“I don’t need paradise Leo, nor eternal love.
I want a world so reasonable that one can live in it as a human being.”
– Rosa Luxemburg, 1899
It’s one of humanity’s oldest illusions that love exists outside of history and regardless of the relations of production. We like to believe the heart “follows no rules” as if it floated above the material world. But the heart beats in a body that works, eats, suffers, and survives within social relations. And that means love, even in its most tender form, is shaped by the world in which it lives.
We don’t love in a vacuum. Our tenderness, jealousy, and sense of “home” are not timeless emotions. They are historical products, changing with the way we produce and reproduce life. As Marx wrote, even our most intimate feelings are “social relations expressed in persons.”
When Engels argued in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” that the monogamous family arose from the man’s need to pass on his property, he wasn’t saying love is a lie. He was saying it is formed by property, labour, and power. Therefore, it can be changed by changing the material conditions.
From sharing to inheritance
Early hunter-gatherer societies shared resources, childcare, and responsibility. There was no concept of “mine and yours,” and no family unit in the modern sense. Love and care were part of collective life. Engels called this stage “primitive communism” a time before class domination, when production and reproduction were shared.
Humans lived as nomadic peoples back then. Accordingly, the accumulation of possessions would have been disadvantageous. They tended to live more from hand to mouth. The idea of private property did not exist back then.
That changed with the rise of agriculture and herding. People began to settle, cultivate, and accumulate.
The invention of the plough in particular enabled humans, for the first time, to produce surpluses. Operating the plough was physically demanding work that was hardly possible during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Before that, women had been able to gather and hunt even while pregnant. With the invention of the plough, the division of labour changed fundamentally. Friedrich Engels described this development as “The world-historic defeat of the female sex.”
This was the birth of private property, and with it, the first great divide: production became men’s domain, reproduction women’s. The family emerged as the basic unit of ownership. The woman, once a co-producer, became responsible for the reproduction. And love became a function of inheritance.
This new concept of property demanded heirs. In order to determine the line of inheritance, it had to be clear who the two progenitors were. This resulted in the regulation of female sexuality.
Surplus created storage; storage created ownership and new roles within the society. Some produced the surplus others coordinated it. This new role of administration was the very first start of classes. Some started to gain control over the surplus while others produced it.
What had once been a communal relation became a private institution. The family taught obedience, possession, and moral duty preparing people for a world organised by domination. The so-called “natural” roles of man and woman were anything but natural. They were historical tools for stabilising property and hierarchy.
The moral economy of marriage
Ancient societies built entire states on this logic. In Greece, the citizen was “free” only because others were not. Men debated in public; women were confined to the house, their bodies part of the machinery of reproduction. Rome perfected this system: the pater familias owned not just land and slaves, but his wife and children. Marriage was a legal contract, not a romantic choice.
When feudalism replaced the empires this logic stayed, only now, God was its guarantor. The Church sanctified property through marriage. What had been a contract became a „sacrament“. Behind the holiness of the family stood the same economics: inheritance, land, and lineage.
The troubadours of the Middle Ages invented “courtly love,” that great European myth of passion and virtue. But it was never a real emancipation, just a poetic mask. Knights sang of love to ennoble themselves, not to challenge the system. The lady was muse, not equal.
In this world, the woman’s chastity secured property; her silence kept peace. Feudal morality turned economic dependence into moral duty. The poorer you were, the more “virtuous” you were expected to be.
Industrial love and bourgeois rebranding
With capitalism came the factory and a new family form. The industrial revolution separated what had long been connected: home from labour.
The bourgeois family became the smallest cell of capitalist reproduction. The man went out to work for wages; the woman worked inside, unpaid.
At the same time marriage was no longer just an economic arrangement; it was supposed to be about “choice,” “feeling,” “the heart.” But this freedom mirrored the market itself. The free love of the bourgeoisie was simply the free competition of capitalism, dressed up as romance.
Love became the emotional compensation for alienated work. The home was a small oasis in a world of profit and exhaustion. But the price of that illusion was high. Women’s unpaid labour childcare, cooking, cleaning, care work became a hidden foundation of industrial wealth.
The idea of “romantic love” was, in truth, a rebranding of the idea of a family functioning for the production. The product was the same as before gendered division of labour but now it came with a prettier label. He earns, she cares, both perform. The marketing campaign was so successful that we still believe it.
The idea of family and gender roles changes with the change of the ‘Relations of Production’.
Swiping left – a new era of intimacy?
Today, the old structures wear new masks. The factory walls have fallen for many, but the work hasn’t disappeared – it’s just moved into our homes, our devices, and even our emotions. The flexible worker must also be a flexible lover.
The contemporary self is a brand. We curate, optimise, sell ourselves. Dating apps promise endless choice and algorithmic destiny, yet what they deliver is a new kind of conformity. Desire is endless, but connection is rare.
We are no longer bound by law or religion but by comparison by the constant demand to be desirable, independent, self-sufficient. Relationships become joint ventures; breakups resemble business dissolutions. Care work is sometimes outsourced, underpaid, and still feminised. The promise of equality has not abolished dependence, it has privatised it.
New forms of relationships
In Germany, alternative relationship structures such as polyamory, open relationships, and co-parenting arrangements have gained increasing visibility in recent years. While reliable prevalence data remain limited, surveys indicate a growing openness toward non-monogamous relationship models. For example, a 2022 YouGov survey found that about 10–15% of respondents in Germany reported that they could imagine being in a non-monogamous relationship, while younger respondents were significantly more open to such arrangements. At the same time, Germany has experienced substantial increases in housing costs and general living expenses over the past decade, particularly in large urban areas.
Within changing material conditions, new relationship forms such as polyamory are neither a coincidence nor an escape from the system. As rents rise and the cost of living becomes unaffordable for many, it is increasingly impossible for people to plan for children or to establish families in the traditional sense. Out of these material contradictions, new ideas emerge. It is understandable that concepts such as polyamory and co-parenting are gaining traction precisely in these crisis stages of capitalism. For many, this may even appear to be a progressive way out of the constraints of capitalism. Yet they too are a consequence of material conditions. The idea of creating an island in the sea of capitalism may seem like an acceptable solution for individuals; however, within a system based on exploitation and oppression, we can neither live freely nor love freely, because we continue to move within its predetermined structures. Regardless of whether these conditions lead people to choose more progressive relationship models.
At the same time, a reactionary movement can be observed regarding the expression of family life and gender roles. On social media in particular, there has been a growing visibility of so-called “tradwives” and “alpha male” influencers who promote a return to traditional relationship models and gender hierarchies. These conservative family structures and role expectations can also be interpreted in connection with broader processes of militarization and rearmament. A society that prepares for military conflict often relies on and reproduces more rigid and conservative gender roles. More broadly, periods of crisis within capitalism tend to produce social polarization, which is also reflected in the organization and imagination of intimate relationships.
Every historical era produces the forms of relationships it economically requires.
How to liberate Love
To love freely, we must live freely. That doesn’t mean moral liberation; it means transforming the material basis of life. When work is no longer coercion, love no longer needs to be compensation.
Love, in this sense, is not a sentimental issue. It’s a question of the material conditions and the production relations.
If, as Marx wrote, ‘being’ determines consciousness, then a different kind of being – collective provision, time, and security will produce a different kind of love. This isn’t romantic idealism; it’s political realism.
The bourgeois world sold us love as a brand for work and hierarchy. To change the branding we must change the system itself. Otherwise we only create islands to escape without realizing that there is no way to escape. When property and exploitation recede, love changes, too. It stops being the branding of a system and becomes the practice of solidarity.
Only then can Luxemburg’s dream become reality, not an eternal love, but a world so rational, so just, that we can finally live, and love, in it as human beings.
