The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

1. The consanguine family, the first organized form of society and the first stage of the family. Here, the marriage groups are separated by generations: all grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husband and wife among themselves, likewise their children, so that the fathers and mothers, just as their children will again form a third circle of common spouses, and their children, the great-grandchildren of the first, a fourth. In this form of family, therefore, only ancestors and descendants, parents and children are excluded from the rights and duties (as we would say) of marriage among themselves. Brothers and sisters, first, second, and more distant cousins are all brothers and sisters to each other and precisely for that reason all husband and wife to one another. The relationship of brother and sister at this stage includes the exercise of mutual sexual intercourse by itself.*) The typical shape of such a family would consist of the offspring of one pair, in which again the descendants of each individual grade are brothers and sisters among themselves and precisely for that reason husbands and wives to one another.

always a certain form of marriage outside of which this intercourse takes place, and includes prostitution at least as a possibility. The word has never been used in any other sense, and in this sense I use it with Morgan. Bachofen's highly significant discoveries are everywhere mystified to the point of disbelief by his imagination that the historically evolved relations of man and woman had their source in the respective religious conceptions of people, not in their actual living conditions.

*) In a letter from the spring of 1882, Marx expresses himself in the strongest terms regarding the total falsification of the ancient world prevailing in Wagner's Nibelungen text. Siegfried boasts: "Was it ever heard that the brother embraced the sister as a bride?" To these "gods of lust" of Wagner's, who make their love affairs spicier in a modern way through a bit of incest, Marx replies: "In the ancient world, the sister was the wife, and that was moral."