Relationship of Gender and Family to Politics and Class in the Communist Manifesto - Article Example

Relationship of Gender and Family To Politics and In The Communist Manifesto In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx made a division between the economically powerful and the largely economically powerless wage earners who possessed limited chance for upward economic movement. From a functionalist perspective society would offer equal economic opportunity. Marx recognizes a deep-seated and biased imbalance of power between the two. Functionalism would consider the advancement of technology an advantage. Marx would see this advance as a catalyst of imbalance of power between owners of factories and workers. For a functionalist any type of social disruption is a problem if it threatens the smooth and efficient running of society. Conflict threatens consensus and is seen as problematic for the functionalists. For a Marx, social problems are defined as poverty and racism and the inequitable distribution of wealth and other scarce resources. The capitalist system refers to and affects more than just monetary concerns. It is intrinsically woven into the way families interact and keeps its members from forming quality interpersonal and societal relations. Capitalism, as opposed to Marxism, is designed to produce for individual profits, not for the whole society which includes friends, neighbors and families. It’s not just that workers aren’t getting the surplus value they create. Marx said, “An immediate consequence of man’s estrangement from the product of his labor, his life activity, his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. What is true of man’s relationship to his labor, to the product of his labor, and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, and to the labor and the object of the labor of other men. Each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man’s essence” (Burleigh, 2005). Marx believed that the family unit is alienating and breaking apart from within as a direct result of the capitalist economic and social system. Marx argues that private property developed from and is based on the privatized family unit of a monogamous couple and that the purpose of the family is to produce rightful heirs for the diffusion of property. Changes in the family are determined, Marx argues, by the development of the social forces of production including both labor-power and the means of production and their resulting contradiction with the relations of production. This class contradiction increases then out of economic necessity, families have had to adjust and develop new relations such as the divorce-extended family in order for members to endure. Rather than assuming that there is a given structure of the family that has the same significance for all of us, Marxist theorists researchers on the family illustrate how people actually live family lives. This approach does not relegate the importance of genetic relationships but neither does it promote them above all others. “It allows us to understand the complexities of family life and most importantly to begin to understand the extent to which we all make choices about how we relate to kin, spouses, partners and friends” (Giddens, 2001, p. 1). No one chooses their parents, grandparents or siblings nor chose their children therefore the term choices may seem unsuitable in the context of family life although increasingly, the choice can be made whether or not to have children. People do make choices regarding whether or not to sustain relationships over the life course, support family members’ needs over those of friends, whether to give up friends in preference for sexual partners or spouses or whether to reject a relative because they rebuff what is considered a normal lifestyles such as sexual inclination and companionship preferences. Marxism ideology ceases to give primacy to a structural conception of the family by investigating which family member feels close to whom else in the unit and by asking questions about who would provide help to which members during times of crisis. “By this method can we see sets of practices or relationships which are woven together to create much more complex and multi-dimensional cross-generational patterns than the traditional idea of the nuclear family typically allows” (Giddens, 2001, p. 1). The problem with viewing families as if they are simple structures as in the functionalist philosophy is that sociology and also social policy becomes more interested in prescribed characters. These human relationships are able to be charted and measured rather than the qualities of lived relationships themselves which are less easily interpreted. Family relationships have become interesting for sociologists since WWII in large part because traditional family relationships can no longer be taken as the norm. The conventional boundaries of families that used to be easily recognised and distinguished by sociologists are becoming vague. The Marxist ideology addresses this progression in family evolution. “The bricks and mortar of a household no longer contain the family (if they ever did). Marriage is no longer a prerequisite for family life and neither is heterosexuality or co-residence” (Giddens, 2001, p. 2). Immigration into Britain whether from South Asia or the Caribbean, or more recently from the European Union or from oppressive regimes, magnifies the reality that close family members may live in different nations and countries. Yet family connections, responsibilities and fondness are as likely to be apparent across continents as within a neighborhood or city. Sociologists from many backgrounds and differing ideologies have pointed out that the basis of family life has changed with the rise of modernity. Marriage is increasingly moving from an arranged economic contract between families giving way to the Marxist idea of marriage based on mutual affection and romantic and sexual love. “This in turn brought pressure for the right to divorce as individuals increasingly felt the legitimacy of gaining happiness through marriage to the right person” (Giddens, 2001, p. 2). Divorce is not only the end of a marriage but also the end of a family. In most instances, fathers leave their children because their ex-spouse decided to have minimal contact to avoid possible conflict. Society as a whole is now entering into another phase of contemporary family life as differing situations associated with serial marriage become apparent. “This new phase may be one in which family life is based primarily on shared aspirations, projects, affections and obligations over time rather than on the fluctuations of romantic/sexual love and co-residential compatibility” (Giddens, 2001, p. 3). Indicators of family unbalance such as divorce, child abuse, alcoholism, single-parent families and single-person households are rising alarmingly (Wrigley, 2005). In Britain today there are several different types of family. High rates of divorce have driven families into a sociological unrest, not because these families and relationships can be rejected as abnormal, but precisely because they have become so normal. Sociologists are asking difficult questions about how relationships operate functionally because we are confronted with so many that do not. Marx perceives divorce as an inevitable part of family and life itself as there is always a struggle or conflict over unequal distribution of power in any social grouping. One party attempts to dominate while others try to evade being dominated. Alliances are short lived and fairness and satisfaction are intangibles. Families evolve through conflict. The rise in divorce is due to conflict over power. Women now have the power to determine birth rates and can be economically self-sufficient. With more opportunities they don’t need to be dependent on a man. Marxist theorists focus on inequality, power, and social change when searching for a sociological explanation.  They see gender as a source of social inequality and that oppression of women is an injustice of a capitalist and class-based society. They have determined that in society, men are perceived to be more powerful than women and adults as more powerful than children.  Marxist theorists affirm that male authority involves two sources of intimidation, physical force and their control of household economic matters.  Conflict theorists see domestic violence as a by-product of control and dominance efforts.  Often, victims of abuse are accused of provoking abusive behavior.  Conflict theorists stress that blaming victims is just another indication of the power of men possess over women.  Family no longer requires physical presence. Houses are becoming ever emptier and there is no longer home in an era when work has become home and home has become work, but there has never been an era when the people share real time and real space with exclusively family. The picture of the pre-industrial family gathered around the hearth is pure folklore. Families are increasingly finding themselves located in cyberspace. “Home has also become detached from the household, acquiring, like family, a mental location separate from physical space, invented by a modern age in need of a reassuring image of the possibility of family togetherness” (Gillis, 2002). Modern technology such as cell phones, video cameras and the internet, allows families to be intimate at a distance. Extending functionalist concepts of family for future family realities amounts to accepting the privatized family which works to replicate and extend the inequalities of capitalism. Families today may be smaller, more fragmented and temporary but through technology, the families we associate ourselves with are larger, more cohesive and permanent now than at any time in the recent past. Society should perceive the family not as a functioning system, but a meaningful system. It is when society frees itself from the narrow categories of real time and real space that functionalists espouse, that people begin to appreciate the true dimensions of contemporary family life. Society is changing and as Marx believed, so is the conception of family. It is not a good or bad proposition, it just is. In the Communist Manifesto Marx argues that change is inevitable and that the family model will, by necessity, evolve as well. One position argues the nuclear family is a result of society, the other, an enabler of society. The technologically advancing modern capitalist society, people are becoming more and more alienated. An individualistic approach to living is separating family from neighbors and from each other. People aren’t interested in interacting with each other, hardly seeing others as important resources in their life. Many people close themselves inside their homes, seldom speaking out. People are allowing personal relationship to be compensated by images on television. They watch old movies nostalgic of a time when communities were closer but don’t seem to venture outside and recreate this in real life. Marx proposes that the alienation from our family is a direct result of the capitalist mode of production. He hypothesizes that neither people nor their social environment can be viewed in isolation, as fitting someone else’s agenda. Marx has no such easy solutions, because his philosophy believes society evolves its own solutions. References Burleigh, G. (13 October, 2005). “Alienation in American Life: A Marxist View.” Peoples Weekly World Newspaper. Retrieved 18 November, 2008 from . Giddens, A. (2001). “Chapter 7: Families.” Sociology. Ed. 4. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Gillis, J. (February, 2002). “Our Imagined Families: The Myths and Rituals We Live By.” Department of History: The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. [working paper] Rutgers University. Retrieved 18 November, 2008 from . Wrigley, E. (2005). “Elements Of A Critical Theory Of The Family: Chapter 6.” University of California. Retrieved 18 November, 2008 from < http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/CTF/chapter6.html>. Read More