“According to Marx, capitalism transforms even the personal relationships between men and women. Critically examine with illustrations from the contemporary Indian context.” (2014)
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie “has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation”, leaving no bond between people but naked self-interest and “callous cash payment”. Intimacy, in this view, is reshaped by property and the market. Contemporary India confirms much of this, but also shows that patriarchy has older roots and that markets can widen women’s choices.
The Marxian argument
- Property and monogamy: Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) linked the rise of private property to monogamous marriage, designed to secure legitimate heirs, and called it the “world historical defeat of the female sex”.
- Wife as instrument of production: the Manifesto claims the bourgeois sees his wife as property, and marriage as a contract of inheritance.
- Split between home and work: capitalism separates paid production from unpaid domestic labour, making women economically dependent.
- Socialist feminism extended this. In the domestic labour debate, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972) and Silvia Federici (Wages Against Housework, 1975) argued that housework reproduces labour power for capital free of charge. Maria Mies (1986) called the process “housewifisation”.
Illustrations from India
- Commodified marriage: dowry has become an inflating transaction tied to grooms’ salaries. NCRB recorded 15,489 cases under the Dowry Prohibition Act and 6,156 dowry deaths in 2023.
- Marriage market: matrimonial apps rank partners by income, profession, complexion and caste filters, turning compatibility into a market profile.
- The body as commodity: India’s transnational surrogacy trade, which Amrita Pande (Wombs in Labor, 2014) studied in Gujarat, led to the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which bans commercial surrogacy.
- Unpaid care: the Time Use Survey 2024 found women spending about 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against 88 minutes for men. PLFS 2025 puts female labour force participation at 40.0% against 79.1% for men.
Critical examination
- Patriarchy precedes capitalism: Uma Chakravarti‘s “Brahmanical patriarchy” (1993) shows caste purity secured through control of women’s sexuality and endogamy, long before markets. Honour killings over inter-caste marriage follow a caste logic, not a cash logic.
- Dowry’s roots: M. N. Srinivas traced “modern dowry” to education and salaried jobs, but its base lies in hypergamy and kinship hierarchy, a hybrid of caste and capital.
- Reductionism: Heidi Hartmann (“The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”, 1979) argued that class analysis is “sex-blind”; patriarchy is a distinct system that capital adapts to.
- Capitalism can emancipate: wage work, urban anonymity and education expand choice. Love and self-arranged marriages, which Perveez Mody (The Intimate State, 2008) studied in Delhi, show individual agency. The Navtej Singh Johar judgment (2018), decriminalising homosexuality, drew on the individualism that market modernity fosters.
Conclusion
Marx correctly foresaw that capitalism would monetise and reorganise intimate life, and dowry markets, surrogacy and unpaid care in India bear this out. But capitalism in India works through caste and patriarchy rather than replacing them, and it also opens spaces for choice. An intersectional reading, combining class with caste and gender, explains contemporary Indian intimacy better than class alone.