I've been thinking a lot about the extent to which capitalism pervades our conceptions of society and ourselves. It's clear to me that I have a capitalist understanding of career and possessions, but there are other, more subtle ways in which it's affected our modes of operating.
For example, relationships. In simple friendships and in romantic relationships, feelings of possession often appear. I can recall middle school fights between bunches of girls who are upset about who's whose "best friend." And you can only have one "best" friend.
Romantic relationships are the same way. We think about our significant others as private property. That's why we get mad about cheating, why we "break up," why we champion marriage for its exclusivity. We think about the people we enter relationships with as things that we own in some capacity, and it causes lots of problems when that idea clashes with their status as actual humans.
Now, I'm not too familiar with historical human relations, but I'd be interested to see what a truly communist society would yield in terms of relationships. Would we stop pairing off this way?
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I think we need to be careful not to conflate results of our evolutionary survival instincts with results of capitalism. While capitalism may influence our relational attitudes, I think that there are other, stronger factors at play. The possessive attitude that we adopt is clearly a product of the fact that we don't want others interfering with our partner, especially if it is our potential or actual mating partner (Sorry, this sounds a little ridiculous.) While I don't know much about evolution, I am willing to bet that this desire (to avoid interference) has some strong ties to evolution. Perhaps the health benefits of sexual exclusivity factor in, here.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there are certain biological factors that probably have to be considered. Sex produces some type of chemical response in each of the participants. In short, each party becomes more protective over the other. This probably heightens the "mine" mentality we adopt with our girlfriends/ boyfriends/ spouses.
interesting! I think I wrote my paper about this...
ReplyDeleteFrom what I garnered, in the early manuscripts, Marx calls for the emancipation of women from the ties of marriage just like he calls for men to strip the ties of private property. (pg 82 of the Marx and Engels reader) The only thing I could never understand was what Marx advocated these emancipated women to do. Certainly no one wants to be known for "general prostitution" in any kind of society...
Shouldn't the emancipated women do the same as the "emancipated" men? I'm not saying that men and women are the same, but this relates back to my blog post about caring. If we were genuinely interested in the betterment of our peers, we wouldn't need to claim spouses our need to create a family unit. Our species ideally should be our family unit.
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