Should it be abolished?
How should it be abolished?
What it be replaced with? (e.g. a bigger extended family, a commune or phalanstery, or nothing/individualism)
I want a pod full of other autistic people where we all have space to be alone as well as to be together and can choose when to switch to have our needs met
meanwhile I want to live such that I never see or, more importantly, hear, another human being unwillingly
that sounds heavenly. put little a mini kitchen in each apartment for days you don't feel like showing your face. even if just a hot plate, microwave, little toaster oven arrangement. oh and personal bathrooms. maybe a communal hot tub
The economy in modern America has already pretty much murdered the family for many Americans. Marriage is seen as the bedrock of the family, and money issues are constantly listed as the #1 reason for divorce, if not then many people get or stay married not out of a need or way to confirm love for another person but to save money on taxes. Communists dont have to kill the superstructural form of the family, the base economic forms will when the proletariat is forced to move away from extended or even close family for work, when the stresses of capital make family a bother to deal with. We already see reports of loneliness and alienation continually increasing.
Perhaps the scariest thought to me about the superstructural issues like this, is that the best way to keep them alive or rejuvenate them would be to instill a communist or socialistic ethic to them. Its the best talking point to give to cultural conservatives, who might otherwise take the "socialism" of the family and keep the capitalist structure. We flirt with fascists in that brief moment.
. If this doesn’t happen, it results in a variety of attachment disorders.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
I think the big problem is conceiving of these things as an "either/or" issue. Like to some extent any kind of "natural" social enculturation of a person is necessarily going to revolve around both a familial life & a public social life.
Like you say that
The whole “send them to school, to extracurriculars, and then home” thing is overly rigid and isolationist. As if we are meant to spend our days traveling between isolated social silos.
But this is really only an issue of like; on the one hand Capitalist demands of like rigidly structured & mandatory work-days, but also just at a basic level a problem of the actual material construction of our society; that we physically break up spaces in such a way that they effectively exist as "isolated social silos".
I think the family is the basic mutual aid structure and should be strengthened. People with good family support are more materially and emotionally secure. Strengthening/changing the family can be called "abolishing the bourgeois family", depending on how the terms are defined.
The nuclear family (a term that didn't exist when the Communist Manifesto was written) is not a great mutual support system, mostly because of its fragility. If one parent dies suddenly, or is mentally ill, or something, the whole thing gets disrupted, everyone's lives get messed up. But it's not the only system. Lewis Henry Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family talks about six kinds of family from different traditional cultures; there's all sorts of possible models.
I don't really agree with the "just choose your family!" stuff that neoliberals say. That's a symptom of atomisation. Consanguinity is here to stay.
Another point is that a political program shouldn't attack the family. That's gonna be unpopular. Replace it gently.
I don’t really agree with the “just choose your family!” stuff that neoliberals say. That’s a symptom of atomisation. Consanguinity is here to stay.
wack
unless we don’t bother to liberate disabled/elderly/poor people/women in an inclusive way, which would be uncool and probably counterproductive
This will be an inevitable transitional phase; can't do it all at once.
This is a very apt article from Granma over the recent Family Code that just passed in Cuba. Basically, the family is still the base structure of society, but what is defined as a family is greatly expanded.
Communal family sorta got swapped out for kindergartens/schools, which was reasonable swap tbh, teachers are better equipped to deal with kids and their intermingling with each other (which should be their primary duty, but it’s not like they are not occupied rn with other bullshit). Kindergartens should be free and accessible of course, as schools are, but otherwise :shrug-outta-hecks:
Inheritance should be for stuff bought (with caveat that housing in cities is socialized and costs its amortization cost per month), and “primary beneficiaries” just get right of first refusal
Families should be communal structures made up of a dozen or more gay dads.
Bourgeois family just means failsons and inheritance. Literally bourgeois family.
The extension of that into the working class isn't a couple and children, that's a natural arrangement (kinda just how having babies works). The shadow of bourgeois family in the working class is patriarchy, sexism, child abuse, filial piety, unequal division of labor in the household (abuse of women in the domestic economy), etc.
Abolition of the bourgeois family is abolition of the bourgeoisie and abolition of the rotten bourgeois elements within the current atomized family structure.
Anyone who preaches sudden and rapid changes to the family structure of society doesn't really understand the basis of revolutionary change. The family structure of society isn't rebuilt by removing children from their parents and rearing them in a pod (though creches and daycares exist and are a primitive form of social child rearing). It's to abolish the burden of domestic labor, equalize the role of all members of the family unit and allow for a shared burden when it comes to child rearing and domestic labor.
This is realized not in some goofy "everyone shares a toothbrush and we all sleep naked in the same pillow room" type setup, it's realized by implementing measures like the GDR and USSR did in terms of free and universal childcare (usually linked to your home or workplace), a state operated cleaning service or a cleaning service that utilizes building rents to pay tenants to clean the building. Promotion of shared burdens in housing as well as social life that create and strengthen the solidarity of a productive unit of workers who live together in a building.
Basically just being a good neighbor and making that idea extend a bit further into state operation and organization of service labor to alleviate the burden of domestic economy on women.
Endnotes - To Abolish the Family
Violence and mutual love are interwoven throughout family forms. All people rely for their survival on relationships of care, love, affection, sex and material sharing of resources. Class society forces these relationships into a variety of specific historical forms. Capitalism’s logic of market dependency and generalized proletarianization forces these loving relationships into a particular structure of semi-coerced, semi-chosen interpersonal dependency. Workers subject to insecure employment depend on their family members and kin ties to get through periodic unemployment; similarly children and those no longer able to work are often reliant on their personal connection to a wage worker. Further, free wage workers often access work through kin-based social networks that provide information and support to locate and secure available employment. These relationships can be sources of genuine care, but the necessary ties of dependency leave them constantly open to violence, abuse and domination. For all forms of gendered violence, the threat may be implicit in the structure of a social institution that facilitates the exercise of violence. Families need not be actually or frequently violent for the family as a widespread institution to systematically enable and permit violence and abuse. The combination of care and violent domination is the dual character of any family structure in class society.
i've been partially estranged from my bio family for most of my life even if i was forced to move back in/out a few times. always did surrogate 'families' and now it's just me and my partner and all my "family" are scattered everywhere and we can never see each other due to $ reasons. maintaining contact is hard because my anxiety and it hurts i would rather be in the same room.
i think those of us left would love living on a campus or other arrangement and probalbly bring our various partners with us. we're all creative neuro/gender diverse millennial weirdos. but i think these things should be choices. not all my surrogate family people have shitty relationships with their biological families.I recommend reading Engels, the origin of family, private property and the state. If anything I would say that the nuclear family in its current form is more superstrucutural, created by the existence of property relations and propagation of ownership as the only real value in procreation. It was also driven by the high baseline misogyny - as wage labor rose in prominence for men, it also both devalued and suborned the wives into domestic servitude for the husbands wage.
This has created an environment that is incredibly prone to abuse and should not be encouraged, but you can't change it from the top down, it has to come from a change in material relations.
The stuff Cuba just added to their constitution is a good modern take on it. The radical creches that were common in the early Soviet Union were also an interesting system, although they did evolve into more conventional (albeit world class) kindergartens as the country industrialized. Overall I think the "bourgeois family" is mostly about property relations and inheritance, which communists of any stripe should have a problem with, and abolishing it and replacing it with a living system of relations which includes not only adding more people to your "family", but also giving everyone the ability to leave their "family" for any reason. A socialist family shouldn't just be your blood relatives, but also the people in your village, on your street, or in your apartment block. Admittedly this is hard to comprehend from our position within a capitalist structure which not only levers every household apart from its neighbors but drives a constant wedge in between individual household members as well in its drive to atomize every one of us, but in a society that is organized around building solidarity instead of driving competition I think it would come much more naturally to include a wider selection of people in your family.
we should all be feral. return to communo-primitivism :monke-return:
alternatively, have a literal nanny state. Every position is staffed by a nanny and everyone is coddled like a baby
