PARTISAN REVIEW
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article of faith of the consumer society could well be the common prop–
erty of groups of families - thus reducing unnecessary duplication of
labor; restraining competition, acquisitiveness; lessening waste. Demo–
cratizing family tasks is one of ·the steps necessary to change the oppres–
sive definitions of the role of wife and husband, mother and father. It
will also help break down the walls constructed in all modern industrial
societies that separate one tiny family from another, thereby putting
such devastating psychological strains on the members of each family.
The modern "nuclear" family is a psychological and moral disaster.
It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing-field of inconsistent moral
laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory, and a
school of selfishness. Yet despite the frightful price its members pay in
anxiety and a backlog of murderous feelings, the modern family does
allow some positive experiences. Particularly in capitalist society today, as
Juliet Mitchell has pointed out, the family is often the only place where
something approximating unalienated personal relations (of warmth,
trust, dialogue, uncompetitiveness, loyalty, spontaneity, sexual pleasure,
fun) are still permitted. It is no accident that one of the slogans of capi–
talist society, the form of society which promotes <the greatest alienation
in
work and all communal bonds, is the sanctity of the family.
(By
the
family is meant, though never said, the patriarchal "nuclear" family only.)
Family life is the anachronistic reserve of exactly those "human-scale"
values which industrial urban society destroys - but which it must some–
how manage to conserve.
To survive, that is, to extract ,the maximum productivity and ap–
petite for consumption from its citizenry, capitalism (and its cousin,
Russian-style communism) must continue to grant a limited existence
to the values of nonalienation. Thus it awards these values a privileged
or proteoted status in an institution, the family, that is economically and
politically innocuous. This is the ideological secret behind the very form
of the modern nuclear family: a family unit too small in numbers, too
stripped down, too confined in its living space (archetypally, the three- or
four-room city apartment) to be viaWe as an economic unit or politi–
cally connected with sources of power. Early in the modern era, the
home lost its ancient role as a site of altars and ritual; religious functions
came to be entirely monopolized by "churches," whose activities the
family members leave the house to attend as
individuals.
Since the late
eighteenth century, the family has been forced to cede its right to educate
(or not educate) its children to the centralized nation-state, which oper–
ates "public sohools" that the chiLdren of each family are legally obliged to
attend as
individuals.
The nuclear family, also known as the basic family,
is the useless family - an ideal invention of urbm industrial society. Its
