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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 15 1970

Indoctrination

Indoctrination

The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumlated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome.

Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed-by captialism, the family as an institution was not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche", which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. "The family that prays together stays together": both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.