How does Marxism influence Family Law if applied?
I’m making a research on how marxism as an ideology in totalitarian states (such as former USSR for instance) influences family law. I would be happy to know your ideas and thoughts about it.
There is no peaceful co-existence between Communism and bourgeois law, and its social forms like the family.
The family plants the seeds of anti-social feelings and actions, because it attaches interest to a particular circle of accidental relationships at the expense of communitarian living.
The abolishment of private private was not only material, but legal, social, cultural as well. That’s what a revolutionary change means: the complete removal of private barriers and locations.
The factory unit was the ideal form of social living, not the isolated, private family.
In fact, the early Reds were great advocates of abortion, abolishing marriage, dissolving families into communal units, moving women into full labor equality, having work place units provide child care.
I can address this question at an ideological level; I lack sufficient historical knowledge to address it historically, therefore my answer is probably only of peripheral interest to you. The first point is that Marx had no legal theory and the only credible Marxist legal theory developed was that of Pashukanis in General Theory and Marxism. To rehash an answer I gave elsewhere on here… His theory rested on two central tenants of orthodox Marxism: (1) law and the state are a superstructure reflecting the basic economic organization of society, and (2) in the socialist society of the future both law and the state will wither away.
His legal theory is essentially: (i) the basic institution of capitalism is exchange and we therefore expect bourgeois law to be permeated with the concept of exchange; (ii) law appears as a distinct social phenomenon when we have men standing towards one another with rights and duties; (iii) the legal subject is the trader in his juristic outfit as he has the power to settle his disputes by a process of barter; (iv) the economic exchange is thereby presupposed in the conception of individual rights.
His moral theory reflects his legal one. Morality is founded on exchange also. Morality has to do with the conflicts of interests between individuals who are conceived to have it within their power to determine what they shall do or not do toward one another. Such individuals are traders in light of ethics. Moral treatises lay down a kind of minimum standard of conduct designed to maintain the principle of reciprocity. Kant’s conception that every man should be treated as an end in himself implies a trading economy. Only in such an economy in can a man who is conceived to be an end in himself be bought, through self-interest, to serve the ends of others—a result if any collective activity is to be achieved.
From these premises it follows that law and morality will disappear when the last vestiges of the economic institution of exchange have been rooted out of society. The main practical implication of such a position would presumably spell the end of marriage and the traditional family as marriage is an aspect of the social contract which would be eradicated following a move to socialism.
References :
Lon L Fuller, [1949 Mich.L.Rev], Pashukanis and Vyshinsky: A Study in the Development of Marxian Legal Theory
There is no peaceful co-existence between Communism and bourgeois law, and its social forms like the family.
The family plants the seeds of anti-social feelings and actions, because it attaches interest to a particular circle of accidental relationships at the expense of communitarian living.
The abolishment of private private was not only material, but legal, social, cultural as well. That’s what a revolutionary change means: the complete removal of private barriers and locations.
The factory unit was the ideal form of social living, not the isolated, private family.
In fact, the early Reds were great advocates of abortion, abolishing marriage, dissolving families into communal units, moving women into full labor equality, having work place units provide child care.
References :