An antisocial mood has swept across the country, and is especially evident on the political Left.
This prevailing antisocial attitude is dangerous. It risks reproducing, or even accelerating, all sorts of social dysfunction. From loneliness to sexlessness, from drug abuse to murder, many on the Left find themselves excusing or ignoring the steady rise of collective antisocial behavior. Some progressives have unwittingly advocated the institutionalization of loneliness through the extreme extension of pandemic policies, and others increasingly view antisocial behavior in public life as in some way virtuous. Still more choose to ignore the worst effects of social alienation—mass drug abuse and murder. This kind of abandonment of the Social Question will only help to harden public demoralization, making the prospects for political renewal especially dim.
The roots of the antisocial attitude run deep. They find their origin in all the structural features of our society that are ambivalent or antagonistic toward our greater social impulses: the creep of market logic into even the most private parts of our lives, the drive to privatize everything that was once public, and, of course, the tendency for work-life to devour the rest of life. Since at least the middle of the last century we’ve witnessed the decline of participation in team sports, voluntary associations, labor unions, social clubs, political organizations, and charitable causes. The march toward social isolation has been a long one.
What fucking lockdowns is he even referring to? Extremely :sus: article in general, not sure if a mere contrarian or just bad faith
This guy is just insane. He complains about random people and articles saying inflammatory things, acts as if asexuality is mainstream and that younger people celebrate not having sex, Onlyfans causing people to care less about physical sex and relationships, that safe injection sites are all over the country and encourages people to shoot up heroin, and that working from home is a large factor in causing isolation and loneliness. Just absolute brain worms.
in reality policing, alongside every other public good, is underdeveloped and underfunded.
To say to the poor who live in fear, amid the daily rising death toll of friends and family, that the bare minimum of protection afforded to them by the publicly funded police should be defunded, just like their schools and hospitals were, is perverse. Real solutions will be much harder to come by—outside the cities restricting gun sales is no easy political sell, and urban Americans are perhaps equally suspicious of appeals to fully-fund and reform policing. These policies in tandem could go a long way to saving lives. Still, the only way to really fix the social unraveling in our cities is through the pursuit of the abolition of poverty—not the police.
Surely the cops getting billions of free money and military weapons = defunding and not contributing to poverty. No siree.
These annoying fucks literally get EVEYRTHING that they want, then still fucking complain because someone on twitter complains about it or they realize the shit they want doesn’t fix anything. They act as if “progressives” have any say in how anything is funded.
"You pointing out the problem is what's causing the problem"
Before the pandemic around 5% of office work was conducted from home; today around 30% is homebound, and in Manhattan fully half of office workers forgo the office. The remote work revolution represents something like a permanent form of professional-class lockdown. For these workers the precious few social aspects of office life have been effectively abolished. Some adults will surely regress socially in ways similar to school children. Corporations that embraced the shift have functionally offloaded overhead costs onto their workforce, who maintain their home offices at their own expense. Meanwhile, as a result, city centers have struggled to rebuild their pre-pandemic vibrancy.
If the cubicle was a social nightmare for the office, the Zoom World Order is a social disaster.
:data-laughing: if you don’t want to waste gas and sit in a chair 45 minutes away from home to do work on a fucking computer, you’re the reason why cities are collapsing and everyone is lonely!!
All of this should be cause for concern. And most of it could be remedied by massive public investments in social infrastructure that ease the burdens of childrearing, combined with an economic program that resolves the financial instability that is so often the catalyst for separation among working-class couples. After all, it is clear that society-wide economic inequality is one cause for our familial woes.
Many on the Left, however, do not see the crisis of family life as a social problem at all. Instead, the collapse of families is rendered as a solution. As marriages crumble, children disappear, and the elderly are shuffled away into holding-pens, we are enjoined to “abolish the family.”
Karl Marx once lamented the “practical absence of family among proletarians”, and Karl Kautsky was at pains to disabuse people of the notion that Social Democrats were opposed to family life. “No socialist has the remotest idea of abolishing the family,” he wrote. Yet, today, they do. Sophie Lewis’s 2022 “manifesto for care and liberation”
Huh? What serious leftist is out here saying “the state not providing any welfare to families or aspiring families is a good thing?” This crank complains about social media being bad but it seems his grievances arose from some random ass people no one cares about saying inflammatory things. Who the fuck is Sophie Lewis? Who gives a fuck? I’m sure leftists are very happy seeing old people slowly dying in their retirement homes
Sophie Lewis’s 2022 “manifesto for care and liberation”
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the crisis of care in the developed world. But the increasing popular recognition that those members of society disproportionately charged with “reproductive labor” are overburdened, isolated, underpaid, or even not paid at all, now provides a possible opening for a radical reorganization of the domestic sphere. Where can we look for inspiration? In the nineteenth century, the French feminist Charles Fourier designed blueprints for communities in which caring responsibilities were maximally shared and redistributed; in the early twentieth century, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a non-propertarian form of parenting she called “red love.” In the Sixties and Seventies, radical Black feminist, gay liberationist, and anti-capitalist militants envisioned “children's liberation” and experimented with kibbutzes and communes. Equally, in various ways throughout history, Indigenous, colonized, and enslaved populations pursued heterogeneous, anti-propertarian versions of kinship. In this talk, Sophie Lewis will present the surprising history of the often misunderstood utopian slogan “abolish the family.”
http://www.bioethics.pitt.edu/event/manifesto-care-and-liberation
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolish-Family-Manifesto-Care-Liberation/dp/1839767197
