Many look; far fewer actually see.
I’m going to do a terrible thing here: I’m going to quote from an explicitly Marxist website:
[T]he oppression of women, their marginalisation within society, and the repression of their sexual behaviour emerged, reducing them to mere instruments of reproduction (caring for the household and children), and became structural and embedded historically, together with the evolution of various family and social structures. Attitudes towards sexual behaviour that falls outside of reproduction within the monogamous family, on the other hand, depends on how much they are considered as a threat to the family as an institution. Homosexual love between women has been subject to varying degrees of repression at different periods in history (we have only mentioned a few above). We can argue, however, that as long as the monogamous family is considered the fundamental cornerstone of society and the only model for legitimate emotional and sexual behaviour, it will be impossible to overcome social discrimination based on sexual orientations.The struggle against sexual discrimination is linked to the struggle against class society in general for several reasons. The first, as we have explained, is that only the abolition of class society can create the material economic basis and cultural drive sufficient to dismantle the model of the monogamous family as the only basic unit of society.
Note the title of that scrofulous essay: “LGBT: Liberation and Revolution.” Then proceed to this even more strident one:
Arguably the most infamous demand of The Communist Manifesto is the “abolition of the family.” The family, Marx and Engels noted, was where patriarchy and capitalism worked in tandem to produce willing, alienated workers, where women became little more than “instruments of production” for the men who lorded over them. Radical queer politics in the 1960s and ’70s added to their critique of the bourgeois family when activists challenged the heteronormativity of familial relations….It’s a central idea to feminism anyway, that mothers aren’t natural entities; they’re making choices to look after this other person. It’s not some sort of mechanical, automatic process; it’s a practice of grounding sociality. Mothers nurture, but they also kill and abuse their wards. That’s why it’s so valuable to denaturalize the mother-child bond. To do anything otherwise is to devalue that work. That’s the horizon that I think opens up the space for a revolutionary politics.
Again, note the title: “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”
Any problems tracing the common thread here, Gentle Reader?
The “thinking” exemplified above has been going on for a very long time. Every Communist regime has labored like Hercules to undermine and destroy family bonds. Communists have targeted virtually every institution that families participate in together, seeking to outlaw it if they couldn’t “denaturalize” it. They’ve had their successes, despite the power of family attachments and parental love. Many of those successes have arisen from economic pressures. We’ve seen a fair amount of that in these United States, as the two-income family gradually supersedes the older one-income model as the norm.
Yes, unrestricted abortion is part of it, but that’s the fish-in-a-barrel class. More subtle, and therefore far more threatening, is the combination of predatory taxation, persistent inflation, the “war between the sexes,” careerism among women, the consequent diminution of family sizes, and the proliferation of “day care” institutions, some of which reach all the way to early infancy.
No doubt there are several reasons the Powers That Be have encouraged those developments. In his excellent and ominous first novel The Hidden Truth, Hans G. Schantz outlined a “game plan” that combines them into a sinister paradigm. The pattern is so similar to the economic, social, and political developments in post-World-War-II Western societies that only the willfully blind could miss it. The more recent promotion, almost entirely by the Left, of non-reproductive, family-averse behaviors such as homosexuality and transgenderism fits into the pattern very well. While there are conservatively inclined, family oriented gays and transgenders, they’re a small (but brave) minority. Moreover, they get no breaks from Nature; they must struggle with the clash between their yearnings for family and their other desires.
Patterns matter. Even those that ultimately prove to have formed out of sheer coincidence should be studied as closely as human intellect permits. Considering that, as Arne Stromberg has said, the family is the essential building block of every stable society, this is a pattern that deserves the closest scrutiny:
“Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families -- clans -- are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need.“When Earth's regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them. That's my thesis, for what it's worth.”
Ponder well, Gentle Reader.
One more thought before I close for today: the articles I cited in the first segment are both explicit about their animosity toward free market economics, a.k.a. capitalism. Their hostility toward the family is instrumental: it is intended to be principally a stroke against capitalism. This reveals them to be users of the homosexual and transgender communities. They are not allies from conviction but exploiters of those communities, in the belief that their enlargement would assist in the destruction of capitalism. Is their belief correct?
I think it is. Family bonds and obligations provide good men the most powerful of all incentives to be producers and earners. Were those incentives to be subtracted, a great deal of the fuel would be removed from the economic engines of capitalist societies. Note that this is observably the case in those nations where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels: e.g., Japan, Russia, and the entire continent of Europe.
Yet I have also said (and I continue to believe) that it is virtually impossible to get people to reproduce for the sake of a future they don’t expect to see. People in First World societies who have children do so for the sake of having children; no other desire participates. The demotion of children from an economic asset to a luxury good forces them to compete with other luxury goods – and children have been losing that competition for decades now.
Food for thought.
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