Engels’ “Origin of the Family” and Answering the “Gay Question”
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. As late as the time of Gaius, the familia, id est patrimonium (family, that is, the patrimony, the inheritance) was bequeathed by will. The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all...[1]
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
1. Introduction:
Despite being a point of huge contention amongst the reactionaries, Marxists have widely remained silent concerning the “gay question” – meaning the reasons behind the existence of homosexual or gender non-conforming people within society, and the continual politicization of their existence. When modern Marxists attempt to shed light upon this topic, they often think of “queers” too generally as just another of a myriad of oppressed groups at the bottom of capitalist hierarchy, and thus fail to enter into the particular nature of homosexuality and “queer” gender expression, failing to explain the situation adequately on the whole. Barring this error, many other “Marxists” abandon dialectical materialism, contenting themselves with echoing bourgeois science or otherwise skirting around the question in an idealist, non-material way.
With so-called Marxists grasping around in the dark, it’s no surprise that the “leftist” pot generally and even the LGBTQ+ “community” cannot explain gay or queer people as a sociological category, or their constant politicization and historical oppression, besides resorting to reductionist “biological” mystifications like “born this way,” the “gay gene,” or bourgeois ideas of individual “hate” and “personal rights.”
Without a sound dialectical materialist analysis, the gay question, like any other question presented to us by life, cannot be adequately answered. True Marxists study the works of the past and develop their understanding of dialectical and historical materialism so as to apply the Marxist scientific method to solve problems. The Editorial Board of Sparkyl operates within this same Communist tradition. The “gay question” is not so much a question for us, but a problem that is answered by an understanding of the development of the family as a material force within class society. Although homosexual and non-binary gender expression is not specifically mentioned in these works, the explanation of social intercourse around the productive forces in The German Ideology, along with Engel’s sound analysis of the development of class society generally in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State – including the patriarchal family, the role of women, sexual repression, and marriage – easily accommodate the explanation to the historical oppression and “othering” of what would be considered today to be homosexual or “gender-queer” people.
The development of marriage from a group form under the savage relation into the domination of the man over “his” wife, children, slaves, and property that Engels lays out in Origin of the Family was also accompanied by changes in the sexual and gendered conceptions of people. Engels takes binary and heterosexual conceptions for granted, but before “He created them male and female” as the Bible tells us so, they were simply people, and people, as a historically constituted group, did not wait to define themselves as “boys and girls,” with all the fluctuating stereotypes that go with these terms, before they engaged in sexual activity or presented themselves socially. Heterosexual compulsivity (or the adherence to the idea that sex is properly between two different genitaled people and geared towards procreation) and the gender binary, which dictates one of two gendered roles (male or female) to persons at birth based on the form of one’s genitals and the role they play in procreative intercourse, are not integral to human beings. They are social forms of behavior that developed alongside class society and the people’s relations to the productive forces, albeit very far back in humankind’s history.
Despite how both of these ideas are enshrined by bourgeois science as engrained within the evolutionary path of our species, the actual biological fact is that non-procreative and homosexual activity, as well as manifestations of gender outside the strict male/female binary and not based on genitalia-type, have always existed, continue to exist, and have always challenged the supposed biological “ubiquity” of straight or cis expression.
However, the ruling class’ need to create the family unit results in the dissemination and enforcement of both heterosexual compulsivity and the gender binary throughout society, constituting oppression towards persons who (through conscious choice or unconscious predilection) are not solely heterosexual or who cannot or will not present themselves in a way that corresponds to the binary gendered understandings assigned to their genitals. It is by understanding the family as an oppressive force of bourgeois control that the usage of the “queer” or “homosexual” identifier(s) throughout society, as well as the oppression received by individuals that have had these identifier(s) successfully applied, can be understood.
Once adequately understanding heterosexual compulsivity and the gender binary in a proper dialectical and historical materialist context, the “gay question” is demystified. As materialists, we do not hold that either have their origin in “human nature” or any “natural law,” but rather that they formed from the relations of people to the productive forces, and especially from the domination of the ruling classes over the lower classes throughout history.
2. The Origin of the Gender Binary and Heterosexual Compulsivity
The origin of the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity is found in the development of class society. The development of class society – the disproportionate control of production by certain classes over and against others – has always been predicated on the control of the lower, toiling classes by the upper, ruling, non-toiling ones. This is as true now under capitalism as it was in the class societies of the past – from the feudal period, through the ancient civilizations, all the way back into the shadowy pre-written histories of powerful tribal family-clans.
Part of this control over the lower classes constitutes the control over breeding. Within all class societies, human labor power is contained and manipulated away from the interest of the class that provides it – the lower classes of serfs, peasants, slaves, or proletarians – and towards the parasitical interest of the ruling class. As commodity production – that is, production in excess in order to produce surplus for sale as profit – came onto the scene during the transition to barbarism, the antagonistic relationship between the servile classes and the ruling ones was increased immensely, and, because the laborers at this period were often slaves with no rights to autonomy apart from their master’s wishes, there became a real class need amongst the rulers to implement social control over the reproduction of this antagonized, incredibly useful, and potentially revolutionary class of laborers. It is in this context that we put the development of the male/female gender binary as well as heterosexual compulsion. Both materially serve to create identities centered on breeding among the people, dividing up the whole population into the role their genitals play in procreative sex, and eschewing non-procreative sexual forms.
Both the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity have been instructed into the people; first by crisis within savage societies, then, by the ruling class of clan patriarchs under barbarism, who, with the rise of primitive accumulation and commodity production, forced subordination and gendered oppression on women and slaves, and later especially by the lords of the feudal period, who adopted strict gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity themselves as a way to grow their family’s lands through marriage, and continued their propagation among the lower class of the serfs in order to bolster the ranks for wars and to grow cash crops where the market allowed. This oppression towards individuals’ personal manifestations of gender and sexuality carries over into our modern day, where it is used to create patriarchal cells of capitalist production, breed workers for the constant growth of profit that the capitalist mode of production requires, and to pass property down through family inheritance.
It is not reasonable to think of “men” and “women” coupling up for the purpose of producing children within the early tribes of the savage period. Despite the chauvinism displayed by modern scholarship that supplants modern understandings of gender and sexuality – born from the uneven march of class society – into the workings of these communities, the expanded group marriages of the savage relation also imply an expanded form of gender and sexual expression, with the production of children heavily deemphasized compared to modernity. Without commodity production or regimented classes, the production of children would be emphasized only as a result of crisis; for example, during particularly intense blood feuds, wars for resources, famine, or natural disaster, but, devoid of these external pressures, the people within the savage relation engaged in the group-based form of sex via particular cultural norms unrelated to gender as we recognize it today, with the children that may or may not follow from the act not being a primary consideration and certainly not considered the property of the breeding adults. Barring external antagonisms, population growth was not a primary factor in the productive forces possessed by the savage community and there would be no reason for the people of the savage relation to define themselves based on their genital type, or to eschew certain types of sexual activity because of its non-procreative nature.
Still, as the population of early savage societies grew along with the rate of social intercourse between them, so too did the frequency of crisis. In response, children and breeding became more emphasized and were needed to maintain society, replacing those who were lost to drought, disease, raids, or to bolster the war parties, introducing an “economy” of sexual reproduction. Although this breeding incentive was an answer to external pressure, it was also assuredly accompanied with a division of the individual people within the community according to their role in breeding, determined by the appearance of their genitalia – an idea of the male/female gender binary and a “proper,” procreative form of the sexual act (early ideas of heterosexual compulsivity) – which would manifest in a variety of ways throughout society, more or less prominent depending on how dire the need for children was. With this understanding, came also the discouragement of non-procreative forms of sex, and, to the extent that this discouragement “bled through” to the individual aesthetic of persons within the community, gender manifestations that did not fit into the breeding-based categories of expression would be discouraged as well.
Here, within the late savage relation, are the beginnings of the gender binary and ideas of heterosexuality. However, these did not become compulsory or probably even dominant throughout society generally until much later, constituting a relatively “free” idea of gender and sexual expression compared to the modern day. This is not to say that individuals within the savage mode of production had no idea of procreation – how it works mechanically using different types of genitalia belonging to two different people. What it does mean is that the act of procreation was not central to their identity, and they did not express themselves socially within a binary based on their genitalia. Children belonged to the whole of society, and, devoid of a material reason to grow the population outside of occasional crises, the people of the savage period, as a whole, had no real conception of personal gender or sexuality. Unlike class society, since there was no force of production necessitating breeding, there was generally no need to take on an identity that implied their role in the procreative sexual act. Their identity was reflective of their occupation in the community, and they engaged in sex as a normal activity of the community, birthing children as the situation presented itself, while not possessing individual parental ownership over them.
It was increasing levels of interdependence and social intercourse, along with the growth of the productive forces and widespread commodity production – factors present in the early to middle period of barbarism (to use Engels’ stages of prehistoric society) – that truly chained humanity to the gender binary and heterosexual breeding, making what had been a crisis-mode social form into the status quo organization of human beings. Speaking of this period, Engels writes:
The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labor power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces.[2]
Where Engels refers primarily to slaves as this period’s “new labor forces,” human reproduction also responded to the call for new labor. The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity were reinforced throughout society as ideological supports for increased breeding, called for by the new economic conditions which required an increase of laborers to work fields and create handicrafts that were no longer just for subsistence, but for profit. Agriculture and commodity production – albeit, at a minuscule level compared to the capitalist mode – brought with it also wealth, famine, and wars of conquest, requiring a growing number of new bodies for both the fields and the military formations.
With the development of commodity production and the resulting consistent markets for surplus within the barbaric period, all the landowners of society had reason to make their land not just produce for themselves, but also for others, in hopes that they could sell the excess and become more affluent, and also so that they could create generational wealth that could be passed down through inheritance. Now children, as property of the family or clan, became also cheap labor in the production of wealth, and they were put to work.
With children being born at increasing rates in order to serve primarily as uncompensated workers in the production of surplus crops, livestock, and handicrafts for profit, or as soldiers for the greater needs of the family-clan, there grew also a change in the breeding adults, who more and more took on the characteristics their relation to the productive forces dictated to them. The outward expression of their lives began to revolve around their sexual capacity for breeding, and they became “man” and “woman” so as to facilitate what was becoming a primary task of production: making humans.
This was further exacerbated by the division of labor called for by the new production. A divide between domestic work and the now much more profitable work of the fields and the ranches began to form, and, as commodity production grew, this divide grew as well, relegating the different genitaled people within society more and more to only one side, and favoring the gender binary as the method of doing so; the long gestation time and bodily taxation of child birthing keeping the “women” relegated indoors while the “man” performed the labor of the fields and the ranches.
At first, this division was less antagonistic, with both sides seeing their “proper” gendered roles in society and coexisting more or less peacefully under the political formation of the tribe or clan, but as a result of the selling of field and ranch surpluses however, wealth began to influence this paradigm. The growing power that came with wealth, and the unevenness of wealth when the labor that produced it was increasingly relegated to the “man,” resulted in the cataclysmic overturning of the old social system of more-or-less gendered equality and its replacement with enshrined patriarchal domination; the man declaring himself “lord” over the “woman.” As a result, women were made solely into incubators within the home, dominated politically by the ranchers and farmers, who now rallied behind the banner of “man” and claimed ownership of the women, their children, and their property through male inheritance rights.
It was the establishment of patriarchy that solidified the full acceptance and propagation of the rigid gender binary. The “world historical defeat of the female sex,”[3] as Engels calls the establishment of patriarchal property – a process that was practically completed by the middle of the barbaric stage – also coincided with the historical defeat of any human expression that sat outside the male/female binary, and its relegation to oppressed status, due to the fact that it stood “outside” the parameters put forward by patriarchy. By the late barbaric stage, women had become the property of men, and monogamous marriage (and thus the beginnings of the modern monogamous family) had replaced group marriage. We hold that the establishment of patriarchal property, itself a motion born from early commodity production and the gendered form that the division of labor took under it, was the nail that pinned the gender binary into the foundations of class society. With the material benefit gained by “men” through patriarchal power, the gender binary was enforced as a way to distinguish between the ruler and the ruled, propping up the supposed “differences” between the two as a justification for male dominance and their continual power over production. With the establishment of patriarchy, the gender binary was given sharp and penetrating teeth, and it has been chomping on the whole of practically every class society since.
While the gender binary became compulsive throughout all classes during middle barbarism into civilization, compulsive heterosexuality was a further development, relegated, first, to the oppressed classes, just as strict monogamy was something for the lower, laboring classes, while the clan patriarch usually had his harem of wives. When we consider that the lower-classes of this period were predominantly the slaves who had no right to life outside of their master, and that, as illustrated previously, there was a material incentive to grow laborers just as commodity production was also growing throughout society, we can see not only the breeding impetus of binary male/female gender as a powerful tool in the production of slaves, but also the repression of non-procreative sexual activities, or heterosexual compulsivity, as existing alongside it and serving the same function.
By the feudal period, we see the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity saturated through all the classes, now fully informing the creation of patriarchal families via monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, along with the subsequent production of offspring. “Proper” monogamous marriage and the birthing of heirs within wedlock was central to the political management of the lords’ realms, their legitimacy as rulers, as well as most property generally; thus ideas of “correct” sexual and gendered behavior that aligned with the creation of these relations had to be upheld.
Part of this upholding was the established tradition of vilifying and criminalizing “deviant” sexual behavior, with deviancy typically labeled as any act that is not specifically procreative. This trend was already mature by the time that it was helped along by the biggest moral authority of the feudal period: the Catholic Church. As far back as 882, “sodomy” is defined by Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims and a prominent theologian at the time, as all non-procreative sexual acts, such as anal sex and masturbation, and even as procreative acts, if they broke monogamous understandings of marriage.[4] Archbishop Hincmar was not an anomaly among his peers, and this single example illustrates the wider trend amongst ruling institutions to apply the term “sodomy” to any sexual act that was not conducive to breeding, enforcing heterosexual compulsivity, as well as the performance of binary gender, through the threat of judicial authority, which, as was stipulated by a 13th century work on French law, often amounted to being burnt at the stake and having your property confiscated by your lord.[5] The last official executions of sodomites happened in France in 1750,[6] England in 1835,[7] North Carolina in 1873,[8] and are still ongoing in many colonial countries, who have inherited the capitalist system, as well as its social relations, through the imperial conquests by Europeans beginning in the 15th century.
3. Current and Historical Examples of Greater Gender/Sexual Expression
When we look at some of the few remaining societies that possess only a rudimentary level of commodity production and lower levels of social intercourse, we see societal forms of personal expression that are outside the male/female binary with greater regularity, as well as freer expressions of sexual activity.
The Muxes (pronounced mu-shay), are a recognized third gender among the Zapotec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, and have been since pre-colonial times.[9] Their inclusion in Zapotec society is not as “queer” people, or a divergence from the “norm,” but as an established and understood gender variant that fits into a wider philosophical worldview; a worldview that denies the absoluteness of a male/female binary and heterosexuality and allows for greater gender expression. Although since being criminalized by the British colonial authorities they are on the decline, the Hijiras of India are another “third-gender,” as are the Sekrata of the Sakalava people of Madagascar, and the Bakla of the Philippines.[10] There is also a “third-gender” present in many North and South American Indigenous communities that is neither male nor female. There are many more examples, mostly coming from communities that are lacking in prominent hierarchal social classes, have a greater attachment to subsistence farming, are relatively isolated, and in some ways are otherwise “outside” the capitalist market and commodity production in some form.
The early European colonists, who interacted with many members of the savage relation, make numerous accounts of the native peoples they met freely practicing “sodomy” and “dressing as women," to use the terms of a Portuguese soldier writing of the native Angolans in 1681.[11] These behaviors were, of course, made illegal under colonial law.
These current and historical examples of greater gender and sexual expression within societies that possess less developed classes and production shows the wider point of this essay: that heterosexual compulsivity and the binary gender are products of class society and commodity production, and are more absent when commodity production and classes are also more absent.
It is here that we wish to reiterate our primary points:
The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity are NOT “natural” formations of human sociality, but learned and enforced behaviors that stem from the ruling class’ oppressive control over the productive forces of society.
The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity are intrinsically linked with commodity production, which necessitates control over breeding in order to produce a (generally) ever increasing amount of laborers to grow ever increasing amounts of surplus to be sold for ever increasing amounts of profit.
The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity ultimately lead to breeding, and are the underlying ideas that group human beings into the patriarchal “family” social form, a social form that is integral to the management of the lower classes towards ruling class aims, and also integral to the form of the productive forces under commodity production.
The enforcement of the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity by class society – an enforcement that culminates with the “proper” behavior of patriarchal family-making – constitutes itself dialectically as “queer” or “gay” oppression. It does this by incensing reaction and by delegitimizing any non-breeding worldview as a deviance from the “norm,” and vilifying gay and queer people unless they validate the base and erroneous bourgeois views of gender and sexuality that saturate society.
In the next section we will explore how the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity were developed by the capitalist class, how the family is utilized under capitalism, and the way that bourgeois society continues the tradition of patriarchy, as well as gay and queer oppression.
4. The Development of the Gender Binary and Heterosexual Compulsivity Under Capitalism
The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.
– a quotation from Karl Marx included in Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Finding the patriarchal, monogamous family already present and ready for them in the feudal relation it grew out of, capitalists adapted the family to their form of production. In doing so, they also took up the task of propagating heterosexual compulsivity and the gender binary, all while eliminating or pathologizing as “insane” or “degenerative” all manifestations of humanity that did not coincide with their form of social control.
The “witch trials” of the 16th and 17th centuries were manifestations of violence upon women (and, though the historical record is more silent on this topic, also gender and sexual non-conformists) that signaled the increased need of the ruling class at the dawn of capitalism to create the “new” family required of the productive forces, primarily by eliminating the vestiges of non-patriarchal power that still existed in the late-feudal/early modern period.
Feudalism generally included “extended family” like aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as “adopted” members who were not genealogically related. Under capitalism, the social relation was fractured into a smaller unit that clung more tightly to immediate paternal hereditary lines of inheritance: composed of a father, his wife, and his children. This new, atomized smaller social unit is the so-called “traditional, monogamous” family as we know it today, and came to prominence throughout all the classes by the end of the feudal period, and especially after the bourgeois liberal revolutions that began at the end of the 1700’s, which politically enshrined capitalist private property and the wage relation.
We should explore the family under capitalism in more detail. This social form sees an able-bodied man leave his home to work for his employer, who pays him a wage. He returns to the home as the sole possessor of money within the family unit he heads, dominant to his subordinate wife and children. Within the home, this creates a material division and antagonistic contradiction between the man and his dependents, “his” wife and children, who cannot hold property, including money, themselves, and thus are dependent upon the man for their livelihoods and wellbeing, forced to submit to his will or be without a home or food to eat. With the man off working, children and women are relegated as the sole producers of necessary domestic services, like house cleaning, child-care, cooking, and other things required of both them and the employed wage-slave (man) who is removed from this work – without any compensation, and usually without having any real say as to when or how the work would be done.
This is the family social form as it existed at the height of capitalist prestige, prior to the advent of socialism, and prior to its alteration by numerous reforms that were pushed through the bourgeois governments by the resistance of the lower classes, primarily the proletariat. Despite reforms, the patriarchal family described above is the de-facto form of human domestic organization that coincides with capitalist production and is still the dominant form of the family globally.
The family benefits the capitalists in three primary ways.
First, it allows for the valorization of labor value by enforcing a division of labor within the home that allows for the full access of the man’s labor power by the capitalist by relegating all his needed life maintenance to the part of his wife and children. If this division is abolished, as neo-liberal society aims to achieve within the countries of the “First World,” it will only mean the failure of both partners to accomplish the needed domestic tasks life demands of them, as is doubtlessly occurring now, with even proletarians in dual income households being squeezed not only by their employers for their time, but also by the rising rents of their landlords, childcare, groceries, and other capitalist commodities, who have all adapted their prices to the increased incomes of the family, making life more and more intolerable for working people.
The tendency for capitalists to proletarianize all members of the family in their lust for profit does not allow for the domestic maintenance of the worker at all, and this contradiction is “solved” under capitalism by the political subjugation of women to men and their confinement to “the home;” performing the needed domestic duties of human life while freeing up the male worker for abject wage slavery. The neo-liberal attempt to depart from the gendered division of labor within the family eventually runs contrary to the smooth extraction of labor value required by the capitalists. Patriarchy is efficient for capitalism, and its division of domestic and public labor along gendered lines remains a cornerstone of capitalist production despite recent neo-liberal reforms, a circumstance that we will explore in the next section.
Second, the family alienates and atomizes consumers, ensuring constant buyers of the capitalists’ commodities. Each individual family is alienated from all the others, purchasing essentially duplicitous commodities (house, car, transportation, appliances, etc.) with no recourse for collectivization. This retards social intercourse, and maximizes the purchasing of commodities from capitalist markets, maximizing profits. It also ensures that the wage-slaves in the family have the majority of their time and labor delineated for capitalist production in order to afford commodities they would not need to purchase if they were more collectivized.
Third, it reproduces and degenerates the laboring class that creates the capitalists’ profit, the proletariat, ideologically and materially; materially, through the wages of the man and through the domestic labor of the woman in birthing, rearing, and maintaining the lives of their progeny, and ideologically, through the instruction of patriarchal discipline and respect for authority, which allows for the continual domination of parents over children and of capitalists over the working masses as a whole.
With the prominence of eugenic “science,” the patriarchal family, as well as gender and sexual oppression reached its height. Eugenics provided a popular academic discipline for colonial surplus labor value extraction and oppression, enshrining not only the phenotype of African, Asian, or otherwise non-“white” people as biologically inferior, but also creating a “scientific” basis to women’s oppression, the gender binary, and heterosexual compulsion, where before the ideological basis for all of these was mostly religious. In doing so, it painted those who did not fit to its standards – minorities, queers, gays, “deviants,” and “uppity” women – as evolutionarily inferior. This view informed public policy, with the 19th and 20th centuries seeing asylums develop, where minorities, queers, homosexuals, and non-patriarchal women were kept, studied, sedated, and tortured in a search for a “cure” to their supposed “biological” non-conformity.[12] This was a departure from the rampant criminalization of these groups in decades past, with, like the “white man’s burden,” psychology stepping in to paternalistically “help” the unfortunate minorities, including the gender and sexual non-conformists, become “functioning” members of society[13]. This, in effect, worked to erase these people, and especially their “deviant” behaviors, from society.
With its need for the family as a ubiquitous social relation, capitalism also needs ideas of heterosexual and male/female gender to be ubiquitous throughout society as well, and targets for repression those whose lives contradict that ubiquity.
5. The Mystification of the Patriarchal Violence of the Family; an Imperialist Reform
Through the reforms of neo-liberal society, much of the overt patriarchal violence and bigotry that flows freely among all the classes of society instructing the construction of families has been mystified. Within the “First World,” the ruling class preaches tolerance, inclusion, and other empty phrases as they attempt to transform the family from its violent foundation in order to accommodate women, as well as queer and gay people, as individual consumers/producers in the capitalist market.
Despite these attempts, patriarchal dominance, complete with bigotry towards queer and gay people, is reflective of the whole historical growth of class society and commodity production; as long as class society and commodity production exists, so too will patriarchal oppression. The neo-liberal reforms to the family, like the neo-liberal trend generally, are part and parcel with imperialism. Within the imperial countries, which are dominated by the most powerful bourgeois financiers, the populace is widely bourgeois and not central to the productive forces. Neo-liberal reforms towards women and queer and gay people, as well as many minorities, have been allowed to occur. The successful initiation of these reforms into law and the wider culture is only because of the non-producer status of a great majority of the members of these imperial societies – their imperial, bourgeois or labor aristocracy status – which has made possible an alleviation of a great many social pressures that face the truer proletarians in the non-imperial countries, who are colonized by capital, and whose surplus labor value is extracted at a much higher rate, constituting the “meat” of the imperial bourgeoisie’s profit.
Within the so-called “Second” and “Third” Worlds, we see the patriarchal family still the norm and strictly enforced, as well as many other examples of violence that imperial neo-liberal society believes itself to have reformed its way away from. This is because the proletarians of the colonized countries, due to the imposition of poverty wages, have become the central force of production, the imperialists having turned the Second and Third World countries into their own personal play-ground for cheap manufacturing and services. As such, the proletarians here are under capitalist domination full-force, without often any recourse to reforms from their government, who very often are nothing but comprador capitalists with a direct line to the imperialists. It is no coincidence that the countries that offer up these proletarians to capitalist-imperial slaughter suffer under “traditional” patriarchal and anti-gay social forms at much higher rates than the parasitical imperial world. With their centrality to capitalist production, so too must the patriarchal family, as the social force of capitalist production, be enforced.
While, only recently, women, and to a much lesser extent, homosexuals and especially gay men have been somewhat successfully acclimated into imperial society as individual market consumers in their own right, trans people, however, as de-facto “breakers” of the genital-dominated regime of binary gender, have not shared in this experience. Globally, anti-trans sentiment is on the rise, largely serving as part of the ideological backbone of the many growing spontaneous reactionary movements around the world. History is showing the incompatibility of gender fluidity within the capitalist mode of production. The gender binary cannot be made mutable and those who break its tenets will always be oppressed; the productive forces of capitalism will not allow otherwise, no matter how much neo-liberal society wishes to reform the material workings of the world through “good vibes” and inclusiveness. Trans people, intersex people, or people who otherwise do not fit cleanly onto the male/female binary will always face the denial of their livelihoods and forms of expression. Capitalism relies and propagates cis-het, breeding families as a force of its production, and so too does it rely on bigotry towards non-cis and non-hetero people within that same system of production.
The fact that the only trans people in bourgeois media are rigidly binary in their presentation, often promoting the use of hormones and surgery in order to avoid appearing queer and “pass” as binary men and women, is further proof of capitalism’s need to uphold compulsory binary gender on the whole.
But the parasitical cloud of decadence that shields many within the current imperial countries from the worst of social oppressions – including patriarchal “family” oppression that makes women and queers subservient to men – is sure to dissipate away. When the imperial privilege of the current imperial societies falls away – ceded to a newer and more imperial country – so too will the many neo-liberal reforms they now enjoy. Without their imperial privilege, the proletarians of the once imperial country will become an actual substantial source of labor value extraction by the new imperial capitalists. As such, they will be unable to keep their many reforms that lessen labor value extraction, and made more properly into a form that is pleasing to capital, adopting the patriarchal family among many other degeneracies; all so that the labor value of the new proletarians may be extracted at a sufficiently high rate that is aligned to the profit motive of the new imperialists.
We can already see the United States, the current dominant imperialist country, having its own imperial status slowly blown away by a strong easterly wind, gusting from the direction of Beijing, who despite espousing Communism, are in possession of a great many powerful financier capitalists who have increased their global investments considerably throughout the recent years, constituting a real rival to our current sect of Euro-American bourgeois imperialists who have dominated since at least the World Wars and are rapidly approaching expiration.
Whether from foreign imperial-capitalist governments or from their own internal fascists responding to economic crisis, when the widely parasitical citizenry of the current imperial nations lose their imperial status and turn proletarian proper due to foreign capitalists needing their surplus labor, the same reductionist, traditional patriarchal views towards women and queer people will return to the nations of the First World just as they have been rigorously maintained in the Third and Second World nations whose proletarians supply the majority of the surplus value of our current leadingimperial capitalist overlords. With this, all gender and sexual expression non-conducive to the creation of the procreative family will also be relegated to oppressed status, poised for elimination, and the rights experienced by women currently will be stripped away as she is again turned into an incubator for the man’s children and his pleasure, and the producer of the unpaid domestic labor that provides for him; the patriarchal family renewed to serve its historical purpose.
The 2022 rescinding of the decision stemming from the 1973 court case which cemented federal abortion protections for the whole United States is the most recent and most drastic example of this phenomenon. The fact that women had their reproductive rights denied them during a global population annihilation event, the COVID-19 pandemic, supports the wider arguments of this article, namely, the strong tie between gendered oppression and the strong breeding impetus the productive forces of class society require. Over a million people in the U.S. died from COVID. With a good many workers killed by the disease, a good many more have to be born, and quickly, in order to replace the holes in production and avoid profit loss as much as possible, as dictated by the capitalists’ profit motive.
As the imperialists continue to squabble and reaction continues to rise, there is no place for the capitalists to drive society except back into the firm clutches of patriarchy and the confinement of the family. Barring the resistance of the people to such aims, we are bound to face this consequence sooner or later.
6. The Fading Away of Gender and Sexuality
However, and in spite of the aims of the capitalists and the reactionaries, the family, which has been so foundational to the productive forces of class society, will fade away with the abolishment of classes under the communist society. As the needs of individuals are fulfilled by all of society under a socialist economy, and all capitalist control (along with their vestiges of patriarchy and general reaction) are fiercely eliminated by the armed might of the people, the bourgeois family will also be eliminated, disintegrating along with the material dependence that ties children to parents in the family, which itself is eliminated by the socialist system.
When the material dependence of persons to others within the family is fully exterminated by the successful completion of the socialist stage of development, the family, as a form of keeping property (including people as property), will cease to exist. Children will be the responsibility of all of society, and guaranteed the same benefits and material ability to propagate their life and existence freely within society as any other member. This will constitute the first truly free generation of people ever to exist under civilization.
With the abolishment of the family and the full liberation of women and children, we will see, also for the first time under civilization, the actual full acceptance of queer and gay people, serving to erode the ideological underpinnings of compulsory heterosexuality and cisgenderism. As gay or queer people are allowed to exist openly in society, and their activity is tolerated and later accepted, “straightness” becomes eroded, unable to hold the same ubiquitous character amongst the masses that it once did. This has already happened in small ways, even under capitalism, with many fashion and sexual trends leaving the realm of “gay” identity and becoming normalized in “straight” spaces, like in the case of male earrings or anal sex, or more recently, the introduction of so-called “top” or “bottom” discourse into self-identifying heterosexual relationships. While the natural disintegration of the secondary contradictions around “gay” or “queer” identity remains the trend due to the social intercourse taking place within the masses, gay or queer liberation will only come to pass under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and can never be realized under capitalism, which fosters reaction, the family relation, and bigotry as its operational mode, dooming the masses to gender and sexual oppression, as well as class oppression for as long as the people lay dormant and do not rise to throw it off via socialist revolution.
Only when society is able to fulfill the axiom, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” will we see the identities of male, female, gay, straight, and queer, as all identities related (either positively or negatively) to the procreative sexual act begin to fade away. This is because procreation, and thus the clear social delineation of genitalia for this purpose, will no longer be a motivator of humans. Sex will be broader than any gender expressions, and engaged in at will by the people involved without thinking about the consequences and certainly without the knowledge of or even the desire to own a human being as “their” child. Gender will become a personal aesthetic, instead of a limiting social identifier that dictates sexual actions, with “sexual orientation” along “straight” or “homosexual” terms, as reflections of binary sex, disappearing entirely.
The elimination of the reductionist gender and sexual identifiers that humans cast upon themselves due to class society will not occur except after several generations under a stable communist society, but the inevitability of this is assured.
7. Conclusion:
Since the family “contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state” it is important that we land on the right side of this contradiction. We have analyzed the origin of the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity in order that we may tie the current rise of anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-women reaction to its positive character, namely the renewed creation of the patriarchal family, which is the logical result of the victory of such types of reaction, and which all Marxists vehemently oppose.
Marxists, who necessarily stand for the abolition of all oppression, must reaffirm their stance against the family, seeing it correctly as a cell of capitalist production and the oppression not just of women and children, but of homosexual and queer people as well. We must additionally unite against the false idea that binary gendered conceptions and heterosexuality are something “normal,” or otherwise a fundamental and unalterable part of humanity. To believe so, as bourgeois “science” does, is to support the creation and maintenance of the oppressive family structure, to engage in idealism, and abandon the dialectical materialist worldview.
What do we advocate for instead of the family? We advocate for the unequivocal recognition that we, as a species, have a responsibility to our children, and that they are not property. We advocate for collectivization and the elimination of parent-right universally, with society itself, under the auspices of the vanguard of the proletariat, taking on the responsibility of child rearing through use of truly revolutionary and proletarian institutions. This is the Communist line towards the family, and it reflects the truth of what is to come.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party[14]
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Endnotes
[1] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020).
[2] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020). Chap. 9: “Barbarism and Civilization”
[3] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 30.
[4] Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. 1980. 203.
[5] “The code of Phillipe de Beaumanoir” drafted in 1283 as mentioned in Boswell, 290-291.
[6] Brossat, Ian. 2014. “Affaire Diot-Lenoir : Briser Le Silence, 250 Ans plus Tard.” L’Humanité (in French). January 10, 2014. https://www.humanite.fr/histoire/histoire/affaire-diot-lenoir-briser-le-silence-250-ans-plus-tard.
[7] Human Dignity Trust. “A History of LGBT Criminalisation.” Human Dignity Trust. February 11, 2025. https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/a-history-of-criminalisation/.
[8] Death Penalty Information Center. “Criminalization of Homosexuality in American History.” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/lgbtq-people/criminalization-of-homosexuality-in-american-history
[9] National History Museum. “Beyond Gender: Indigenous Perspectives, Muxe.” September 15, 2020. https://nhm.org/stories/beyond-gender-indigenous-perspectives-muxe
[10] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “6 Cultures That Recognize More than Two Genders.” Britannica. June 13, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders#:~:text=Two%2Dspirit%20is%20a%20term,acceptance%20in%20some%20Indigenous%20communities.
[11] Mehra, Bharat, Paul A. Lemieux, and Keri Stophel. “An Exploratory Journey of Cultural Visual Literacy of ‘Non-Conforming’ Gender Representations from Pre-Colonial Sub- Saharan Africa.” Open Information Science 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2019-0001.
[12] Cohen, Bruce. Psychiatric Hegemony a Marxist Theory of Mental Illness (London Palgrave Macmillan Uk: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 44–52. https://archive.org/details/bruce-m.-z.-cohen-auth.-psychiatric-hegemony-a-marxist-theory-of-mental-illness-/page/n225/mode/2up
[13] Ibid. 172-192
[14] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. Progress Publishers, 1969. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.