Colinxy: Are We at Heart Communists?

Every so often—usually from people who should know better, and occasionally from people who definitely do—someone confidently declares that the family is “inherently communist.” Ben Shapiro has repeated it. Countless left‑leaning commentators repeat it with a knowing smirk. And Marxists, of course, treat it as a kind of anthropological mic‑drop: See? You’re already communists. You just don’t realise it yet.

The argument goes like this: In the traditional nuclear family, the father provides “according to his ability,” the mother and children receive “according to their needs,” and the household distributes resources without markets, prices, or contracts. Voilà—communism in miniature. All we need to do is scale the family up to the size of society, and the communist utopia emerges like a butterfly from its bourgeois chrysalis.

It’s a seductive idea. It’s also nonsense.

The Marxist Anthropological Trick

Marx believed that humans are naturally communist but trapped in “false consciousness.” If only we could shed the illusions imposed by capitalism, we would return to our true, communal nature. So, when Marxists point to the family as “proof,” they think they’ve found the Rosetta Stone of human nature.

But this is sleight‑of‑hand. It works only if you ignore everything about how families actually function.

The Traditional Family Was Not an Egalitarian Commune

The traditional nuclear family, before its recent ideological disassembly, was not a flat, egalitarian collective. It was a hierarchical institution with defined roles, asymmetric responsibilities, and clear lines of authority.

Let’s lay it out plainly:

1. The father provided, but he also governed.

Until about five minutes ago in historical time, the father was head of the household. He made the major decisions. He bore legal responsibility for the family’s welfare. His authority was not symbolic; it was structural.

2. The mother was the primary caregiver, but also the primary disciplinarian.

She wasn’t a passive recipient of redistributed goods. She exercised authority over children, managed the household economy, and enforced norms. Her role was different from the father’s, but not subordinate in the Marxist sense of “oppressed class.”

3. Children were not equal members of a commune.

They were subordinate. They obeyed. They were trained, corrected, and socialised. They did chores. They had duties. They were not “co‑owners of the means of production”; they were apprentices in civilisation.

4. Birth order mattered.

The eldest often had more responsibility. Younger siblings had different expectations. This is not communism; it’s hierarchy layered on hierarchy.

In other words: The family is not a commune. It is a micro‑civilisation.

Why Marxists Need the Family to Be Communist

Marxism has always struggled with human nature. People stubbornly refuse to behave like the blank‑slate, selfless co-operators the theory requires. So, Marxists must either:

1. Change human nature (the 20th‑century solution), or
2. Deny human nature (the 21st‑century solution).

Claiming that the family is “already communist” is a way of smuggling in the second option. If the family is communist, then communism is natural. If communism is natural, then resistance to it must be artificial—an illusion, a false consciousness, a bourgeois infection.

It’s a rhetorical trick, not an anthropological insight.

The Ants-and-Bees Fallacy

This isn’t the first-time collectivists have tried to justify their ideology by pointing to nature. Early socialists compared humans to ants and honeybees—species that live in highly coordinated, self‑sacrificing colonies.

But ants and bees achieve this through:

• genetic uniformity
• rigid caste systems
• instinctive behaviour
• reproductive suppression
• total subordination of the individual to the hive

If that’s your model for human society, you’re not describing communism. You’re describing totalitarianism with pheromones.

Humans are not eusocial insects. We are cooperative, yes—but also hierarchical, competitive, innovative, and individually motivated. The family reflects this complexity. It is not a commune; it is a structured, role‑based institution designed to raise children into functioning adults.

Scaling the Family Is Impossible

Even if the family were communistic (it isn’t), scaling it to society would still be impossible. Families work because:

• they are small
• they are bound by kinship
• they operate on trust
• they rely on deep emotional bonds
• they have natural authority structures

None of these scale to millions of unrelated strangers. The attempt to scale them is what produced the 20th century’s most catastrophic experiments in social engineering.

The family works because it is not a political system. It is a biological, cultural, and moral institution.

The Real Lesson

The family is not proof that humans are “secret communists.” It is proof that humans thrive in structured, hierarchical, cooperative units—units that balance authority with care, responsibility with affection, and duty with love.

Marxism flattens all this into a cartoon. It sees equality where there is hierarchy, collectivism where there is kinship, and ideology where there is biology.

The family is not communism in miniature. It is civilisation in miniature.

And that is precisely why Marxists have spent a century trying to dismantle it.

Colinxy regularly blogs at No Minister, This article was sourced HERE