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This isn't a struggle session but it is an important discussion. Bare minimum, I believe in at least three generations living together. Grandparents should play a role in the raising of grandchildren, and receive aid while aging in turn.
The bigger issue is the fact that the nuclear family exists in a desocialized context, where there is no broader community. Living should be much more communal, and families should be helping each other.
This isn’t a struggle session but it is an important discussion
It's not really. Nothing anyone ever says will play any significant role for anything. Change will happen naturally when it does. Also what you're talking about with 3 generations living together is the norm in many countries. It's more or less the norm in Greece too. It's alright I guess though it does have some problems.
Families are good. The bigger the family the better. Live with your parents, siblings, both sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins etc. in a large house like the good old days.
I grew up in a sort of compound house with my uncle, my aunt, my cousin, my grandpa and grandma. Big families are pretty normal in Greece, it too is eroding of course. It's alright, it's not a terrible model. Would I want to continue it? Probably not because while I love my parents and all I've kinda had enough of them in regards to some stuff. Unless I move close to the parents of whomever I might marry eventually if I ever do.
I say close to because it doesn't have to literally be the same house. Our house was compound so all 3 homes were part of the same building but had different doors. But, you know, grandma was cooking for everyone when the rest had work to do and she looked after me and my cousin when our parents had work. In return we looked after her. It's also cost effective because you don't need nannies, childcare etc since someone is almost always there. So that's the good aspect. The bad aspect is when frictions develop, when they do. But that's why it is preferable to not be literally in the same house, just next door.
I said before it is eroding mostly because it is no longer feasible for many families to live like that because one ownership rates are dropping (although they're still somewhat high compared to the US) and people are forced to rent. Also some people just don't want to live like that and prefer to be more independent of their parents.
or they are fuck for some people and not for others but we let people do whatever they want 🤷 I love my found family I live with now but would really enjoy a nuclear as well im gunna just live life and itll sort itself out
I wanna make clear the roles within a nuclear family that hold people down are definitely a fuck
Traditional family arrangements are a result of material relations. Change people's material relations and put the MOP in the hands of the working class, then allow people and society to figure out new family relations that better suit the new economic system. This process may take a few generations, but it should happen naturally. Don't put the cart before the horse.
The point is that we can't imagine what the family unit under socialism will be like, and it's not a good idea to force it. There have been attempts to make people live communally in the Soviet Union and China that people wound up hating. There were revolutionary American Maoists in the 70s who were aggressively anti-monogamy, but they wound up either being torn apart through personal jealousies over everyone fucking each other all the time, or turned into sex cults. It took generations for the nuclear family to emerge under capitalism, and it will take generations for whatever family structure that replaces it to emerge under socialism.
Liberation isn't forcing change, it's removing barriers to change.
We already have trailer parks and apartment complexes. Those are essentially already that. Communal housing would just be taking that model and not making it a debt trap/indentured servitude.
i'm not going to answer your questions in the general, but here's a specific take on a new way of living: i would personally like to live seasonally. i'd like to be more in tune with the land and food production in the summer, living outdoors/more rural with a large intergenerational group of people. come winter, i'd like to hole up with a few special people, maybe those i didn't live with during the summer.
My polycule is pretty cool and basically replaces traditional family especially during the pandemic
yo make sure you talk to your spouse about that shit they may be more down than you realize
gruesome cooking experiments
Just do this one now lol, what they gonna do? Leave you over a dorito casserole??
This isn't exactly a new struggle session. Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State about the Victorian nuclear family. Check it out, it's good.
Read Kollontai (an actual bolshevik revolutionary) if you want materialist analysis of love, sex, and family bonds. I'd recommend Winged Eros or to just listen to the AK47 podcast which goes over her body of work
As some one who doesn't really having a loving family or will every have a family due to my mental problems, I don't care.
What replaces them? How do you deal with people not scrubbing the toilet? Who decides who gets to live with who? How do you prevent abuse and over-dependency? What to do about love triangles?
I don't think these things are necessarily what defines the nuclear family.
Nevertheless, I think the answer to your question is relatively simple, albeit maybe not the one you want. As Marx and Engels describe, the nuclear family emerges not out of any intelligent design, but because it is what suits capitalism best (all of life is shaped to mold into the contours of the dominant economic system, as has always been before capitalism also). Similarly this will be the case in socialism. We may not be able to imagine what this will be like, but it is the economic system that sets the stage for what life will be able to be.
