It is a part of the dialectical materialist method, its a basic property of immanent critique, negation of the negation, or like others have mentioned unity of opposites.

Its like, by the time members of society are able to critique parts of of society, the object of criticism has already completely taken over. Its like you can’t just know the true nature of a thing in order to revolutionize it, because the thing exists concretely as a social and historical set of relationships. Its like, by the time we see a part of society for what it is, it’s already totally taken over.

The way to change it is to first understand its deeply contradictory nature, and then overthrow or abolish the concrete social/economic base for its existence.

In Theses on Feuerbach, Feuerbach Wrote this book The Essence of Christianity where he theorized that the church served all these social functions in society, so as materialists we should keep the social functions but get rid of all the religious hooey. Marx really thought this was a great advancement, but criticized Feuerbach. His criticism is the actual turning of Hegel on his head, fusing Hegelian dialectics with scientific materialist philosophy, negating the idealist character of both leaving behind a dialectical materialist method. He said:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

Basically, by the time anyone realized that the Holy family, God the father, Mary the mother, and Jesus Christ the son, was derivative of the nuclear family, itself a historic social relation that has changed and taken on a different character at different times, the idea of a nuclear family removed from the holy family was completely foreign concept to most people, save a few cranks and heretics. Even today, changes in the definition of family are met with extreme virulent backlash from whom? Religious fundamentalists. “Marriage is one man, one woman, with the goal of having children.” This is reinforced heavily by scripture and religious doctrine. The idea of gay marriage is still widely rejected, and where it exists it is the target of ceaseless attack.

Marriage, the family, is a major center of religious power. Liberal society doesn’t defeat it in theory, you have to fight these fuckers on every front. The European bourgeois attacked the church as they held immense land, power and resources; and the bourgeois are incapable of sharing power indefinitely. The church is a husk of what it once was, and still they wield immense power over our lives, by defining the family based on its own principles. But where did these principles come from in the first place? They were coopted from the organic association of human families, as they were organized under monarchic rule. The ideological family suited the aims of the monarchies and the major religions which established themselves around the same time as monarchies enshrined the human family into the holy family so that the human family disappeared as a thing unto itself, and only exists as God’s family. And it is only by literally stripping power from the church is any kind of family other than the holy definition of it able to assert itself in society.

Its like, you can criticize the old thing all you want, if we are to be rid of it, it must be smashed, the basis for it eradicated, before we can replace it with something new.

All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.

– 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon