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/342/ Maybe Don't Abolish the Family? w/ Amber A'Lee Frost
🕑 Added 2023-05-23 06:01:00 +0000 UTCOn family abolition.
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Amber A'Lee Frost joins us to talk through recent radical proposals to do away with the family as an institution. Author Sophie Lewis claims that "ever since the capitalist victory over the long Sixties, the shout for abolition of the family has been buried beneath a strange kind of shame”, but that now it’s back. Why?
What problems does family abolition address? And how do contemporary accounts sit in relation to earlier radical proposals by the Old and New Lefts?
If "the family is doing a bad job at care" and "getting in the way of alternatives", what actually is the alternative? Wouldn't destroying the family merely make life worse for most, without putting anything better in its place?
Readings:
- Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis, Verso
- Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso
- Profile of Sophie Lewis in VICE
- Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch
- Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star
- The Lockdown Left: socialists against society, Philip Cunliffe, spiked
- Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage
Comments
Chris Clark
Just watched an old interview. She used the phrase “Xenofam”. How will language like this help? In terms of recruiting people to her cause. Hello person in Morrisons struggling to pay your heating bills. Have you ever considered starting a Xenofam. Erm.
Andrea
The mafia was not the way Italian peasants protected themselves from the state. The mafia developed from a specific social arrangement in certain extreme south latifundia. They were mostly thugs paid by latifundists to keep peasants in check/repress them violently. They then developed by the control of state distribution of resources and by occupying public offices in those areas. Notably thanks to the US after WWII, it then developed further as a crucial way to guarantee votes to the dominant Christian Democratic Party in the South through violent social control. It then furthered it's grip on the State's flows of money in southern regions in the different phases of infrastructuration and attempted industrialization of the South from the 60s to the 80s with complacency (and even request) of state apparatuses. The mafia was not a way to protect the insiders from the outside world and especially from the state. Not the Italian state at least. Also, interestingly, pre-capitalist family types in Italy varied a lot depending on the region and the productive structure. In Sicily it was mostly a nuclear patrilocal type if I remember correctly, not the stereotypical extended multigenerational cohabiting family type often used as a symbol for either the Italian, Southern European, or even generally pre-modern traditional family. That depiction of the mafia family speaks more to Anglos stereotypes about Italy than anything else.
aarinsanity
I feel like Sophie Lewis must be a very sad person internally
