The short answer is — there isn’t one.

Socialists have been known to argue at length about “the family” as well as every other social institution.  

But Marxists don’t have a collective “position” on people’s personal relationships or domestic arrangements, as long as they are entered into freely, don’t involve violence, coercion, corruption, exploitation or greed, and don’t damage anyone else.

Love, in particular, is (arguably) beyond the remit of any Marxist analysis. People fall in love, fall out of love; two (or more) people get together, and while their relationship may be of interest to others, it is no particular business of a Marxist.  

Some people love their pets, some love money, some evangelicals claim to be able to transmit God’s love of humankind. Marxists may have views on these latter manifestations of love, usually involving terms such as alienation and reification but these are the subject of other answers.

Having said that, it is hardly surprising that Marxists have studied the family as a social institution, given that it has played (and continues to play) such a prominent — and contradictory — role in social life.  

Where, as ever, Marxists can make a contribution is in setting love, marriage and the family in their social and historical context.  

For most of the time that capitalism has existed the (nuclear, heterosexual) family — husband, wife and kids — has been prescribed by Church and state as its basic — and sacrosanct — unit.  

And for the much lesser time that Marxism and communism have been around, they have been castigated for (amongst other things) belittling this hallowed unit and for promoting promiscuity.  

The reality is a little more complex. “The family” today corresponds probably less than it ever has in the past to the supposedly ideal nuclear family.  

This particularly applies to the status of women and also to same sex/non-binary relationships, whether sanctioned by law or not.

Marxism is, above everything else, a dialectical and materialist examination of how humans live and how we sustain and reproduce ourselves — the production and reproduction of human existence. Social institutions (including the family) are intimately linked to these two elements.  

Most of Marx’s own work was concerned with the economic functioning of capitalism. But this inevitably raised the question of the role of some of its central elements, including the family, its role in the production and reproduction of existence and its relation to the state.  

Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) argued that all three elements arose together with the appearance of class society.  

As soon as settled agriculture produced sufficient food (a “surplus”) beyond what was needed to sustain those who produced it, a ruling class emerged (nobles, landowners and the clergy) as well as new groups of non-agricultural workers — blacksmiths, bakers, candlestick makers and the rest.  

The agricultural surplus was appropriated — it became private property and could be traded. And new forms of capital, machines and money, emerged giving a dynamic to social change which led eventually to the replacement of feudalism by capitalism.

Engels’s understanding of pre-class society was based on the work of US anthropologist Lewis Morgan.  

Morgan’s 1877 book Ancient Society proposed three stages of human development — from “savagery” through “barbarism” and slave society, to “civilisation.”  

Morgan’s perceptions of “savagery” (Engels called it “primitive communism”) were based on his studies of human kinship systems of the Iroquois and other Native American groups among whom he had lived.

Engels developed Morgan’s ideas within a dynamic, Marxist framework — including class, which Morgan ignored.  

Morgan’s work has subsequently been challenged by other anthropologists, as has Engels’s on matters of detail.  But the central thesis — that monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is a historical phenomenon, not a biological “given” — remains sound.

In 1847 Engels wrote that communism would “transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage — the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.”  

Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution Alexandra Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) began to elaborate a revolutionary vision for women, based on a code of equality and “a withering away of the family.”

They saw the traditional family as an agent of oppression under capitalism, which “has placed on the shoulders of the woman a burden which crushes her: it has made her a wage worker without having lessened her cares as a housekeeper and mother.”

That oppression would be transformed with its abolition, not by sending women “back to the home” (something that happened in Britain after the second world war when women had occupied roles previously regarded as the province of men) but by economic, social and sexual equality.  

Under socialism, they declared, the patriarchal family would become a “legacy from the past” to be replaced by “free love.”  

Free love of course meant not sexual promiscuity (male or female) but rather, relationships entered into freely, on the basis of equality and mutual respect.

In 1918, one year after the Bolsheviks took power, the young Soviet Union ratified the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship.

It was expected that family law would soon be outmoded and “the fetters of husband and wife” were unnecessary.  

Children, the elderly, and the disabled would be supported by the state; housework would be socialised and waged; and women would no longer be economically dependent on men.  

The family, stripped of its social functions, would “wither away,” replaced by “free unions” based on mutual love and respect. The code aimed to provide a transitional legal framework for that short period in which legal duties and protections were still necessary.  

Kollontai wrote of the need for “a new form of relation between the sexes … in place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of woman, we shall see rise the free union, fortified by the love and respect of the two members of the Workers’ State equal in their rights and in their obligations.”

The influence of the writings of Kollontai and others meant that some communists, both women and men, regarded marriage as a “bourgeois” phenomenon.

Paradoxically in socialist societies — past and present — with genuine equality between women and men, with good provision of socialised childcare and with their liberal attitudes to divorce and abortion the “traditional” family remains strong, as it does among working-class people today.  

Some have — unhelpfully — attempted to distinguish between “bourgeois” and “proletarian” families. Others have emphasised the role of hegemony, the dominance of ideas rehearsed in rhetoric if not in reality among those who do have property to bequeath and by the state that represents them.  

The family features prominently in propaganda and policy of both church and state. Everything from pensions to inheritance tax is made easier for married couples.  

And for capital, the family is a unit of consumption and a site for the realisation of profit in its own right.  

The reality is that the concept of the family is a fluid one, and one that is not inherently antithetical to “free” love. It has changed over time and will continue to do so.

In both capitalist and socialist societies long struggles were needed before same-sex couples secured the right for their union to be recognised in the institution of civil partnership.  

And for heterosexual couples who do object to marriage, for example because of the pejorative historical power connotations of the words “husband” and “wife,” the option of a civil partnership seems likely at last to be granted.  

As to the future, it would be foolhardy either to predict or to prescribe the way that human personal relationships may change or the form that “families” (or wider kinship relationships) might take.  

But the struggle for a classless society and the demand for “free associations” in interpersonal relationships, based responsibly on mutual love and respect, are “intimately” related.