Quality | 2010.01.17
Divorced from reality | Tristram Hunt
The left\'s hostility to family and marriage has had some profoundly unprogressive results
\' On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain ." This week David Cameron got into trouble backing up the Communist Manifesto with his confused plans for marriage tax breaks . But the left should not be too cock-a-hoop, for it also remains far too much in the grip of Marxian thinking on marriage.
From socialism\'s earliest days, there existed a profound hostility towards traditional family forms. The French socialist Charles Fourier regarded marriage as a desperate hypocrisy that subverted the natural urge for sexual variety and resulted, at his count, in 32 different types of adultery. In Fourier\'s utopian future, citizens would be allowed full sexual freedom, women would have control over reproduction and children would be given the opportunity to choose between real or adoptive fathers.
In Britain, the socialist Robert Owen – who married into his New Lanark money – was equally opposed to wedded bliss. "Marriage, religion and property are the sole causes of the calamity that has existed since the world began." To move from the immoral world of selfishness to the moral world of fellowship demanded an end to the traditional marriage contract. His communes emphasised group education and doggedly resisted any "family interest" developing in opposition to the community.
To this tradition Marx and Engels added some materialist rigour. For them, the modern family was simply a product of private property and the nucleus of capitalist inequality. An abusive system of sexual inequality underpinned the practice of marriage comparable to the exploitation of the workers. "Within the family he is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat."
Marx and Engels chronicled the slow, steady loss of female power since the earliest societies, when gender equality was the norm as land and partners were held in common. But with private ownership and the advent of inheritable wealth, men demanded female monogamy. To pass on property to their biological offspring, paternity had to be established beyond doubt.
There was nothing God-given or natural about sexism; it was the inevitable result of capitalist economics. So behind the contented veneer of Victorian family life lurked "a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as \'domestic bliss\'". Its predictable accompaniment was widespread prostitution and relentless unhappiness. Indeed, Engels could see little difference between a street whore and a bourgeois wife, who merely "does not let out her body on a piecework, as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery".
But come the revolution all would be different. With the abolition of private property (let alone tax breaks) and the communal raising of children, marriage would crumble. The individual family would cease to be the economic unit of society, private housekeeping would be transformed into a social industry, and there would be a happy rise in "unrestrained sexual intercourse". Relationships would be entered into for love and then dissolved without "the useless mire of divorce proceedings".
In the 20th century, this Marxian assault on the family proved extraordinarily powerful. On the one hand, it transformed the prospects of women in the face of religious and customary oppression from Russia to China and Cuba. Female literacy and education in socialist societies stood among the world\'s finest. On the other hand, in the west it led to a voguish, new left assault on the nuclear family as bourgeois, repressive and past its sell-by date.
But there was always a more socially conservative strand to the Labour party\'s thinking. While the Second International made fighting for gender equality a priority, the Labour world of chapels, trade unions and friendly societies liked the family form just so. And for much of the postwar era, British social democracy was slow to develop policies on marriage and the family any different to the Tories\'. It was in reaction to such institutionalised sexism that many on the metropolitan left embraced a Marxist hostility to marriage and the family as a political end in itself. As it did so, it aligned itself with an ethos of social hedonism with profoundly unprogressive consequences for the offspring of generations of unstable households.
So, just as it is absolutely right for Harriet Harman to criticise Tory tax breaks for subsidising philandering men on their second or third marriages, so Ed Balls is also surely right to argue that for too long "family policy was all about children". Now, he argues that it is "the strength of the adult relationships that is important for the progress of the children". And marriage, surely, is as good a guarantor of that as any.
And what of the original opponents of marriage? Well, Karl Marx remained happily wedded to Jenny von Westphalen for 40 years. And even Engels the great Bohemian granted his partner Lizzy Burns her final wish with a death-bed marriage. Clearly, there was more to the family form than private gain.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]d-reality-left-family-marriage
