Vol. 73/No. 25      June 29, 2009

The chapter is based on reports presented by Barnes to an April 11-13, 2009, Socialist Workers Party leadership conference in New York and a Nov. 22, 2008, talk by him to a public meeting of some 375 participants held in Newark, New Jersey, sponsored by the SWP and Young Socialists. The second part of the chapter is printed below. The book will be released this fall. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
While the bourgeois-minded social layer Obama is part of has seen its income rise sharply since the 1960s, there has been an even starker deterioration over that same period in the living and working conditions of a growing majority of the proletariat of all skin colors.

The hypocritical and fraudulent character of Obama’s Fathers’ Day concerns last year about “the foundations of our families” getting “weaker”* became even clearer a few weeks later, when he took part in a televised presidential forum in southern California at the Saddleback Church of Rev. Rick Warren. When Warren asked him about “the most significant position you held ten years ago that you no longer hold today,” Obama immediately pointed to his support today for the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by the Clinton administration and Congress in 1996. Obama said that he “was much more concerned ten years ago when President Clinton initially signed the bill that this could have disastrous results.” But today, in August 2008, he said, he was “absolutely convinced” that Clinton’s “welfare reform” had to remain “a centerpiece of any social policy.”

What have been the results of this liberal “centerpiece,” even prior to the long contraction in the rate of economic growth and working-class incomes the depression that began in 2007? Since the destruction of “welfare as we know it,” as Clinton callously described his target, the number of people receiving cash assistance—now administered by state governments under AFDC’s successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—has dropped to a more than forty-year low. Far from having productive jobs at good wages, however, those pushed off AFDC who were lucky enough to find work of any kind—only about half by 2005, according to a recent study¹—were forced into low-paying, nonunion jobs with little or no health, pension, or other benefits.

By 2005 the 50 percent of former AFDC recipients who are Black and unemployed had fallen more than 30 percent further below the official federal government poverty line than they had been in 1999—and, once again, this was well before today’s deep capitalist downturn. What’s more, whereas cash payments to women eligible for AFDC increased during the 1974-75, 1981-82, and 1990-91 recessions, as of the end of 2008 cash benefits had been reduced in eight of the twelve states where unemployment had increased the most during the opening months of the current crisis. The government’s official jobless rate for Black women over twenty years of age—which we know is way below the actual level of unemployment—has shot up from 7.8 percent to 10.5 percent just over the twelve months since early 2008.

Whether it’s the gutting of AFDC, cuts in pension and health-care funding, the reduction of already woefully inadequate child-care and preschool programs, or assaults on other aspects of workers’ social wage, the blows rain down hardest on women in the working class, and heaviest of all on women workers of the Black or other oppressed nationalities. What’s more, it didn’t take the new Obama administration more than a week after the January 20 inauguration to signal that such assaults would continue. As a result of the adoption of the reactionary Hyde Amendment in 1976, abortion since that time remains the one medical procedure for which women enrolled in Medicaid—today some 12 percent of all women of reproductive age—are denied federal funding. Just days after taking office, Obama succeeded in killing a provision in the so-called congressional stimulus plan that would have expanded access to financial support for birth control to women not otherwise eligible for Medicaid.²

There has been a convergence since the 1960s in the economic and social conditions of working people of all skin colors and national backgrounds in the United States. But that’s not because times have gotten better for tens of millions of workers who are Black or Latino. The reason is that wages and living standards have declined for a growing majority of the working class as a whole.

While the rate of births to unwed teenagers has risen sharply among both whites and African-Americans since the 1960s, for example, the gap between young women who are Black and those who are white has dropped from a twelvefold difference to about two to one today.³

A comparable driving down of the conditions facing all working people, with African-Americans hit the hardest, is registered in the colossal increase in the size of the U.S. prison population over the past three decades. As of 2005 more than 700 U.S. residents out of every 100,000 were in prison or jail in this country. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds nearly 25 percent of all prisoners on earth—more than 2.2 million people! The highest incarceration rate of any country in the world—yes, any country! And if you sum up all those behind bars, on parole, or on probation, the total comes to more than 7 million people—more than 3 percent of the adult U.S. population.

The largest increase has been among African-Americans. Some 577,000 Blacks were in prison or jail in 2005, a 58 percent increase just since 1990. Black men are eight times more likely than white men to be behind bars—altogether some 14 percent of Black men in their twenties.

At the same time, in the years since 1980 there has been a threefold increase in the imprisonment rate of white men in their twenties. Three times greater. Nearly 2 percent of white males in this age group were in jail or prison at some point in 2004.  
 
Fettering working people with debt
Working people in the United States, especially those with the lowest incomes, are also being hit hard by the disastrous consequences of the rulers’ drive over the past quarter century to float their rate of profit on a sea of debt, in which we are left to drown. With real wages slowly declining throughout this period, it became more and more difficult for workers to cover the cost of basic necessities without relying on credit. This has reached the point in recent years where growing numbers of us have little or nothing left at the end of the month to pay off interest and principal on loans. We simply can’t pay the bills. We more and more do, in fact, “owe our souls to the company store.”

How did this situation come about? Since the mid-1970s, as the capitalists held back expenditures for the expansion of productive capacity and large-scale employment of labor, their representatives in the White House and Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, together with the Federal Reserve Board, sought to counter the long-term pressure on the profit rate—which has slowly been trending down since the mid-1960s—through a massive expansion of credit. They did so both by increasing the amount of funds on loan, and, for the first time in history, by spreading the use of credit deep into the working class, including those with the lowest incomes.⁴

Since the mid-1980s, Washington has not only flushed trillions of dollars into the banks but throughout the imperialist financial system has encouraged a degree of leverage that would make Las Vegas blush. The U.S. rulers have intervened continually in world markets to keep interest rates at historically low levels.⁵ In combination, these measures have kept banks in the United States awash with funds they needed to lend in order to boost their profit rates above those of competitors worldwide. The result has been a cascade of bank-driven “debt crises.” Among the earliest targets of the banks were working farmers in the United States and the governments of oppressed nations across the Americas, Africa, and Asia—who were increasingly pushed toward default, and, in the case of farmers, into foreclosure and the loss of the land they tilled.

This simultaneous goading and luring of more and more layers of working people into ever-deeper indebtedness—credit card debt, student loans, auto “financing,” mortgages and “home equity loans”—sharply accelerated through the 1990s and opening years of the twenty-first century. Total consumer debt, by government figures, has increased by nearly 400 percent since 1985. Credit card debt has nearly doubled over the last decade alone, and what the banks and other financial institutions call “delinquencies” have jumped by more than a third just since 2006, with nearly 12 percent of credit card loans more than ninety days past due in early 2009. What’s more, these high-interest pieces of plastic are aggressively pushed on working people: 5 billion solicitations were mailed in the United States in 2001 alone, roughly 50 for each household. And they aren’t mailed to the bourgeoisie!

Student loan debt, which has become impossible to shake off, even through bankruptcy (it lasts beyond the grave), has more than doubled since 1995. In 2007 nearly two-thirds of college graduates left school shouldering debt—and on top of that, some 15 percent of parents of college graduates (according to 2004 figures) had also taken out loans. In 2007 the average debt load of graduating students who had borrowed to finance their schooling was more than $22,000. Moreover, that average prettifies the situation of millions of students who graduate even more deeply in debt—some 10 percent owing more than $33,000 in 2004—not to mention those who go on to medical or other postgraduate schools.

Meanwhile, college administrations—at state universities, as well as private ones—not only keep cranking up the cost of tuition, room, and board (a true “bubble”). More and more of them have also been found to be in bed—for a fee—with “student loan finance companies” raking in extortionate interest payments. This line of work has a name that college officials take umbrage at being called.

Remember those TV commercials for auto loans only a year or so ago? “No job? No problem! Bad credit? No problem! Alimony payments? No problem!” Well, defaults on auto loans increased by 25 percent in 2008, and more and more working people are losing cars to the repo man each month. Problem.

The list could go on, and this doesn’t even include the massive debt incurred by small businesses, corporations, and the government. Over the past quarter century, total debt in the United States—private and public—has risen by more than $45 trillion, while the U.S. gross domestic product has grown by less than $11 trillion.

A large percentage of the federal government debt—a share that has spiked sharply since the White House and Congress launched their bloody assaults against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq earlier in this decade—goes to pay for Washington’s wars. This includes not only increasing annual outlays on military spending but mounting payments of interest and principal to the wealthiest bondholders on the national debt from past wars.

The propertied families of the United States have not had much success over the past sixty years in maintaining popular support for their wars to continue the domination, exploitation, and oppression of the world’s peoples. The wars against the people of Korea and Vietnam were unpopular. The rulers failed to win sustained patriotic backing for the Gulf War of 1990-91, the bombardment and intervention in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, or the more recent assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan (except immediately after 9/11), and now the border regions of Pakistan. In the absence of any broad outpouring of nationalistic fervor for such wars, the rulers face growing problems in rationalizing—under the banner of “patriotic sacrifice”—the inevitably inflationary consequences of massive military spending.

For example, in the 1960s as broad popular opposition to the Vietnam War increased, including among GIs at the front, Democratic president Lyndon Johnson sought to throw a smokescreen over the inflationary toll that rising military expenditures were inevitably going to take on workers’ living standards. In order to do so, and to maintain the “Great Society” fiction of painlessly financing “guns” and “butter” at the same time, Johnson took a number of steps to appear to reduce the size of the federal budget. Among the biggest of the sleights of hand, the Democratic administration took the debt of the Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—off the government balance sheet in 1968. Simply declared no longer a federal agency, Fannie Mae was dubbed “a government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE), owned and operated by private shareholders. Two years later, in 1970, a second such GSE was launched, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac—also off the federal balance sheet.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in turn, became among the capitalists’ favored institutions from the 1980s on to hobble working people with an even wider variety of credit shackles—house mortgages, and then “home equity loans.” This drive by the rulers to make us think and act like “homeowners” with a stake in the capitalist system accelerated to a dizzying degree in recent decades. In the process, Fannie’s and Freddie’s share of residential mortgage debt in the United States rocketed from 7 percent in 1980 to nearly 50 percent at the opening of the 2007 housing crisis; together they issued some 75 percent of so-called mortgaged-backed securities.⁶

Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations, for example, unrelentingly pushed workers to go into debt to buy houses and apartments, with a special eye to working people who are Black or Latino. Clinton mandated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to step up their trafficking in what are today called “subprime” loans, targeting working people, particularly Blacks. Bush—who set a goal of expanding “minority home-ownership,” especially by Mexican-Americans, by at least 5.5 million before 2010—told a gathering of commercial home builders in Ohio in 2004 that, “To build an ownership society, we’ll help even more Americans to buy homes. Some families are more than able to pay a mortgage but don’t have the savings to put money down.”

That same year, then Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, in a February speech to the Credit Union National Association, gave a thumbs up to such high-risk loans. “[M]any home-owners might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed rate mortgages during the past decade,” Greenspan said, adding that “American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.”

Banks, “home finance companies,” and other mortgage-origination sharks proved themselves more than happy to take advantage of the sales opportunity, while the big banks and financial intermediaries packaged the debt and confidently carried it on their books as leveraged “assets.” Over the past decade or so they’ve lured many working people to manacle ourselves and our families with “low-down-payment” (or even “no-down-payment”) loans, “adjustable rate” financing, and other forms of high-risk debt servitude. They’ve solicited and facilitated, in large numbers, what they cynically came to call “liars’ loans” (that is, the lender and the borrower exchange mutual lies and winks when filling out mortgage applications, with the debtors eventually getting crushed while the creditors make off like the bandits they are).

“We believe that low-income borrowers”—a code word for workers—“are going to be our leading customers going into the 21st century,” an executive for Norwest Mortgage (now merged with Wells Fargo) cynically and baldly told the press in 1998.

During the Clinton administration, between 1993 and 1997 alone, there was a substantial jump in the number of Blacks taking on debt in order to buy—or, the biggest lie of all, to “invest”—in houses and apartments, and the pace quickened until the availability of credit seized up beginning in 2007. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in real estate foreclosures over the past few years, tripling just since 2006 to a rate of 1.8 percent of mortgages nationwide by the end of 2008. Workers—especially those with the smallest houses, built with the cheapest materials—have been the hardest hit, once again with working people who are Black or Latino sustaining disproportionately heavy blows.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doing nothing to assist working people in face of this expanding social crisis, other than proposing yet another plan “encouraging” banks to “voluntarily” renegotiate the terms of mortgages inevitably gone sour. The result will be that banks stretch out their income stream from interest and principal payments a year or so longer, before then foreclosing on these workers—who face soaring unemployment and declining real wages—and repossessing their houses.⁷

What broader political advantage do the U.S. rulers and the two dominant wings of the party of capital, the Democrats and Republicans, reap by supporting the bankers (their bosses) in encouraging and accelerating real estate “ownership” by workers? They understand that under capitalism, owning a house also has a conservatizing impact on working people and the oppressed. It fosters the illusion that we too are “property holders.”

As Greenspan candidly wrote in 2007 in defense of his earlier encouragement of “adjustable rate” loans: “I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk, and that subsidized home ownership initiatives distort market outcomes. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk [for the rulers!—JB]. Protection of property rights, so critical to a market economy, requires a critical mass of owners to sustain political support.”⁸

Owning a house ties workers down with onerous mortgage payments and endless expenditures of time and money for physical upkeep and repairs. It subverts our habits of class solidarity by elevating relations and problems we share in common with “fellow owners,” fellow “property-holding taxpayers,” over those with fellow workers.

It makes us less footloose. It makes us less free, as Engels insisted—more tied to the land the “real estate” rests on. In his 1873 booklet The Housing Question, Engels explained that a title to real property (sentimentally called “home” ownership by its bourgeois proponents who, with consummate cynicism, add a maudlin touch to all their nomenclature) is “a fetter” for workers in capitalist society. “Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil, and break their power of resistance” during “a big strike or a general industrial crisis,” Engels wrote.⁹

We are already witnessing such modern-day steps backward toward greater bondage. As of March 2008, fewer people in the United States had moved over the past year than any time since 1962, when the population was 40 percent smaller!  
 
Social conquests of Black struggle
One of the most important conquests of the mass, proletarian-led struggle for Black rights in the 1950s and 1960s was the substantial extension of workers’ social wage that had been won as a by-product of working-class battles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s. As a direct result of the movement that brought down Jim Crow and the urban uprisings that turned the country and the confidence of the ruling class upside down, Medicare and Medicaid were won in 1965. And in 1972—thirty-five years after the original Social Security legislation—the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for the blind, disabled, and elderly was established.

The Social Security Act of 1935 had included small retirement supplements for many workers, federally mandated unemployment insurance and workers compensation, and aid for dependent children (paid to eligible mothers). It’s important to remember that this legislation had been crafted by the Roosevelt administration to serve the needs of capital by limiting concessions as much as possible. For example, not only were retirement benefits financed in part by a payroll tax on workers (a regressive, anti-working-class measure), but the minimal sums paid out were meant only as a minor supplement to whatever workers were able to put aside for old age (usually nothing) or get from their adult sons and daughters.

What’s more, since average life expectancy in 1935 was below sixty-two, and just below sixty for men, the anticipated government payout on pension benefits beginning at age sixty-five would be small—in fact, in close to a majority of cases, nary a penny!

Social Security payments were not intended to defend and strengthen the working class. They returned to workers no more than a token of the wealth produced by our social labor. Social Security was aimed at bolstering the responsibility of the petty-bourgeois family for meeting the needs of the young, the elderly, the disabled, and the ill, including reinforcing the social norm that the place of working-class women with dependent children was in the home. (I say working-class women, because the bourgeois family has always hired or retained a phalanx of wet nurses, nannies, tutors, and even dog-walkers—in the latter case, the comical twenty-first century surrogate for the old bourgeois stable staff.)

Contrary to the self-interested claims of capitalist ideologues, there is no such thing as the “working-class family.” The family—the word derived from the Latin familia, meaning the totality of household slaves that are the property of one man—has from its beginnings in the rise of class society been an institution of the ruling classes. Its primary function has always been to preserve the accumulated wealth and private property of the ruling class—whether cattle, slaves, and estates, or capital in land, mines, mills, and factories—and assure its orderly transfer from generation to generation.

Today’s counterpart of this institution among the propertyless working masses (also, and confusingly, known in everyday speech as a “family”) is descended from the petty-bourgeois family of the peasantry—a productive unit in which every man, woman, and child of all ages and generations labored for the father to provide the necessities of life. The survival of the individual members of this production unit depended on the mutual contributions of all.

With the rise of industrial capitalism, a hereditary proletariat was born through the forcible dispossession of the peasantry from the land. Each individual member of the previously productive peasant family—children and women first of all—was now forced to sell his or her labor power on the market to a capitalist employer, with all the brutality and suffering that produced. In the process, the petty-bourgeois family was ripped asunder. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, the young Frederick Engels, with great eloquence and compassion, described the horrendous consequences of this dispossession and proletarianization as it occurred there, and then across Western Europe.

The working class everywhere organized and fought to curb the degree of that exploitation, demanding a shorter workday, higher wages, and legislation to regulate factory conditions. Meanwhile, armies of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois reformers set out to reimpose on the toilers as individuals, and on women first and foremost, the responsibility for reproducing and maintaining the working class, including those unable to sell their labor power.

The concrete complexities of this historical transition from precapitalist to capitalist property and social relations have differed from one part of the world to another. But the modern descendant of the petty-bourgeois family is today as universally recognizable to the factory worker in Shanghai as it is to his or her fellow worker in Manchester, Atlanta, Cairo, Johannesburg, or Mexico City.

All sanctimonious prattle by the capitalist rulers and their spokespersons about “defending the working-class family” serves only to obscure these social relations, which are the product of class society—to absolve the capitalist ruling families and their government institutions of social responsibility for food and clothing, education, health care, housing, transportation, and more. It is the banner under which responsibility for the care of children, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly is pressed on individual workers—that is, primarily on women.

It is these capitalist property relations that are the root of so much individual and “family” misery today. Only when they are uprooted through revolutionary action by the working classes ourselves, only when economic compulsion—the wages system, the “cash nexus”—ceases to be the foundation of all social interaction, will new human relations eventually emerge. While we cannot even begin to imagine what those relations will be, the one thing we can be sure of is that they will have little in common with the petty-bourgeois family of today, much less the propertied family of the capitalist class.¹⁰

Working people have a vital stake not only in defending the social wage we’ve fought for and won, but above all in building a mass social and political movement of the working class to extend these conquests as universal rights—not means-tested charity—for all. Through our labor, the working class, in this country and worldwide, produces more than enough wealth to provide education, health care, housing, and retirement to every human being on earth, for a lifetime.

None of these questions are new ones for class-conscious workers. In the founding document of the modern revolutionary working-class movement, the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels recognized the “bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child,”¹¹ for what it really is. It is the rationalization for rejecting government responsibility for the social needs of the working classes. It is the ideological excuse by the capitalist class for imposing those obligations on the individual families of workers. It is a pretext to keep women the second sex.

Every move toward a “family-centered” social policy, instead of an independent proletarian course to advance the historic interests of working people, including the right of every woman to reproductive freedom…

Every step by “talented” youth from the working class toward “a career” as a ladder up (and out of their class)…

Every move toward state-funded and “faith-based” charity (and Obama pledges to follow in Bush’s footsteps on the latter), instead of government-guaranteed education, health care, and pensions as the universal social rights of the working class…

Every move toward tightening the trap of mortgage debt slavery (that is, “home ownership”), as opposed to a revolutionary social movement of the toilers that demands nationalization of the land and the housing stock as we fight for pleasant, spacious, and affordable accommodations for all…

Every such move weakens the working class and labor movement, as it strengthens the hand of the rulers, who seek to blame sections of our class and other scapegoats for the accelerating ills of the world capitalist order.

Every such move strikes a blow to what working people, including Blacks, women, and the foreign-born, have fought for and conquered from the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction on—through the mass social movement that built the industrial unions, and the Black-led struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s that drove a stake through the heart of Jim Crow and fundamentally transformed social relations in the United States.

1. See “Welfare Reform in the Mid-2000s: How African American and Hispanic Families in Three Cities Are Faring” by Andrew Cherlin et al, in Douglas Massey and Robert J. Sampson, The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades, special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January 2009).

2. Speaking at the May 17, 2009, commencement at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Obama called for finding “common ground” with opponents of a woman’s right to abortion. Deciding to have this medical procedure, he said, is “a heart-wrenching decision for any woman,” with “both moral and spiritual dimensions.” Aiming his remarks at opponents of a woman’s right to choose abortion, the president said, “let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortion.”

Only two weeks later a fascist-minded militant, a hater of women’s rights, walked into the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, and murdered Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was the operator and physician at a clinic in Wichita that performed abortions, and one of only a handful of doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions. Obama responded to the killing with nothing more than a two-sentence statement, saying, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion”—once again, abortion is not a woman’s right, but “a difficult issue”—"they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

3. The same trend can be seen in the rising percentage of children born outside marriage. While the percentage of African-American children born to unwed mothers has increased from 24 percent in 1965 to 72 percent in 2007, the proportion shot up at a substantially faster rate from 6 percent to 28 percent for white children over that same period. The percentage of Latino children born to unwed mothers increased from 37 percent in 1990 to 51 percent in 2007.

4. See “The Clintons’ Antilabor Legacy: Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis” in New International no. 14, as well as Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes, “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” in New International no. 12 (2005), and “What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold” in New International no. 10 (1994).

5. Keeping lending cheap in the United States has not been achieved, and could not have been, simply by the Federal Reserve board setting low interests rates on its own loans to U.S. banks, on banks’ overnight loans to each other, etc. The U.S. rulers also actively intervened in world markets to keep interest rates low by holding down global gold prices (even as it denied doing so); promoted deals with the bourgeois Stalinist regime in Beijing to keep buying enormous quantities of U.S. Treasury bonds; and took advantage of U.S. imperialism’s obscene degree of “seigniorage”—that is, its ability because the dollar is accepted as “the world’s reserve currency” simply to print money to pay off U.S. debts to capitalists and governments the world over.

6. The beginning of the surge in the percentage of working people, of whatever skin color, “owning” rather than renting the roofs over their heads came during the capitalist expansion following World War II. Living in terror of a return of prewar depression conditions and a resurgence of workers’ struggles, the rulers adopted the GI Bill—not only to help finance college enrollment for veterans who would otherwise be jobless, but to offer them mortgage subsidies to spur housing construction. More than 20 percent of all single-family houses built during the two decades following the war were financed in part by GI Bill loans. Since the 1950s, the percentage gap between whites and Blacks has slowly but steadily continued to narrow, with some 48 percent of Black households “owning” houses in 2008 and some 75 percent of white households.

7. A May 2009 report by Fitch, a major Wall Street “ratings” agency, found, as a “conservative projection,” that within a year after “renegotiating” the principal and interests on their loans, between 65 percent and 75 percent of holders of subprime mortgages will once again have fallen behind sixty days or more on their payments.

8. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 233.

9. Frederick Engels, “The Housing Question,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 344.

10. For a further discussion of the emergence of the family in class society, see “Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation,” resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party national convention (August 1979), in Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women’s Liberation, Part I (Pathfinder, 1992).

11. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Pathfinder, 1970, 1987, 2008), p. 53 [2009 printing].  
 
 
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