jones Looking at the number of baby mums he has you could say the richest cunt on earth runs an experiment of that sort right now.
I don't really identify as a family activist or someone who advocates the "family of choice" concept. To me it's a concept a bit like polyamory: I tried it years ago and found it to be a pain in the neck, but I think all relationships and families tend to have challenges, so I try not to judge people on these questions alone.
To me the underlying question is about freedom. I will lay out my thinking, don't take the long write-up as condescension, I'm just organising my thoughts for my own sake really, but maybe it will be worth a read.
Capitalism requires liberalism to guarantee the ideology of two main premises: private property rights, and the right (actually a necessity) to work for a wage.
Marx identifies two main classes brought about by these premises (these classes are incomplete economic tendencies not social clubs with membership cards).
First there's the bourgeoisie which owns the means of production and is compelled to reinvest in this ownership to avoid working for a wage.
Second there's the proletariat which owns little or nothing and is compelled to return to sell its labour-power to a bourgeois for a wage to avoid starvation.
The liberal state has a monopoly on violence which it uses to enforce these two premises in order to keep the proles in line. You can throw in a third fundamental premise if you like: land can be private property.
Beyond these invariants there are many contingent and changing instruments of law, policy, culture and ideology: democracy, suffrage, equalities of gender, sexuality and race, etc. These contingencies are the "nice to haves" and there is nothing bad to be said about them, but they are props and not foundations.
The invariant premise of private property in capitalism makes bourgeois individuals the locus of accumulation. This makes the bourgeois individual the locus of freedom in liberal ideology. That's why bourgeois par excellence Elon Musk seems to run whatever "experiment" he chooses: not only is Musk known to be rich, Musk is perceived to be free.
Liberal ideology obscures class struggle in popular consciousness. In the liberal ideological frame, the bourgeois individual is also the perceived proper locus of freedom for a proletarian. Where the bourgeois individual (such as Musk) is perceived to be freer than the proletarian individual, this freedom is received as a matter of individual strength or merit (Musk is a genius, rather than an otherwise ordinary man reshaped by continually accrued profit).
But according to Marx, for a proletarian the perception that freedom originates with individuals would be false. Proletarian freedom instead originates with the collective transformation of social relations. And this freedom has a collective subject—the proletariat.
We don't have to fully agree with Marx on all this "subject of history" stuff to agree freedom is best viewed as a collective phenomenon. This view of freedom can be justified from two directions.
First direction: the things individuals want tend to be collective. Mostly individuals want love, community, a family, fraternity, peer feeling, belonging, etc.
Second direction: the way in which "little people" can collectively have power is also collective. Their power derives from the withdrawal of labour, from not showing up, from protest, from armed insurrection, or most generally from disruption of production or the threat to disrupt production.
According to this framework, the two economic classes are collaborating in production but are simultaneously caught up in this struggle for freedom. The goods the economy produces are sold in its markets, where they are bought by way of accumulated profit or with workers' wages.
This state of affairs has to reproduce itself or it collapses. Workers need to eat or they don't come back to work, workers retire so we need more workers, and the means of production expire so the bourgeoisie must reinvest in them.
As a result the process of social reproduction is preoccupied with utility and infrastructure investment, and with biological reproduction and the reproduction of labour.
One way the last two have conventionally been achieved is through the organisation of the nuclear family. Such a family includes one or more workers, receives one or more wages, obtains goods at market with these wages, and redistributes these goods: "raising the kids" and "putting food on the table".
This tendency to broaden proletarian accumulation to the family collective in turn makes the nuclear family, rather than the individual, the locus of freedom—now you're "going on a family vacation" or "having a picnic" or "playing a board game".
This tendency in self-understanding is also why the proletariat happily fosters the ideology of the moral right of inherited wealth, even though the legal enforcement of inherited wealth is what secures the generational oppression of the proletariat.
But so long as capitalist social reproduction strictly depends on enforcing these tendencies of the proletarian family, its corresponding liberal ideology must also be intensely preoccupied with disciplining sexual and family behaviour, parenting, etc. Which needless to say are huge and relentless topics of social enquiry—as perhaps they should be.
The consequence of all this disciplinary enforcement is that the new locus of freedom, the collective inaugurated by its necessity to social reproduction, the nuclear family, becomes perversely less free in the process of its establishment.
For example, the most easily recognisable historical form of abusive patriarchy was a by-product of the long cultural hangover of the gendered household division of reproductive labour during the early period of industrialisation.
Dad has the Wage, Mum raises Son, Dad hates the Job, Dad gets depressed, Mum avoids Dad, Dad gets Drunk, Mum complains about Wage, Mum accuses Dad, Dad assaults Mum, Son sees the assault, Son hates Dad—and next thing you know, Sigmund Freud declares this thing called "the Oedipus Complex" is human nature!
Conversely, society can reduce this dependency. For instance this can be achieved by the state owning and re-providing the means of the reproduction of labour (universal free or subsidised health and education) on behalf of the proletariat, or by social policy ensuring the means of subsistence is accessible to all (social payments and affordable housing) regardless of whether they have a wage (are employed).
This movement re-formalises in communities the free circulation of those goods that previously circulated within families—with the effect being that the new loci of freedom are communities rather than the family. It's on just such a trajectory that one sees the proliferation of community goods such as swimming pools and libraries.
That's "social democracy" by any other name.
If you think along the whole spectrum correspondent to these lines of discussion, what has been called "family activism" or "family abolitionism" in this conversation so far is really more about proletarian life expressed with maximal freedom.
There are a lot of ways to do it, but the main premise is to reduce the fixities and the degree of primary and secondary disciplinary enforcement of these fixities—an enforcement notionally on behalf of the social reproduction of capitalism, although often vestigial and readily ended.
Instruments such as no-fault divorce are an example of "family abolitionist" ideas that have become uncontroversial and widely accepted in the mainstream.
