abolish the family¶

This is what "abolish the family" actually means. The bourgeois family form is explicitly constructed to abrogate community and replace it with secluded, patriarchal, easily-modulated units of social reproduction. https://t.co/kFBWJNheZa The role of the nuclear family is to alienate you from the vast breadth of support and input to which you are entitled as a privilege of social life. You become inured to the notion of being wholly dependent on yourself and the whims of a tiny group of family members. Communal life is relegated to "appropriate spheres," easily filtered through the various lenses of explicit and implicit hegemonic control, thereby subverting the organic social recombination through which cultures naturally evolve. Your values, sensibilities, skills, cultural expressions, conceptions of the world around you, and especially ability to coalesce into political formations are constrained into these tiny reproductive units. Your social horizon becomes the walls of your nuclear home. Rebellion in any form is heavily suppressed under the bourgeois family model. Without that communal interplay, you are likely to retain and reproduce the ideology and standing of your parents, who did the same with their parents. You carry forward their class position, their religion, their culture, their political allegiance, their deference to hegemonic structures, and of course, their instinct to uphold the exact same social reproductive model as superior to all others. This is one of the many ways bourgeois hegemony maintains itself. The nuclear family is a potent force for social protectionism, conserving the dominant ideology, even to the detriment of its working class adherents. You are trapped, both materially and ideologically. This is where the deliberate construction of working class ideology comes into play. We build explicitly ideological organizations to bridge that economic-cultural gap between "nuclear" islands. These organizations must span all spheres of social life, superceding the extant "appropriate" areas of social interaction: workplaces, schools, religious spaces, community associations, recreation, etc. True working class orgs are omnipresent and available to the entire class. "Community" feels like a natural, organically arising phenomenon, emerging out of the fertile soil of unplanned social interactions between neighbors. And to some extent it is. But in practice, that soil has been depleted by bourgeois culture. It must be replenished. Members of the community must first see themselves as part of a collective while, engaged in shared material struggle. This is where the organization comes into play. It creates the framework for folding natural collegiality into an overarching project: an ideological movement. We "abolish the family" when we create the conditions for every member of the working class to see their entire community as their family. You are surrounded by your friends, your comrades, your cousins, your elders, your children. Your class is your community.