Assess The Marxist Contribution To Our Understanding Of The Family

Evaluation of the contribution that Marxist views give our understanding of the family

Being a communist conflict theory, Marxists generally believe that the nuclear family is not nessesary in today's society. They believe that the nuclear family teaches people to ‘know their place’ and that it is there to simply produce new generations of workers and consumers for the capitalist ruling class to exploit. Being structural and macro theories, both Marxism and Functionalism believe that the family contributes to the maintenance of societies structure, and believe that theory is still just as revelvant today in our families as it was years ago when sociologists such as Engels, Zaretsky and Althusser were alive.

The Marxist sociologist Friedrich

This theory is similar to the Fuctionalist ‘Warm Bath’ theory, being that after a long, hard day at work, the male worker (the bread-winner) will come home to his loving supporting wife and family, who will soothe him and make him feel better so that he can return to work the next day to be unknowingly exploited by the ruling class. The Warm Bath theory is all about the stabilisation of adult personalities. Zaretsky goes on to say that this soothing and loving stops the individual from seeing the harsh reality of life and therefore stops them from trying to change anything from the capitalist ways in society. Although, this theory depends on the idea that the homelife in the family is loving and okay. If there is domestic abuse within the relationship, then there is no soothing and loving space to go back to. 1 out of 4 people will experience domestic abuse within their lifetime nowadays, showing that the good home environment today isn't necessarily something people can look forward to when leaving work. This theory also has problems to it when it comes to what type of families it ignores, like single parent families, duel earner families, and same sex marriages if that's based on traditional roles for gender. To evaluate, Zaretsky’s views contribute to our understanding for the family today by

Althusser argued that for capatalism to survive, the working class must submit to the ruling class. He suggested that the nuclear family was developed as a way to pass down this ideology through the generations to keep the ruling class ruling, and that this family system helps to maintain the capatalist inequality and expoitation in society. Alternatively, functionalists argue against this, saying that the family enables children to internalise the norms and values needed to be effective in society from their parents, as they learnt from theirs. Instead, of the capitalist ideology being passed down, it's the norns and values that are passed on according to Functionalists, who believe this is a vital function for the whole of society to run