The family powerfully influences the larger economy and society. We introduce (and apply) Louis Althusser's analysis of the contradictions between family and economy in the US today. On the one hand, families are an "ideological state apparatus" shaping people in ways as important for sustaining capitalism as the police, courts and the military are (Althusser's "repressive state apparatuses"). Yet families also challenge and undermine capitalism. We explore these family-economy tensions.

The current forms of organization of both households and workplaces in the US are very particular; they are neither natural, inevitable, or the only kinds of organization. Human beings have organized their family lives, for example, in social ways very differently from the small, isolated, nuclear family organization typical in the US. The same applies to workplaces. The capitalist organization that pits employers against employees is neither inevitable nor natural nor all that exists today. Here we explore the very different possible forms of organizing our lives at home and at work.

Introduction: This series of podcasts explores the two economic systems we all live in and with: the family or household economy and the larger wage economy. Each of them shapes and is shaped by the other. Their interaction influences us deeply but also in a contradictory way. Families both support yet also undermine the larger wage economy and vice versa. Today, that contradictory relationship provokes acute tensions and conflicts in both economic systems. The results are transforming everything from our world’s political struggles to the intimacies of our personal lives