KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk

KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION - Selçuk Sentürk


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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_df2f19a3-0869-5da1-9c41-a7cb0e85385a">The Family in Marxism/Communist Theory

      While Marxism and communism share similarities, the former is a political theory that analyses class-driven inequalities in existing society, whereas the latter is a political system that theorises an egalitarian future society. Marxism views society and its institutions as structured by capitalism, which is established upon an uneven class conflict between a small and elite group called the bourgeoisie and a large number of working class people called the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, having the economic power, control the means of production and labour, keeping the proletariat oppressed due to the unequal distribution of economic power and labour. In Marxist/communist theory, the production of food and material objects are necessary if humans are to survive. Therefore, productive activity is key to the ways in which the ordering of a society and its institutions are created. The function of the family is to sustain the operation and reproduction of capitalism over time.45 The Marxist school of thought critiqued the modern family as a state apparatus controlling individuals in accordance with capitalist imperatives.

      Communist theories of the family mainly originate from the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Rather than offering a systematic critique of ←37 | 38→the family, especially in relation to gender inequalities within society, communist theory focuses more on the relation between capitalism and the family in sustaining a class-based society through production and reproduction.46 Marx and Engels write about the transformation of the economic structure, which they believe would bring a change in the elements of superstructure such as family and religion in the communist society. Therefore, it is taken for granted that economic transformation will bring a change in the function of the family. Richard Weikart summaries Engels and Marx’s critique of the family in three main points. They offer ‘a depiction of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the contemporary bourgeois family, the historicisation of the family, i.e. historical account of the origins and development of the family in the past; and a vision of the future “family in communist society” ’.47 The bourgeois family refers to an economic unit that controls modes of production and reproduction on behalf of capitalism. It provides a ready and free labour force through unpaid housework, childbearing, and childrearing. Capitalism exploits the labour in the family as a way to benefit from the working class (mostly men) at a maximum level in the production.

      In The Principles of Communism (1847), Engels presents the influence of the communist society on the family. At the very beginning of his analysis, he defines communism as ‘the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat’.48 Engels argues that in communist society, the relations between the sexes will be transformed into a purely private affair, so society would have no intervention into these relations at all. In order to achieve this, he proposes the abolishment of private property and suggests the communal education of children:

      With the transfer of all means of ownership into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of the society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.49

      For Engels, private property and children are the ‘two bases of the traditional marriage’ that ensure the dependence of women on men, and children on their ←38 | 39→parents. Moreover, as private property is transmitted from one generation to another in accordance with male lineage, it reproduces the sexual division of labour in each succeeding generation. Alexandra Kollontai, a twentieth-century communist writer, identifies the establishment of communal kitchens, raising children communally, weakening the parent-child bond, and the abolishment of inheritance and private property as the characteristics of the future family in communist society.50 In particular, her reference to kitchens and children signals women’s traditional role and ongoing oppression in families. Also, the abolishment of inheritance, which is wealth passed through male generations, would mitigate the continuing transfer of male hegemony.

      In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawn from Friedrich Engel’s and Karl Marx’s notes, the former successively analyses the evaluation of different family forms in primitive societies as identified by the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan: ‘The Consanguine, the punaluan, the pairing, the patriarchal and the monogamous families’. For Engels, the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century elevated with it the monogamous family, which controls sexuality. In his analysis, Engels concludes that the family and labour are two different modes of production, which have a determining effect on the creation of a class society:

      According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and 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.51

      As the communist/Marxist ideology envisages ‘a classless society’, it aims to regulate both modes of production in a way that would eradicate any class stratification in society. Among its proposed stages of economic development, communism will be the last stage where the whole society will be transformed into one family rather than being divided into different classes of family (that is, working, middle, and upper). Instead of analysing the family with regards to individuals (either women, men, or children), communism focuses on the ←39 | 40→relation between reproduction and capitalism, which transforms family into an economic unit together with ‘sex role differentiation’. As Irene Bruegel argues:

      Capitalism exploits the differentiation of the sexes. It does this by differentiating between ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’, using women both as a cheap labour for employment in the more marginal and insecure jobs, and as a reserve army of labour. […] Thus it is in the interests of capitalism as a system to sustain sex role differentiation and the family as a reservoir of potential (latent) labour power.52

      Through this role differentiation, capitalism creates a ready human labour force, and women’s participation in the market offers an opportunity for cheaper labour due to their socially specified inferior role at home. Therefore, as Heather A. Brown highlights in Marx on Gender and the Family (2012), Marx and Engels indirectly argue that ‘since the origins of class-society exists in the family, a classless society cannot be created and maintained so long as familial and gender oppression exits’.53 Lindsey German, a Marxist feminist, explains the relation between reproduction and capitalism: ‘Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact’.54 The Marxist/communist ideology envisages the transformation of the family via the economic transformations in historical development, say, from capitalism to socialism. In this sense, it critiques the family with regards to the material conditions such as private property that cause the inequalities between the sexes in society.

      In Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (1976), Eli Zaretsky argues that the family is ‘already an integral part of the economy under capitalism’, and the bourgeois view that presents the family as ‘the basic unit of the society’ regardless of the individuals or classes ‘reinforce[s]; the deeply rooted traditions of male supremacy’.55 In Marxist and functionalist views of the family alike, men have been the reference and norm against which everything else is measured and discussed. From a functionalist perspective, women’s roles as mothers and wives contributed greatly to the sustenance of a stable society. Marxist/communist ←40 | 41→views critiqued this society for creating an unequal distribution of power and labour between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, while ignoring a greater unequal distribution of labour and power relations existent between men and women in the family. Women have been at the very centre of these theories, but their labour in the family has been excluded or made invisible. Feminist movements, contrary


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