Ryan McMaken in Mises Wire warns that socialist ideologues are targeting the very basis of human independence – the family – to pave the way for totalitarian rule.
In early June, at the Socialism 2025 Conference, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) held a panel on the family. The topic was introduced by the organization with the idea: “How should the left relate to the family? Socialist analysis makes it clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently oppressive, racist, and heterosexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”
The roundtable was attended by Olivia Katbi, co-chair of the Portland DSA; Eman Abdelhadi, assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago; and Katie Gibson, teaching associate at the University of Chicago.
The main ideas from the panelists were:
“When we talk about the disappearance of the family, we talk about the disappearance of the economic unit… it is the collective that will take care of all our material needs.”
“We are in favor of the disappearance of the family in general… the institution of the family operates as part of the prison system.”
Of course, these leftists partly want to eliminate the family because they agree with Marx that the family is a “bourgeois” institution that must be destroyed to make way for a socialist utopia. Another element against the family comes from the left’s strange preoccupation with the commodification of sex. It’s ironic that these “anti-capitalists” are so eager to turn sex into an economic good, but this seems to have been a key tenet of leftist thought in recent decades. Thus, they seek to normalize sexual intercourse as work. This is partly because the left sees marriage itself as a form of sex work. After all, the family is “inherently oppressive” and all sexual intercourse within marriage is essentially rape. Therefore, eliminating sexual intercourse within the marital bond and replacing it with “sexual intercourse as work” is considered “progress.”
Here are some quotes taken from the roundtable that reflect this stance:
“Sexual relationships as work and in marriage cannot exist without each other - they are two sides of the same coin.”
"The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and length of the contract."
These leftists also believe that child rearing should be managed and controlled by the state. That is, child rearing should be collectivized and the parent-child relationship replaced with the child-collective relationship.
This idea is certainly familiar to Sophie Lewis, another presenter at the conference, who has written a book that promotes the widespread use of surrogacy for childbearing. Specifically, Lewis argues that surrogacy is a useful tool for severing the biological bond between parents and children and for destroying traditional notions of gender and family.
(Lewis is partly right. Surrogacy actually undermines the family as an institution, and its spread will be a cornerstone for the post-humanist dystopian nightmare that people like Elon Musk are trying to build.)
At the core of all this is the opposition to the family as an independent institution and the leftist claim that the family should be placed completely under the control of the state.
Whatever the left may have to say about the economic mechanisms that supposedly underlie the family, the fact is that the left's hatred of the family stems primarily from the fact that the family is an obstacle to state power.
As I emphasized in a lecture last year, the family is an institution that predates all states and is natural to the human condition and to all human societies.
Leftists like those at the DSA conference seek to dismantle any remaining vestiges of independent non-state governance. Although they deny this, “democratic socialists” are at the forefront of the push for unlimited state power, to be administered by an “enlightened” ruling oligarchy. Democratic socialists therefore seek to refocus all human loyalties on the state, creating a direct state-citizen relationship for all and establishing the state as the institution that fulfills all human needs. Unlike any individual family, which is relatively weak in the exercise of its power and is always temporary, the power of the state, in the vision of the left, must be overwhelming and permanent.
The idea of the family as a barrier was central to proponents of state-building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marxists, being extreme advocates of state power, also found the “problem” in the family. For example, Marxists in nineteenth-century Europe saw extended family enterprises as constituting a special locus of power outside the structure of the state, and many of these families consciously sought to remain economically independent. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s view of the “bourgeois family” provides some insight into the central role of the family in nineteenth-century society: “The ‘family’ was not simply the basic social unit of bourgeois society, but its basic unit of property and economic enterprise.”
But even this informal institutional competition with the state cannot be tolerated by proponents of the idea of greater state power. In the nineteenth century, the state's opposition to independent institutions was taken to another level with the welfare state. This first appeared in Germany, where the true bureaucratic welfare state was first introduced by the conservative nationalist Otto von Bismarck. (Bismarck was a conservative, but he implemented the welfare state - which was promoted by socialists - as a means of politically appropriating socialists.) However, Bismarck, like the socialists, further advanced the welfare state as a deliberate attempt to end the population's financial independence from the state.
Economist Antony Mueller concludes that the welfare state created “a system of mutual obligations between the state and its citizens.” This also became a powerful tool for bypassing the family unit that stood as an intermediary institution between the state and individuals. Of course, care for the poor had existed in the past. But it was almost always administered at the family level. The state, before Bismarck’s welfare state, had not yet fully penetrated the family unit to deal directly with individuals.
The same plan has been copied all over the world and has been remarkably successful in co-opting the family from the state. Of course, modern leftists want more of this. Much more.
This has been key to the accumulation and stratification of state power, and the marginalization of the family is particularly important to the left because resistance to the state tends to be centered around some kind of institutional, cultural, or local loyalty. Historically, it often took the form of local networks of families and their allies. Tocqueville noted that these groups provided a ready nexus around which opposition to government abuses could be organized. He writes, “As long as the family feeling was kept alive, the opponent of oppression was never alone; he looked around and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his relatives or people like him. If this support was desired, he found it in his ancestors and was inspired by his descendants.”
Without these, or similar institutions, Tocqueville concludes, political opposition to the state becomes ineffective. Specifically, without institutions through which resistance to state power can be practically constructed, even anti-regime ideology has no way of being put into practice.
He further elaborates: “What force can public opinion retain, when not even twenty persons manage to unite by a common bond; when not even one person, or even one family… has the power to represent that opinion; and when every citizen – being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependent – is left with only his personal powerlessness to oppose the organized force of government?”
The reduction of individuals to powerless, isolated units—who interact primarily with agents of the state—is the ultimate outcome of the left’s efforts, whatever its stated goals may be. Instead of independent family groups, bound by biology and ancient, natural modes of human love and fidelity, we should have, as the “norm,” state-regulated sex workers and state-ordered children, conceived through artificial insemination (in vitro) and raised in surrogate wombs. This, the left tells us, will free us from the “slavery” of marriage and family, and replace capitalism with the “freedom” to be completely alone, to be atoms and unconnected socially or economically outside the structures of the state.
Source: https://mises.org/mises-wire/leftists-still-want-abolish-family?utm_source=MI+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=6bae37b408-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_01_07_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-fb69bb184c-230529100
