenas porque a divisão de trabalho fora da família tinha mudado. A mesma razão que assegurara à mulher o predomínio dentro de casa, isto é, sua limitação ao trabalho doméstico, assegurava agora a dominação do homem dentro de casa: o trabalho doméstico da mulher perdeu importância diante do trabalho de subsistência do homem; este passou a ser tudo, aquele um complemento insignificante. Aqui já se mostra que a libertação da mulher, sua equiparação com o homem, é e continuará impossível enquanto a mulher for excluída do trabalho social produtivo e permanecer restrita ao trabalho doméstico privado. A libertação da mulher só se torna possível no momento em que ela pode participar da produção em grande escala, ou seja, em escala social, e o trabalho doméstico lhe toma apenas um tempo insignificante. E isso só se tornou possível graças à grande indústria moderna, que não só admite o trabalho feminino em grande escala, mas de fato também o exige e, ademais, aspira a dissolver cada vez mais o trabalho doméstico privado em uma indústria pública.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State