ABSTRACT
The antagonists identify the existing economic political and family system with the male father, against whom they revolt. The transition from the pairing family to the patriarchal, monogamous form of marriage was brought about, according to Engels, by socioeconomic forces. Engels has a twofold exploitation in mind: a sexual and an economic one. The woman, like the proletariat, can be liberated only by participating, on equal terms, in industrial production for the public good; and this requires the elimination of the family as economic unit as a precondition for the abolition of private and the establishment of public property of the means of production. We contend that a similar unconscious symbolism is at work in the thought of the apologists: they are against the female element, land and earth, because they side with the existing economic system, which has a male connotation.
