"The Holy Family" by Marx & Engels

[The Vegan Marxist]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/index.htm

I was asked to read this after I got into a debate with a fellow Comrade who says that this book outlined the abolition of the family, not under term wise, but to where babies are collectively re-distributed communally.

Is there any truth to this before I start reading?

[BAM]

I think your friend is wrong. The Holy Family is a rather tedious denunciation of Marx and Engels's former associates and a lot of other people who have never been heard of since.

There is a reference in the German Ideology to the abolition of the family, but it's just in a footnote, and also in part two of the Communist Manfesto, but there's no mention of "redistributing babies"!

[Zanthorus]

Is there any truth to this before I start reading?

Not that I can remember. The book for the most part is a polemic against many of the German Hegelian philosophers of the time.

Like BAM said it's a pretty tedious book unless you're interested in debates between long dead German dudes or you're researching the development of Marx's thought or something.

[28350]

I've never read it, but from what I understand, the 'holy family' refers to the bourgeois conception of the class system, ie. all the classes working together for the benefit of society (sort of like national syndicalism).

[which doctor]

I always thought the title "The Holy Family" was a pun on Bruno Bauer's investigations into Christianity.

[BAM]

I've never read it, but from what I understand, the 'holy family' refers to the bourgeois conception of the class system, ie. all the classes working together for the benefit of society (sort of like national syndicalism).

Marx and Engels were having a joke at the Bauer brothers' expense, calling them The Holy Family. It's a satirical reference to the holy family of Christianity (Jesus, Mary and Joseph). The Bauers were part of the Young Hegelian milieu which thought radical democratic ideas could be derived through theology, through Hegel's idealist method.

Marx reckoned it was all nonsense. Theology concerns itself with heaven, not earth. (This is why he derisively calls his opponents such as Bruno Bauer "Saint Bruno", etc.) Reality on the ground is what is important and in any case, religion is a reflection of man's real existence, not the other way round. He writes later in the Theses on Feuerbach, "once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated [vernichtet] theoretically and practically."

You're better off reading The German Ideology for a more readable account of Marx new materialist method.