How did capitalism develop the family?

Capitalism intervenes to change the family as it sees fit

The family is not a constant feature of human society. Nor is it a natural expression of love and devotion.

It is an institution structured by the demands of capitalism—and by struggles of working class people for a better life.

Understanding how the modern nuclear family was formed, and why, helps us to challenge the limitations it places on our lives today.

For millennia, human beings lived in various kinship networks. Around 8-10,000 years ago, agricultural production started to produce a surplus above what people needed to exist.

Control of this surplus became the basis of class society. And the family began to develop alongside classes.

Feudal society was ­dominated by small-scale agriculture. The whole family was involved in tedious and backbreaking labour. The home was the place where raw materials were turned into food and clothes.

Women had big families, and they often lived in multigenerational households. They found ways to combine labour and childcare in their homes and communities.

Women who wove or stitched goods for market or for an intermediary to sell on could keep an eye on their babies and involve older children in their work.

The brutal enclosures of the common land smashed up these communities and drove the poor into the cities to seek work. Those who remained in the countryside could not compete with the new ways of ­producing goods in the new factories

Factory and mill ­workers used new technologies to produce commodities for the market. This form of production began in Lancashire and West Yorkshire and spread across the whole country.

These capitalist production methods were characterised by wage labour and the separation of home and workplace.

Workers began to operate large machines in factories or mills under the rigid discipline of the overseers, instead of spinning textiles by hand in their homes.

The introduction of ­increasingly sophisticated industrial machinery meant that workers were able to produce more goods, and faster. But they did not benefit from this rise in ­production—any profit was stolen by the bosses who owned the factories.

Every member of the ­household, however young, had no choice but to earn a wage. And those without work simply starved.

Women began to have fewer children. The average woman gave birth to six children in 1830, dropping to three ­children at the end of the century. The babies they did have were strapped to their mothers while they worked.

Sometimes older siblings “minded” the babies, or they were left with childminders, some drugged the children to keep them quiet. One social reformer reported seeing a baby suspended from a factory ceiling in an egg box.

Capitalism had a catastrophic impact on family life. Frederick Engels wrote that “the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker”.

He wrote about how ­mothers got up early, fed their babies and children, ran off to work and rushed home again to briefly see their children. Men were seen taking babies to factories to be breastfed by women as they worked.

Engels wrote powerfully about how child neglect was “too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society.”

His analysis located poverty and neglect in the conditions of capitalist society, rather than in the personal failure of family members.

Life expectancy plummeted because of poor diets, rampant disease, exhaustion and industrial accidents. In cities like Manchester and London there was overwhelming pollution, with no clean water or sewage system.

Rather than limiting ­themselves to commenting on human misery, Engels and his collaborator Karl Marx looked at a central component of capitalism—accumulation.

They argued the rich had to “constantly revolutionise the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”.

Capitalists are forced to invest in the latest technologies or methods of production because they need to steal as much profit as possible to ­compete with their rivals.

The reproduction of human beings was shaped by the way production was organised. The family was torn apart, which led to a crisis of rocketing infant mortality rates. Some 60 percent of children born in Manchester in 1840 did not live to see their fifth birthday.

Workers subsisted on low wages which funded the daily replacement costs of labour power. They could eat enough to go to work the next day.

But the wages did not meet generational reproduction costs which would enable workers to live long enough to raise families.

This crisis in social ­reproduction ­in the middle of the 19th century put the system at a crossroads.

The ruling class was divided. Some wanted to drive down wages and grab more profits. But others who feared the longer-term decline in the supply of workers for their factories and mines.

Many members of the ruling class believed that the nuclear family structure would ensure women would provide the necessary care. That family structure would help to stabilise the whole social structure, providing a model of male authority which would mirror the ­hierarchy of the British state.

Parliament enacted a series of laws which extended ­education and limited child labour and the employment of women in industries like mining.

Laws were introduced to bring “order” to the new industrial towns by criminalising homelessness, sex work and drunkenness.

The most important ­intervention in family life was the introduction the family wage—the proposition that men should be able to earn enough to allow women not to work.

The demand for a family wage justified and legitimised male trade unionists as they fought for higher pay.

But the family wage was never a reality. Many women continued to work both outside and inside the home, ­childminding and taking in laundry.

Some women tried to keep their right to work, valuing the financial independence it gave them, resisting attempts to limit their ability to work.

Many labourers in industrial centres like Manchester looked to early socialist ideas which advocated ­communal living and the collective ­provision of ­childcare and domestic labour.

Thousands joined attempts to create ­communities free from competition and inequality. But they could not sustain their ideals within a system based on exploitation and ­driving down living standards.

So for many, the family wage was the only way to provide care for children, the sick and the elderly. If women had previously had to put their baby in an egg box, is it any wonder they relished the opportunity to stay at home and hold them?

Many bosses deeply resented giving up more of their profits to improve workers’ lives and mocked the working women who dared to claim the right to care for their families.

How the family is benefitting the bosses

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The long-term impact of the family wage was to remove women from employment or to push them into part time jobs. These caring roles became seen as “suitable” for women.

The low wages paid to women were excused as “pin money”. Bans on the employment of married women were introduced in some industries.

The family unit acted as a mediator for both the construction and preservation of ­gendered patterns of labour.

Capitalism did not invent sexism, and it did not invent the family. But it was able to codify and use older familial structures and ideas about a ­woman’s place in society to support its new system.

The last part of the puzzle is how ideology was utilised to justify this restructuring of the family.

Men were encouraged to see themselves as heads of their own little fiefdoms with the sole responsibility for bringing in a wage. And women were told that the religious, moral, social and emotional wellbeing of ­everyone in the family was dependent on their worth as a caregiver.

Today, most women do work and care for family members in the isolation of the capitalist home.

And the state is still reinforcing the ideological element of the capitalist family—and ­legislating to control our personal lives and reproductive choices.

The Marxist analysis of the family has important consequences for how we fight today. Those who have babies face the same dilemma as those 19th century mill ­workers—pay for exorbitant childcare or stay at home and be dependent on a partner.

The family is profoundly shaped by capitalism. This means that challenging the system will open up new and unlimited possibilities for creating a multitude of different caring relationships.

Any radical challenge to ­capitalism will need to address the structures of the family by socialising care work and ­releasing women from this burden.

Capitalism is doomed to face crisis after crisis. The question is not “if” but when the next crisis of capitalism will hit—and how the working class is able to shape the next one.