Marxism’s War on the Family

I have Dr Stephen McInerney to thank for drawing my attention to one of the most chillingly prophetic essays I have read in years.

In “Revolution in the Home: The Marxist Theory of the Family”, the late American scholar Dr John Senior examined Friedrich Engels’ 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Senior’s point was brutally simple: Marxism was never merely a scheme for seizing factories, banks and parliaments. Its revolution had to enter the kitchen, the nursery and the marriage bed.

Engels said so plainly. The monogamous family was the economic unit of capitalist society. Therefore, once production passed into collective ownership, private housekeeping would become a social industry and the care and education of children a public affair. Marriage would last only while romantic feeling lasted. Women would be drawn into public industry and freed from economic dependence upon husbands.

Senior saw exactly where that road would end. While polite society called it progress, he recognised a civilisation dismantling its own foundations. He warned that the barricades in kitchens and bedrooms were more dangerous than those in jungles or streets.

The intervening decades have vindicated him.

In 1968, 85 per cent of American children lived with two parents. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 70 per cent. The number living with their mother alone had doubled. In Australia, 1.2 million families are now one-parent families, and 77 per cent of those are headed by mothers.

Marriage itself has been stripped of its place as the recognised doorway into family life. In the United States and Britain, only 5 to 6 per cent of births occurred outside marriage in 1960. In England and Wales, the figure had passed 51 per cent by 2022.

What Engels described as the coming liberation from monogamy is now presented as ordinary life. The permanent marriage covenant has been replaced by temporary relationships governed by feeling, convenience and individual desire.

Then comes the demographic verdict. Australia’s fertility rate fell to 1.481 children per woman in 2024. England and Wales reached a record-low 1.41. Canada entered what its own statistics agency calls “ultra-low fertility” at 1.25. Every one sits far below the replacement level of roughly 2.1.

Engels imagined liberation from the fear of pregnancy. What the West achieved was liberation from its own future.

Paid employment became the only work granted genuine social status. Motherhood was demoted to an interruption in a woman’s career. Fathers were declared unnecessary. Children were progressively transferred from the authority of parents to childcare systems, schools, bureaucracies and ideological professionals.

Even the OECD, hardly a defender of Christian civilisation, acknowledges that one-parent households face higher risks of poverty and social and emotional difficulties. Its research finds greater risks of educational and behavioural problems among children living with a single mother than among those living with both biological parents.

The revolution promised freedom. It delivered heavier burdens for mothers, disposable fathers, insecure children and governments forced to manage the resulting human wreckage.

Senior understood what modern conservatives too often forget. The family does not have to be formally abolished. It can be taxed, priced, propagandised, and legislated into practical irrelevance. The state then arrives as substitute parent, provider, educator, and moral authority.

Engels supplied the blueprint. Our ruling class implemented it under friendlier branding. “Liberation,” “choice,” and “equality” sounded far nicer than revolution.

But the destination is precisely where Senior said it would be: marriage weakened, husbands and wives set against one another, children placed in the care of systems, and nations too exhausted and atomised even to replace themselves.

The revolution did not storm the home. We invited it inside.

“For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty.”
– G. K. Chesterton