Capitalism and the American Family

The expansion of the Child Tax Credit, recently included in a major stimulus package passed through Congress, is justified by the conditions under which families have lived for the last several decades of American capitalism. The assault on the family by late capitalism is hardly new. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx remarked upon the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie who feigned to uphold the dignity of the family, observing that nothing had so undone the family as capitalism itself. In Marx’s words, “the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.” (Communist Manifesto, 27.)

In other words, Marx regarded the family as subject to the same mechanisms of exploitation which he himself identified and analyzed in the text of Capital. He also saw the undoing of the family as part-and-parcel of capital’s assault upon disposable time in general, reducing the worker’s experience of time to the exclusive preoccupation with wage-labor. A glance at the empirical evidence in the current economy, as well as a serious reflection upon the concrete lived experience of American families, shows this to be truer than ever…