Marxist View on The Family Flashcards
What do Marxists argue about the nuclear family
That the nuclear family functions to serve the capitalist system, and that it is the bourgeois class that benefits from that economic system.
What view do Marxists reject
The consensus view - functionalism and new right
What does Engels (1972) argue
That the nuclear family was deliberately created by capitalism to ensure that private property and wealth in wealthy families could be efficiently handed down the male line to keep wealth and property in the family
What does Engels also claim
That the nuclear family oppressed women
What does Zaretsky (1976) claim
That the nuclear family socialised its children into bourgeois values and norms such as obedience, respect for authority and hierarchy so ensuring that the bourgeoisie’s dominance of culture was rarely challenged
What does Copper (1968) see
He sees the nuclear family as an ‘ideological conditioning device’ which functions to ensure that children are socialised or brainwashed into being obedient and passively accepting their low status in capitalist society as exploited workers
What does the Marxist theory of the family assume
That capitalism largely shapes life within families and it portrays working-class people as the docile puppets of capitalism
What does the Marxist theory of the family neglect
The concept of free will and the interpretivist view that working-class can choose to reject both the nuclear family and bourgeois culture
Is the Marxist view dated and why
Yes because it ignores the diversity of family that exists today
What has the Marxist view been accused of
Reducing the family to a set of economic and class relationships and neglecting other sources of inequality and oppression such as ethnicity and sexuality
How do interactionists criticise the Marxist view
For seeing socialisation as a one-way process in which children are pumped full of bourgeois ideas. Marxists rarely consider the possibility that that working-class parents and children may resist this process