A View From The Marxist Left- Communism and the Family 

Workers Vanguard No. 1066	17 April 2015

TROTSKY

LENIN

Communism and the Family

(Quote of the Week)

In laying out the communist goal for the future, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described a world of material abundance in which socialized domestic services as well as collectivized care and responsibility for all children have liberated woman and child alike from the chains of the bourgeois family. To begin to realize this vision requires proletarian socialist revolutions all across the globe.

 

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

 

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)