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abolish the family with rifles!

what?

“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!
Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists.”

the Family did not spring out of the ground, natural, fully formed.

the Family is not ‘natural’ and so it is not ‘naturally’ a site of love and care.

if the Family was created, then it can be abolished (with rifles)

why?

  • the Family is a legal and political entity.
  • the Family is a conduit between capitalism and the individual.
  • the Family circumscribes and structures inheritance rights, private property, health insurance &c.
  • the Family invisibilizes and feminizes domestic labor as the exclusive domain of women.
  • the Family privatizes care.
  • the Family reinforces and reproduces hegemonic ideology.
    • "Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty."
  • adults in the Family own children as property. own children’s bodies as property.
  • piercings are betrayal. tattoos are betrayal. being gay or transgender is betrayal, because
    • your body is my body. one big Family Body.
  • children in the Family are legally economically socially bound to their guardian/s.
  • children in the Family are at all times under implicit or explicit threat of ‘discipline’ (violence).
  • under threat of homelessness, institutionalization, prison.
  • all axes of marginalization are compounded by the Family.
  • the young, the elderly, the disabled are especially vulnerable in the Family
    • as non-people who the Family must make decisions for.

surely not my family?

not just the Nuclear Family or Some Families or Abusive Families. Every Family.

abusive Families are not rare, sad aberrations of the Family.

abusive Families just make good on the promise of power and control inhered in the Family
made explicit instead of implicit

even if your mom is nice, maybe, or your dad’s not that horrible,
the state of being a child,
of being property,
is and was a state of total dispossession

how?

dissolution of exclusive privilege conferred by the couple and/or family form

full legal and economic emancipation from dependence on consanguineous relationships

legal right to self-determination for children and total access to necessities outside the family form

legitimization of housework and child-rearing as evenly distributed labor not according to feminized hierarchies

what might this look like? see Cuba’s 2022 family code.

header image is Wolf (1971) by Andrzej Strumiłło.