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.
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