Abolish the Family is the catchy title of a new book by Philadelphia-based writer Sophie Lewis that was reviewed positively by the New Statesman this weekend. “Sophie Lewis is our most eloquent, furious and funny critic of how the family is a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment,” reviewer Erin Maglaque writes.
Lewis is just one of many modern feminist writers who believe the nuclear family is “the most fundamental unit of privatisation and scarcity in our society” and therefore want to see it terminated. But as Lewis herself would be quick to point out, the Left’s desire to abolish the family is nothing new. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw the destruction of the family as absolutely essential to the success of communism.
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“The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family,” Lewis quotes Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai in her book.
So why were Marx and Engels so bent on ending families — and why are Lewis and Maglaque? The answer goes back to a faulty understanding of human history.
Marx and Engels both believed that man originally existed in a classless “primitive communism,” in which there was no private property and no families. There were no marriages. Every man had sex with every woman in what Engels called a “promiscuous horde.” It was only with the invention of marriage that private property began and people started oppressing each other by class.
Communism, under this worldview, would just be a return to our true human nature.
But, of course, this entire understanding of history is nonsense. The idea that humans once lived communally without marriages was actually quite common when Marx and Engels were writing in the 19th century, but it has since been disproven. Anthropology has shown us that all societies throughout time had both marriage and families. In fact, it has been credibly argued that monogamous pair bonding is what made us human in the course of evolution.
There are many reasons socialism doesn’t work. Its demonstrably false understanding of human history may be the most important reason of all.
