“In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1948)
To be sure, the left loves to call their political enemies “fascists” and “Nazis.” But they don’t spend any time talking about Adolf Hitler’s theories or spreading fear about “Hitlerism.” This is because Hitler’s work was the work of a hack. High in emotional intelligence, as sociopaths tend to be, Hitler’s writing is ordinary and his theories crackpot. But the political right works overtime to spread fear about Marxism. This is because Karl Marx’s work is chockfull of profound sociological insights and his theories enjoy considerable criterion-related validity. Marx is to social thought what Darwin is to natural history, or Einstein is to physics. This is why Marx is taught in college classrooms, while Hitler’s writings are unnecessary to consider. The fact that Marxism is recognized as a legitimate scientific endeavor drives right wing ideologues up the wall. And so everything left of center becomes “socialist”—and everything socialist, “Marxist.”
The obsession with Marx doesn’t mean that his right wing critics spend anytime reading his work. Jordan Peterson, an educated man, in preparing for his debate with Slavoj Zizek back in 2019, skimmed The Communist Manifesto. Before and beyond that, by his own admission, he had never bothered to read any Marx at all. Yet he feigned to talk about Marxist thought as if he had given it the attention he’d given Carl Jung or Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. But, to his credit, that’s more Marx than most other right-wing critics have read. Most people attribute to Marx things other right-wing thinkers say, especially the influential intellectual dark web (IDW). So, when Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a 2015 video that surfaced in June that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists,” she had for America’s right wing made clear the movement’s ideological foundation. But it’s not true. Cullors and her associated are adherents to critical race theory. Now queer theorists are held up by right-wingers (some left-wingers, too) as Marxists for wanting to “abolish the family.” This is not true, either.
The importance of reading the corpus of Marx’s writings, as well as developing a good understanding of the work of Hegel and other relevant thinkers, is illustrated by the misreading of Marx’s fourth thesis on Feuerbach, a document he penned in 1845. There Marx writes, “Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.” Many think that Marx is calling for the abolition of the family. See, for example Richard Weikart’s essay “Marx, Engels, and the Abolition of the Family,” published in a 1994 issue of the History of European Ideas. (Weikart is the Intelligent Design advocate who blamed Darwin for the Holocaust.)
But Marx isn’t talking about the family at all in that passage. He is using the term as a metaphor. Marx is critiquing traditional philosophical approaches, most immediately that of Ludwig Feuerbach, who, according to Marx, stops at the contemplation of the material world without moving on to practical, transformative action. In the quoted sentence, Marx is expressing the idea that once we understand that the “holy family,” which represents the abstract and idealistic philosophy, i.e., ideology, is, in reality, rooted in the “earthly family,” i.e., the actual material conditions and social relations, we must go beyond mere theoretical understanding. The phrase “the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice” is Marx calling for a radical transformation of both theoretical and practical conditions. Put another way, the “earthly family” refers to actual social and material relationships among individuals, while the “holy family” represents the philosophical abstractions that have historically been detached from these real-world conditions. Marx is arguing for a dynamic and revolutionary approach that goes beyond contemplation and necessitates a transformation of both our understanding (theory) and the concrete social structures (practice). The goal is to move from understanding the world to actively changing it. He even says in the final thesis (thesis eleven): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” How embarrassing for Professor Weikart!
Where does this idea that Marxists advocate for the abolition of the family come from? What did Marx and Engels have to say about the family? Michèle Barrett, in her entry “Family” in the encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxist Thought, tells readers that “Marx himself did not develop an analysis of the family independently of that produced by Engels, and indeed the evidence suggests that his own conception of the family was naturalistic and uncritical.” She notes that The Communist Manifesto calls for the “abolition of the family,” but that this has often been interpreted as a call to replace the bourgeois family with a proletarian, socialist one, usually assumed to be based on heterosexual serial monogamy. Even if there are errors in Barrett’s entry (and there are—Marx had quite a lot to say about the subject and the polemic referenced is more subtle than the suppose consensus), there’s nothing there to support the claim that Marx and Engels call for the abolition of the family—or turn children over to the state, the warning that typically follows. If we cannot find support for the vulgar anti-socialism of the political right in an entry in Tom Bottomore’s definitive dictionary of Marxist thought, then perhaps we can find it elsewhere.
This is the matter I wish to take up in this essay, which is a continuation of my on-going exposé on postmodernist-corrupted ideology of the left, showing once more that gender ideology and elements of the academic and popular progressive agenda bears no resemblance to the materialist conception of history found in Marxism, but is instead an expression of a quasi-religious development commonly called “Wokism.” Wokism is not Marxist; it is the popular cultural and ideological expression of corporatism and managerialism under late capitalism. What feeds the culture and ideology is the nihilistic tribalism of poststructuralist/postmodernist and identitarian ideas and politics. These and other reactionary philosophies provide the source of queer theory (see Foucault), post-colonial studies (see Said), and all the rest of it—that is, the anti-Enlightenment and anti-Western movement currently threatening democratic-republicanism and liberal arrangements (see (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism; Why the Woke Hate the West). In academia and corporate boardrooms, woke manifests as soft fascism (speech codes, DEI, etc.; see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). On the streets, the fascism is quite a bit harder (Antifa, BLM, the Party of God; see The Woke-Islam Alliance and the Threat to Secularism; Woke Progressivism and the Party of God). Marxists loathe all of this. Moreover, where’s the class struggle? The alleged left today talks about everything but social class. References to capitalism are at best code for cisgendered white supremacy. As I recently clarified in a back-and-forth on X (Twitter): “Marxists are not the problem. It’s the people running struggle sessions at your workplace and marching around with ‘Queers for Palestine’ banners that ought to worry you,” before adding: “And corporate control over culture and information.”
I am moved to write this essay because of an Internet exchange. The day before yesterday I made a comment (which I will come to in a moment) vis-a-vis Karlyn Borysenko’s freakout on my X (Twitter) timeline yesterday (which was spectacular). Borysenko is an organizational psychologist who runs consulting business and wrote a book called Zen Your Work. I followed her on X (Twitter) because I had caught her on an August 2020 episode of Triggernometry “Anti-Racism Training Doesn’t Work” and found her interesting. She was saying many of the things I had been blogging about. I even referenced the episode in a September 2020 blog essay The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What You Think. In my comment to account (I had never commented there before), I merely clarified the Marxist position on the gender binary; Borysenko badly garbled the position in a question to a Marxist-turned-libertarian professor appearing on her Discord server. She blew up and blocked me and another user. To be sure, Borysenko’s personality borders on pathological narcissism (something I picked up from her Discord server), but the speed with which she went from zero to hyperventilating surprised me—that is until I realized that my intervention undermined her grift. An Internet acquaintance explained this to me (the one she blocked): she can’t have somebody who has read and understands Marx coming between her and her audience. It helped me understand why, despite closing her discussion with Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin on Triggernometry with telling them that her central concern is the addiction to anger that marks the social justice movement, she would blow a gasket over a benign comment.
For context, in the comment I will share in a moment, I’m responding to comments implying that what I’m arguing is correct but then go on to say that this isn’t what today’s Marxists believe and therefore my point is irrelevant. “Why are we arguing over things men who died a long time ago said” was the general sentiment. By today’s Marxists, the crowd means adherents to queer theory, crackpots with whom I strongly disagree; as I will explain in a forthcoming essay on Freedom and Reason, elaborating arguments I have already made, queer theory is the result of postmodernism and sexology, deeply problematical projects that stand in opposition to Marxism with respect to the gender binary and the theorization/fate of the family. Indeed, the conflation of Marxism and queer theory is among the most vulgar of right-wing conceits about left wing politics.
So here’s my comment (it was to one user, but addressing several of them): “Thanks for recognizing I’m right about Marx and Engels. But it’s not just them. There’s a long history with historical materialism. However, for you and others desperate to avoid reworking the ‘critique’ you’ve been handed, pretending queers are Marxists because it fits your narrative is dishonest and self-deluding. To be sure, queers (not the slur for gays and lesbians, but adherents to gender ideology and the anarchist praxis of transgression) want to abolish the family. This is because they want to get at children. Marxists seek the abolition of capitalism because it’s destructive to working class families and harms children. That the exploitative bourgeois family is abolished in the process is not the abolition of the family per se. To not get that straightaway exposes the speaker as ignorant. I always assume people are willing to deepen their understanding. I’m charitable that way.” That final statement honestly contains no snark.
My clarification to Borysenko’s feed that started all of this was merely this: “Marx and Engels argue that there’s a natural sexual division of labor and that this division is a primordial fact of the species—just as it is for all mammalian species. The gender binary not only precedes capitalism, but all societies based on social class. Engels wrote a whole book about it, a book based on Marx’s notes on Ancient Society by Morgan. I don’t know of any Marxist who argues that the gender binary was created by capitalism. In fact, anybody who claims to be a Marxist who would tell you that doesn’t understand Marxism at even the most basic level.” Since Borysenko is not a Marxist, my criticism wasn’t meant to tear her down. Also, note that I said nothing of family abolition. I was specifically responding to Borysenko’s malformed question with a clarification. What I see now is that right wing certainty about the gender binary, which is warranted, is held in tandem with right wing certain about the patriarchal family, which is mistaken.
Borysenko responded to my clarification with the above video, which she purports expresses the Marxist standpoint, but which couldn’t possibly, since the speaker, Mary Bowman, assistant professor at DePaul University, argues that the gender binary is an ideological construction of bourgeois society. As I had already noted, correctly, Marx and Engels assume that the gender binary is primordial, i.e., that it has always existed. Moreover, they recognize that, from time immemorial, there has been a sexual division of labor. Even if they had made this explicit in their world, those familiar with their work infer this since Marx and Engels operate from a scientific materialist standpoint that accepts the Darwinian model of natural history. For Marx and Engels there are only men and women. Moreover, they seek to establish a social order that will allow men and women to live for one another rather than for capitalist production. In other words, Marx and Engels seek the opposite of what queer theorists seek, which truly is to abolish the family (as well as any solidity to gender categories); except where she apes the jargon, Marx and Engels’ work refutes everything Bowman says.
Refuting Bowman is no difficult task, to be sure. Ridiculously, Bowman argues that the gender binary is a white supremacist invention, a claim is so absurd that one can easily imagine Marx and Engels rolling their eyes at the corruption of knowledge in colleges and university—not the corruption of Marxism, mind you, but of basic historical and anthropological knowledge. And while there is a relation between class and family in capitalist society (which I will turn to in a moment), Bowman mystifies the relation by discussing men in general, something Marx insisted one never do in working from a materialist conception of history. Such questions concerning class, consumption, family, production, etc., must always specify the spatial-temporal and developmental context: Which class in what type of class-based system at what point in time? What type of consumption relative to what mode of production at what developmental stage? What type of family relative to what social class and what mode of production? And so on. This is what trips so many people up in reading, e.g., The Communist Manifesto: they miss the adjective (bourgeois) before the noun (family).
Errors abound in this clip. Bowman claims that women’s work was “feminized.” Here, she is denying that women are natural beings, typical of queer theory where, as Judith Butler tells her audience, “woman” is a “performance” (how the performance was feminized is typically mystified). But the reality is that women are feminized because of natural history (albeit along a continuum, since plainly there are masculinized women, as evidenced by the Bowman’s visage). The gender binary is not, as Bowman claims, “one aspect of the cultural devastation wrought by colonization.” Or species is sexual dimorphic. The claim that follows that, prior to the emergence and spread of the Enlightenment via the world capitalist economy, there were other genders is therefore obviously false, since there are only two genders. To be sure, one can find a culture here or there that managed gender nonconformity and other deviations by creating unique statuses, but this doesn’t change the fact that, e.g., the fa’afafine in Samoan culture is a man (fa’afafine means “in the way of a woman”) anymore than the schizophrenic-cum-shaman in in actual communication with the spirit world. Moreover, the fact that women controlled their reproduction capacity in ancient times is an ordinary fact of human life. In fact, as a matter of natural history, the female of our species hides estrus for this purpose. Other animals control reproduction, as well. The claim that the oppression of women and other gender status categories is a unique tool of white supremacy is more nonsense. The oppression of women has been occurring for millennia, for reasons Marx and Engels explain. Frankly, I could not have selected a clip that illustrates my argument better so succinctly than the video Borysenko believes contradicts my point (it’s only 1:46 long).
So, let’s turn to Marx and Engels’ argument. For starters, I should remind the reader that Barrett’s article I cited at the top has errors. She is particularly interested in The Origin of the Family, where Engels contends that the bourgeois family is founded on a material basis of inequality between husband and wife. He describes the wife’s role as producing legitimate heirs for property transmission in exchange for necessities, likening it to a form of prostitution. Engels thesis is rather more sophisticated than Barrett lets on. Engels book is based on Marx’s notes on the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, work that Barrett characterizes as “dubious.” Since Barrett doesn’t appear to know that Marx had a rather well-developed theory of the family, which I will cover in detail in this essay, it is unclear her source in making the claim. However, Barrett does have a point in noting that Engels account “underplays the palpable domination of men in the proletarian family as ‘residual,’ and fails to consider the domestic division of labor and the burdens imposed on women undertaking a ‘double shift’ of wage labor along with childcare and housework at home.” We cannot expect Engels to fully escape his place in time.
While Engels’ analysis has faced criticism, notably in that it minimizes male dominance in proletarian families and overlooks the domestic division of labor and the added burdens on women juggling childcare, housework, and wage labor, it provides a distinctively materialist perspective on the family, explaining variations in family forms across different social classes. Engels, in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, famously writes, “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.” (Obviously, this formulation precludes any significant jettisoning or even skirting of the reality of sex differences.)
Moreover, in “actually existing” socialism rooted the Marxist-Leninist tradition, Marx and Engels’ arguments form the basis of official family policy. For example, in the Soviet Union, there was an emphasis on involving women into productive labor (which was the case of proletarian women already under capitalism), while combining the wage with a social provision of childcare facilities. Official ideology exalted the “working mother.” To be sure, as Barrett points out, while Lenin argued for the socialization of housework, such socialization was never understood as involving men undertaking domestic chores. However, whatever other problems state sociological had, the demand that women would participate in the work force without having to abandon their children to uncertainty or impoverishment was met. (This is not an endorsement of the state socialist model. For my assessment of this mode of production, see my 2003 review essay The Soviet Union: “State Capitalist” or “Siege Socialist”?)
Barrett is disappointed that Marx and Engels don’t present a more radical critique and solution to the problem of the family (here her post-structuralist leanings poke through). Such a “socialist family,” she tells the reader, falls far short of critiques of the family in more general radical thought. “Marxist thought on the family has therefore tended to be less uncompromisingly critical than utopian socialist, libertarian, anarchist and feminist positions.” The anarchist piece covers queer theory. This is not to say that Barrett would agree with Bowman’s assessment of history; rather it is to say that Barrett wouldn’t endorse Bowman via the Marxist route. (Without reading into Barrett’s work I cannot say for sure, but from what I have read, her work is leagues more substantial than Bowman’s, who appears as a graduate student waved through and put on the tenure track for reasons of diversity and inclusion. Sorry to sound cruel, but this is not high-quality stuff.)
To understand Marx, one must start from his starting point, which is the question of property, as well as grasp his critique of Georg Hegel’s theorization of the family, and his use of Ludwig Feuerbach’s transformative method. Perhaps there is no more compelling voice on the matter than Shlomo Avineri and his Social & Political Thought of Karl Marx, published in 1968. Before I turn to an analysis incorporating his work, I want to briefly acknowledge Avineri’s passing on Friday, December 1 at the age of ninety. This news shook me. Amid the discussion of Marx’s views on gender and the family, and in preparing to pen this blog essay, I pulled from my shelf the next morning Avineri’s book. I wanted to see what he thought about my argument. His work affirms it. I then turned to the Internet to see what Avineri was up to these days and discovered that he had died. I met Avineri at the United Nations University in Amman, Jordan back in 2006, when we were assigned the task of lecturing on religion and politics (see Journey to Jordan). We stayed in the same hotel and had lunch and dinner together for several nights. He was a fascinating man and I regret not staying in touch.
Some of what follows are close paraphrases from his book. You can find his words on pages 28-29, 89-91, and 163 of the 1996 edition to compare. Avineri begins by noting Marx’s use of Feuerbach’s transformative method to show that property inverts the relations between the human subject and the world of objects. To summarize Feuerbach’s method, which he presents in his book The Essence of Christianity, published in 1842, a critique of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, in the same way that Absolute Spirit attains self-awareness through manifesting itself in the finite world, the finite spirit attains self-knowledge by projecting itself into the concept of God, recognizing the outward projection as merely serving as the framework through which the human spirit unveils its intrinsic essence. Put another way, being is not the result of thought, but rather thought comes from being. According to Marx, Hegel transforms property in his method from being an object of the will into the master of the will. By asserting that an individual is defined by their class status, one essentially declares that humanity becomes a predicate of its possessions.
In the passages that draw Marx’s focus, Hegel examines the status of the landed gentry holding entailed estates. Comparable to England, in Prussia, primogeniture was applied to the landed property of the gentry. This practice ensured that the family estate transferred in its entirety from the father to the first-born son. The eldest son inherited both the title and the estate, with all other children excluded from the inheritance concerning landed property. This arrangement, by rendering the landed estates of the nobility and gentry essentially inalienable through sale, effectively curtailed the potential fragmentation of noble estates, preserving them in their entirety. Thus, the form of family was functional to the reproduction of the property structure, which means that the class imperative used the wife as a producer of heirs.
Hegel not only endorses this arrangement but also perceived it as a manifestation of, and assurance for, the elevated ethical conduct of the gentry. He contends that the entailed estate (a type of ownership where property on transfers to specific family members) places the property of the aristocracy not in the hands of arbitrary individuals but within the family unit. According to Hegel’s system, the family serves as the repository of substantive ethical life; thus, any social group linking its property to the family minimizes the capricious impacts of civil society on its members. Possessing property immune to state interference and relatively impervious to unforeseen market fluctuations, the aristocracy is exceptionally equipped for roles in civil service and political leadership (this is a view advanced by James Madison and other elites during the founding of the American Republic). Hegel asserts that individuals within this group could be anticipated to exhibit greater freedom from interpreting their functions as public servants through the lens of self-interest compared to any other segment of society.
Marx criticizes this perspective by highlighting the inconsistency in Hegel’s advocacy for a form of property immune to the influences of both civil society and the state, which contradicts Hegel’s earlier conceptualizations of property (obviously, a complete account of this is beyond the scope of this essay). By shielding the noble estate from reliance on state authority and societal demands, Hegel implies that the unadulterated concept of property, as exemplified in the entailed estate, exists in isolation from its social surroundings. While Hegel initially defined property as an object subject to the free disposal of its owner, he now appears to suggest that property is entirely divorced from individual will. Moreover, the detachment of entailed property from the social fabric poses an even more profound dilemma. The Hegelian state was initially depicted as a universality that reconciles concrete interests; however, it now appears that the class deemed most suitable for governing the state possesses a form of property whose social connections have been severed entirely. The claimed ethical significance for the nobility becomes susceptible to criticism. Hegel asserts that the nobility’s dependence on family enhances its ethical character, but Marx highlights the contrary reality for the noble estate. In essence, entailed property undermines family solidarity, as only the eldest son holds any stake in it. Hegel envisions the family as the “ethical spirit in its natural and immediate phase,” yet he diminishes this solidarity, stripping it of genuine significance.
Marx reflects on this: “That class founded [according to Hegel] on the family [the aristocracy] lacks therefore the basis for family life—love as the real, active, and determining principle. It is family life without spirit, the illusion of family life. In its highest form of development, the principle of private property contradicts the principle of family.” This understanding never changes in Marx’s work (contradicting Weikart’s superficial understanding). “This is then the sovereign magnificence and superiority of private property, landed property, about which in modern times so many sentimentalities have been uttered and for whose sake so many multicolored crocodile tears have been shed.” Marx exposes the inconsistency in Hegel’s stance by comparing his definition of private property in the Philosophy of Right as alienable and freely disposable with his subsequent observations on entailed estates. According to Marx, these statements are incompatible. Entailed property, in Hegel’s view, shapes self-consciousness and the essence of personality. However, Marx contends that if property is deemed inalienable, it renders all other aspects of human existence, such as personality, self-consciousness, ethical life, and religion, alienable: “‘The non-transferability of property amounts to the transferability of free will and ethics.”
“Marx’s way to socialism is not a collectivism which subsumes the individual under an abstract whole; it is rather an attempt to break down the barriers between the individual and society and to try to find the key to the reunion of these two aspects of human existence,” Avineri writes. “Within this context Marx sees communism as the ultimate trend of human life, the identity of man with the circumstances of life.” Marx defines communism as “the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation [and] therefore as the return of man to himself as a social, i.e. really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development.” The desired outcome allows man to live according to his natural other-directedness, which is more sensually expressed in his sexual relations with his betrothed.
Marx thus identifies a blueprint for the future paradigm in the family, or more precisely, in the dynamics between the sexes. According to Marx, the distinctive nature of these relationships holds a systematic significance, allowing them to serve as a general model for the structure of human relations in a socialist society. Sexual relations, in Marx’s view, possess both necessity and spontaneity, epitomizing an exceptional focus on the other. The inherent interdependence in the sexual relationship, where one’s satisfaction relies on the satisfaction of another, signifies a reciprocal nature. Marx contends that if these relations become one-sided, they lose their character as a true relationship, reducing the other person to a mere object rather than an equal participant. In the chapter on communist society in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx extensively delves into sexual relationships, emphasizing their integral role in shaping the envisioned societal structure.
“The immediate, natural, and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman,” Marx writes. “In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation it is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being a human being. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him. It also shows how far man’s needs have become human needs, and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.”
Reread that passage and note this line in particular: “The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being.” Here Marx is saying, in the most explicit way possible, that there are men and women and that their relations are the most natural relations between humans. This is not a person who denies the gender binary. Nor is it a person who seeks the abolition of the family—if by family one means the separation of men and women in committed relationships marked by the sexual dynamic. This is what Marx meant when he said this.
Avineri writes, “These considerations may also help to explain Marx’s vicious, if not vulgar, attack on the bourgeois family in The Communist Manifesto. The text of the Manuscripts reveals the depths of Marx’s feelings about what he conceived to be the utmost travesty of sexual relations. According to him, the nineteenth-century bourgeois world made even the limited reciprocity of family life impossible and turned the woman into a mere object.” (I’d say this does in fact explain Marx’s polemic.) Avineri then quotes Marx directly: “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production…. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting the more, by the action of modem industry, all family ties among the proletarians are tom asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.” Marx wasn’t seeking to dissolve the family but to save it. Save it from what? Exploitation and estrangement under capitalism.
Avineri writes, “There are clear Hegelian overtones in this discussion, though Marx’s construction of them is highly original.” In Philosophy of Right, Hegel perceives the family as inherently ethical due to its foundation on reciprocity. However, he believed that the egoism prevalent in civil society erodes this reciprocity, leaving it preserved only within the confines of internal family relations. Marx, in contrast, argues that civil society, characterized by egoistic pursuits, renders even this ethical sense of family life impossible. As long as civil society persists, it will obstruct the reciprocal essence of family life. Marx rejects the notion of constructing a society modeled on the family, considering it a romantic fallacy. Instead, he sees the family and sexual relations as a potential paradigm only insofar as they indicate the feasibility of other-oriented relations. The challenge lies in avoiding romantic idealization of the family or sexuality while simultaneously devising a solution that transforms the fundamental structural principle of sexual relations into a universal guiding principle for social organization. According to Marx, achieving this transformation hinges on a correct understanding and overhaul of the production system within the societal framework.” This is everything.
The source most people cite to make the claim that Marxist want to abolish the family is The Communist Manifesto. The foregoing renders the meaning of the pamphlet clearly. Marx and Engels tell their audience that, according to their critics, communists propose the abolition of the family and note that this is a notion that even the most radical individuals find shocking. But to understand the proposal, an examination of the foundation of the present family, specifically the bourgeois family, which is rooted in capital and private gain, is in order. This familial structure the communists are critical of is fully developed only among the bourgeoisie, while among the proletarians, the practical absence of the family is evident. Both parents are forced into wage labor, the children either left to fend for themselves or forced into wage labor, as well. Indeed, bourgeois rhetoric on the sanctity of family and education (a response to the communist plan for public education) becomes repulsive in the context of capitalism’s impact, tearing apart family ties among the proletarians and reducing their children to mere commodities and labor instruments.
Marx and Engels theorize that the existence of the bourgeois family is intricately linked to the presence of capital. This feels somewhat like a tautology, but it is part of the materialist conception of history that family and sexual relations are tied to modes of production and to class positions with those modes. The family’s demise, both the bourgeois family and the proletarian family, is envisioned as a natural consequence when its complement, i.e., capital and the exploitation of labor, vanishes. Consequently, the bourgeois family and capital will both cease to exist together. If the proletarian family is abolished, it is only in the sense that the demoralizing conditions under which the working class attempts to make families will be replaced by conditions that allow the man and woman to have a truly sensual relationship on egalitarian grounds as described above.
Marx and Engels also take on the related accusation that communists aim to introduce the “community of women.” The community of women is a situation where all women are available to any man seeking to have sex with them. Weikart and other conservatives want to make this about the problem of “free love.” But it is really about prostitution. The bourgeois perspective is biased on the matter since they view women as mere instruments of production. As explained in the earlier discussion about the entailed estate, the elite see the family as a mechanism for transmitting wealth down the father’s line (patrilineage), the eldest son receiving the inheritance. As instruments to this end, the wives of the bourgeoisie are already in a sense prostitutes. Thus the bourgeois misconception arises from the belief that common exploitation of production tools implies a shared fate for women.
The goal of communism, as Marxists see it, is to eliminate the subjugation of women as instruments of production. The bourgeois indignation towards the supposed introduction of community of women by communists is therefore deemed ridiculous, as this arrangement has existed for centuries. Have you yet picked up on the fact that the The Communist Manifesto is a polemic and Marx and Engels are debunking bourgeois propaganda, a polemic that is at times dripping with ferocious sarcasm? Go back and read the document with new eyes. The critique is devastating, punctuated by Marx and Engels observation that bourgeois marriage is in fact a system of shared wives, with the bourgeoisie not limiting themselves to the wives and daughters of proletarians. This is no call for the abolition of family, but the abolition of conditions that make the other-directedness of a loving man-woman dyad difficult if not impossible.
The proposed abolition of the family by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto is thus intricately tied to the elimination of the bourgeois family, which is fundamentally based on capital. The critique of communists as promoting a community of women is unfounded, as the true objective is to eradicate the exploitation of women as mere instruments of production, a notion that has persisted throughout history and is evident in bourgeois practices. The goal is the abolition of the present system of production, leading to the eradication of both public and private forms of prostitution. Marx and Engels are feminists. Not queers in the sense conveyed by gender ideology. They are socialist feminists.
As the reader can see, the argument that capitalism created the gender binary and the standard model of the family, the man-woman dyad, i.e., the idea of a heterosexual pair forming the core of a family unit, is rather easily blown up. The gender binary is primordial and all the rest of is has cultural and historical foundations that extend far beyond the capitalist economic systems and its emergence. The man-woman dyad is traceable back to ancient civilizations, where marriage and family structures were integral to societal organization. To be sure, various factors, including cultural norms, economic forces, and religious beliefs, have influenced the development of family models throughout history, but the man-woman dyad is the most common form—and remains the most common form.
Therefore, while it’s true that societal changes, including economic shifts such as the Industrial Revolution, influence family structures, the man-woman dyad is not a creation by capitalism or of white supremacy. To make such a claim is to profess profound ignorance of anthropology and history. One must accept that capitalism, or any other economic mode of production, even if the Marxist standpoint is rejected and economics is seen as lesser part of a broader historical and cultural context, has played a role in shaping societal structures, including family dynamics. It’s essential in any scientific analysis of history and society to consider the multifaceted influences on family structures, acknowledging the contributions of cultural and religious traditions, economic systems, and social norms throughout history. The man-woman dyad has been a prevalent family model across various societies and time periods, shaped by a complex interplay of historical, cultural, and social factors. Moreover, the gender binary is an anthropological truth, timeless and unchanging. Queer theory rejects all this, and is therefore crackpot.
As for Borysenko, like many animals of the Internet, she seeks and consumes information from a rather closed circuit containing ideas that conform to ossified and reductive thought, what I call the practice of cerebral hygiene, a practice reinforced by the fans she has accumulated. Why grow when one’s ideas find such a receptive audience who don’t know enough to challenge you, especially when you can always block those who do? Her PhD obtained from an online for-profit degree mill, in the field of organizational psychology no less, it’s doubtful Borysenko attended many seminars of substance or bothered to read deeply into the literature she feigns to critique, all of which is evident in the output. Before the Internet, individuals of this sort were marginal, as their self-assessment as intellectuals wouldn’t have sufficed to get them where they would have a critical audience, namely the academy (which, today, is itself a closed circuit). The rationalization for all this is, of course, Freud’s defense mechanism of reaction formation, which finds right wing figures boasting about not having taught at a college or university, which they tells us is a hellscape of Marxist corruption, despite the fact that the academy, with a few notable exceptions, is almost entirely devoid of Marxists. The boasting and resentment now has purchase, thanks to the Internet. Since this avenue allows a few to distort the knowledge base, and because the academy has become corrupted by woke postmodernism, I, too, have become an animal of the Internet.
freedom and reason 