The Family

[OhYesIdid]

This theme seems to come up fairly often down here south of the border, where we are still a largely conservative society (a gay guy gets killed? he had it coming), and I'm curious to see what the general consensus is on this.

First off, I believe everyone's read this: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm

If you haven't you should.

The first few chapters deal with how the nuclear Family is a socio-economical construct meant to protect private property, much like the state and the army. This is what I personally believe, though I suppose a lot of you here may disagree. What I'm most curious about, though, is whether or not it should be abolished, ended and forgotten as an institution once we enter the transition to a socialist society. I'll be completely honest about it: I've never married, never had any children, and my own experiences as a younger member of a family were traumatizing to say the least, but I hope this is no obstacle for discussion.
Thoughts?

[Dumb]

I think one has to differentiate between the "nuclear family" and the general concept of family.

To some extent, I think it will be natural for many couples to co-habitate, and for such couples to choose to raise their biological progeny. I take issue, however, with the legal, social, and economic ties the bind partners together longer than they wish to remain so, and ties that bind children to homes where they're either unwanted, unloved, or otherwise maltreated.

Ultimately, I'd like to see the family evolve into a fluid concept, at one's own will including or excluding blood relatives, sexual partners, friends, what have you - basically, that part of the community with which one chooses to share the most intimacy.

[Robocommie]

Questions like this seem almost certain to just weird out and alienate the vast majority of the working class who will see socialists as some kind of bizarre lifestylists akin to nudists. The very concept of "abolishing" the nuclear family comes off to the uninitiated as sounding like the passing of laws which makes it illegal to visit your grandmother on her birthday, or illegal to get married or fall in love.

It's all a social construct anyway, which means its more influenced by material conditions than on our personal ideals on the subject.

[Terminator X]

Care to expand on how you would go about "abolishing" the nuclear family in a socialist society?

[Die Neue Zeit]

I'd like to know, between the "nuclear family" and the broader "collectivist" family model from Oriental and Southeast Asia, which of the two is more reactionary.

[Zanthorus]

I don't believe Engels' text ever refers to the 'nuclear' family but rather to the 'monogomous' family, which if I recall correctly is identified by Engels' as the specific social arrangement in which one man is married to one woman, and in which the woman is opressed. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the concept of the 'nuclear' family as in just a man, woman and their children living together only became prevalent in the 20th century, whereas in Engels' time extended families living together was much more common (This is what wikipedia's article on the subject appears to be saying anyway), but either way as I said Engels' seems to be specifically concerned in his text with the opression of women rather than the specific arrangement known as the nuclear family.

And his analysis was most definitely not that the monogamous family was a 'socio-economical construct meant to protect private property', rather the other way around - the monogamous family is, according to Engels, produced by private property relations. With the abolition of private property, it's basis is accordingly undercut.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ That's what I'm referring to. "Nuclear family" in the US parlance is based on the union of one man and one woman and also distance of relationships with other relatives, unlike the "collectivist" family model of Oriental and Southeast Asia (closer relationships with one's parents even when in a marriage, with one's uncles and aunts, first cousins, etc. but there is in fact more patriarchalism).

I should also say that polyamory (like two guys and a girl or two girls and a guy living in and in a close relationship) can be quit "nuclear," certainly in terms of eschewing the closer relationships with one's parents, uncles and aunts, first cousins, etc.

[RevLeft By Birth]

Care to expand on how you would go about "abolishing" the nuclear family in a socialist society?

Raise children in collective nurseries from a very young age. That way their life is focused on the collective experience, and parents (mothers) can return to work very quickly after giving birth. And since all children would be raised in the same conditions from a very young age it would insure equal rearing conditions.

[hatzel]

parents (mothers) can return to work very quickly after giving birth.Do they want to, though? Maybe they want time to recover physically, perhaps they want to bond with their children. I do feel that our intention should be to maximise the time between birth and the parents' return to work, by ensuring that they are not dragged back to work against their own volition by financial necessity. Here, I'm talking about mother and father alike. I do not agree that the ultimate intention of policy should be to bring new parents back into the workforce as immediately as possible. Maternal and paternal leave isn't the kind of gain we should aim to abolish; instead, we should fight to extend it!

[RevLeft By Birth]

Do they want to, though? Maybe they want time to recover physically, perhaps they want to bond with their children. I do feel that our intention should be to maximise the time between birth and the parents' return to work, by ensuring that they are not dragged back to work against their own volition by financial necessity. Here, I'm talking about mother and father alike. I do not agree that the ultimate intention of policy should be to bring new parents back into the workforce as immediately as possible. Maternal and paternal leave isn't the kind of gain we should aim to abolish; instead, we should fight to extend it!

Well at least having the possibility of returning to work quickly for both the parents insures equality. Also I think in any ideologically conscious system parents will be excited and want to return to work to help in socialist construction.

I suppose, if parents want to, they should be able to spend more time with their children before returning to work. Certainly material conditions should not force them to return to work as they do in Capitalist countries.

[VeritablyV]

The family as it exists today, especially the concept of nuclear one, should be abolished in my view. I much prefer a more opted collectivist one and I would imagine in a Communist society a community-based collectivist would be opted for, blood or not. Probably similar to the tribal-communism, wherein your immediate community would probably be rather similar to you, a clan so to speak.

I must say though, the abolition of the family construct is unsettling to me because the idea of a family seems so fundamental to humans, but it's like the argument put forth against capitalist propaganda about greed and human nature.. There is no human nature. "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they only seek to alter the character of that intervention and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class."(Communist Manifesto; Ch3- The Bourgeois Society Compared To The Communist State)

Interesting.

[SacRedMan]

A family is the child of society. Look after a family that is independent of our society today, and you will look for months!

[Mr. Natural]

Comrade,
Families are natural to the human species. We have always been born into and lived in families, although there are almost infinite cultural variations of the basic family theme.

On the other hand, our current "nuclear families" are formed within the capitalist system and reflect its values. They are dysfunctional disasters, as is capitalism.

We need to create human families that oppose and transcend their degradation within The System. We need to create community, and the family is the base human community.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Well at least having the possibility of returning to work quickly for both the parents insures equality. Also I think in any ideologically conscious system parents will be excited and want to return to work to help in socialist construction.

I suppose, if parents want to, they should be able to spend more time with their children before returning to work. Certainly material conditions should not force them to return to work as they do in Capitalist countries.

Or in most normal current societies, most people simply don't give a shit.

Your Korean army and labour camps can't create perfect 'Socialist man/woman.'

Humanity will reach a point of natural social compassion when it is developed enough, organically. You cannot legislate or force and acceleration of human development in that way.

Back on topic, I voted the some do, some don't, I don't care either way option. My main beef with the nuclear family is from a feminist POV - it was used historically as a means for a man to legally and financially control a woman, not to mention that marital rape was legal in the UK until 1996. The law needs to be neutral in terms of not encouraging either greater nuclear family hegemony nor anti-nuclear family sentiment. People should be free to do what the fuck they want, in that respect.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

To clarify and expand:

We cannot abolish the nuclear family. To abolish implies forceful action on the part of communists. That shouldn't be our aim. Our aim should be to create material conditions in society, whereby perhaps one day, human development will allow for an absolute communitarian way of living, on a grand scale. Our goal should not be to force the consequences of communitarianism on people. Those were the mistakes of the 20th century communists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Abolition doesn't mean just legal action. Wage labour should be abolished, but that doesn't mean laws alone can achieve this.

Abolition merely implies the necessity of political action every step of the way.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Abolition implies that the primal force behind change 'abc' is active action. I doubt that:

1) Abolition, in regards the family, would have any popular support
2) It would very much be effective at all, in the long run

I stress, human nature and psychological development is not at, or anywhere near, a stage whereby the active abolition of the family can be sought, in favour of some communitarian, large pack-style group of people living.

Force it if you want, it won't work.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The OP is writing about the economic family, not couples or polyamorous participants loving each other and having kids.

That is why I asked the question, which nobody has responded to yet, about which economic family form in the short-term is the least reactionary, patriarchal, etc. then mentioned the "nuclear" Western family and the Oriental family (tighter extended family relationships).

[caramelpence]

the Oriental family (tighter extended family relationships).

It's great that you feel capable of making sweeping comments like this about what people in "the Orient" get up to, but unfortunately the entire notion that "Orientals" are disposed towards having tighter and more extended families is highly problematic. As other posters have alluded to, most societies witness a shift towards nuclear families as part of the processes of modernization and social change - the basic reason for this is that in societies which are still overwhelmingly agrarian and which lack developed state systems with adequate social security arrangements, there is a material basis for the extended family and for broader lineage networks, in that these social institutions function as support systems for their individual members, by providing crucial assistance in periods of economic distress when the state cannot play that role. The history of the PRC and particularly the reform period has involved the emergence of families and social relationships that more closely match the "nuclear" concept alongside and as a consequence of the intervention of the state in social and economic life and demographic processes like sustained urbanization. In very simple terms, when you get everyone living in villages and when state capacity is weak, you get extended families, when you get people going off to the city for education and/or work or when you get people being able to change between cities, you get nuclear families. Not only that, even in the Chinese countryside before 1949, the extended family, whereby a single household would embody around three or four generations, was only one of many familial arrangements, just as the standard practice of a women leaving her original home and entering a new household was only one of the several forms of martial practice - there were also, for example, cases of men becoming "male daughters-in-law" whereby they would join the household of their wife and their children would become part of the familial line of the father of the bride rather than of the actual father of the children. Contrary to myth, the Chinese countryside also embodied widespread acceptance of concubinage if not extramarital relations between married members of different households. The late Qing and other periods of agrarian depression also involved the destruction or weakening of Chinese family units in important ways, as when individual women moved into the cotton and silk plants of Shanghai in order to provide an additional source of income for their families and only returned to their agrarian communities during major holidays, and as when children were sold by poor peasant families in order to cover debts and tenancy costs.

The idea that family is always more important in "Oriental" societies is part of Orientalist mythology, not least in its assertion of an essential commonality between multiple societies with very different histories and cultural traditions, and is a replacement for a more detailed and materialist analysis of how these societies have actually functioned and changed over time. To ask what kind of family is more "reactionary" is even more stupid and immature.

[Kamil]

Since we can all agree that openly advocating the "abolition of family" is not going to get us anywhere- lets opt instead to actively support "non-traditional" family situations (read: non-WASP style family relations). Namely: same-sex marriage, legalization of polygamy/polyandry/group marriages. But what is the actual alternative? Abolish the "family"? Ok....but what will the new living situations look like?

[Tenka]

An Anachronism, A Burden to be Shed
I voted this. Glad to see it's second only to the apathetic option.
Marriage as it is generally conceived of today has no place in a Socialist society, in my opinion; children should be raised by the community, with no special privileges over them granted to the biological progenitors; cohabitation between adults should be determined by social compatibility alone, with considerations of gender and genetics left out. While I am today in favour of homosexual marriage for equality's sake, and for the delicious enturbulation of conservatives, I think "marriage" will be reduced to a useless label in a future where there is no private property or patriarchy; and in such a future, the structure of "the family" would be so radically different from the genetic determinism of today's that I would hesitate to use the old label "family", but it'd be no skin off my back if others still used it.