I watched an interesting program tonight, which I have shared at the bottom. Kaylyn Borysenko, an anarcho-capitalist I follow on X (Twitter), shared an anti-family presentation by ME O’Brien. It’s long. Borysenko makes decent points throughout, but the anti-Marxist reflex prevents a more depth analysis of O’Brien’s angle.
I studied Marxism in the 1990s in graduate school at the University of Tennessee. In fact, my PhD carries a specialization in critical political economy—heavily Marxist. My teachers were Marxists (Bill Robinson, now at UC-Santa Barbara, was one of them). What’s being passed off in the discussion as Marxism is really neo-Hegelian philosophy. Marx and Engels were materialists. And although ME O’Brien appeals to humanism at the end, and uses the rhetoric of communalism/communization throughout, O’Brien self-identifies as a Hegelian. They’re a lot of junk stuck to it so it is definitely neo.
Marx and Engels did not advocate for the abolition of the family. Their discussion of the family, in The Communist Manifesto (I wrote the intro to the Skyhorse edition, so check it out) and in Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (adapted from Marx’s notes of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family and Ancient Society), focuses on how the institution of the family is shaped by the mode of production and, in turn, reproduces the prevailing mode of production.
Marx and Engels argue for the abolition of the bourgeois family because, duh, they argue for the abolition of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels believed that the family is functional to the reproduction of labor and the maintenance of class divisions in a given mode of production; the bourgeoise family, characterized by patriarchal structures, private property, and inheritance, is functional to the capitalist class. Theoretically, bourgeois attributes, such as inheritance, would lose their significance with the passing of capitalism. It’s a pretty obvious sociological observation.
freedom and reason 