Marx with Engel and Tocqueville Concerning the Family as a Social and Political Construct - Research Paper Example

? Marx, Engels and Tocqueville on the Family Introduction In this paper I will examine the theories of Marx, Engel and Tocqueville concerning the family as a social and political construct. Marx and Engels wrote from their paradigm of Marxism. In their view, history is composed of a long succession of oppressors and oppressed. They fit the family into this hierarchical framework. Toqueville’s depiction of families in America in 1831 draws on the emerging democracies in both France and America. These diverging perspectives lead to some very different analyses on the family and is role expectations. Manifesto of the Communist Party In the beginning of the manifesto, Marx details the history and evolution of the means of production from feudal to modern times. As Europe expanded through colonization and exploitation of its colonies, the feudal system collapsed, and “the Manufacturing System took its place” (Marx, 1888, p8). The feudal lords fell to the industrial middle class. Technology and trade continued to expand exponentially, and the industrial middle class was replaced by “industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois”(Marx, 1888, p8). The bourgeois, or new ruling class, controlled the means of production and had all political power. The modern working class--the proletariat--”must sell themselves piecemeal, as a commodity, like every other article of commerce” (Marx, 1888, p14). Their labor was unskilled and grueling. They worked under the eyes of the bourgeois manufacturer for minimum wage in factories. With automation came the blurring of the distinction in who was needed to work. Women and children could do repetitive tasks as well: “All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex” (Marx, 1888, p15). The Manifesto contends that all history is a form of conflict between oppressor and oppressed. What changes are the names and ideologies of the oppressors, but the fundamental dynamic remains the same. At the end of the 19th century, globalization was occurring, with capitalism as its driving force. Marx and Engels were well aware of this propensity: “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, brutal exploitation” (1888,p 10). With this in mind, Marx turns his attention to the bourgeois idealization of the family. By making into law its values and expectations, the bourgeoisie legitimizes the system of production (1888,p 24). The family in its ideal form exists only for the wealthy. It claims to be an ideal form. Yet, the bourgeois man is the only real beneficiary. As the property owner, and as the owner of the means of production, the upper class man owns both his wife and his children. The right of ownership guarantees him freedom to determine his own destiny. As property, the wife and children, although materially provided-for, have no real freedom. The proletarian is unable to live even like this, because he, his wife and his children must work in order to survive: “The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child becomes all the more disgusting [because]…by the actions of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder and their children transformed into…articles of commerce and instruments of labor” (Marx, 1888, p 25). Marx advocates replacing home education with social education, in order to make an even start for rich and poor children. This “even start” as I phrase it, is a bit utopian, but it is the goal of Marxism to overthrow the unfair, elitist results of the capitalist system. The notion of complete ownership of the means of production allows the elite man to possess indiscriminately. (1888, p 25). As all women [ as well as lower class men] are his property, then all can be used. The proletarian men are only instruments to be used in the amassing of capital. All women, rich, poor, married, unmarried and prostitutes, are the property of the rich industrialist to use as he deems fit. In addressing the “community of women”, Marx posits an “openly legalized” community, as opposed to the status they now hold as objects, only partially legitimized by marriage: “it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution, both public and private” (1888, p 26). Engels: The Family: Its Past, Present and Future Engels, who wrote the Communist Manifesto with Marx in 1848, returns to document the development of the family throughout history in this essay. It was written nearer to the 20th century. Engels’ earlier dire predictions on the corrosive nature of world capitalism were becoming even more evident at this point. Engels’ analysis of the family begins in prehistory and works its way up to a proposed social revolution. The certainty of lineage from the mother guaranteed women a position of high esteem in early times. With the increased concentration of wealth brought on by the development of agrarian communities, an increase of power for the men developed. Men could not completely remove women from power until they could reconfigure the lines of descent. They accomplished this by deciding that “the descendants of the male members should remain in the gens, but…those of the females were to be excluded from the gens and transferred to that of their father…male lineage and right of inheritance from the father [was in this way] instituted” (1884, p 736). The Romans, according to Engels, produced “a new social organism” which consisted of the patriarch, his wife, children and slaves. The patriarch had, in this arrangement “the power of life and death over them all (1884, p737). This familia was the historic basis for all families thereafter, and contained within it the power dynamic of patriarchal lineage, patriarch as property owner and all others in the familia as property. The Greeks formed monogamy as a means of controlling wealth and lineage. The main aim of monogamy was “the rule of the man in the family, the procreation of children who could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his wealth” (Engels, 1884, p 739). Monogamy produced, the author says, the “first class oppression”: that of male over female. Historically, it created the dynamic that continues to the present, where one group realizes its happiness by the repression of another (1884, p 739). Bourgeois marriage in Engels’ time consisted of the Catholic and the Protestant varieties. The Catholic parents choose a suitable wife for their son. Protestant parents allow a son to pick a wife, but she must be from his own class. Because the marriage is kept within class boundaries, Engels defines it as a “marriage of convenience” (1884, p 742). Engels defines the individual family as a microcosm of the class structure in society as a whole. Within the family, women are enslaved, prevented from gaining any kind of autonomy because the man is the sole wage-earner. This gives the right of ownership to him, and the wife and children are his property: “he is the bourgeois: the wife represents the proletariat” (1884, p 744). The wife as slave is an opposite image to Tocqueville’s enshrined keeper of the domestic mores, religion and peace. Although Tocqueville’s wife construct may enjoy some prestige from this role, she ultimately remains the property of her husband. Democracy in America Tocqueville’s assessment begins with his praise of the virtues of American women: “religion…reigns supreme over the soul of woman, and it is woman who shapes the mores. Of all the countries in the world, America is the one in which people subscribe to the loftiest and most just ideal of conjugal happiness” (1831, p336). The wife provides an alternate world of “order and peace” to which the husband escapes from the outer world of society and political strife. Europeans, Tocqeuville maintains, carry the problems and passions of the home into society. America is the opposite. The order and peace of the American home provide the stable base on which the man forms political opinions. (1831, p336). The woman is the keeper of all that is virtuous. Tocqueville’s equation of power in a democracy is that the fathers don’t own much, and depend on and work together with their sons, which causes familiarity. This familiarity lessens the old ideas of aristocracy, where the father represents the past, wealth and power. Instead, this camaraderie between fathers and sons in a democracy influences the ideas of the society as a whole, and causes “a kind of equality…around the domestic hearth” (1831, p 688). In aristocracies, property rights are rigid and traditional. An eldest son inherits all. But the younger sons can form alliances with him in order to improve their lot, and to make the eldest son look good. This in turn makes the whole family look good to other aristocratic families. It is a political system in miniature, in which “The various members…are therefore closely tied to one another. Their interests mesh…but rarely do their hearts coincide” (Tocqueville, 1831, p 689). Tocqueville distinguishes between the “social bonds” and the “natural bonds”. In aristocracies, the social bonds hold sway, and are carried out even in intimate family settings. Democracy as a form of government “relaxes social bonds but tightens natural ones” (1831, p 691). The natural bonds are those that can develop when everyone in a family is treated equally. The children in a democratic family, says Tocqueville, are raised as equals, producing a “gentle, childlike intimacy” between them that lasts a lifetime (1831, p 690). This is Tocqueville’s assessment and generalization of families in America in 1831. Tocqueville does not mention women and girls in his discussion of natural and social bonds. His emphasis is entirely on the influence of democratic ideals as they translate to the microcosm of the family. Perhaps unmarried women and girls are encouraged to have freedom. Yet, the marital laws of the time encouraged the relegation of married women to the domestic sphere. It is here that she is to exercise her power. This power consists in her embodiment of the religious and ethical standards of a democratic society. According to Tocqueville, America needs to serve the mode of production. The violation of matrimonial vows would “disrupt the internal order of the family which is so essential to success in business” (1831, p 732). Tocqueville writes from a perspective of democracy .He observes the workings of democratic ideals in American society. He documents the existence of these ideals as they were embodied in the American family. Marx and Engels write from their perspective of class struggle. They look at the evidence of this struggle, not only between rich and poor, but between men and women. The family as it developed through the ages contained this struggle, embodied in different forms. Their view of capitalism insists that it engendered inequality, between the bourgeois and the proletariat, and between man and women within these groups. By the turn of the new century, Marx and Engels see a need to dismantle this system. Conclusion It is perhaps not surprising to see that there is a wide divergence in the views on the family present in the writings of Marx and Engels as opposed to those of Tocqueville. Marx and Engels see the family as a microcosm of class oppression. Tocqueville sees democratic ideals in action. He minimizes the different spheres of men and women in service to these democratic ideals. Tocqueville idealizes the marginalized role of women in America at the beginning of the 19th century. He makes her the ruler of the home, and the keeper of religion, virtue and morals. The woman, in his view, provides a home as sanctuary for her husband. From this calm bedrock, as it were, the man is free to pursue the utmost ideals of liberty and democracy. Marx and Engels, in 1848 and in the latter part of the century, surveyed the scene created by the rise of the bourgeoisie as the new ruling class. Their analysis of the history of class oppression, and the enactment of that oppression on an individual level differs sharply from Tocqueville’s democratic family structure. Their view was that an idealized conception of family existed only for the wealthy. Within this conception, idealized by the bourgeoisie, lurked the poison of enslavement of women to their husbands, and the toxic dynamic of power that saw industrialist men as the property owners, and all others as the property. The proletariat class, according to Marx and Engels, was crushed by having to become “part of the machine”. Even the dubious privileges of bourgeois marriage were denied to them. Tocqueville recorded the rosy dawn of capitalism, while Marx and Engels chronicled its later poisonous effects on the family, and on society as a whole. References: Engels, F., Tucker, R. ed. (1978). The family: its past, present and future. The Marx/ Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton. Marx, K., Engels, F., Feuer, L., ed. (1959). Manifesto of the communist party. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. New York: Doubleday. Tocqueville, A., Goldhammer, A. transl. (2004). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. Read More