Date: Tue, 07 Jan 1997 22:32:23 -0500
Subject: M-G: Re:Re Rolf-Justin debate


Justine Schwartz wrote:

> I don't think I agree with the call to abolish the family. I'd like to
> extend and expand it, to make it less nuclear and self-subsistent. I'd
> like to think of ways that the inequalities produced by raising children
> in families with differential resources, some of them inherent and not
> merely pecuniary, might be equalized. I'd like to see both men and
> women in whatever combination who enter into family relations be more
> easy and less jealous in their personal relations. But if someone were to
> try to take away my children, I'd kill them. If the abolition of the
> family means that people relate through dating services provided by the
> satte and children are raised a la Plato in orphanages, I think that's a
> nightmare. Of course, if abolitionof the family is shorthand for abolition
> of traditional gender roles, women's oppression and homophobia, I'm all
> for it, but I wouldn't call it that.

Don't panic, Justin. Nobody will take away the grand-grandchildren of your
children nor put their women in collective use. The family will be abolished 
as a social institution and ideology. I don't know what you mean by "family
relations," but the only relations with sexual content after the Family is gone
will be those conditioned by purely personal attractions. And no more Oedipean
triangles, but collective upbringing of children, instead. No more parental
"love" of the bourgeois individual to his live property but "free association"
of children and adults alike. Sounds "inhuman", eh? It actually is, from the
ex profundis our "humanity."

Vladimir


     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---