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

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers' states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.

For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers' state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers' democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.

No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is the most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers states, however is the fact that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin's time never glorified the family as an instrument-real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Bussian economy and culture permitted, the passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin's bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abertion enhanced parental authority and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism!

SDS cannot wish, away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it "a unit for fighting the ruling class" Reactionary institution end.