Marxist ideas on family functions (to benefit the capitalist system)
- Created by: Former Member
- Created on: 14-02-14 06:58
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- Marxist ideas on family functions (to benefit the capitalist system)
- Ideological functions
- Family socialises children into believing hierarchy and inequality are inevitable
- Parental power over children makes them think there must always be someone in charge (usually a man), and prepares them for a working life under capitalist employers
- Makes capitalism seem justified and unchangeable. Maintains it
- Elizaretsky- family offers an apparent haven from the harsh and exploitative world of capitalism. Largely illusory- the family cannot meet the member's needs, e.g. based on the domestic servitude of women
- Unit of consumption
- Important market for sale of consumers goods
- Advertisers urge families to consume all the latest products
- Workers end up buying what they made!
- Often at costs higher than what they earnt in wages!
- Media targets children, who use pester power to persuade parents to spend
- Peers mock those lacking must have clothes, gadgets, etc.
- Important market for sale of consumers goods
- Inheritance of property
- Family evolves with the mode of production. Once capitalism goes, there will be no further need of the patriarchal nuclear family- no need to transmit private property down the generations
- Earliest, classless society was a 'promiscuous horde' with no family or sexual restrictions (Friedrich Engels)
- Increased wealth -> private property -> patriarchal monogamous nuclear family (men need certainty it's their children to ensure legitimate heirs)
- Turns women into a 'mere instrument for the production of children'
- Criticisms
- Functionalists- ignores benefits of the family, e.g. intimacy, mutual support
- Feminists- underestimates gender inequality. Family primarily serves the interest of men, not capitalism
- Ignores the wide and increasing variety of family structures today
- Ideological functions
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