Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 08:11:30 -0500
From: Van Piercy <vpiercy-AT-indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Analyzing the family


What is the--a--Marxist analysis of the family these days?  How is society being
reproduced, if not wholly through the mass media?  (Anthony Wilden once remarked
that the university itself, and by implication schools generally, was a branch of
the mass media.)  If the day care centers and public schools are verging on
collapse (or at least increased violence, police surveillance and intervention),
and with them the public sector, then does that mean we will see more
"privatization" in the way of renewing the division of labor between men and women
(as Malecki suggested), along with the continued rise of such movements as
"homeschooling" or "home education," the "back to the land" movement," "voluntary
simplicity" (see the writings of Lawrence Shames), and other well pubicized
fantasies of what I take to be middle class and perhaps nationalist purity, spiked
with a decent dose of rejecting modernity?

Randy Weaver seems to be emblematic of these tendencies, though the Right is not
alone in possessing elements pursuing these flights from the (official or liberal)
public sector.  One thinks of the "soft" Left, what used to be called hippies,
"progressive" communalists, "organic" farmers, "unschoolers," independent home
builders, non Christian spiritualists (all the recent and growing white American
versions of Buddhism, Taoism, mysticism, environmentalism, "Deep Ecology,"
Orientalism generally I suppose, though Native American traditions seem to be
invoked widely as well), and education theorists like John Holt and Ivan Illych.
One common thread running through these Right and Left "separatists" seems to be
libertarianism and a suspicion toward the State.

The family seems to be a focal point for a number of other contradictory moves
where, for example, women are being pressed by medical authority more and more to
breastfeed, but that private mother-child relationship is not at all widely
condoned in the public workplace (though a few "progressive" firms seem to be
making nominal gestures, e.g., on-site daycare and nursing lounges, but I think
these are largely limited to professional women or women still protected by unions
in their industries).  That means that those women who bow to medical expertise and
withdraw from the job market to take care of children will be at a disadvantage
building their marketable skills and competing with men who did not withdraw from
their jobs to "raise a family."  Yet both medical expertise and the drive to expand
women's role in the workforce are modern forces.  What will come of this
contradiction?  A child friendly workplace?

But the Marxist has to ask, How does capital gain from these anti-statist moves
given that while they are not all explicitly anti-capitalist they are often also
withdraws from the market?  Organic farmers often compete in a local, untaxed, and
sometimes barter economy.  They do not participate in the petrochemical fertilizer
trade.  Weaver himself was involved in an underground gun trade.  Alternative
religious ideologies seem to invite complicated re-workings of the traditional, for
Americans, largely Puritan, work ethic.  And the case of breastfeeding pits medical
authority against "formula" companies (and billians in profits worldwide)  in that
women own their breastmilk; it's free.

If you start to combine some of these movements, they appear to come together to
reconstitute a sort of neo-liberal idea of the nuclear family: women "home" educate
children, refuse the workplace, wean children late, and, interestingly, refuse the
material compensations of the Yuppie, cosmopolitan, modern, two earner household
(withdraw from the job market).  Is there a reason why capitalists would invite a
*decreased* supply of labor?  Or is there a recognition that the _quality_ of
techno-capitailism's future labor is at risk in the present State sponsored
medical/vaccination/education/child rearing system?


Van

=Robert Malecki wrote:

> Hugh writes;
> >
> >As for the family thing, it's more social than individual. And kids today
> >are in a terrible situation. In many ways they're better informed and
> >better equipped to look after themselves than ever before (at least as far
> >as bourgeois society is concerned), but with the prospects of work receding
> >to middle age, their material possibilities of making a go of it are
> >diminishing all the time, and this is accompanied by a complete chasm
> >between them and social empowerment of any kind. Poor devils.

[...]

> One of the few things that sweden at least does try and do is early sex
> education. Unfortunately, this is connected to a sordid history of the
> Lutheren church morality
> and the present destruction of the public sector were the schools and even
> daycare centers are turning into battlegrounds of violence and gang mentality..
>
> Bob Malecki





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