Karl Marx & Friedrich EngelsSociology 100

If only those marriages that are based on love are moral, then, also, only those are moral in which the love continues.

Pre-history• Originally, “marriage” (sex & reproduction) included an entire tribe.• Then, the exclusion of family members led to pairing “marriages”

– Sex pairs, non-monogamous– Kidnapping, purchase of women– Organized into communistic households– Mothers given high esteem, only parent you could be sure of– Attack on “natural” subordination of women

• Somehow, increased wealth led to male revolution, patrilineal inheritance (733-736

• This style of “at the dawn of time” conjectural argument was common in the 19th century– Don’t do this

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Family & Property• In Rome, originally, “Famulus means household slave

and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. Even in the time of Gaius the familia, id est patrimonium (that is, the inheritance) is bequeathed by will.” (737)– Julius Caesar & Caesar Augustus

• “Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to guarantee the fidelity of the wife, that is, the paternity of the children, the woman is placed in the man’s absolute power; if he kills here, he is but exercising his right. (737)

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Monogamy• Monogamy thus has “its specific character as monogamy only for

the woman, but not for the man.” (738)– Slaves, prostitutes

• It is thus “the first form of the family based not on natural but on economic conditions, namely, the victory of private property over the original, naturally developed common ownership. The rule of the man in the family, the procreation of children who could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his wealth—these alone were frankly avowed by the Greeks as the exclusive aims of monogamy.” (739)– “But the degradation of the women recoiled on the men themselves

and degraded them too, until they sank into the perversion of boy love...” (739)

– Homophobia

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Monogamy• The institution of monogamy and subjugation of

women creates prostitution– “Hetaerism is as much as social institution as any

other; it is a continuation of the old sexual freedom—in favor of the men. Although, in reality, it is not only tolerated but practiced with gusto by the ruling classes, it is condemned in words. In reality, however, this condemnation by no means hits the men who indulge in it, it hits only the women: they are ostracized and cast out in order to proclaim once again the absolute domination of the male over the female sex as the fundamental law of society.” (740)• Hookers & johns, sluts & studs

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Monogamy

• But monogamy (and the neglected wife whose husband spends his time with prostitutes) creates two new figures:– The paramour– The cuckold

• Marriage, is a material arrangement or political act– Romantic love (“sex love”) originates conceptually during the feudal

period, and the husband is not originally its appropriate target (747)

– Napoleonic code: “‘a child conceived during marriage has for its father the husband.’ This is the final outcome of three thousand years of monogamy.” (740)• The monogamous system undermines itself

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“Sex love”

• Presupposes reciprocated feelings– In this way, women and men equal

• Intensity and permanence means that separation is seen “as a great, if not the greatest misfortune.

• New moral standard for judging sex: not only in marriage/not-in marriage, but whether it arises from mutual love (746-747)– Historically new in Middle Ages, complicates eros

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Love, Bourgeois-style• While bourgeois society prizes marriage for love, it does so only on

paper (748)– As it commodified everything, so it does to ancient institutions (748)– While “the form of marriage by purchase disappears, the transaction

itself is to an ever-increasing degree carried out in such a way that not only the woman but the man is appraised, not by his personal qualities but by his possessions.” (748)

• Marriage is, on paper, between freely contracting individuals, but this freedom is illusory– Where children are required by law to have a share of inheritance,

parents’ consent required to marry.– Where parents can withdraw inheritance, their consent is not needed

(743)• Thus, marriage remains about property

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Love, Bourgeois-style• False freedom

– The woman remains a “domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.” In the family, the husband “is the bourgeoisie, she is the proletariat.” (744)

– Basic elements of gender roles determined by bourgeois domination• False love

– Dependency of women means men can cheat, patronize prostitutes• Boys will be boys: “What for a woman is a crime entailing dire legal and social

consequences, is regarded in the case of a man as being honourable or, at most, a slight moral stain that one bears with pleasure.” (744)

– Marriage for property only makes a “marriage of convenience often enough turns into the crassest prostitution—sometimes on both sides, but much more generally for the wife, who differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a wage-worker, on piecework, but sells it into slavery once and for all.” (742)

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Proletarian Love• “Sex love in the relationship of husband and wife can become the

rule only among the oppressed classes, that is, in the present day, among the proletariat, no matter whether this relationship is officially sanctioned or not.” (742)

• “In short, proletarian marriage is monogamian in the etymological sense of the word, but by no means in the historical sense.” (743)– No property– No inheritance– No material reason for marriage– Women can and must work– No basis for male oppression

• Some brutality toward women, inherited from the bourgeois, may be present, but will fade

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Proletarian Love

• The ruling class is dominated by material concerns in marriage, while the proletarians are not (750)

• Thus, full freedom in marriage can become generally operative only with the abolition of capitalist production, and of the property relations created by it...” (750)– “The first premise for the emancipation of women is

the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry” (744)

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Proletarian Love

• After the revolution, prostitution of all kinds will vanish, there being no need for it (745)– The position “of the women, of all women [will undergo]

important alteration. With the passage of the means of production into common property, the individual family ceases to be the economic unit of society.” (745)• Private housekeeping recognized as socially productive work• Care of children becomes public, liberating women for work• Children raised by society regardless of whether they are born in

wedlock• Not fearing consequences of pregnancy and poverty, women

become sexually liberated (745-46)– Birth control?

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Proletarian Love• “Since sex love is by its very nature exclusive—

although this exclusiveness is fully realized today only in the woman—then marriage based on sex love is by its very nature monogamy. [...] With the disappearance of the economic conditions which compelled women to tolerate the customary infidelity of men—the anxiety about their own livelihood and even more about the future of her children—the equality of women thus achieved will, judging from all previous experience, result far more effectively in the men becoming really monogamous than in the women becoming polyandrous.” (750)

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Proletarian Love• “What will most definitely disappear from

marriage, however, is all the characteristics stamped on it in consequence of its having arisen out of property relationships.” (750-51)– Dominance of the man

• Consequence of economic dominance, will “vanish with it automatically.”

– Indissolubility• “If only those marriages that are based on love are moral,

then, also, only those are moral in which the love continues.” End of love “makes separation a blessing for both parties as well as for society.”

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Proletarian Love• “But what will be added? That will be settled

after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences.” (751)– “Surrender”

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Proletarian Love

• “Once such people appear, they will no care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual—and that’s the end of it.” (751)

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