Read on Twitter
I agree with a lot of what @MarxinHell does here. Opening the relation. I would also add that @robynmarasco made the excellent point that the family, as a whole, is a political relation. So, here's my take on the Berlatsky thing (1/11): https://twitter.com/MarxinHell/status/1338863297446039552
First - white people and rich people are not classes. They are social relations, but not classes, per se. (2/11)
Second, family is an economic and political relation that is concretized, historically in the early capitalist period and remade for the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and certain members of the labor aristocracy in the global north after WWII with the introduction of the (3/11)
family wage. This historical unit is generally presented as a transhistorical FACT of both biology and emotional nurturing by liberals and conservatives alike. But it is far more complicated than this. If one, say, were to take note of marriage rates in the global north (4/11)
outside of the US, one can see that the political and economic pressures of employer-based health insurance, retirement, home-ownership, &c. make marriage itself much less common. This is also true among certain sectors of the American working and petty-bourgeois classes. (5/11)
As for the relationship of parents and children, this is also historically situated: first - parents don't make up a class, they are members of a certain class which will have relevant impact on the cultural and personal methods and strategies of child rearing. (6/11)
This includes the capacity or incapacity to hire out these tasks. Second: the question of tyrant or guardian is, as Will pointed out, always a relative one. But Plato also describes the city as a community constantly conquering itself regardless of the ruler, so (7/11)
I don't think that his (Plato's) work is the right place to situate this relation. Parents bring with them their experiences and their fears for themselves and their child. @latinxparenting is an amazing resource for parents of any background in this regard. (8/11)
These experiences are intersectional: class, race, gender, religion (or non-religion), all play a part. The point, however, is that parents replay or resist their own upbringing in under different historical conditions, and inevitably get some things wrong. (9/11)
All this said, the best argument for family abolition, and a future oriented conception of "it takes a village" is to become a parent in the first place. To engage with this relationship is to remake it and remake one's own self both as authority and friend. (10/11)
To enact a communist practice of parenting would be, at least at first, to engage with the child as a human being rather than a subjected human being to be either guarded or dominated. Parents are not sovereigns, parenting is not sovereignty. (11/11)
