The family home is hardly havenBy Margaret Allen
John Howard and his government are determined to reinstate "family values". But while Howard may extol the virtues of a return to the comfortable and relaxed nuclear family, the reality is a much different story.
Rather than making the family home a more pleasant place to be, the government is making most people's lives immeasurably more miserable by forcing them, instead of the state, to provide care for children and the sick and elderly.
Since the Coalition came to power, it has dramatically cut funding to health, social services, welfare and child-care — all of which were already suffering under Labor.
Those most in the firing line are the elderly (despite Howard's partial back-down on nursing home fees), the young, the sick and those on welfare.
With funding cuts to the service providers, fees rise and most people have no choice but to turn to the family unit. Despite the gains of the women's rights movement over the last three decades, women will have to shoulder most of the extra unpaid domestic work.
When their independent income is reduced or eliminated, women are often forced to stay at home by their economic dependence and also their "duty" to tend to the needs of those family members in their direct care.
Part-time work is being held up as a great gain for working women because of the flexibility it provides. But it really benefits only that tiny minority of society who gain from not having to pay for the services provided by (still mostly) women in the home.
If this work were not privatised within the home, the capitalist class would have to pay in the form of higher wages to workers to afford paid household help, or by paying more tax to the state to cover the cost of social services. This is one of the main roles the family unit plays within the capitalist system: it privatises social responsibilities.
The family also plays an important social role under the present class system. It generally produces conformity and obedience to authority, and reinforces the transmission of socially approved attitudes from one generation to the next.
This system also provides for the perpetuation of division in society. The system of property inheritance ensures that wealthy families usually stay that way, and only a small percentage of ordinary people "make it" in the world of money and power.
The contradiction is that, as life gets tougher for most, the family is the only place to turn for comfort and a buffer from the harsh world outside. This is especially the case in many migrant communities, for whom support networks outside the family structure are often much harder to establish.
Human relations should be based on meaningful social interaction and the satisfaction of human needs such as companionship, love, sexuality and other forms of social expression.
While socialists recognise the specific social, political and economic role that the family plays under capitalism, a socialist revolution would not "abolish" the family as part of a transition to socialism.
In a transitional period parts of the family system would still exist. However, once the needs currently provided by the family are provided by and for the whole community, the economic imperative of the family will disappear and the possibilities of different sorts of social relationships will emerge.
By abolishing the compulsion to live in a particular way in a carefully defined structure, socialism will provide the freedom for meaningful social groupings in which people will be brought together by the need for human interaction and cooperation.
[Margaret Allen is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]