Did Karl Marx Support Marriage?

[Aleenik]

I'll get my personal opinion out of the way. I myself am against marriage. It is a union between two people and the state. I don't see how I could justify wanting to be involved in such. I am fine with personal unions however.

So ya... did Karl Marx support marriage? Obviously he was married as we all know, but maybe he married before he decided to be against the idea of it? I know Friedrich Engels was against marriage and so never married his long time lover.

Some of you may be wondering why this is important. Well, it isn't that important, but it doesn't make sense to me for a promoter of Communism to participate in such a union. He was against the state and capitalism, but was fine making a union between him and Jenny and the state?

[VivaValiente]

I believe he did not support marriage fully. In his Communist manifesto, Marx seems to suggest that marriage, as an instrument of the state and the middle-class, exploits women since women serve only as instruments of producing children in such an arrangement. Marx, given the time/context he was writing in, viewed men and the state (which are made up of men) as the sole beneficiaries in such an arrangement--since married women were not entitled to the same rights as the husband. The state imposing certain rights upon individuals in this arrangement (and reinforcing certain sex/power roles around them) is probably what Marx had an issue with. But he does not elaborate or develop his ideas on this overall. Perhaps, he believed in marriage outside of state recognition or approval. Nonetheless, here is what he says in the Communist manifesto:


"The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private."- Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2.

This is available online. Even though Marx may have been against marriage politically, he was a man of his time. Marriage was not just of mere political importance to the state but it was also the way to get approved by others if you were involved. A woman unmarried to a man but living with him might have been viewed as strange/inappropriate. Perhaps he worried about Jenny's reputation? Who knows.