Marxism Flashcards
(7 cards)
Engels
MONOGAMOUS NUCLEAR FAMILY:
-Developed as a means to pass private property onto heirs
- Family coupled with monogamy = ideal mechanism as it provides proof of paternity, ensures property is passed onto right people
- For example: Victorian men wanted women with wide hips
- A03: GIDDENS: just a little bit confidence as well relationship relationships are now based on love not financial reasons, he causes this a pure relationship. Argues: we now have plastic sexuality, we have sex for reproduction and pleasure. All evidence = Engels lacks contemporary relevant
Althusser
- for capitalism to survive: working class must submit to the middle class-family act as a social control mechanism passing down the ideology of the ruling class-ideological state apparatus
- Sees family as a microcosm of capitalist society. Children respect parents authority mirroring the workplace.
A03: some sociologists argue that parents have lost their ability to discipline their children for example Melanie Phillips (new right) argue children have too many rights and responsibilities making it harder for parents to discipline their children. For example the ban of smacking in public-lacks contemporary relevance.
radical psychiatry
Ways the family can cause emotional and physical harms:
1. Leach: emotional stress.
- Modern society, the family is isolated from Kin and wider community. It’s now an inward looking institution which can lead to emotional stress.
- Family expects and demands too much from each other this can generate emotional stress
2. Laing and cooper: destructive and exploitative family
- Family can smother the development of individuality leading to an unquestioning obedience to authority in later life and contributing to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia
Family as a prop for capitalism
ZARETSKY:
- ideological role of family is to help prop up capitalism
- Family is an escape route from oppression and exploitation at work
- Family is a private place, can enjoy personal life and be valued as individuals and have some control over their lives
- Benefits capitalism: realise family can help deal with daily oppression of work, won’t complain about a capitalist system. This is a cushion of capitalism.
A03: romanticised view of family without family conflicts and other aspects of the dark side of family.
Family as a unit of consumption
ZARETSKY:
- Capitalism exploits labour of workers, making profit by selling products for more than it pays them to produce their commodities
- Family is a major role in generating profits, important market for the sale of consumer goods
- Advert: keeping up with the Jones-urges them to buy latest product if children don’t have latest clothes or gadgets they are more led by their peers
A03: Marxist tend to assume the nuclear family is dominance in capitalist society, ignores wide and increasing variety family structures found in society today for example some same-sex families and single parent families
Foucault:
- developed concept of surveillance
- State keeps an eye on you
- Media and education are ways to force to conform socially acceptable norms of proper family life and parenting
- Believes: in a postmodern society surveillance has been internalised people accept norms and values as their own as they think it’s in their interest to do so when they exercise their own surveillance and police their own behaviour so other institutions don’t need to
Henderson: informal surveillance by mothers
- Mothers often judge other parents styles
- look at products they buy and how they discipline them
- feel guilty if they don’t live up to their own self imposed expectation
- establishes self imposed pattern of conformity to accept norms of family life and is another means in which family life operates as a agency of social control
- Marxists see it as repressive promoting submission
- functionalists see it as a desirable process ensuring social stability
