Describe and Evaluate Marxist Views of the Family.

Marxism views family as an institution to advance capitalism and maintain its needs. Engles argues that originally we lived in ‘promiscuous hordes’ and the family was only created as a capitalist concept to retain wealth and private property. If the family can retain wealth through inheritance, it is able to perpetuate the bourgeoisie class. Althuser argues that the family is just another element of the ideological state apparatus which is used to socialise the proletariat into capitalist values. For example, the family teaches us obedience and gender roles which are all reflected in the work place. This primary socialisation within the family aids the continuation of capitalism. Lastly, the family has become a unit of consumption, that families are often encouraged to ‘keep up with the jones’, to continue consuming so that they are not seen to be left behind. Particularly from a Marxist feminist perspective, adverts are often aimed at women to buy products for domestic duties in the family, further socialising them into their gender role but to also purchase capitalist commodities. Critics of Marxism would say that it has become outdated, Marx’s theories were written at a time where the nuclear family was the complete norm with very little family diversity. Whilst now it is still the most common, it only accounts for 50% of family types, with increasing single parent or same sex families. These types of families would suggest there would be less gender role socialisation, counteracting the dominant bourgeois ideology; a single mother is less likely to socialise children into thinking that women should play an expressive role at home when they are likely to be working themselves. Marxism has also been criticised for being deterministic, as if we are completely passive and cannot question capitalist ideology with a pre-determined future. Changes in the traditional nuclear family where the man is not always the bread winner would suggest that socialisation in the family is not as determined as Marxists would suggest.