Marx saw both bourgeois and proletarian families as distorted by commodity and exploitation.

Evidence

For Hegel, the family had been the central ethical institution on which the community was ultimately based. Marx, of course, had had a very different evaluation of the family as it concretely appeared in the society he examined. The bourgeois family, he had argued in The Communist Manifesto, was a monument of dehumanized alienation. Unlike Hegel, he felt that a civil society fostering egoistic, exchange-value dominated motivations had invaded the family and distorted its “ethical” side. The reality of the bourgeois family, Marx argued, was its commodity nature; that of the proletarian family was its dissolution through external exploitation. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the Institute’s family studies in the Hegel-vs-Marx opposition it mediated; contrasts with Marx’s Communist Manifesto account of the family as alienation monument. — connects to: Bourgeois ideology fragments classes into possessive individual subjects. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912; The same process destroying the family was generating proletarian solidarity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 472

Broader Connections

• Bourgeois ideology fragments classes into possessive individual subjects. #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912