This article presents the radio-play Il mattatoio (The slaughter house) by the writer and playwright Giorgio Pressburger. The analysis is focused on some main points of the theories of Herbert Marcuse (who is directly mentioned in the incipit of the piece) regarding consumer society and family.  In this work, presented by RAI at the Prix Italia 1967 and aired on the Third Program on the 9th October of the same year, the author is able to describe with intelligence a situation in which Luciano Prisco, an alleged mobster and businessman native of Naples, owner of three slaughterhouses in New York, passes craftily over everything that is not connected to his own social and economic climbing. In such context, where family becomes only a way to manage power and business, in part like a clientelistic structure, with functions and roles decided by the main character, every aspect that is not connected to the protection and growth of his authority becomes useless and dangerous.