Comrades studying the topic proposed this draft of a first part of theses, presented at the meeting, related to the history preceding capitalism.

1. We call family the set of reproductive and kinship relations. Just as the earliest communities were arranged for productive labor, on the basis of rudimentary technology, so were they arranged with a view to mating and procreation as well as the education and protection of children. The family is thus, in its various forms, a productive relationship, suited to different environments and available productive forces. The economy encompasses the whole vast complex of human activities, with influence on the natural environment. Economic determinism concerns the entire history of the species and explains both the so-called public and domestic spheres. Just as private property and the state are not eternal, the current mode of sexual and kinship relations, the patriarchal, hetero-normative and monogamous family, is also not eternal. This purported fundamental social value, which characterizes societies based on private property, is only a transitory institution. Having no basis outside material determination, it will be destroyed by the victory of communism: materialist theory has analyzed the totality of its development and has already condemned it.

2. The earliest form of prehistoric society, called savage by past scientific literature and currently of hunter-gatherers, has been called primitive communism by Marxism. In this vast period, the human species knew neither private property and exploitation nor the state. It was the period when humanity’s appropriation of products in their natural state predominated; the products of human art were mainly tools that assisted this appropriation. The main activities of this era were hunting and gathering. Most hunters were male, most gatherers female, but some were hunters and gatherers, and being a hunter or gatherer was not determined by sex. The opposing roles of male and female, and the associated limitations, had not yet appeared.
     Polygamous sexual and amorous relationships tended to be between hunters and gatherers rather than between the male and female sexes, but neither were excluded between hunters and between gatherers. The choice of partners was essentially based on the sharing of skills necessary for material survival. Consequently, hetero-normativity had not yet appeared.
     So-called barbarism had three stages: lower, describing the first anatomically modern humans; intermediate, beginning with the use of fire; and higher, marking the rise of homo sapiens with the invention of the bow and arrow. The family relationships of the first two stages have been called the consanguineous family, in which marriage groups are separated according to generations and only ancestors and progeny, and parents and offspring, are excluded from love and sexual relationships.
     During the higher stage, what has been called the punaluan family (from pun aluan, meaning dear companion) emerged and gradually spread in the species, in which siblings on the mother’s side are excluded from reproduction. Here appeared a kinship relationship called gens, which consisted of sisters and their children, together with brothers on the maternal side, and in which women were given the functions of responsibility and decisions, both in the home and in the affairs of the tribe. The family forms that existed during the age of barbarism were matrilineal, and finally matriarchal as the gens developed.

3. Savagery was followed by barbarism, the period during which humanity learned to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquired methods of increasing the supply of natural products by organized human activity. Barbarism too had three stages: lower, which dates from the introduction of pottery based on the productive use of high heat to transform raw materials; middle, which begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with domestication of animals and in the Western, with the cultivation, by means of irrigation, of plants for food; and upper, which begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing. The lower and middle stages of barbarism, like savagery, were primitive communist societies. A new form of family, called the pairing family, appeared with the advent of the early stage of barbarism.
     Sexual relations for a longer or shorter period between the same individuals already occurred in earlier family forms; they became more stable as the gens developed and the number of “brothers” and “sisters,” between whom marriage was excluded, became larger, which led to the prohibition of marriage between all relatives. At this stage the couple lived together, but the marriage bond could easily be dissolved by either partner, and after separation, the children still belonged, as before, to the mother. The couple relationship was still not exclusively heterosexual reproductive, but of the type inherited from barbarism, although the opposition between the social roles of men and women were gradually beginning to develop. The couple family, itself too weak and unstable to make separate housing necessary or even imposed, did not replace the communal home inherited from earlier times. The communist household was based on the supremacy of women in the home and the continuation of matriarchy.
     In the transitional period between the middle and upper stages of barbarism, however, the monogamous family developed from the couple family. It differed from couple marriage in being defined on socially defined gender concepts of man and woman and in the much greater strength of the marriage bond, which could no longer be dissolved by the will of either partner but only by the man.
     Monogamous marriage drew women into violent submission to the will of men. Thus patriarchy was born, and with it the first form of slavery. On the basis of the monogamous family, the modes of production called despotic, Asiatic or slavery appeared during the higher barbarism. Along with private property, the institution called the state became necessary. “The first class opposition to appear in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male sex (...) It is the cellular form of civil society, in which one can already study the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society” (Engels).

4. Barbarism was followed by civilization, that is, the succession of class societies. Increased production in all sectors had given human labor-power the ability to produce greater quantities than necessary for its maintenance. At the same time the amount of labor required increased. War provided it with these new labor forces: prisoners of war were turned into slaves. Thus was born the division of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited. The distinction between rich and poor soon appeared alongside that between free and slave. Finally, property inequalities between individual heads of households came to break up the old domestic communities, where they had still managed to survive, and with them their common cultivation of the land.
     Alongside wealth in commodities and slaves, alongside wealth in money, there now appeared wealth in land. Thus the mode of production called slavery, the peculiar form of the ancient world, evolved from the despotic mode of production and became dominant. The existence of slavery, alongside the monogamous family, marked patriarchy from the very beginning. Monogamy, always for the woman, was often not imposed on the man. Love and sexuality, at first a free activity of species life, were subjected to the strict moral norms of the class order, leading to widespread habitual and legal repression.
     Alienated sexual instincts became a tool in the hands of the ruling class. Men in war were promised women and children to rape or enslave. Prostitution of women of miserable status and social position was born, although there were exceptions. The rigid and exclusive opposition of man and woman had the late consequence of the emergence of homophobia and transphobia, hitherto unknown in human communities.
     Legal wives were confined to the home, excluded from public life. Even the small number of reigning queens who emerged in this era ruled in the name and defense of patriarchy.
     The form of family that corresponded to civilization, and with it was definitively established, was the patriarchal, hetero-normative and monogamous family, with the dominance of man over woman and father over children and home, as well as the definition of predefined gender roles and the transformation of human beings into private property.

5. Feudalism is a mode of production based on serfs bound to the land instead of slaves belonging to a master. It arose as a consequence of the clash between slave and barbarian civilizations. It had already appeared in antiquity, but became dominant only with the breakdown of the old slave societies.
     Patriarchy intensified during feudalism. It was in the lord’s interest for his serfs to reproduce, because their children would increase the number of his workers and increase his income. The feudal lord had almost unlimited power over his serfs. In many feudal societies he could force any man and woman of age to marry, and dictate who they should marry, even in the case of widows and widowers. As lord of his subjects, he considered himself entitled to engage in sexual relations with his servants.
     Meanwhile, prostitution grew; brothels, whether municipal, state, or ecclesiastical owned, were operated in the cities, the profits from which went to replenish their respective coffers. However, persecution of prostitutes, sometimes vicious, came from the very men who demanded and maintained prostitution.
     Religious ideology preached current morality and spread fear and guilt among women, along with homophobia and transphobia, thus maintaining and strengthening the institution of the patriarchal family.

6. Patriarchy and civilization imposed themselves on a world that had lived in primitive communism for hundreds of thousands of years. The emergence of exploitation and oppression led to the revolt of the exploited and oppressed. Ancient civilizations were shaken by great rebellions of slaves and medieval ones of peasants, in both of which women actively participated.
     There were philosophical currents, both ancient and medieval, that expressed dismay and disgust at the condition of women, lamenting the immense waste of human potential caused by their domestic captivity. Not surprisingly, the same philosophers who rejected the monogamous family also called for the abolition of private property and dreamed of a communistic future for humanity. They were the precursors of modern utopian socialists, thus also of Marxism, a link in the millennial trajectory connecting the ancestral tribal human to the member of the future harmonious community.
     Although the great rebellions of slaves and peasants gave rude and fearsome assaults on social preservation, in ancient and medieval societies the conditions were not ripe for the victory and emancipation of the exploited and oppressed; consequently these movements were defeated without exception. Since these were still economies of scarcity, neither a return to primitive communism nor an advance to modern communism was possible. The emergence of a movement potentially able to seize power and advance human society toward communism was only possible with the emergence of the modern proletariat, the exploited class of a world that was finally producing in abundance while still failing to meet the needs of the many.