SPK
28th September 2006, 10:00
Originally posted by
[email protected] 27 2006, 05:15 AM
The key to remember with Marx is that he viewed the family structure, as with everything else, to be dependent on the mode of production. When that changes so do the various structures it supports.
Indeed. This perspective is what distinguishes Marxism from other forms of radical thought.
Different things are going to happen in a revolutionary society. There will be an ideological struggle against the backwards aspects of the family, as it exists today: the relegation of women to the domestic sphere, pervasive violence against women and children, the view of children as property, and so on. This will be a conscious, political campaign of ideas, to change peoples minds.
Of course, certain related laws or regulations, applied by the state or some other collective body, will still be required. There should be fewer instances where they have to be enforced, though, as compared to contemporary capitalist society -- a world characterized by economic justice should not have the rampant social degeneracy that we see today. These laws or rules would have to be used against people who actually commit acts of violence against women or children, who attempt to perpetuate the most backwards cultural practices against women -- such as arranged marriages -- and so on.
Some Marxists also believe that a change in the economic mode of production, from capitalism to socialism / communism, will lead to the eventual disappearance of these reactionary ideas about the family. I don't think that would naturally or automatically happen, without a conscious ideological struggle against those ideas. The economic structure is the most central determining element of familial forms, but ideas are never, in a simple or mechanistic way, derived from the economic.
But the most immediate and far-reaching change to the family structure, or its total disappearance in the form that we see it today, is going to come from the concrete, practical, material effects of the change in the economic mode of production. Specifically, this change in the family will be centrally driven by the elimination of want and misery and by the guarantee of the basic necessities of life.
In capitalist society, economic coercion is the central determining factor in how families are structured. Women are driven into marriage, in many cases, as a simple survival mechanism: because of discrimination in employment, the wage gap vis-à-vis men, the difficulty – if they are a single mother -- in raising a family on one income, and so forth. Abused youth must remain tied to their family in many cases, because the family provides the basic necessities of life, as well as other, critical things, like money for education. With the constant decline in wages and well as intensifying job insecurity, people in general find it increasingly difficult and precarious to live on one income, with no financial cushion, thus further encouraging marriages. The capitalist state, at least in the usa, systematically pushes the responsibility for care of the elderly onto families: note the threat to social security and federally-regulated pension programs, as well as Medicare. This pushes people to have children, in order to have someone to look after them as they get older and infirm.
This economic pressure, which is characteristic of capitalism, is a form of coercion or force. When it disappears under communism, people will be genuinely free to make their own, autonomous, independent, personal decisions on how to create families or affiliate with them. Women won’t have to get married to pay the bills. Youth won’t have to stay with an abusive or fucked-up family to simply survive. People won’t be forced to form families merely to provide a shelter from the everyday instabilities and upheavals that characterize workers’ lives today.
There will be an explicit debate and dialogue, an ideological struggle, in revolutionary societies about what forms the family should take. Laws and regulations will still be necessary at some level. People may or may not begin to overcome backwards ideas like sexism or homophobia. But while all of this is occurring, a fundamental program of economic justice which is central to the communist vision will empower individuals to make their own decisions about whether or not, and how, to form families.