ABOLISH THE FAMILY?, written by Thomas Roud, a leading figure of the Canterbury Socialists, appeared in the October 2022 issue of one of the Nationalist Socialists magazines. Their website is hosted by media vocal socialist advocate Byron Clark‘s employer, Voyager.
This guy has obviously never watched an episode of Desperate Housewives. Clearly, Roud hates New Zealand’s 1960’s-70’s concept of the middle class majority, where only one person in a household needed to slave for the employers. Remember it was the Labour Party that introduced privatisation and globalisation to NZ.
The global communist trade unions in NZ made possibly the globalisation of NZ industry, by arranging private payments to government ministers. A global corporate could not operate without a tame workforce. Who are the only ones making money out of this? The global corporates Pfizer and co, who are paying the union organisers “marketing” money.
The communist unions cannot make money off of sole trading tea shops and burger joints, they can only make money off of Star Bucks and McD’s.
As communism is Godless, there’s no mention of husband and wife becoming one flesh, or, as happened in my family, husband leaving everything to the wife when he passed who then split it to the children when she passed. This treats women solely as economic commodities, to be exploited financially buy the corporates, and society. Labour ensured that sex is to be sold, unionised (so unions get a cut from prostitution here in NZ, and taxed so the politicians get their cut also.
This is why the NZ trade unions were out in force against Posie Parker in Albert Park – communists only after the temporal sexual pleasure which makes the global corporates billions of dollars each year.
If there’s no STD’s, abortions, sex-changes, or mental illness medications resulting from the previous, the global corporates won’t be able to pay the union organisers backhanders will they?
This is why these men and women fight to abolish the family. Their own personal sex and money desires. Other unionists, also part of Toucan Media, are creating the ‘safe space’ website so children can discuss ‘safely’ with them how they could be sexually satisfied better.
Each of the trade union/communist measures to abolish the family has of course been passed with Government blessings.
Below are the reasons the communists want to abolish the traditional Biblical family, and what they want to replace it with.
If you want to abolish the family, leave a reason why in the comments.
ABOLISH THE FAMILY? Tom Roud
‘…the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equal members of the workers’ state who are united by love and mutual respect. In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relations between men and women in the communist society will be like. These new relations will ensure for humanity, all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial society of a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners.’
—Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family, 1920.
The abolition of the family, advocated by Marx and Engels in texts as early as the Communist Manifesto, has consistently alarmed great numbers of people who encounter it as a demand. Recently the topic has resurfaced, particularly through thinker Sophie Lewis who has authored Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family (2019), and Abolish the Family: a Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022).
Rather than respond directly to these texts, whose true audience resides in the publishing houses of Brooklyn, New York, and Ivy League college campuses in the United States, I will try to contextualise the perspective as posited by the then bleeding edge of the historic labour movement—that is, the thinking going on in the 19th and early 20th Century where the slogan ‘Abolish the Family’ was first articulated as part of a socialist or communist programme.
Firstly, it is worth noting that critiques of the family unit are not especially new in 1848. Utopian thought as early as Plato’s Republic discussed how the class of guardians charged with running the state would hold all spouses and children in common. So too this elite class would be barred from owning property, a theme that permeates a great deal of utopian literature ever since— neither family, nor property. If calls for the abolition of the family are not novel, where Marx and especially Engels (in his later work, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) present something original is through the explanatory power of ‘historical materialism’ to account for the form of the family throughout human societies. In short, historical materialism claims that the prime organising principle of a society is to be found in its economic foundation—the structure of classes, the how/what/why of the production and distribution of goods, etcetera. Antagonistic social classes within different periods of human society compete with one another for supremacy, and through this process society and its economic base is transformed from one system to another.
The abolition of the family, then, rests on an analysis of the family in a capitalist society—and, in particular, on the form of the bourgeois family: the nuclear family of the Victorian period. ‘On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.’ The bourgeois family is one of contractual agreement, a relationship of property and of securing patrilineal inheritance— wealth and property, usually from father to son. In Engels’ later work he presents a compelling argument that this nuclear family with its essential logic tied into private property is, at that time, a modern phenomenon and that previous societies naturally had different familial structures.
This is not to claim that the pre-capitalist family was always free of tensions that continue to plague the social institution today: domestic violence, male chauvinism, the uneven burden of domestic labour,—in short the oppression of women. However, even today we can see the way the family unit is influenced by economics. Consider the simple difference in familial size between subsistence farming communities and the wealthy urban core in so-called developed societies. In the former, sons and daughters can be an economic boon providing additional labour for the family. In the latter a child tends to be an expense rather than an enrichment of the family. This trend is particularly telling in that the average family size in a given country is often closely related to urbanisation rather than by cultural prohibition of contraceptives, or mere unavailability of the same. Human societies have for centuries practised methods-some safer than others—for women to have some agency over the number of children they bear, much to the chagrin of many ruling classes who wished to under mine this control for economic and political reasons (see Sylvia Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch). Conversely, politics has sought in the last century to intercede in various ways regarding family size—whether through the recriminalization of abortion in the Soviet Union in 1936, China’s one child policy, or the ‘contraceptive first’ supposed solution to poverty in the third world advocated by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates. We can even be more granular with these observations—even within urban developed societies family size can vary greatly, and among the working class sometimes children do become a part of the family as a productive economic unit rather than as a merely consumptive one. They may take up part-time or even full-time jobs in adolescence as an expectation to contribute to the household financially, or be conscripted into child rearing younger siblings to enable parents to work longer hours.
If it is the case, and I believe it is, that the nuclear family of those with property is essentially itself a contractual relationship about said property then the reason ‘Abolition of the Family’ appears in The Manifesto and elsewhere becomes obvious: communists predict the next stage of human society to be one that includes the abolition of private property. If the same family can be seen as a microcosmic representation of the state itself, and communists also predict the withering of the state, then once again we see the impossibility of a specific form of the family persisting into a communist society. For Marx and Engels the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course.
But what of the proletarian, ie. working class ‘propertyless’ family? The claim was that the families of working people are not based on this contractual relationship for the simple point that there is nothing over which to have a contract—there is no property at play. Both Engels, and later August Bebel, saw in the working-class family an admirable—if distorted and mangled by the pressures of capitalist society—expression of genuine affection. While none can act entirely freely in an unfree society, the family which forms and maintains itself out of mutual affection and respect (and perhaps some abstract sense of responsibility) is not easily comparable to the family–of–property. This conception is, in a contradictory way, both affirmed and shattered by later thinkers like Kollontai and Zetkin who all too rightly note that there was no absence of brutality, domination, chauvinism, and oppression among the working classes. This domination of men over women is no doubt exacerbated under certain economic conditions, though Engels also notes that it is conceivable that the ‘original’ division of labour in our species in the form of sexual reproduction may have been significant in the resulting gendered oppression with the advent of class society. As Irish revolutionary James Connolly put it, ‘The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.’ Nonetheless, the unpropertied familial form of a communal society would also be distinct from the current working-class family in that
rather than an inheritance of in-or-near poverty, the new form of common ownership means all families have the common inheritance of the wealth of society in general.
With this in mind, what those dedicated to human freedom have sought in articulating a vision of the family beyond capitalism has been the liberation of that genuine affection and familial love from up’ or a ‘sublation’, the integration of one thing into a larger whole.
Let us compare the origins of the family, as well as its potential transformation, to that of the nation state. In his seminal work Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson traces the origin and persistence of nationalist sentiment/ nationalism. The work details the way that social, economic, and technological
changes that expanded the outer borders the unpropertied family, while alleviating those forces that result in the emergence of oppression within the family. Furthermore, the goal is set to expand
this sense of duty and care beyond one’s kin and instead establish a ‘fellowship of toil’, the commonwealth of labour, an affective community that encompasses all of humanity. The abolition of the
bourgeois family is achieved through a change in property relations from private to common property. I would argue that the abolition (aufhebung) of the family in general is better conceived as a ‘lifting of ‘community’ changed the self-perception of those within that community. The move from direct kin groups and small clusters of intertwined familial communities to the steady expansion of some form of ‘state’ right to the boundaries of some of the largest landmasses in the world was a process that took centuries—and often occurred very unevenly. The spread of literacy was an enormous part of establishing the nation state, as a people could consider themselves part of the same polity without ever meeting or really having much to do with each other. As economic and social processes have become more and more intertwined nation states have developed a basis beyond just a shared language. The historical recentness of this process cannot be overstated. It has been said that when Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi toured the country in the mid 1800s he was met with cries of ‘Viva Garibaldi!’, to which he would respond ‘Viva Italia!’. His countrymen, assuming Italia was his mistress, would respond in kind ‘Viva Italia!’. It is entirely plausible that the concept of an Italian-American has a longer distinct and unified cultural weight than being Italian. Nonetheless, this steady expansion from kin, tribe, region, and then larger self perception as part of a nation state or even an international community, develops through a combination of technology, social structure, cultural exchange, and how production is organised.
Why this brief digression into the development of national sentiment? To emphasise a point that I believe is in conflict with those who would ‘abolish the family’ through phraseology, or a revolution in the hearts and minds of humanity. One can no more easily abolish the family with words, nor with a moralistic transformation of one’s own attitudes and practices, than one could establish a nation with the same process. The transformation of the family in a system beyond capitalism can no more be declared by fiat from our current standpoint than any other dramatic social change. What materialist politics demands is to see in the present the seeds of the future, to study history in a way that illuminates how people lived and how we may live again in a new form, and to build these considerations on a firm foundation—that the economic organisation of a society is the primary factor in shaping the social practices of human beings. We know that the bourgeois family will not survive the end of bourgeois society, for it would have no basis on which to do so. We can infer that the forms of the family we see that are not primarily concerned with maintenance of property may be the ones that persist and develop in a new system. Human society will be different, we will organise ourselves more freely as ‘abolition of the family’ strikes me as at best absurd. The demand comes so diluted with qualifiers and backtracking as to be confusing—imagine explaining to your fellow worker that you had no intention of taking away their children or forcing them to hold their romantic partners ‘in common’. On the other hand the impression left by the demand for universal surrogacy, relying on biotechnical wombs that do not currently exist, manages to bring the adolescent and anti-humanist qualities of ‘fully automated’ communism into the realm of sexual reproduction—a trend in contemporary left wing musings I consider the ‘Wall-E-fication of social ism’. Finally, such statements will merely conjure a vision of socialism where an ideological elite will tell you how to live your life, and will legislate endlessly to ensure your adherence. We already have a society like that! Instead let us pursue those immediate and medium term changes that will strengthen the working class in its task of achieving socialism—that includes fighting for both the provision of child care for all who require it alongside the economic advancement of working people so that if they wish to stay home with their children they are able to do so, and includes those measures that encourage the equality of the sexes, effectively doubling the ranks of the organised working class.
As for the family in the future form of society—que sera, sera.