...It would be easy enough to retort that Marx is hardly the first great thinker to have feet of clay. But in truth, his repudiation of paternal obligation wasn’t much of a departure from the utopian political vision he and Engels outlined. For since The Communist Manifesto was published, three years before the birth of Freddy DeMuth, perhaps its most controversial doctrine has been family abolition. In proposing this, the architects of socialism unleashed a vision that has since inspired many feminists and utopians — but that fails even more completely as a delivery-mechanism for heaven on earth than the flawed and fractious families we have.
The architects of communism took aim particularly at the bourgeois family. In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels argued that the bourgeois family was a recent invention, rationalised as eternal, that served as a means of perpetuating inequality. The Communist Manifesto denounced this con-trick as a fake universal that, for the proletariat, didn’t even deliver joy or intimacy. Instead, it served as a machine for manufacturing new factory operatives: a cynical enterprise in which proletarian children were “transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour”.
More recent critics of the family take this even further. It’s not just the bourgeois family that has to go. It’s every family — even those of the poor, vulnerable, oppressed and helpless, for whom the alternative to relying on blood kin is destitution. This is the argument made by anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis in Abolish the Family: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”....
The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
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Originally Posted by midcan5
