Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. . . .
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels set forth the Communist stance towards parental rights and advocated the socialization of human intellectual capital:
. . . The bourgeois family will vanish . . . with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social [education].
. . . .
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child . . . [is] disgusting . . . .
. . . .
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State . . . .
. . . .
. . . [I]n the most advanced countries the following [methods] will be found generally applicable: [ten items listed]
. . . .
10. Free education for all children in public schools[, and] [c]ombination of education with industrial producation . . . .
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto 33-34, 39-40 (Paul M. Sweeny trans., Modern Readers Paperback 1968) (1933)(Manifesto originally written 1848).
Engels further noted: “[Communism’s influence on the family] will transform the relations between the sexes . . . . It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, . . . [removing] the dependence . . . of the children on the parents.” Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism 80 (Paul M. Sweezy trans., Modern Readers Paperback 1968)(1952)(Principles originally written 1848-49).
Marx and Engels helped fuel a broader utopian socialist movement in many parts of mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe and North America. Utopian socialist aspirations in Germany and Humboldt University helped bolster intellectual support for the fledgling compulsory public education movement in the United States.
Unlike the Mennonites of Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972) fame, Russian Mennonites (and other demographic minorities) had no constitutional protections to invoke when the Soviet Union subsumed the Russian Mennonite educational system as part of the militantly secular “Great Terror.” See John B. Toews, Czars, Soviets & Mennonites 177-78 (1982).
Back to:
1) Index of Quaqua Legal and Historical Pages
2) History
3) Legal Resources
4) Quaqua Society Home Page