By Mahdyeh Saeedi

How has liberal capitalism contributed to the collapse of the family institution?

March 7, 2023 - 15:54

The formation of the "Women's Liberation Movement" in the West has often been used to promote the superiority of the capitalist system as a symbol of developed Western society based on liberal values.

However, the hypocritical approach of the West, which claimed to champion women's freedom while exploiting women for material gain, not only failed to bring real freedom to women, but also led to the collapse of the family in the West. This is evident from the voices of Western thinkers who now raise the alarm.

With the rise of industrial capitalism, the family gradually lost its role as the creator and maintainer of human society. Women were subjected to extensive economic exploitation, being treated as low-cost, cheap, and readily available assets in the capitalist system. As they moved away from the home and family environment and entered the new industrial society, they assumed roles that did not value their originality and identity as mothers, wives, and family members. This is where the gradual deterioration of the family began.
Warnings about the decline of the family are now more widespread than ever. Although liberals and young people may dismiss it as irrelevant, the fact remains that everything is changing, and it is up to us to deal with it. With the promotion and popularization of the beauty ideology by the capitalist system, women are now more than ever alienated from their natural and innate roles as mothers, wives, and family-oriented individuals. The power of the market and the multi-billion-dollar advertising industry in the fields of fashion, clothing, diet, cosmetics, and beauty procedures dictates to women that they are a valuable commodity and that their past roles are worthless. They are told to distance themselves from their previous roles and embrace new ones dictated by the market.

The unprecedented interference of Western liberal governments in private life has resulted in children gaining power, robbing family savings, and imprisoning parents without trial. The phenomenon of the divorce revolution, about four decades ago at the height of the sexual revolution, was one of the most adventurous social experiments in the history of the modern West. It led to jurisdictions enacting laws that treat marriage as an enforceable contract. Nowadays, it is not possible to create a binding agreement to establish a family, and the government can simply terminate the marriage based on the opposition of the other at the request of one of the couples. The triangle of "divorce," "custody battle," and "property division," along with the formation of the feminist-homosexual current, believes that families are defined and developed based on the whims of individuals, and therefore, they should be completely privatized. The formation of the idea of "chosen family," such as LGBTIQA, in Western industrial societies, against the idea of "family of origin," which is formed based on biological bonds, shows how much people in the West do not trust the institution of the family. This makes it clearer than ever that greedy and hypocritical western capitalism is getting rid of the responsibility of the family. Instead of solving the problems and challenges of the family, it tries to erase the face of the problem. This capitalist neglect of the family problem has reached such a degree that now the tragedy of the collapse of the family in the West has raised the voice of Western thinkers themselves.

But in Islam, family formation is the result of a general law of creation, which is the law of marriage: "سُبحانَ الَّذی خَلَقَ الاَزواجَ کُلَّها مِمّا تُنبِتُ الاَرضُ وَ مِن اَنفُسِهِم وَ مِمّا لا یَعلَمون." (36:36)" According to the Qur'an, the Almighty God has placed marriage in everything: humans, animals, and plants. This marriage, which is so clear in the Islamic view, is the exact opposite point of the contradiction in the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. In Islam, synthesis does not come from antithesis but from marriage. From marriage and companionship, the next rank in man is created, the next generation is created, the next movement is created, and the next stage is created.

However, this fixed law in humans has a condition. This is not specific to Islam. Look at all the religions in the world, and marriage is considered legal. These rules ensure the health of the family. If humans were free to satisfy their sexual instincts as they wished, the family would either not form, or it would become weak, empty, threatening, and destructible. For this reason, it is now more evident than ever that wherever sexual freedoms exist, the family is equally weak because men and women do not need this institution to satisfy their instincts. In places where religion is the guiding principle, and there is no sexual freedom, everything is regulated for men and women, and hence the family is maintained. The struggle of western propaganda with Muslims and the Islamic Republic originates from this fundamental difference in values.

Now, the question that can be asked by Islamic experts and thinkers is, what is the reason for the hostility of modern Western industrial capitalism towards the spiritual identity of women, moral, and family values? When we turn to the works of modern Western thinkers, we see that almost every theorist in modern Western law has something to say about the family, often to the detriment of the family. These theorists include Erasmus, Milton, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, and Freud.

In other words, the crisis of the family is not simply a product of the sexual and feminist revolutions, although they certainly accelerated the rate of deterioration. The cause of the current decline of the family in today's societies may be inherent in what is commonly called modernity or the industrial capitalist system.