> > .... It is crucially important for the
> > left to develop progressive proposals for family policy, social
> > welfare, and the legal institutions of the family that promote
> > universalism and challenge the presumption of the family as primary
> > nurturer.
I agree with Wojtek that what Goldberg is about
> is more of a diatribe
> against the public sphere and universalism and continental Europe as the
> main bearer of them, as opposed to the US (and insular British) privatism
> and isolationism - rather than an advocacy of racist views. His strategy
> is to divide to conquer the universalist public sphere
>
I would like to expand on this, and hope others will see this as a useful discussion. Let me put forward some more concrete progressive proposals. These are not winnable at this time, but I suggest them as alternatives to what now is because the left has given so little attention to these issues, and putting forward alternatives may serve to promote critiques of existing institutions and their problems. On the question of what social welfare ought to comprise, there are many examples in Europe, even in England, but universalistic health provision, day care, family allowances etc., are a good beginning.
What is crucial, especially in the United States, where traditions of American exceptionalism leave the rôle of government weak and the ascribed rôle for the family pre-eminent, it seems we need to challenge this basic idea in all ways possible, putting forward alternatives to the increasing inadequacies of the family as default nurturer.
Probably the most basic problem with the social and legally presumed normative rôle of the family is that it unites two really disparate political/economic functions that once fitted together fairly well when the family was mostly a unit of production. Now they have no organic relation as it has become primarily a unit of consumption. The one function is the meeting of adults' nurturant/affective needs. The other is the meeting of children's developmental needs.
If you think about it, many of the problems of family experience we see from day to day, and many of the political conflicts around "family values" arise out of the anachronistic juxtaposition of these two functions. The "nuclear" family is really too small, intense, and frequently too stressed a location for optimal child development, and really, it is historically fairly rare for so small a social institution to have the primary task of child-rearing. Sound and universalistic social welfare would offer all children copious day-care, early childhood education, and other services with financial support via family allowances forming a floor under the child-rearing parents' income. The child's material security should not depend on the viability of the relationship between the adults involved. In many European countries something like this already exists, and the alleged ill effects of single parenthood are correspondingly less.
Hence, a major component of a progressive family and social welfare policy would involve detaching the legal structures of parent-child relations from those regulating domestic relations between adults. This implies a reform of marriage. Such a reform would involve at least the following --
1. Marriage would be a contractual relationship by mutual consent. Lawyers
like Justin and Nathan can advise on the details of this, but at least it
should follow criteria of bourgeois legality. The participants would have
to be of age. This would be a great advance, inasmuch as current marriage
institutions, though modified, are the last vestige of feudalism,
presumed to be fundamentally different from other forms of contract.
Probably the domestic relations agreements that already accommodate gays
in some places could form a model. Of course, there would be no
limitations as to the sex/gender of the participants.
2. People would have considerable legal latitude in arranging marriage
contracts. There would be a legal definition of a "least common
denominator" of such a contract, and people could embellish it as desired
within some legal definition of limits of acceptability. This definition
would exist mostly to prevent exploitation of weaker parties by stronger
ones.
3. When a law to establish the marriage reform I'm proposing became
effective, existing marriages would be presumed, legally, to be contracts
according to this "least common denominator."
4. No other form of marriage would have a legal existence. Ceremonies of
"marriage" under ecclesiastical, or any other, auspices would be
permissible, but would not commit participants to any legal obligations
and would not be enforceable. Also, such ceremonies would not relieve
participants of other legal obligations. By this I mean, specifically,
that ecclesiastical ceremonies should not protect against prosecution
under laws regulating sexual relations between adults and minors. To many
this may seem a quaint concern. To be sure, among a fair part of the
Euro-american and African-american population the coerced marriage of
teen-age girls, (which is most of what this is about) is passé, but there
are some locations where it certainly exists and immigrant groups where
it is fairly common. I have seen much suffering in this area. Some
multiculturalists may object to this, but it is really an issue like
genital mutilation of girls.
5. There would be no distinction between children according to the marital
status of their parents. "Illegitimacy" would not exist. I would make it
a serious crime to discriminate against anybody on the basis of their
own, or their parents' marital status in the present or the past.
These are some basic notions. The right has an agenda for promoting "family values". As previous posts in this thread have made clear, "family values" is a coherent program for limited government, privatistic approaches to what really are social issues, and corporate domination of day-to-day social existence. Gordon tells us that
> The
> anarchist Left already has a proposal for family policy: to
> allow people to form such attachments as they please,
> without interference or coercion, especially by the State.
>
This seems as simplistic as most anarchist prescriptions. Moreover, as a social worker, I have seen enough of family relationships to know that, quite without direct state intervention, people can oppress each other very cruelly within families. This is why I suggested earlier that we should try to use even a bourgeois state which we could influence to protect weaker persons caught in decadent premodern family institutions that persist in the United States.
The problem is that the family is not just a set of interpersonal experiences which we can significantly reform by urging everybody to "Do your own thing!" It is, as currently constituted, a location in which people reproduce themselves and the species and do it under conditions so adverse that the results are questionable. I do agree with Gordon that
> If my reading isn't entirely fiction, "the family" as the
> Republicans conceive of it didn't even exist until a few
> hundred years ago, and can be preserved as a social
> formation today only if imposed by the use of force.
>
My reading too. But "the use of force" implies that family and social welfare policy is an arena of contestation, and one where we need to think of legal relationships and structures, and bureaucratic institutions. The right has its own ideas of what to do, and there are real signs that the populations is tired of them. Now we need to put forward suggestions that really will make peoples' lives better.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema