Marxist View on The Family

Question 1

What do Marxists argue about the nuclear family

Answer 1

That the nuclear family functions to serve the capitalist system, and that it is the bourgeois class that benefits from that economic system.

Question 2

What view do Marxists reject

Answer 2

The consensus view - functionalism and new right

Question 3

What does Engels (1972) argue

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What does Engels also claim

Answer 4

That the nuclear family oppressed women

Question 5

What does Zaretsky (1976) claim

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What does Copper (1968) see

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What does the Marxist theory of the family assume

Answer 7

That capitalism largely shapes life within families and it portrays working-class people as the docile puppets of capitalism

Question 8

What does the Marxist theory of the family neglect

Answer 8

The concept of free will and the interpretivist view that working-class can choose to reject both the nuclear family and bourgeois culture

Question 9

Is the Marxist view dated and why

Answer 9

Yes because it ignores the diversity of family that exists today

Question 10

What has the Marxist view been accused of

Answer 10

Reducing the family to a set of economic and class relationships and neglecting other sources of inequality and oppression such as ethnicity and sexuality

Question 11

How do interactionists criticise the Marxist view

Answer 11

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