This Valentine’s Day, Let’s Look to Marxists to Reimagine Love, Romance and Sex

In this, he built on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published half a century earlier by Marx’s best friend, editor and frequent coauthor Friedrich Engels. Engels had a rather unconventional romantic life himself. While outwardly maintaining his bourgeois lifestyle, he never married and instead secretly cohabitated with his working-class lover, Mary Burns (an Irish radical who deeply influenced his work); and after Mary died, with her sister Lizzie. In this book, he built on notes left by Marx and attempted to write a historical materialist critique of the Victorian family — an ultra-patriarchal household designed to consolidate and hand down wealth and police women’s behavior, or in other words, a more tightly controlled version of the nuclear family we still have. 

What both Gramsci and Engels point out (the latter at considerable length) is that the family form they had been raised to think of as normal was, in fact, a recent invention, created with some degree of coercion and molded into ​“common sense,” a term Gramsci used for the kinds of popular beliefs that shape our world, even when they’re wrong. (He counterposed it to ​“good sense,” a more accurate understanding of the forces at play in the world.) Heterosexuality, as it existed in both men’s lifetimes, was a particular construct of industrial capitalism, designed to suit the needs of factory employers rather than to make people happy. A wife at home to do the cooking, cleaning and caring sent workers off to the factory better rested and ready for another day of work. Such ​“reproductive labor,” the Wages for Housework movement, decades later, would note, makes husbands’ work possible.

A century’s worth of Marxist-feminists have built this understanding into theories of housework, caring labor, emotional labor and much more. They were often part of social movements demanding radical changes to the law to accommodate vastly different understandings of love, marriage and gender, aware that the ways we are allowed to be and build lives together have a real effect on our material well-being. And in turn, our material well-being has a lot to do with how good our relationships (romantic or otherwise) are able to be. In this, I think, there’s something to be gleaned from these two writers that might help us navigate this moment and imagine a better framework for love than the one that’s been handed down to us from patriarchs past.

The reason I returned to Engels and Gramsci this Valentine’s Day is that while this holiday is, like the nuclear family, a construct of a particular kind of capitalism, it is a time of year where romance is inescapable, and yet many of us wind up feeling like we’re doing it wrong. In this moment, with more options for what shape relationships might take than ever before, with fewer and fewer people opting for the nuclear family form, especially among the working class, there’s still plenty of social pressure to be coupled. Just look at the increasingly frantic genre of romance reality TV (a friend of mine referred to England’s Love Island as ​“Heterosexuality Gulag” and he’s not wrong). 

While I wouldn’t recommend reading Engels for a perfectly accurate history of the development of the modern family, what he does do is connect the couple form and gender roles to developments in the economy. In other words, the form of couple we’re told is a natural way to experience love actually developed in order to consolidate wealth, and evolved alongside the institution of private property. (For a modern-day and brilliant expansion on this topic, I recommend Melinda Cooper.)

Engels drew upon anthropological research among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in North America to note how the Victorian family was but one of many options, and that the modern family had, as it were, undergone an enclosure, consolidating control in the hands of a patriarch. The origin of monogamy, he writes, had very little to do with ​“the sexual love of the individual in the modern sense”; indeed, most men had no intention of staying faithful, only of keeping their wives so. Monogamy was in no way the highest form of love, but rather a form of antagonism. After all, if it was simply a matter of evolution, Engels joked, ​“then the palm belongs to the tapeworm that carries a complete male and female sexual apparatus in each of its 50 to 200 sections and passes its whole lifetime in fertilizing itself in every one of its sections.” 

Rather than being natural, Engels argued, monogamy was formed based on economic conditions: the need to pass down property. This meant that the working classes actually had a better opportunity to find real love, in his view, because they had no property to pass down. So naturally, in order to keep the working classes in order, they had to be brought into this form of the family. 

Enter Henry Ford, and Gramsci’s take on him. 

Gramsci, like Engels, found sex a worthwhile subject of inquiry, and was particularly interested in the attempts to control and harness its power. It was not just puritanism, he wrote, that made Ford so interested in the sex lives of his workers that he sent inspectors into their homes to make sure they were properly heterosexually coupled. Increasingly rationalized, Taylorized factory work required, Gramsci wrote, ​“a rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts,” and ​“regulation and stability of sexual relations.” Ford was willing to pay higher wages, but had to ensure that the workers wouldn’t spend their extra money on booze and women. Rather, the implication seemed, they should be putting that money into property that they could pass down through their families.

We should probably note at this juncture that Gramsci had a rather prudish take on these issues — he wasn’t entirely disapproving of Ford’s methods. Certainly he, unlike Engels, did not write glowingly of the need to liberate love from the demands of industrial capital. But he too was clear: ​“the new industrialism wants monogamy” because the ​“exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected with the most perfected automatism.” For the working classes, both Engels and Gramsci stress, freedom is only the freedom to sell their time for a wage; freedom when it comes to relationships and marriage follows the same logic. Civil law, Engels wrote, might hold that marriage is a free contract between men and women, but the reality is as unequal as the relationship between a worker and her employer. This still holds up today: women still make less money, and during the pandemic we saw large numbers of women leaving the workforce due to caring responsibilities. And the #MeToo movement reminds us of the unequal threat faced by women who might want to have relationships, romantic or otherwise, with men. 

Common sense says we’re all equal now; good sense includes the realities of still-existing power relations.