Marx and the Family, Reconsidered

• In Event: Marx's Forgotten Concepts

Abstract

A vibrant discussion has emerged in recent years about where to look for Marx’s political theory – to his early critique of liberalism, his contributions to the socialist debates of his time, his reflections on failed revolutions and civil wars, or to the text of Capital itself. Marx’s late and unfinished project, the so-called Ethnological Notebooks, have remained marginal to these discussions. The return of Marx, even within political theory, has revolved around labor, “the market” and questions of political economy. Will Roberts and Søren Mau, two of the most prominent among a new generation of Marxist scholars, are good examples. Both are brilliant readers of Marx, meticulous in their attention to text and context, deeply interested in questions of political theory and political power. Yet they are utterly disinterested in Marx’s theory of the state, or his lifelong interest in the family as a political institution. Among the new generation of Marxists, the family has become a mostly forgotten concept.

Marx’s Notebooks presents us with a different view, in which the family is critical to a theory of politics and the state. In this paper, I return to the Ethnological Notebooks to reconstruct an argument in Marx about the family as a political institution. Engels develops a variation on this argument in The Origins of the Family, The State, and Private Property, but the differences between Marx and Engels on the family are instructive. I will argue that Marx saw, much more than Engels, that the historical reorganization of kinship and the birth of the family was a political act. (Likewise, Engels understood, much more clearly than Marx, that this history involved women and that the family was a form of sexual domination.) A Marxist theory that centers on labor and market forces tends to obscure this other view of the family: the family as a political institution, as an elementary form of political life, and as an apparatus of the state. I will argue that Marx’s political theory of the family reverberates in the tradition of radical feminism, with its critique of patriarchy, but that it was largely abandoned by socialist-feminism, with profound implications for how we read Marx today.

Author

• Robyn Marasco, CUNY, Hunter College