Q: In the 'Origin of Family, Private Property and the State', Engels argued that love or marital relationship between individuals must be completely their private affair and just as in primitive communism, in future communist society also, it should be possible to easily end a relationship from either side and without the interference of public courts. After the Russian revolution, Lenin said that henceforth the so-called 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' children would be equal. In western world today, being formal partners, ie, live-in relationship has become very common. In this context, I have these questions:

1. Why hasn’t any socialist country legally introduced the system of unilateral divorce, without the interference by courts?
2. Is it not time to do away with the formal difference between 'marriage’ and 'live-in relationship’?
What is the Marxist understanding on this entire problem?

R Sarbatrik Brahma, Kolkata

IN an ideal world, love and marital relationships between individuals should, of course, be entirely private matters of no concern to others or to the State.  The problem, of course, is that we do not live in an ideal world and nowhere in the globe has a communist society been established yet.  In a world still dominated by private property, exploitation and growing inequality between and within nations, patriarchy is being strengthened in many different ways. This is not only because it reinforces the feelings of superiority that most men feel towards women but, even more importantly, because capitalism itself is strengthened by the super profits that unequal women can be forced to yield, by the unpaid labour that women render within the home and the family that takes the burden of paying for social reproduction (healthcare, education, nursing, cooking, clothing, nurturing children etc) off the shoulders of employers and the capitalist State.  If women were truly equal, the cost of social reproduction would have to be factored into the wages of both men and women workers and the State would also have to contribute tangibly by providing universal education and health services, child care, care to senior citizens, canteens etc.  Today, as part of the neo-liberal paradigm, the State across nations is withdrawing even more from its responsibilities of providing public and social services.  Whatever little was being done, and, of course, this varied from country to country, is today being reduced with alarming speed. While this increases the burden on all working people, it is women who have to bear the brunt.  The promotion of patriarchal values in many different ways is essential in ensuring that they accept this as part of their duties as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers.

The institution of marriage in which women are unequal partners came into being once private property started dominating social, economic and political relations.  Restrictions placed on the autonomy and freedom of women was crucial in order to ensure the ‘legitimacy’ of heirs on which the inheritance of private property rested.  For centuries, marriage meant very different things to men and women.  For women it was a construct that inhibited them and curtailed their freedom, for men it guaranteed comfort and legal heirs without the imposition of constraints on their sexual or other activity.

Engels was the most trenchant critic of the bourgeois institution of marriage but he was only too aware of its historical roots and the way in which it was intrinsically connected with the institution of private property.  That is why he said that just as it did not exist in times of primitive communism, it would cease to exist when future communist societies were established. 

The important thing to remember is that this has not yet happened.  Nowhere has a communist society come into existence.  Even the Soviet Union was socialist in nature and no one realised better than Lenin that a communist society remained very, very much in the distant future. Despite the fact that the USSR could not abolish private property altogether, it did do away with much private ownership and exploitation in industry and agriculture. 

From its birth, the USSR had to face tremendous external and internal threats.  Despite this, Lenin gave serious thought to the status of women from the inception of the Soviet State.  In 1920, at a time when the country was threatened with famine and bloody civil war, he had a long discussion with the great Socialist leader, Clara Zetkin, in which he spoke forcefully of the need to provide women with all that was required to liberate them from the bondage of the home and the drudgery of housework. Crèches, healthcare, employment and a legal framework that ensured equality in all spheres were all being visualised and realised by him (and, of course, the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet State) at a time when the very existence of the USSR was threatened.

As a result, the 1923 Constitution of the USSR not only gave Soviet women the right to vote before any other country in the world, but it went to great lengths to ensure their equality in all spheres including the marital home.  In an extraordinary step, the constitution gave equal rights to both legitimate and illegitimate children.  It has taken so-called advanced democracies decades to legislate in this fashion.  The constitution also gave women equal rights to property, inheritance and equal access to the right to seek a divorce.  These were revolutionary steps. Granting the unilateral right to divorce to either partner would have meant that in most cases women and children would have suffered greatly from its consequences.  In unequal societies such seemingly ‘equal’ laws have very dangerous implication for those who are the most unequal.  That is why in such societies there are demands for laws that discriminate in favour of those who are unequal.

As mentioned earlier, communism, ie, a completely free society which is also free of private property and exploitation does not exist anywhere today.  Private property, rapacious exploitation and strengthened patriarchy are ubiquitous, found everywhere.  As a result, women’s’ rights and autonomy are under tremendous attack and are being whittled away in many parts of the world.  In such a situation, women need more protective laws not freedom from all laws. Married women need laws to protect them from violence and sexual assault in their homes, to protect them from being abandoned or thrown out of the marital home, to protect them from being divorced without being provided maintenance and shelter for themselves and their children etc.  The women’s movement everywhere is actually involved in struggles to strengthen and augment protective laws for women in all spheres. 

If, however, two people feel that they should enter into a live-in relationship, they should not be prevented from doing so.  Even in such cases, however, women need to be protected against violence and from being rendered homeless and destitute.  For this reason, there are laws to protect women in these relationships too and wherever such laws do not exist, they are being demanded.

Communism is the society of the future but until it is firmly established laws regulating marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance etc (along with other protective legislation) cannot be given up.  On the contrary, they have to be strengthened and their ambit widened to include many different kinds of relationships other than man and wife, parents and children.