Hodgepodge posted:

I just think that children should also be the primary responsibility of someone who irrationally values their specific personal wellbeing where ever possible, their biological family being the first candidates.

T-man posted:

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

meet my family motherfucker and say that again

T-man posted:

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

meet my family motherfucker and say that again

Warmachine posted:

Yeeeeeah I've seen way too much dysfunction in nuclear families, as well as the outright hostility of families toward LGBTQ+ folks, to say anything more than "familial bonds are statistically likely to be very strong."

That said, a lot of my observed anecdotes involve a heavy material component to the dysfunction that has a high chance of being solved under a properly managed socialist system.

Larry Parrish posted:

my family upbringing could probably be described as communal and it was a pretty normal American thing where you tias and tios and grandparents visit or you visit every week or so

bike tory posted:

Children need pretty intense one-on-one attention for their first 2-3 years, doesn't really matter who is giving them that so long as it's the same few people. Kids just need continuity and stability in the care they recieve, and there are a lot of ways to organise that. That the care needs to be high quality probably goes without saying.

The nuclear family is definitely a capitalist invention, and it's definitely not the best way to raise kids. But weirdly it's not even the best way to raise kids or organise labour under capitalism tbh.

etalian posted:

It could be worse!

https://twitter.com/dannoyes/status/1190326077391917056

Hodgepodge posted:

i mean, to be really fair, replacing the majority of the foster system with full-time kibbutzes where the parents are allowed to be present in their child's life if appropriate, but where children live with a consistent group of other children with a small team of long-term, dedicated caregivers fulltime would be amazing. we literally sacrifice children at the altar of the normalization of the nuclear family.

e: it's probably worth mentioning that the nuclear family is a new experiment even for capitalism, that's why it's called "nuclear." it mostly exists to drive consumerism, ie maximizing the necessary amount of homes, vehicles, etc.

Sedisp posted:

So it's decided as was said at the beginning of the slap fight. Communal families. Good. Destroy the family and replace it with magical thinking. Bad.

Sedisp posted:

Destroy the family and replace it with magical thinking. Bad.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Yes, capitalism is indeed bad.

V. Illych L. posted:

i mean, sure, it's a policy with a lot of pitfalls like all radical policies, but i'd like to add that it's also been a driving force in scandinavian attitudes towards family (trying to push mothers into salaried work rather than unpaid domestic labour, full subsidised daycare coverage, mandatory state schooling etc) up until the present day.

basically the critique of the family as an institution is a real thing with fairly specific policy motivations, good and bad, but it's by no means an unfounded critique. the post i was responding to made it seem as though it wasn't

bike tory posted:

The nuclear family is definitely a capitalist invention, and it's definitely not the best way to raise kids. But weirdly it's not even the best way to raise kids or organise labour under capitalism tbh.

Alobar posted:

They've started checking for tickets and kicking people off the train at embarcadero station in the early mornings, but only trains leaving SF. I feel like I'm the only one talking poo poo to them. I told one of the cops that they're keeping the working class down and another one of them laughed and said, "heh, he doesn't think we're working class?"

Peanut President posted:

"yeah you're class traitors, dipshit"

Larry Parrish posted:

the part of the nuclear family that's bad is the american version of it based around minimizing housing density and maximizing vehicle ownership. the small but close knit family unit part is not the bad part.

Ruffian Price posted:

...and the opposition to that is mostly about returning to traditional multigenerational households, not randomizing legal guardians

Squalid posted:

it was actually a stupid idea that destroyed thousands of lives and we've seen almost all countries go in exactly the same direction with regards to women's participation in the labour force, schooling etc, even those where nobody gave a poo poo about these weird fringe ideas. the critique of the family was a real thing. . . a real stupid thing!!!

I think its worth noting now that probably the single most important policy change in the gay rights movement has been the right to marriage + adoption. All changes designed to integrate queers into the traditional family economic/social system. The USA saw big changes in perceptions of gays during/after that change. Logically, if you oppose the family as an institution you should have opposed this policy shift because it was integrating queers into an oppressive institution. Obviously almost nobody actually did because doing so would have obviously been stupid.


it's not. Here lemme crack my Culture Sketches: Case Studies in Anthropology reference text and pull up one counter example that demonstrates that it isn't. Here we are, Chapter 3, THE BASSERI: Pastoral Nomads on the il-Rah. "Residence Patterns: Each independent Basseri household is a nuclear family living in a single tent. These constitute the basic unit of production and consumption, and ownership of livestock."

You can't blame everything on capitalism. Personally, I would blame the American institution of the nuclear family on high labor mobility and a history of abundant land on the frontier. I couldn't live with my parents even if I wanted to because I live a thousand miles away. There's a lot of different ways to raise kids. In some matrilocal societies the mother's brothers fulfill much of the role fathers do in the USA. If you actually care about this poo poo though I recommend reading real anthropology, psychology, and sociology rather than philosophers who never had to deal with the practical consequences of their ideas. Or hell maybe Pol Pot and Ron Paul were right and we should all just kill you're parents.

Larry Parrish posted:

i guess I see it like UBI: it's something I want but it's not explicitly Marxist so its possible to end up with some real monkeys paw poo poo

Shame Boy posted:

The irony is my nuclear family growing up was idyllic and tolerant and incredibly loving and my grandparents were wonderful amazing people.

I'm literally the only person I know who has parents like that, everyone else I'm friends with had lovely abusive parents who drank and beat them or drank and raped them or drank and raped and beat them, and extended families that either ignored the abuse or actively encouraged it.

I don't know what my point is here, I just wish my friends didn't have crushing emotional damage from their awful childhoods

V. Illych L. posted:

this is a real bad post my dude, on par with the people who whine about venezuela whenever someone wants to look a little to the left. yeah it's motivated lovely policy. it's also motivated good policy. what you're doing here is hysterically shutting down because the pain of the change is perceived as necessarily greater than the pain generated by the structure as-is, which is a completely ridiculous thing to do

i'm not even advocating for the policy (as you say it's a very risky area to start experimenting), just trying to contextualise it and explain why it's a Thing and what sort of policy implications it has. many of these reasons, from the greater social implications of inherited privilege to the more intimate scenes of extreme power afforded to people with no oversight and risk of abuse in the family unit, are very real and there's no answer to them except trying to undermine that institution

indeed, your point about gay marriage actually serves to underscore this - the conservatives, with whom you actually align on the issue, are heavily opposed because the broadening of the family category also means a weakening of it. the conservatives want families to be two married people and their biological children because to them that's what a family basically is. the radical answer to issues of marriage is to gleefully say that yes, we're helping to empty the institution of marriage of meaning by making it as casual and broad as possible. easy divorce, minimal privileges ho! hell, i'm all for allowing more than two people into a marriage, cos that really is a bullshit institution

these battles are never won by abolition - people's small-c conservativism is too strong. instead we can use the capitalist tendency to hollow out and commoditise cultural phenomena so long as we're under capitalism. abolitionism of the kind you're describing hasn't really been around much since the New Left took over

Sedisp posted:

It's almost as if the hellscape of modern parenting has been corrupted by some sort of system dedicated to bending all peoples and inventions towards profit.

Inceltown posted:

V. Illych L. posted:

this is a real bad post my dude, on par with the people who whine about venezuela whenever someone wants to look a little to the left. yeah it's motivated lovely policy. it's also motivated good policy. what you're doing here is hysterically shutting down because the pain of the change is perceived as necessarily greater than the pain generated by the structure as-is, which is a completely ridiculous thing to do

i'm not even advocating for the policy (as you say it's a very risky area to start experimenting), just trying to contextualise it and explain why it's a Thing and what sort of policy implications it has. many of these reasons, from the greater social implications of inherited privilege to the more intimate scenes of extreme power afforded to people with no oversight and risk of abuse in the family unit, are very real and there's no answer to them except trying to undermine that institution

indeed, your point about gay marriage actually serves to underscore this - the conservatives, with whom you actually align on the issue, are heavily opposed because the broadening of the family category also means a weakening of it. the conservatives want families to be two married people and their biological children because to them that's what a family basically is. the radical answer to issues of marriage is to gleefully say that yes, we're helping to empty the institution of marriage of meaning by making it as casual and broad as possible. easy divorce, minimal privileges ho! hell, i'm all for allowing more than two people into a marriage, cos that really is a bullshit institution

these battles are never won by abolition - people's small-c conservativism is too strong. instead we can use the capitalist tendency to hollow out and commoditise cultural phenomena so long as we're under capitalism. abolitionism of the kind you're describing hasn't really been around much since the New Left took over

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Marketing is a lot like economics where it should be very telling that the entire sector has gone on for decades with fundamentally incorrect assumptions about pretty much everything and no one has noticed.