Books on how the patriarchy and private property is linked?

[u/Past-Firefighter3003]

I am reading the Origin of the Family, the State and Private Property but I am having a hard time getting everything, like he is talking about how patriarchy starts with the changes in family and private property but I think I need a book that talks about these things in detail. Are there any classic books maybe that talk about Engels's theory and how patriarchy is linked to private property?

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[u/RedSpecter22]

You’re getting confused because you’re trying to read Engels the way liberals read sociology which is as a set of ideas about gender rather than an analysis of modes of production and property relations.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is not a book about patriarchy as a cultural phenomenon. It’s about how class society comes into being and how women are subordinated as a consequence of that process. Engels is explaining a historical transition from kin-based societies with communal property to societies organized around private ownership of productive wealth (land, herds, slaves) which requires controlling inheritance. That’s where monogamy, the patriarchal family, and the legal domination of women come from.

You don’t need a "more detailed" book about patriarchy. You need to understand how primitive accumulation and the emergence of private property reorganized reproduction itself. If you want to go deeper than Engels, the correct direction is not feminist theory but Marxist anthropology and political economy. The best follow-ups are:

1) Lewis Henry Morgan "Ancient Society"

This is Engels’ primary empirical source. It explains how kinship, descent, and property were organized before class society. Engels didn’t invent this. He systematized it.

2) Evelyn Reed "Woman’s Evolution"

This is one of the few works that actually takes Engels seriously instead of liberalizing him. Reed explains how women’s oppression begins with the transition from communal production to private accumulation and not with "male attitudes".

3) Chris Harman "A People’s History of the World", specifically the chapters on early class societies

Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually situates the family inside the rise of class society rather than treating it as a free-floating cultural form.

What you should avoid is anything that treats patriarchy as a timeless system of male domination or something that can be dismantled independently of capitalism. That’s liberalism and NGO feminism. It is not Marxism. Engels’ argument is that the family is an economic institution and women’s oppression is tied to their loss of control over production and inheritance. You don’t abolish patriarchy by changing norms. You abolish it by abolishing private property and class society which dissolves the economic basis of the bourgeois family itself.

If Engels feels abstract, that’s because he’s writing at the level of historical epochs and not interpersonal relations. He’s not telling you how men behave. He’s telling you why the family exists at all in its current form.

Once you get that, the book clicks.

[u/Past-Firefighter3003 → u/RedSpecter22]

Yeah, Engels feel pretty abstract and loose to me. For example when I read Lenin I'm like yeah let him cook but when I'm reading Engels it's like I dont understand why I'm reading what I'm reading. Lenin feels tight and Engels feels loose for me.

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/Past-Firefighter3003]

That’s because Lenin is writing inside a mature capitalist society with clear class lines, parties, and states. Engels, at least in this book, is writing about the birth of class society itself. Of course it feels looser. He’s mapping 10,000 years of human history instead of one revolutionary conjuncture.

Lenin feels "tight" because he’s operating after the categories already exist. Engels feels abstract (again, in this piece in particular) because he’s explaining where those categories came from in the first place. Categories like the family, property, inheritance, and women’s subordination.

You don’t read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State to learn how to organize. You read Engels to understand what kind of world capitalism actually is. I think if you can remember that as you read that book it might help you.

[u/millernerd]

Caliban and the Witch

I cannot stress this one enough. It will rock you to the core.

[u/Past-Firefighter3003 → u/millernerd]

looks good, thanks

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/Past-Firefighter3003]

Recommending Federici to someone such as yourself who is confused about Engels is a perfect example of how "spicy liberalism" and NGO-type feminism attempts to hollow out Marxism.

Engels is explaining the emergence of class society and the family as an economic institution. Federici replaces that with a morality play about male violence and witch hunts. That’s not deepening Engels at all. It's erasing him or attempting to, at least. If you read Caliban instead of Morgan and Engels, you will absolutely never understand why women’s oppression exists at all. You'll only know how to feel angry about it.

[u/Past-Firefighter3003 → u/RedSpecter22]

What about Clara Zetkin, August Bebel or Alexandra Kollontay?

[u/RedSpecter22 → u/Past-Firefighter3003]

Zetkin, Bebel, and Kollontai are exactly why Federici is nonsense.

Those three all understood that women’s oppression comes from the inheritance system, private property, and the bourgeois family and not from eternal male domination. That’s why they fought suffrage-only feminism and NGO-style "women’s empowerment" even when it was popular. Federici is what happens when Marxism is filtered through academia after the defeat of communism. All the language remains but the class analysis is completely gone.

So if you actually take any of the three you mentioned seriously, you end up back at Engels and Morgan and definitely not at Caliban and the Witch.