By Carlos Polo | As a result of the debate in Peru on Bills 4705/2022-CR and 5308/2023-CR that address the “right to care” and the recognition of “unpaid work for members of the family group”, it is essential to understand the substantive differences that exist between a community of persons such as the family and a society of persons. The care that people provide to their dependents is of a different nature and characteristics than labor or contractual relationships. These bills are an attack against the family by applying the contractual logic to family relationships.

People can be linked in different ways and the way they relate to each other can be different depending on the type of bond that unites them.

One of the fundamental characteristics of the family institution is that they depend on human nature. The family is prior to the State and therefore it is the State that should preserve and serve it. Therefore, the bonds that unite the members of a family are of belonging and communion. They commit existentially in a total and gratuitous way. One is born into it or enters it freely, but through a definitive bond (by origin, in children for example, or by choice, when you marry) and is not subject to revision. There is no regulation of exchange in responsibilities. They sprout by belonging. Roles depend on the person (and not the other way around). The person is the “only ontic subject”. These are definitely personal relationships.

The opposite happens in a society of people, whether in a company or in a soccer team, since these are generated from a contractual link that can be modified and managed according to functionality. And what is functional, by definition, admits substitution. I can hire or fire a manager or a center forward in relation to his productivity. Because its internal logic consists in the “arbitrary” choice between alternatives that are considered more or less indifferent. In a society, the functional takes precedence over the personal, and its processes can be ordered with a clear awareness of their purpose and a well-founded choice of means.

Currently, we are facing a gradual and profound social change that has been underway for some time and that has had its impact on the vision of marriage and the family. According to this paradigm shift, it would no longer be the family with its logic that would define social relations, but the other way around. Little by little, imperceptibly, the criteria of the functional society were applied to the understanding of the family. It was chosen to see it no longer as a community but basically as one more functional society that justified its existence and relevance in the way it could solve certain problems (vital, but always utilitarian).

Sociology was able to distinguish early on the concepts of “society” and “community” in order to differentiate between those social bonds freely established by virtue of a contract and those others that are not eligible but belong to them by virtue of birth (or free, voluntary and unconditioned incorporation) and will accompany people throughout their lives. Contractual corporate bonds are functional, that is to say, they do not commit the persons in the totality and unity of their being persons, but only in those aspects explicitly considered in the contract, allowing the delimitation of the responsibilities and the temporal term of validity of the same.

In this way the family does not correspond, certainly, to the experience of the societies (or corporate unions), because it does not have a predetermined term of validity, nor are the responsibilities within it limited up to a certain amount or to certain cases defined beforehand. The family is properly a community, since the bond that unites its members among themselves involves them in the totality of their being persons and with total indetermination of its temporal validity.

On the other hand, it is good to point out that the community is a form of organization that differs from contractual forms at least in the following three fundamental aspects:

a) in that people do not choose to belong to a community, but are born into it, or join it freely, but establishing a bond that is definitive and not subject to revision;

b) in which the responsibilities in the community are not limited neither by amount nor by typologies, as are the obligations contracted in the different societies recognized by law, and

c) in that the social functions and roles are inseparable from the individuality and subsistence of the persons who serve them (the person is before his role and not the other way around, the person is valued for himself and not for the efficiency with which he fulfills a certain role).

By virtue of these three characteristics, it can be said that the bond that unites the members of a community is one of belonging and not of a functional nature.

Marriage (origin of the family), throughout history, has also acquired the legal figure of the contract, and therefore, has been the object of a functional definition. However, even under this modality, it is a very special contract, since, unlike the other contracts, it expressly states its temporary indissolubility and includes all the aspects of life in common and not only some of them especially highlighted and delimited in its responsibility.

Therefore, more than the juridical formula, what is of interest from the anthropological point of view is the very reality of marriage and the family: the fact that it refers to a community of persons. The bond that unites people is of such a nature that it is constituted as such a community not by virtue of the fiction of being self-sufficient subjects who seek to achieve a certain objective, but, on the contrary, they seek to realize themselves as subjects in the total communal interdependence determined by the spousal relationship, the parental / filial relationship, and the relationship of consanguinity between those who make it up.

The great modern drama is that this communional figure has become strange for a society that is organized on the basis of specialized functions. To the extent that we are more society and less community, we lose more of the characteristics of the family. Not all relationships between people are societal, nor should they be: the most basic and essential ones are communitarian. And it is up to the State to protect them.

•

Carlos Polo is director for Latin America of the Population Research Institute and member of the Committee of Experts of the Political Network for Values.