How the family is benefitting the bosses

capitalism presents us with a constant stream of what the ideal family should look like—but has no way for us to achieve it (Picture: Catherine Scott/Wikicommons)

It’s a policy so hated it’s earned the new prime minister the nickname “Kid Starver”. The two-child benefit cap is a hammer blow to the rights of working class people to live free of poverty and choose their family size.

The policy’s entire ­existence highlights the contradictions of capitalism around the family, parenting and welfare—and how ­ordinary people pay the price. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed a powerful analysis of the family under capitalism. They argued the capitalist class relies on the privatised reproduction of labour—raising the next generation of workers—through the family.

This rests on the unpaid, unseen work of women going on behind closed doors. Economist Diane Coyle, said, “Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work—it’s just not part of ‘the economy’.” The size and strength of national economies are generally measured by a metric called Gross Domestic Product (GDP). When GDP was first introduced, there was a debate about whether to include unpaid domestic labour as part of it.

But, explains Coyle, “After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, it was decided that this would be too big a task of collecting the data.” And, in addition to not ­counting it, capitalists don’t directly pay for domestic labour.

It shifts the burden of raising and socialising the next generation onto the parents, with most of the cost borne privately.

So, to view it in crude ­economic terms, the cost of raising the next generation of workers is a tax on parents. However, while capitalism relies on unpaid labour in the family, it also wants to exploit women as part of the labour force.

One of the jobs of the state is to provide the conditions for capital accumulation, bosses maximising profits, to take place. As more women joined the workforce from the 1940s onwards, sections of the capitalist class accepted the need to develop a comprehensive ­welfare state.

The capitalist class accepts that some state support is needed to ensure the population is largely healthy, educated and socialised—however begrudging it is about paying taxes. This support is delivered socially, and largely universally, through hospitals, children’s centres, schools, ­libraries, and so on.

While some state support is in the longer-term interests of capitalists, they don’t want their taxes to be too high to pay for a higher welfare bill. How does the system try to resolve this contradiction? It creates the ideology of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.

Some families require extra state support because of low pay, soaring childcare costs and outrageous rent demands. But the support that’s available is highly moralised in a way other government interventions aren’t.

The two-child cap is a ­measure targeted directly at the poorest in society—in a way that other types of state welfare simply aren’t. There are other sorts, such as the child benefit scheme, or the government’s “free hours” allowance for childcare.

These initiatives are based on certain criteria around working hours or parent income. But they can be used for three, four, five, or more children. There is hypocrisy at every turn. It would appear ridiculous to criticise parents for being unable to afford to send their kids to a fee-paying private school.

But can’t afford childcare payments? You’re accused of sponging off the state.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank, last week summed up why some are determined to keep the two-child benefit cap. “The most powerful, and the one that seems to cut through, is about a different form of ­fairness,” he wrote in The Times newspaper.

“If middle income people have to make financial trade‑offs and sacrifices when it comes to deciding how many children to have, is it really fair to have an open-ended ­commitment to poorer families who decide to have more children?”.

The Tories have at least been overt about this since the outset. When it was introduced, millionaire and father of four George Osborne said the cut would “ensure that families in receipt of benefits faced the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely in work”.

Yet for all the Tories’ grand designs, the policy has had virtually no impact on family sizes or parental working patterns. It’s true that the birth rates in Britain have fallen to historically low levels. But this is reflective of larger decades-long trend of women having fewer children.

A three-year study by the London School of Economics, released in 2023, found the two-child limit had virtually no impact on birth rates, and no change on employment rates or working hours for parents. Yet the study noted, “The implications for children’s lives are multiple and far-reaching.”

Parents reported they were unable to afford “nappies, baby milk, heating, fresh food, shoes and clothes that fit, replacements for broken white goods like a washing machine or a cooker, after-school clubs, swimming lessons, school trips, celebrations on special occasions and outings with family or friends.”

In other words, the policy does little but generate personal misery for ordinary people. Poverty is not the result of fickle financial decisions or poor parenting by individuals. It is a symptom of an unequal society, where the vast ­majority of people are left to flounder on very little, while the rich sit atop piles of cash.

Blaming individuals for ­poverty fits hand-in-glove with how families in general are seen in wider capitalist society. A hyperfocus on parenting choices—how benefit money is spent, how babies are fed or how long teenagers spend on YouTube, obscures the reality of living in such an unequal world. How families operate is seen as abstract parenting ­philosophies or moral decisions.

Of course, individuals make different decisions, but people’s lifestyles are broadly reflective of their class position. For instance, if parents are struggling to get by on Universal Credit they’re advised to earn more money at work.

But in a Fawcett Society survey in 2023, some 85 percent of women said they struggled to find a job that can accommodate their childcare needs. The same figure, some 85 percent of women surveyed, quit full time work within five years of having children.

There’s another ­contradiction of capitalism that piles pressure onto ordinary people. We face a system that promotes the ideology of the family, but perpetually makes life harder for working class families and undermines them.  

Marx and Engels railed against the hypocrisy of the ruling class.The rich proselytise about the uncomplicated joy of family life, yet rule over a system that makes this more of a fantasy than a reality.

They wrote, “Bourgeois phrases about the family and child-rearing, about the deeply felt relationships of parent to child, become even more revolting when all ­proletarian family ties are severed as a consequence of large scale industry.”

In Britain, the welfare state developed under a period of unprecedented capitalist boom. When that came to an end, the capitalist class turned to “neoliberalism”—a cocktail of spending cuts, privatisation and letting inequality spiral.

And then came the global financial crash and 14 years of Tory austerity. Round after round of vicious Tory austerity has slashed ­virtually any service that made life easier for poor families.

And the government used arguments that claimed it wasn’t just fiscally necessary, but ideologically right that parents take on even more responsibility. “Mothers and fathers are their children’s first and most important educators,” the Tory Department for Education said in 2011.

“What happens in the home environment has more influence on future achievement than innate ability, material circumstances or the quality of pre-school and school provision.” It’s convenient rhetoric for a regime that slashed services to lay all the blame for child outcomes at the hands of the family and not at an unequal society.

And Starmer today won’t break with that—in fact, the government is determined to show its tough on welfare claimants. It is that unequal society that robs ordinary people of choice and dignity at every turn. Fighting the attacks on ­welfare should include radical arguments about what kind of society can provide for the vast majority of people in a way that capitalism does not.