In honor of International Women’s Day, we publish this translation by Ben Klein of a historic document of the socialist women’s movement. What follows is a report on the Second International Socialist Congress of Women that was held in Copenhagen in 1910. The report was originally published in Clara Zetkin’s Die Gleicheit, the fortnightly magazine of the SPD’s women’s movement. To support Ben’s work translating similar documents become a patron of Marxism Translated.
The Second International Socialist Congress of Women in Copenhagen (1910)
First published in Die Gleichheit, 25 (1910), pp. 387-390
The significance of the Second International Conference of Women Socialists should not be judged by its depiction in the press. There it was overshadowed by the larger, more significant event that proceeded it – the International Socialist Congress – to such an extent that the essential features and significance of the women’s conference could not be clearly outlined. Its importance and its achievements, however, will undoubtedly find expression in the activity of the women comrades of all countries who sent their representatives to the meeting. And this is what matters. If we examine the outcome of the proceedings in Copenhagen from this perspective, then the female comrades ought to be satisfied with it. The conference broadened and strengthened the relations between the socialist women of the various countries and here and there increased the common understanding of the central features of the movement. For some it shed clear light on the fundamental socialist attitude on many an important question, while for others it led to new fruitful suggestions for practice. So it was that nobody went home from the meetings empty-handed, and those who had things to offer in one respect benefited in the other. The appreciative and uplifting awareness of this interaction can only help to strengthen the bonds which unite the female comrades of all countries in their will to work as uniformly as possible in the service of the shared great goal of socialism.
If the necessity of international coordination between socialist women had not yet been established, then the Copenhagen Conference did so not only by its sizeable attendance, which speaks of a vividly felt need for such discussions but also, and above all, by the course of the negotiations themselves. Delegates were present from seventeen different nations and it is both understandable and extremely gratifying that the Danish and Swedish women comrades sent a particularly strong delegation. We may hope that from now on the women comrades in the Scandinavian countries, whose work exhibits both so much freshness and a deep yet controlled enthusiasm, will have established close contact with the Socialist Women’s International. The same is true of the American women comrades, but it will take time for an organized socialist women’s movement to develop in the Romance-speaking countries that will seek connections with the sister movements abroad.
There are many signs that our hopes for this are certainly justified. The trade association of seamstresses and shopfitters in Lisbon wanted to express its solidarity with the comrades at the congress and its desire for constant contact with them, so it gave comrade [Clara] Zetkin a mandate. In the Italian Socialist Party, there is a growing recognition that the women of the working people must be trained in socialism and united in an organization. A discussion of the woman question at the forthcoming party congress is to set in motion the related systematic work and draw up guidelines for it. The Executive Committee of our fraternal party in Italy, therefore, sent comrade [Angelika] Balabanoff to the conference as a delegate and conveyed its heartfelt congratulations for the work of the congress, which unfortunately arrived too late to be read out. The same happened to two other letters: one from comrade Tillmann, who wrote on behalf of the National Association of Socialist Women in Belgium, and another from a recently founded socialist women’s group in Lille (North France). We are convinced that the beginnings of the unified activity of the female comrades in the Romance countries will be fostered by these international links. The next International Socialist Women’s Conference will therefore no longer exhibit the gaps and shortcomings that we are so painfully aware of at the moment.
During the discussions on the means of making international relations between the women comrades of all countries more regular and firmer, there were many proposals and suggestions for things that already exist, such as the international exchange of socialist women’s publications, the submission of correspondence to a central office for further dissemination and so on. Of course, such proposals came from women comrades who had only recently, or almost never, come into contact with the International Secretariat. Much more ambitious was the proposal of our female comrades from the Netherlands to establish an international women’s journal that would not only provide information about the state of the socialist women’s movement in the individual countries but would also deal with emerging problems of the woman question from a socialist point of view, taking into account everything that relates to that question. The comrades justified this demand in particular with reference to the urgent need to train women comrades in the fundamentals and to the inadequate treatment of the various aspects of the woman question in the socialist press. The Dutch comrades withdrew the motion after comrade [Luise] Zietz had convincingly shown both the practical impossibility of its realization and that this need should be addressed in another way. Through their correspondence, she said, the comrades of the different countries should bring their desire for a theoretical discussion of individual questions to the attention of the international secretary, who would then see to it that they were dealt with in Die Gleichheit. Comrade Zietz rightly pointed out that the articles in question would be useful not only to female comrades abroad but also to newly recruited women. Her suggestion met with general approval, since – as was stressed by all sides – Die Gleichheit has certainly proved its worth as a central agency and publication for international correspondence.
Without doubt, the highlight of the conference was the discussion on female suffrage. Once again, it became apparent how, as soon as major questions of principle are fought over, the debates acquire inner substance, strength, and momentum. And that was the case here too. Those comrades present who were familiar with the situation and knew that a not inconsiderable number of leading English female comrades – despite all of the resolutions passed by the trade union and party congresses in their own country and the International Socialist Congress in 1907 – unfortunately were fighting alongside bourgeois women’s rights activists for a restricted women’s suffrage; for those comrades familiar with this situation, it was clear from the outset that the discussions would revolve not around the question of the means but the goal itself. And so it came to pass. The well-represented English comrades, who belong to the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, warmly advocated that the passage that characterized the restricted right of women to vote in a sharp and principled manner should be deleted from the resolution proclaiming the struggle for universal suffrage for all adults. This characterization, they argued, was an indirect condemnation of the attitude of those comrades who had initially supported the demand for a restricted right to vote for women in England.
The comrades Murphy, Butcher, Philipps and others tried in vain to justify this position. Their reasoning is well-known: the nature and the effects of a restricted suffrage are not as bad as they appear in principle, they said; it could of course not the be the overall goal of the struggle for the political emancipation of the female sex, but represented an important in that direction; in England they had to take what could be achieved at this moment in time and so on. The fact that this reasoning was repeated on several occasions did not exactly bolster its cogency. Nor did it become more convincing by the fact that it was combined with a glorification of the good hearts and minds of the bourgeois ladies, as well as of the advantages that could be gained from working hand-in-hand with women’s rightism/feminism [Frauenrechtlerei]: in short, this reasoning lacked a correct understanding of the significance of class contradictions.
It also completely undermined the impact of the speech by Mrs. Charlotte Despard, one of the most passionate and energetic leaders of the Suffragettes, in which she defended a restricted franchise for women. To be sure, all delegates were unanimous in holding this distinguished old woman, and the civic virtues she has practiced, in the highest esteem. However, the overwhelming majority of them were just as united in regretting that such great, beautiful qualities were being wasted on such a petty and unfortunate matter as restricted female suffrage. The delegates responded with a virtually unanimous, unflinching ‘no” to the proposal to advocate universal suffrage without a corresponding denunciation of restricted female suffrage. The resolution was adopted with 10 votes against, which were cast by a section of the English delegation. Led by comrade Montefiore, the commendable champion of suffrage for all adults, a minority of that delegation sharply criticized the tactic of compromise. The debate that preceded the vote was a vivid demonstration of how fruitful the Stuttgart conference had been, and how much clarity and consolidation the international socialist women’s movement owes to its work. It was a pleasure to listen to the speeches by comrades Twining and May Wood-Simons from the United States, comrades Dahlström and Gustafson from Sweden, comrade Gjöstein from Norway, comrade Kollontai from Russia, comrades Zietz and Popp from Germany and Austria respectively, comrades Montefiore, Grundy and Burrows from England. In each speech there was the same basic tone but no tiring repetition, because in each address the clear grasp of principles was supported by valuable factual material which outlined the character and the effects of restricted female suffrage and the role of class antagonisms in the world of women [Frauenwelt]. The statements made by our American comrades deserve special mention in this context. They outlined a splendid refutation of the fondly told fairy tale of the sisterhood of the female sex, of the fairy tale of the bourgeois women’s movement showing sympathy for proletarian interests wherever that movement is in bloom and its political demands have been fulfilled. It should be noted that the German comrades’ resolution on the question of women’s suffrage was improved by two amendments from the Austrian comrades. They prevent any misunderstanding of our demand by expressly calling for women’s suffrage in the individual federal states or Crown lands, and call for the right of women to stand for all legislative and administrative bodies. The proposals on how to develop the most uniform practical work possible for the introduction of women’s suffrage found unanimous approval. Now it is up to the female comrades of all countries to put the resolutions into practice. This particularly applies to the decision to deploy a new means of agitation in the form of ‘Women’s Day’: we use this means without any illusions. We know that it does not mean the world for the conquest of political rights for women, but we also have a firm will to give it the practical scope that a well-prepared Women’s Day can have and must eventually gain.
The Women’s Conference was not spared the loss of concentration and freshness which, as experience shows, tends to follow major debates of matters of principle at all conferences. We regret that the treatment of the questions of social childcare and schools suffered as a result. The discussion of these issues also suffered from other factors, such as the lack of time and the discussion of a matter that had not been foreseen, namely the prohibition of night work for women. As a result, maternity and child care could not be dealt with in the breadth or depth that the range of the conditions and demands for reform deserved. Comrade Duncker, who spoke to the resolution of the German women comrades, gave a concise but incisive presentation on this subject, which, together with the speech of comrades Nielsen (Denmark) and Pärsinnei (Finland), highlighted just how many factual insights we would have gained from further discussion. The debate concluded with the adoption of a resolution from the German comrades and a motion from England, which outlined the general principle that society is obliged to care for mother and child. In our opinion, this does not settle this important question once and for all for the female comrades from the various countries. Some of its aspects will need to be dealt with on another occasion; we are thinking in particular of the important social measures to benefit school-age children that are not being provided for. The conference also referred two motions from our Finnish comrades on the position of mothers who have given birth out of wedlock and the punishment for infanticide to the next conference.
The fact that a socialist women’s conference could be called upon to oppose banning night work for women was a painful surprise to some comrades. This demand was passionately supported by the large majority of Danish and Swedish delegates and is characteristic of the fact that the movement in these countries has not shed either the influence of feminist views nor the narrow ties of an egotistical guild-professional evaluation of things. It was the feminist platitude of the “woman’s right to work”, of the mechanical “equality of the sexes”, it was considerations that only took into account the circumstances of the small group of women typesetters that led to the demand: “No ban on night work for women”. Unfortunately, the majority of Swedish female comrades has already made it difficult for the Social Democratic Party there to advocate this urgently needed reform by organizing a protest action. In Denmark, the Social Democratic Party is similarly in the embarrassing position that a considerable number of women comrades are still fighting against the ban on female night work. In light of this situation, a confrontation on this contentious question, which is no longer an issue at all for the women comrades in any other country, became inevitable. At the eleventh hour, female comrades from Denmark put forward a motion opposing the ban on night work for women, which, according to the conference decision, had to be dealt with together with social welfare for mother and child. The protest against the ban came in particular from the Danish comrade Frone, a Social Democratic city councillor in Copenhagen, who spoke with emphatically and spiritedly and had the strong support of the great majority of Danish and Swedish delegates. Comrade Vang (Copenhagen) responded to this protest with a declaration in which she, as a member of the Social Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, briefly explained the opposite point of view held by the Danish Social Democrats and the minority of Danish delegates to the Women’s Conference. Comrade Hanna, the representative of the Women Workers’ Commission of the German trade unions, spoke convincingly against the motion. In the vote, all the nations represented came out against the motion, with the exception of the Danish and Swedish delegations, in which, however, there was also a minority against it. We hope that these discussions will help to support the educational work being conducted by this minority and lead the entirety of the Danish and Swedish women comrades to demand a ban on night work for women.
The Danish comrades had tabled a second motion to summon the social democratic parties of all countries to support vigorously the legal prohibition of domestic work [Heimarbeit]. However, they withdrew it after the German delegation had responded with a counter-motion calling for its legal regulation and restructuring. Two proposals from the League for the Interests of Working Women in England were approved in principle by the conference. One spoke in favor of state insurance for widows, the other in favor of measures to benefit unemployed women. The very different degrees of internal and external development of the women’s movement in the individual countries was expressed through numerous motions that demanded what has long existed and has become a matter of course, wherever female comrades are well organized with a clear awareness of their aims in their ranks. In order to promote the movement’s progress in those countries where this is not yet the case, the conference approved several such proposals in principle. They relate to agitation among the female proletariat, the training of female comrades, affiliations to the party and the trade unions, moral and material support for social democratic women’s publications and so on. Of greater importance was a resolution from the female comrades in Austria – moved effectively by comrade Freundlich – which sought to make the artificial rise in the price of the proletarian life the point of departure for systematic agitation that can enlighten women about the essence of the capitalist social order and lead them into joining the political organizations, the trade unions and the consumer associations in which the spirit of the modern workers’ movement is vibrant.
Two other conference decisions deserve special mention. Before starting its business, the conference agreed by acclamation a resolution tabled and moved by comrade Zetkin, which denounced Russian tsarism’s attack on Finland’s political freedom and expressed the deepest sympathy for the struggle of the Finnish people for their rights. Likewise, by acclamation, the conference agreed to the resolution from the German and Austrian delegations and the Socialist Women’s Bureau in England, which reminded the socialist women of all countries of their special task in the struggle against militarism and war: to educate the youth in socialist ideas and, through incessant agitation amongst the female proletariat, to strengthen the awareness of the power which women enjoy due to their role in economic life and which they can – and must – assert. With this resolution, the conference dealt with motions from Sweden and England that were in line with comrade Ihrer’s splendid remarks on the need to place the maintenance of peace on the conference agenda.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the conference was delighted to receive a letter from August Bebel, which we will publish elsewhere in this publication. The stormy applause with which the delegates met the letter and the proposal to send him the conference’s best of thanks and warmest wishes, was testament to the deep admiration which the female comrades of all countries have for this great champion of the rights of the female sex and of the liberation of the working class.
The International Women’s Secretariat will continue to exist in its current form. Comrade Zetkin was unanimously re-elected as its International Secretary. The Third International Women’s Conference will take place after the next International Socialist Congress, which will take place in 1913 in Vienna. In the future, a working committee of comrades from different countries will participate in the preparation and organization of the conferences, so that a preliminary meeting can be held in good time to make the arrangements for fruitful discussions. This decision, which the experience of the first two conferences has shown to be a practical necessity, is very much to be welcomed. Implementing it means avoiding the disturbances and grievances that made themselves uncomfortably felt at the second international conference. It will also relieve the secretary of additional organizational work, which is absolutely necessary. It would be easy to say a great deal about this deficiency, with which the conference was confronted and which all international meetings are likely to face and which, on top of everything else, occurs during the particularly difficult conditions of organizing the women’s conference. But it strikes us as more important to demonstrate the valuable work that has been done in Copenhagen. It will stimulate the further work of the female comrades in all countries, make it more uniform, clearer, and make it an increasingly valuable part of the proletarian struggle for emancipation. Our deepest thanks must go to the Danish comrades, as well as the political and trade union organizations behind them, who made the conference in Copenhagen both possible and successful, and who ensured that the hours of effort and work were enriched by infinitely amiable and warm hospitality, is due to our Danish comrades and the political and trade union organizations behind them. The young socialist women’s international has only one slogan: ‘Forwards!’
Social Conservative defenses of the nuclear family pose it as the default natural form of kinship and blame working-class immiseration on its decline. Cam Scott takes aim at such arguments, including those made by leftists.
As the deepening crises of capitalism impel greater numbers of people to the left, the communist movement gains in strength. These numerical gains, however, bring about another slew of contradictions, as false friends and ideological seductions appear in a myriad of intimate guises. In imperial core countries such as the United States, a new brand of majoritarian socialism, backed by common sense, gathers around a program of drastic, but ultimately serviceable, reforms to the capitalist system. Within this recent ferment, opportunism flourishes, and right-wing talking points proliferate with the advantage of simplicity.
A persistent example of rightism within a widening socialist spectrum would be Angela Nagle, who made her debut as a cultural critic with the 2017 publication of Kill All Normies, a remedial ethnography of the online right and its misogynist ressentiment. Perhaps the author’s sympathies were already clear from this early screed against “Tumblr-liberalism,” in which Nagle more or less describes a penchant for denunciation from a “campus left” as a self-fulfilling prophecy, goading its nemesis into existence by sheer wishful hyperbole. But it was only after Nagle published a piece in the conservative journal American Affairs entitled “The Left Case against Open Borders,” calling internationalists “the useful idiots of big business,” that she attracted the interest and agreement of pundits like Tucker Carlson, and a reputation as an “anti-woke” culture warrior. Most recently, Nagle has turned her attention to the family—more specifically, to its defense against a deviant left—for The Lamp, a journal of “consistent, undiluted Catholic orthodoxy.”
As a moral institution, the bourgeois family proves a remarkably effective figure with which to condense Nagle’s racial and sexual politics. Her polemic opens defensively, like so many conservative rallying cries, positioning the family as an institution under attack: “The call to abolish the family has recently been revived by cultural revolutionaries who are getting their way on a number of issues to which most people had never given any consideration.” Beyond the lurching grammar of this curious assertion and its uncertain timeline lurks a fantasy of persecution. Nagle warns her reader of a return; but from whence does this renewed demand originate? Without addressing the pre-history of this apparently perverse fad, Nagle proceeds to ask a follow-up question: “Why is it being revived now, when the family has already been in decline for decades?”
Here one perceives a sudden and deceptive shift, for there’s a wide difference between ‘abolition’ and ‘decline.’ Any revolutionary will profess a desire for the abolition of capitalism, at the same time as they will almost certainly understand that any interval in which capitalism finds itself in decline is sure to be a time of intense cruelty, when its most oppressive institutions reassert themselves. Historical structures, particularly those that ought to be transformed altogether, often enter into periods of decline because of their own contradictions. Decline has never sufficed for revolution in itself; more often, it names the intolerable stage of an untenable state.
Leaving aside this sleight, the question remains: who are the cultural revolutionaries behind this revival? In a scaremongering rollcall of family abolitionists, Nagle includes “anarchists,” Black Lives Matter, one defunct magazine, and apparently, by implication, the Ford Foundation. With this roster of variously wretched and connected nemeses, Nagle panders to a moral majority, for whom—to the extent that she still claims any left politics whatsoever—she is determined to play the useful idiot. Nonetheless, only an extremely online reader could follow Nagle’s paranoid synopsis, in which she digresses upon the short-lived Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, characterizing organizer Raz Simone as a “warlord” with the racist panache of a Fox News telecaster, and seethingly obsesses over the work of theorist Sophie Lewis on surrogacy.1
Nagle appears certain that the family, as a unit of social production and necessary (however often obliged, coercive) care, follows natural law, and can be extrapolated from biological descendence. The nuclear family, she asserts, is a cornerstone of “virtually every society hitherto observed in human history.” This is demonstrably false, as well-observed by many decidedly non-radical sociologists and anthropologists. But one needn’t heed any academic in particular, where innumerable cultures world-over call attention to the socially corrosive imposition of the nuclear family form on their own kinship practices and ways of belonging. Nagle is something far worse than incurious, however—she is a reactionary, and the willingness of some on the left to take her seriously warrants a materialist summary of the ground on which she intervenes.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
In 1884, Friedrich Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a historical excavation of the development of the family in consequence of changing relations of production. While clearly dated, the work is a cornerstone of Marxist and feminist theory, in which Engels argues that the patrilinear organization of the modern family develops with the advent of private property, in order that “children of undisputed paternity (might) come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.” It is worth quoting at greater length from the text:
Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some are won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied.
In Engels’ account, it isn’t only that the nuclear family appears at a particular moment in history as a requirement of capitalist accumulation. Rather, the patriarchal distribution of property in relation to a gendered division of labor preconfigures class society. Theorist Shulamith Firestone believes that “Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered recognitions,” and that his work perceives the “sexual substratum of the historical dialectic” only insofar as it aligns with his own principally economic concerns.2 But it is precisely this alignment to which Nagle and conservative socialists must be accountable. Any serious examination of the emergence and maintenance of capitalism has to account for the development of the nuclear family, and any thought that attempts to circumvent the historicity of this development by reference to natural advantage is unsuitable to the critique of capitalism.
Over the course of his influential work, Engels narrates the rise of institutionalized patrilineality as a means of transmitting private wealth from generation to generation; and the Marxist demand for the abolition of all rights of inheritance makes little sense without a firm historical grasp of the institutions by which unyielding, multi-generational ownership of the means of production is naturalized along patrilineal, and racial, lines. At the same time, socialist feminists such as Selma James and Silvia Federici have demonstrated the extent to which the family as a minimal unity was essential to the success of free labor, where women and children necessarily tend to a household owned by a man. This is not only a holdover from a feudal arrangement; rather, as John D’Emilio explains in his influential essay on gay identity formation, family members remain mutually dependent under the capitalist mode of production, even as the family ceases to function as a self-sufficient unit of production. As individuals struck out into the market, selling their labor power, new principles of social affiliation emerged. It is the decline of this mutual dependency that Nagle and other defenders of family values bemoan:
Robert Putnam’s famous work, for example, documents the steady decline of social trust, community, and cooperation in the same time period during which the family has declined, with loneliness and isolation increasing by every statistical measure to a greater extent now than at any point in American history.
One should ask, however, what else has taken place over the decades in question. Correlation does not imply causation, and as Nagle herself claims to have noticed, almost every collectivity has been threatened by massive deregulation over the last half-century, from organized labor to team bowling. This citation on its own is specious; if proletarianization erodes family values, it in no way follows that this erosion is the cause of other, related symptoms; nor does it follow that the nuclear family as a feudal vestige must be defended. Nagle disagrees:
In the Eighties, the wealth gap that opened up between the educated and less educated due to offshoring and the decline in opportunities for the working class is considered one of the primary causes of family break-ups by sociologists such as Andrew Cherlin, the author of Love’s Labour Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class Family in America. While the working-class family suffered under these economic conditions, family stability increased among the educated. This disparity has in turn exacerbated the wealth gap further. The many demonstrable positive benefits of growing up with two parents are among the many evils of the past from which the working class and the less educated appear to have been liberated.
Moving swiftly past the sleight of hand by which Nagle smuggles her economic nationalism into her defense of the family, she again confuses the disaggregation of the family by economic pressure, and the pains of further isolation from this minimal unity, with an abolitionist program of affirmative affiliation. Cherlin uses an apparent “marriage gap” to index the economic gulf between classes, and before any normative interpretation, this observation—that a stable family structure strongly correlates with economic security—is easily reconcilable with much Marxist and abolitionist thinking on the family. As noted, the family is a miniature unit of production and wealth-sharing in an otherwise atomized market society. As a legal institution, the family functions as a firm, by which wealth is inherited and inequality is reproduced. Otherwise, the security afforded to working people by the family is carefully annotated within Marxist sociology and feminist thought, which describes the family as a site of occluded labor, where unpaid domestic service is expected: the waged worker doesn’t reproduce themself alone.
Making and Breaking Kin
This reply is far too abstract, however, where Nagle’s racist innuendo is so brazen. Nagle’s assertions about the benefits of growing up in a two-parent household are either banally true, concerning the material advantages of pooling multiple incomes or having the full-time attention of an unwaged, stay-at-home caregiver—or they partake of the deep stereotypes used to ideologize American economic policy. Bluntly, Nagle’s determinism has less to do with Karl Marx than with Daniel Moynihan, whose 1965 report on Black poverty in the United States famously pathologized its subjects, venturing a dismal verdict on Black men and single mothers. As Angela Davis writes:
According to the report’s thesis, the source of oppression was deeper than the racial discrimination that produced unemployment, shoddy housing, inadequate education and substandard medical care. The root of oppression was described as a ‘tangle of pathology’ created by the absence of male authority among Black people!3
In this document, Moynihan framed the adverse effects of poverty and discrimination as evidence of the incompatibility of Black “matriarchal” custom with European American social mores and progress. Moynihan’s description of this alternative family arrangement was in no way ennobling—rather, this comparative term functioned to naturalize the bourgeois nuclear family and its constitutive divisions of labor and to prioritize this organization as a requirement of economic advancement.
In a historically sweeping, meta-psychoanalytic reading of the Moynihan Report, theorist Hortense J. Spillers explains its fatal logic and flawed terminology. The report, she says, purports to compare the “’white’ family, by implication, and the ‘Negro Family,’ by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings … with neither past nor future, as tribal currents moving out of time.”4 These two family forms, insofar as they are binarized and reference only each other, lack historical substantiality themselves while operating within a racist imaginary that is itself a historical product. The synchronic Oedipality of Moynihan’s account evades the history of which it is a product. This supposed cultural difference only stands for failure and exclusion where the family is both an amenity and an institution of whiteness:
It seems clear, however, that ‘Family,’ as we practice and understand it ‘in the West’—the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community.5
Any verdict as regards Black family life, Spillers suggests, is “impertinent” where enslaved people were forcibly dispersed from their own familial and social arrangements. Slavery is a system that makes kinship impossible, for if it remained so, Spillers explains, “property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father.”6 Thus the Moynihan report’s improper speculation as to the obstinacy of a Black “matriarchal” culture suggests that Black women have been empowered to claim their children throughout history, on a model of inheritance that was systematically denied them.
As one can see, it isn’t simply that the nuclear family has outlived a once-upon-a-time utility, but that it has served continuously as an instrument of subjugation. Where many cultures were suppressed by European colonizers and prohibited access to the conceptual and material resources afforded by the family, others were disciplined into accepting its strictures over the course of forced assimilation. As Europe colonized North America, a patriarchal family unit proved particularly beneficial to the new economy, which in turn transformed vast territories shared by First Nations into private property. The family, as the maximum society permitted by this dispersal, doubled as a workforce; and the drive by individual households to maximize productive capacity changed the demography of North America. As Dakota scholar Kim TallBear explains:
Growing the white population through biologically reproductive heterosexual marriage—in addition to encouraging immigration from some places and not others—was crucial to settler-colonial nation-building … At the same time that the biologically reproductive monogamous white marriage and family were solidified as ideal and central to both US and Canadian nation building, Indigenous peoples who found themselves inside these two countries were being viciously restrained both conceptually and physically inside colonial borders and institutions that included residential schools, churches and missions all designed to “save the man and kill the Indian.”7
For all of her concern about child welfare and the breaking up of homes, Nagle remains ignorant of how the mandate of the nuclear family has been used to destroy other systems of multi-generational care. The seizure of Indigenous children by the state has been a permanent feature of colonization, from residential schooling to Sixties Scoop— the massive abduction of Indigenous children from their communities throughout the 1960s, and their adoption into middle-class settler families across North America. In Canada today, there are more Indigenous children in the custody of Child and Family Services than were placed in residential schools; which have been named an officially genocidal institution. These apprehensions have been similarly denounced by human rights advocates, and often proceed on the basis of discrimination against young, “single” parents or the greater role of older community members in care. On this point, TallBear quotes Cree-Métis feminist Kim Anderson: “Our traditional societies had been sustained by strong kin relations in which women had significant authority. There was no such thing as a single mother because Native women and their children lived and worked in extended kin networks.”8
Throughout her work, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock makes a forceful case for the historical subversion of the labor of women, and the consequent transformation of social relations, in the development of capitalism. Based on her time with the Innu people, and less fanciful accounts of Indigenous North American life and customs than Engels’ third-hand characterization of the Haudenosaunee, Leacock observes the even dispersal of rights and responsibilities among men and women, in a collective arrangement that considerably surpasses the narrowness of the nuclear family. In these societies, Leacock explains, “women retained control over the products of their labor. These were not alienated, and women’s production of clothing, shelter, and canoe covering gave them concomitant practical power and influence.”9
Having observed the economic equality of genders as independent parties to exchange in non-European societies, Leacock argues adamantly for a Marxist theory to account for the subordination of women in the emergence of the family, as a crucial prerequisite to the capitalist transformation of work into abstract labour and cooperative production into private property relations. For want of such an account, anthropologists and laypersons alike will repeat “the widespread normative ideal of men as household heads who provision dependent women and children reflects some human need or drive … (and) the unique and valued culture history and tradition of each Third World people will continue to be distorted, twisted to fit the interests of capitalist exploitation.”10
In arguing for a trans-historical family integrity, Nagle and her fellow moral crusaders implicitly condone a trans-historical—that is to say, natural—dependency of women upon men. This imputed dependency serves in turn as a firm foundation for a rigid conception of sex and gender, extrapolated from a division of labour and its concomitant system of property. Little wonder, then, that Nagle’s declensionist account of the American family fixates upon the project of queer liberation as a scene of turpitude. But even she may be surprised at certain reevaluations of the family from the moral right.
The Brooks Debate
In an improbable piece for The Atlantic, conservative commentator David Brooks narrates the rise and fall of the American family with considerably less dread than one might expect. Brooks notes the social supports offered by the “corporate” family structure of the nineteenth-century, where multiple households supported a family business; and the subsequent decline of multi-generational habitation with the rise of an urban proletariat throughout the twentieth-century. Citing a middle-class cult of “togetherness,” Brooks correctly regards the nuclear family as an idealization, or an abstraction from a statistical average. The 1950s, Brooks declares, “was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.”
Brooks, who for our purposes appears a better vulgar Marxist than Nagle, periodizes the decline of the nuclear family; marking a fall in real wages through the 1970s and a correspondent uptake in competitive individualism, alongside real gains in mobility for women by the feminist movement. (In this observation, he’s a better dialectician than Nagle, too.) Today, Brooks says, American marriage and birth rates continue to fall and the nuclear family seems on its way out. But this is only half the story. America, Brooks continues, “now has two entirely different family regimes.” Here Brooks winds up veering eerily close to the prognosis of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels declare that the bourgeois family, based on private gain, exists only for the bourgeoisie, while immiserating conditions have already abolished the family among proletarians. Now Brooks:
Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs.
Brooks, like Nagle, cites Cherlin’s “marriage gap,” arguing that marriage is not only an amenity but an instrument of wealth. For moralists like Brooks, however, economic fortunes are an index of social behavior, and a secondary cause at best; and he’s quick to seek out sociological determinations of economic disparity, reading rates of divorce and remarriage as harbingers of poverty and very nearly parroting the Moynihan report’s foreclosure of Black sociality. The practical difference is in policy, where Brooks proposes a deemphasis of family life in favor of extended and experimental kinship structures.
“The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old,” writes Brooks. Were the source concealed, one might almost agree. Surely politics trails actual developments within the lives of people, and the ways in which those lives are organized is nothing if not changeable. As Leacock explains, human beings only demonstrate a “potential for social living which cultural traditions then supply with specific goals. The notions of private property, or the monogamous family, are culturally learned goals.”11
In a series of anthropological overtures, looking to pre-capitalist and communal cultures throughout history and across the globe, Brooks strives to remind his reader that “throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.” This is doubtlessly true; though the recommendation is scarcely credible in Brooks’ voice, as a frontier mentality underwrites his canvassing of human custom writ large. Moreover, his account of the American family, however economistic, fails to apprehend the relations of production that subtend his broader thesis. Nothing about Brooks’ perspective is exemplary, except for its part in a broad consensus that the family isn’t working as one might expect.
The Lawful Structure of Love
In a response to Brooks, as part of an online symposium about his essay hosted by the Institute for Family Studies, Cherlin accuses sentimentality: large extended families form a nostalgic backdrop to a bygone way of life, he says, but rarely figured in the everyday; and those who have “innovated” their families outside of the white mainstream rarely did so by choice, and struggle in the present to repair conventional family bonds. All told, Cherlin opines on the side of natural law:
But one must recognize that forged families have some limitations. These kinship ties are easier to break because they are voluntary; neither strong norms nor laws stand in the way of ending them. They also take continual work to maintain: Although your sister is always your sister and your spouse is always your spouse, your close friend is part of your forged family only as long as you and she actively support each other.
This is a popular, and for many definitive, defense of the family bond, which takes on an ethical character insofar as it is both immutable and received. And yet, in setting forth their materialist determination of the family, Marx and Engels faced down an incredibly sophisticated version of this prejudice, in an account that forms a basis for many liberal defenses of the family today.
In his 1820 work, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, G.W.F. Hegel characterized the loving family as the “immediate substantiality of mind”—a paradigm of individuality in essential unity with an external group.12 But even Hegel’s portrayal of the family as a social metabolism requires a moment of departure from this cozy interdependence, where the individual’s life within this group attains its meaning only when the group begins to dissolve. At this point, the family member in question sets out into the world; not as an act of secession but succession, to marry and recommence the cycle by which the family is “completed”—or, why not, abolished.
The act of marriage, Hegel continues, is a willed arrangement by which family capital is exchanged: “The family, as person, has its real external existence in property; and it is only when this property takes the form of capital that it becomes the embodiment of the substantial personality of the family.”13 In this description, free exchange motivates exogenous marriage rite, which market relation Hegel imbues with spiritual necessity, defining marriage as an ethical exemplum—a necessarily loving and conscious unity between consenting individuals. This subjective accord finds its objective unity in a child, to which both parties are absolutely obliged. One could always choose to end a marriage; but this new, dependant relation is non-elective, and thus forms a natural basis for social responsibility and property alike, as the objectification of the family’s intersubjective will.
Children are not property themselves, Hegel continues, but must be raised at expense of the family’s common capital until they reach self-subsistence and are capable of holding property of their own; in which case the dissolution of the family is nearly complete, pending inheritance on the death of the father. Regarding this transaction, Hegel is clear: “the essence of inheritance is the transfer to private ownership of property which is in principle common.”14 Hegel notes that certain earlier ideas of inheritance favored appropriation by proximity, insofar as death transforms private property into wealth without an owner, and the family was simply nearest to the deceased. This, however, “disregards the nature of family relationship,” which necessitates the transmission of property from generation to generation as a principle of ethical life.
In spite of his idealism, Hegel grasps the essential relationship between the family and private property, and the difficulty of accounting for family bonds outside of the latter logic. Here we can perform a simple Marxist manoeuvre and turn Hegel on his big head; for a re-historicization of bourgeois right—which extrapolates private property relations from personal embodiment and filiation—suggests that the custodial family models itself on private property relations, much as the productive family is a staple institution of an earlier feudalism. Moreover, the ethico-legal function of marriage in Hegel’s system models the calling of the authorizing state—to assuage an antagonism immanent to society itself.
Certainly, Marx and Engels oppose this metaphysical scheme in their demand for the abolition of the right to inheritance; otherwise, the redistribution in advance of lineal wealth allocation. But can the normative social function of Hegel’s family extend beyond the bourgeois property relations that it otherwise models? What, if anything, of this order might remain after the abolition of bourgeois right and property?
The Logical Structure of Love
In their work, Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love, philosophers Toula Nicolacopoulos andGeorge Vassilacopoulos attempt to rewrite the account of familial love offered in the Philosophy of Right, in a manner that proves generative for a communist program of generalized care. As many rebuttals construe the family along similar lines to Hegel, as a timeless unit of ethical life, this work imagines other forms of objective solicitude, irrespective of sex, station, or relation.
Hegel’s description of familial love is based on an ideal unity, which may or may not be present in other intersubjective relationships. Altruism and solidarity, for example, needn’t recognize the particular individuality of the other; friendship proceeds without a public witness. If recognition is a crucial litmus, Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos argue, then the dynamic individuality that Hegel prizes is even absent from single-parenting, where the love of a parent for a child is initially asymmetrical; the child doesn’t recognize its self-unity in the parent as yet, and must move from undifferentiated identity with the parent to an atomic individuality before doing so.15 This insight is less disturbing than it sounds at first; for it only rejects the prospect of an unmediated ethical relationship. As noted above, the “single parent” exists only with reference to a double standard—nobody parents alone.
But what of marriage, the lawful relationship that culminates in the family? It’s true that the conceptual sacrament of marriage in Hegel is heterosexual, monogamous, dyadic; but its ethical necessity consists in loving and mutual consent. In Origins of the Family, Engels submits this implausible ideal to historical scrutiny, staging a dialectic of recognition; for where bourgeois property relations obtain, “the marriage is conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of convenience,” if not outright captivity. Elaborating on a theme from the Manifesto—that in many respects, the family has already been abolished for the proletariat—Engels ventures that real mutual love can only exist amid the formal equality of the oppressed:
Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat—whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective … The proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority.
Engels offers a historically specific definition of monogamy, as descended from property relations, that precludes the requirement of free consent. In this way, the disintegration of the family as a unit of production actually conditions love; though of course there are many other power differentials between people in a concrete situation, and in a patriarchal society marriage remains a point of access to a family wage. But Engels’ amoral claim by no means construes proletarianization as emancipatory in itself. One century later, John D’Emilio would ambivalently observe the correlation between “free labor” and free sexual association in a landmark essay on capitalism and gay identity, in an analysis that patiently attends to the domestic constraints placed upon women in the same conjuncture. These key materialist texts illuminate the difficulty of describing the family in terms of affective ties, and the impossibility of extrapolating affection from its legal sanction.
Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos understand the necessity of monogamy for Hegel, as “immediate exclusive individuality,” to denote the singularity of the beloved, where “exclusivity” denotes the relationship between a beloved’s attributes and their rare person, rather than a pact pertaining to exclusive use.16 This ingenious reading opens away from legalistic monogamy, affording ethical status to all manner of potentially concurrent relationships, but fails by the standard of property, where the institution of marriage presides over the distribution of economic benefit. But where the matter of family capital is concerned, Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos point out that Hegel defines family property as property that the family holds in common, that cannot be used by any family member in the capacity of the atomic individual. Truthfully, Nagle’s defense of the family as predictive of economic security, following Cherlin, is little more than a defense of this common property, to which empirical banality one must ultimately assent; it is better to have some wealth than none. But to expand the remit of the family beyond present recognition would surely change the meaning of collective wealth as well, including any protocol against the alienation of family property.
Most importantly, “although Hegel repeatedly invokes the biological family … he does not conflate this with the source of the ethical bond between parents and their children,” Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos and explain. Rather, “the ethically significant relationship between parents and children concerns the ‘second or spiritual birth of the children,’” namely their upbringing.17 Parenting for Hegel is ethically imbued because it has the negative aim of raising children out of instinct into the freedom of personality, beyond which Hegel offers no instructions or prescriptions as to the cultural situation or particulars of parenting. Thus the Hegelian approach of Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos “can recognise people sharing responsibility for raising children with a wider circle of intimate others. What matters for the ethical significance of parenting is whether or not those raising the children are related to each other and/or to the children through their mutual loving feeling.”18
Against heteronormativity—and an inconsequential homonormativity sourced from the reifications of queer theory, which seeks a universal figure of desire in historically proscribed behaviors—Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos recommend a social fabric of “multiple loving forms.” Where Cherlin’s churlishness is concerned, it suffices to say that his thinking is entirely constrained by a society based on generalized self-interest and competition. One needn’t believe in an alternative, nor in the possibility of change; but then one needn’t be a Marxist, either.
Old Habits
In 1920, Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai wrote extensively on the family for the journal Komunistka, or ‘The Woman Communist.’ Kollontai stages the question directly:
Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”.19
Noting the oppression of women within the traditional family, who are obliged to domestic labor and increasingly subject to the necessity of waged work outside the household, Kollontai observes that the family as a unit of production is disaggregated by capitalist expansion: “The circumstances that held the family together no longer exist. The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole.”20 Kollontai doesn’t simplistically bemoan this decline or superfluity, in which the family appears as an archaic form of organizing and disciplining labor, but presses further in observation of the historical character of this organization. The family is principally charged with education, in the Russian case; rather than expand this function, Kollontai wonders if it can’t be relieved of this task as well, envisioning the end of housework and domestic hierarchy.
As the individual household ceases to be productive, greater demands are to be made of the state; and Kollontai describes this movement in the precise terms of socialist transition. “Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility.”21 Kollontai’s subsequent proposals for dividing childcare in the service of “solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective,” and to overcome the strictures of “the old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring,” would surely scandalize readers of The Lamp every bit as much as Nagle’s lurid paraphrase of more recent, ultraleft opinion against the family.22
Yet Kollontai deals with the two facets or temporalities of family transformation that Nagle conflates—abolition and decline—as part of a movement: “There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity.”23 To this way of thinking, the family is not destroyed by voluntarist deviancy, but in the same way that any culture opens itself to change in an orthodox Marxist description—insofar as its private remit enters into a contradiction with increasingly socialized production. Kollontai consoles the caring parent:
Working mothers have no need to be alarmed; communists are not intending to take children away from their parents or to tear the baby from the breast of its mother, and neither are they planning to take violent measures to destroy the family. No such thing! The aims of communist society are quite different. Communist society sees that the old type of family is breaking up, and that all the old pillars which supported the family as a social unit are being removed: the domestic economy is dying, and working-class parents are unable to take care of their children or provide them with sustenance and education. Parents and children suffer equally from this situation.24
In a recent summary of Marxist thinking on the family, Alyson Escalante reminds the reader that Kollontai, like Marx, “points to capitalism’s own destruction of the family among the workers” as proletarianization proceeds apace. Moreover, Escalante notes, Kollontai writes to counsel the necessity of change, not a program of abolition per se, where capitalism has already weakened, and perhaps destroyed, the productive substrate of the family. Because of this insight, Kollontai’s hundred-year-old words can help one to imagine an objective and affective future for innumerably many loving, fighting forms. As Escalante writes:
In the face of the capitalist destruction of the role of the family, (Kollontai) simultaneously argues that attempts to hold on to the old family are both doomed and also naturalize women’s subordination, while simultaneously insisting that a new type of family is possible. She does not tell concerned workers that they must suck it up, that their fears are reactionary and that they must embrace a world without the family. Rather, she preserves the language of the family but reinterprets it into a collectivist, that is to say, a communist, version of the family. The old family is dead, capitalism has killed it, and so we have been invited to build and define a new family.
Family Borders
This is a powerful reply, if not to Nagle and to Brooks themselves, then to the conditions that they differently, and partially, address. While Brooks’ thought experiment attempts to recompose the American social fabric after the fashion of a corporation, he fares considerably better than Nagle in observing the necessity of change. Faced with the specter of collectivism, Nagle taunts: “but where will the village, this hypothetical replacement network of solidarity that will recreate and even improve upon the intense loyalty and selfless caregiving of parents and their children in the family unit come from?” One might suggest that this network will necessarily come from those parents and children whose fortunes require a total transformation of society, but that would be only too logical. As Nagle refuses to see communal supersession as a solution to, rather than a cause of, the objective decline of the bourgeois family, she misapprehends the bearing of its discontents. The support network that Nagle disparages is already immanent to the crisis of the family—which is only ever a crisis of capitalism, shored at home—and her language of “replacement” alludes to a different set of anxieties altogether.
Nagle’s unsuitable nostalgia for a recent period of social cohesion, shored in the miniature family as a bulwark against social chaos, is perhaps too typical of the American left, though her conservatism is near-total:
Nobody would have believed just a few months ago that, say, abolishing the police would become a tenet of mainstream American liberalism. Even rightwing politicians have been cowed more or less overnight into publicly agreeing with things beyond the wildest dreams of the most radical anarchist of just a few years ago. If the abolition of the family is the next demand of our successful cultural revolutionaries, it is easy to imagine how the legal infrastructure undergirding could be dismantled; its moral and cultural foundations are already vulnerable old structures just waiting to be tipped over. Who exactly is going to stop them?
Who, “exactly,” does this call intend to summon to the family’s defense? Nagle’s culture war proceeds on many fronts, and it’s certainly handy that she can’t turn in a 1500-word screed on the family without calling the police. But an inventory of her various journalistic stunts paints a fairly clear picture of her ideology. The cause of the American family has facilitated racial and sexual panic for more than a century, and unspecified concern for the health of “the family” as a reproductive project has long been a polite expression of anxiety over racial purity and demographics.
In The Left Case against Open Borders, an execrable piece from 2018, Nagle punches left again. Here Nagle argues that “open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.” Almost clause for clause, this sentence does the work that it attributes to irrational radicals, pitting workers against one another to the benefit of the ruling class. At any border, the contradiction between capital and labor means a relative porosity for capital flows and increased brutality and scrutiny for migrants; and an international division of labor is responsible for the domestic fortunes of a country’s working class in any case.25 “But the Left need not take my word for it,” Nagle gloats. “Just ask Karl Marx, whose position on immigration would get him banished from the modern Left.”
Nagle’s staggeringly incorrect reading of Marx quotes from a letter regarding the division of English proletarians and Irish proletarians: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself,” she recites. It’s difficult to enumerate the errors in thinking here. Where Marx sees a process of ethnic scapegoating, obscuring the true contradiction of labor and capital, Nagle chooses to see a contradiction between national interests, and her own racism is clear from her abuse of this citation. In the letter quoted above, Marx goes on to compare this divisive scenario to the enmity of “poor whites” for former slaves in the United States, anticipating W.E.B. Dubois’ description of whiteness as a “psychological wage,” preventing white workers from practicing solidarity by conferring public and legal benefits beyond simple remuneration.
It’s worth noting that there’s almost no chance that Nagle was familiar with Marx’s argumentation on this matter before seeking recourse to his authority. Rather than cite Marx’s 1870 correspondence with Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, in which this passage appears, Nagle’s bibliography points to an article by David L. Wilson, in which he quotes from Marx’s letter in order to make a very different argument. Wilson notes Marx’s assertion that Irish immigration precipitated a reduction in English workers’ wages—before theorizing the ideological utility of this national division for the ruling class, one might add—but is careful to note how racism and xenophobia create the climate in which migrant laborers face lower pay and worse conditions of work, putatively forcing wages down. The problem, Wilson concludes, is exploitation, not immigration.
Nagle’s national chauvinism is intimately related to her defense of the family; for closed borders and private families are two means of attempting to ensure the homogeneity and mores of a population. In Kill All Normies, Nagle portrays the online “alt-right” as a negation of the family-values conservatism evolved by pundits such as Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, which characterization both exaggerates the novelty of this phenomenon and paves the way for a rehabilitation of family values from the left. But as Sophie Bjork-James shows in her research into white nationalist web forums, the family is a central occupation, even a primary concern, of today’s online and alternative right:
Over the past few decades, changes in economic conditions and gender norms have created a proliferation of new family forms, further destabilizing the nuclear family—changes that effectively reduce the space of patriarchal power and disrupt the perceived division between personal and economic life … These conservative and racist activists fight to restore a model of the family, race, nation, and economy that has lost its hegemonic status.26
Bjork-James ventures a determination that eludes Nagle, where the family functions for its staunchest defenders as a fantastic unity beyond the economy and state, despite its historical existence as an expression of both. Ironically, it’s because of Nagle’s crude “class reductionism” that her economic analysis bottoms out at the usual racist canards—“cheap illegal labour,” “single parents,” and so on. Nagle attributes declining economic fortunes to the same scapegoats as the right—once an ethnographic quarry, now her preferred company.
Fordism and the Family Wage
For all of her dalliances with the right, it’s crucial to note that Nagle’s merely reflexive arguments have far more rigorous, if rigorously reactionary, precedent on the chauvinist left. One could look to sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, for example, whose grim assessment of the postwar welfare state was influential in the 2018 formation of Aufstehen, a German political coalition of “the materialist left, not the moral left.” Like Nagle, Streeck has a record of xenophobic invective, accusing refugee and asylum policy of serving elite interests by importing a foreign labor reserve.27 Streeck takes a special interest in the family, too—annotating its transformation after the decline of American industrial occupation in the postwar era, and the relative safety net extending from the factory to the father to his dependents. According to Streeck:
The social and family structure that the standard employment relationship had once underwritten has itself dissolved in a process of truly revolutionary change. In fact, it appears that the Fordist family was replaced by a flexible family in much the same way as Fordist employment was replaced by flexible employment, during the same period and also all across the Western world.28
Such an account offers the periodizing detail that Nagle omits. But Streeck also laments the disappearance of jobs from core capitalist countries at the same time as he divides the working class by national origin; thus his account of family “decline” is both tellingly chauvinistic, and elucidating in overlay. According to Streeck, “intensified commodification of labor, in particular the increased labor market participation of women, and the de-institutionalization of family relations,” are key factors in the decline of fertility in advanced industrial countries and not others.29 Political scientist Melinda Cooper calls attention to the apparent sexism of this description:
It was feminism, after all, that first challenged the legal and institutional forms of the Fordist family by encouraging women to seek an independent wage on a par with men and transforming marriage from a long-term, noncontractual obligation into a contract that could be dissolved at will. In so doing, feminists (whom he imagines as middle class) robbed women (whom he imagines as working class) of the economic security that came from marriage to a Fordist worker. By undermining the idea that men should be paid wages high enough to care for a wife and children, feminism helped managers to generalize the norm of precarious employment and workplace flexibility, eventually compromising the security of all workers.30
One ought to note the parallels between Streeck’s account of the flexibilized family and his characterization of the welfare state destabilized by rapid demographic change, in which he describes European immigration policy as an executive adjustment to wages and employment opportunities for domestic workers, enacted after the progressive desires of “liberal-cosmopolitans.” In broad strokes, Streeck’s sketch of the post-Fordist dissolution of the family implies an infiltration of the national economy from within—a domestication of the national economy transpiring in tandem with the global operators of deindustrialization. As with his disparaging remarks about the role of multiculturalism in economic deregulation, Streeck’s paranoia leads him to non-dynamically assert the leading role of culture in the family’s transformation:
Cultural change—the spread of non-standard forms of social life—may have paved the way for economic and institutional change, in particular the rise of non-standard forms of employment, with the deregulation of society as a forerunner to the deregulation of the economy … Clearly, the decisive development in this context was the mass entry of women into paid employment, which eventually came to be celebrated across the political spectrum as a long-overdue liberation from servitude in the feudal village of the patriarchal family. Especially for the liberal wing of the rapidly growing feminist movement, the associated increase in economic uncertainty and social instability appeared to be a price worth paying for what was seen as secular social progress.31
Streeck glancingly counters his own hypothesis with a more substantive claim—that a decline in real wages might have forced more members of a given household into the workforce in order to support their middle-class standard of living, for one—but doesn’t really attempt to mediate these two perspectives. As one should understand, social movements do not emerge under conditions of the participants’ choosing; and the abatement of the family organization isn’t a revenge fantasy of its feminized discontents. By Streeck’s account, incorrigible women en masse appear too covetous of precarity to recognize that they are about to destroy the patriarchal family wage, of which they are the foremost beneficiaries.
In the post-Fordist Genesis of Streeck’s simplifications, it seems inconceivable that women could make political demands upon capital, for liberation from the household, or for a subsequent social wage. Notably then, even though his own politics offer no greater destination than the recent past, Streeck already sees this post-Fordist deregulation of the family culminating in a paradoxical redistribution of responsibility. Streeck observes a trend toward the socialization of reproduction in a number of countries, including free childcare and wages for stay-at-home caregivers—and compares this to a shameful situation in the United States, where single parents have fewer real supports than any core capitalist country.
New Poor Law
When Nagle cites the outcomes of single parenting in North America without any reference to the paucity of available resources, she imputes the violence of the state to proletarian parents, exaggerating and denying their agency all at once. This is a fairly standard manoeuvre, that construes systemic obstacles as failings of personal morality. In its perfected form, this ideology makes moral demonstration into a condition of social support; which is, in broad strokes, exactly how the American welfare system was rearticulated during periods of neoliberal restructuring. Thus, as Melinda Cooper explains, broad neoliberal reforms in the period following the collapse of the Fordist paradigm sought to resuscitate a kind of poor law, emphasizing marital responsibility and familial relation as crucial institutions of economic security, apart from the welfare state.
This powerful ideology justifies the low participation of the United States government in social assistance programs, as observed by Streeck. But for all of his cultural fixations, Streeck’s empirical comparison between American and European data sets omits crucial mediations of data. The crisis of the 1970s was a crisis of the racial state, writes theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, in which “poverty had to be colored black”; and the reconstructed welfare system that emerged from this decade further entrenched this expectation. This era’s debates fixated on the issue of single parents, “as a way to animate state policy and mobilize a manufactured popular memory that made (black) poverty the causal derivative of welfare.”32
Cooper observes the special scrutiny reserved for federal assistance programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was accused by the conservative left and the right alike of “undermining the American family and contributing to the problem of inflation.”33 This program comprised an important arm of the new poor law, establishing a state chaperone of ruthless prurience—“man-in-the-house” rules, for example, permitted random home inspection to determine whether or not a program participant was in a sexual relationship with a man. If they were, Cooper explains, benefits were revoked, as the male houseguest was deemed “a proper substitute for the paternal function of the state.”34 In this respect, the new liberal welfare regime and its flagship programs functioned as the precise obverse of the Fordist family wage system—presuming male attendance to betoken financial stability. In this lawful arrangement, Alexander says, the state assumes the position of “white fathers to blackness,” recalling the “memory of secret yet licit white paternity under slavery and its possible vengeful reemergence at a different historical moment.”35
As both Cooper and Alexander discuss, the AFDC program proved especially controversial for its perceived benefit to single Black mothers at public expense, even though it was relatively inexpensive among social security programs and the majority of recipients were white. Where the paternal function of the state is concerned, Alexander diagnoses a conservative moralism according to which “it was an irresponsibly absent black masculinity that made the potential conjugal couple incomplete and shifted the fiduciary obligations of the private patriarch onto the public patriarch, thereby forcing an uncomfortable and unwanted paternity onto the white public patriarch.”36 With this dynamic in mind, conservative attacks on single parents appear less a matter of superior morality than an ironic disputation of responsibility, historical and present.
Democrats and Republicans alike accused the AFDC program of fostering dependence on state support, even though benefits had declined precipitously since 1970; and AFDC was replaced with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) by President Bill Clinton in 1996. PRWORA replaced AFDC with a highly conditional program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), offering benefits at approximately one-third of the poverty level; and proliferating conditions that were found to contravene human rights, even permitting states to withhold benefits from mothers who can’t identify the biological father of their children. In this respect, Cooper suggests, PRWORA is both precedent-setting and paradoxical—using the conservative sacrament of the heterosexual family to pursue a radical neoliberal agenda of atomized personal responsibility.
The “ideological blackening of welfare,” Alexander says, also adversely affects other racialized groups. She calls attention to the “ideological proximity between PRWORA (and) the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act also of 1996,” which work at once to “make welfare, labor, and immigration deeply intertwined.” Here Alexander follows the work of Payal Banerjee:
Banerjee argues that the state derived support for PRWORA from the widely held belief that “illegal” and “legal” immigrants relied on state public support and that prohibiting immigrants from receiving public assistance would act as a powerful deterrence to immigration. As a result, both “legal” immigrants (noncitizens) and “illegal” immigrants became ineligible for certain provisions under PRWORA.37
Weighing the Anchor
This complicated saga of targeted racism, massive deregulation, and misogynist stricture forms the basis for Nagle’s assertions as to the non-viability of single-parent homes and the apparently poor outcomes of non-patriarchal care. These are the family values that Nagle defends—a mercenary hodge-podge of spiritualized economic precepts, essentialized market relations, phobic prohibitions, and paranoia. It goes without saying that families of all kinds are places of intense care and devotion, among many other things; but that guise is ultimately incidental to Nagle’s rallying cry, where she knows very well that it is not being criticized by Marxist feminists for any of those occasional features. As noted above, the ethical dimension of family life is itself contingent, consisting of a collective life that can even help to envision its historical transformation.
The family is not only a historical phenomenon, subject to alteration; but as Bjork-James notes, can also serve as “an anchor of stability in a time of increasing economic and social change.”38 At its most constructive, Nagle’s argument tends to nostalgia for mid-century conditions of capital accumulation, in which sweeping and systemic exclusion procured limited security for a politically enfranchised section of the working class and their preordained dependents. This is a Trojan horse for racism and xenophobia—MAGA with medicare, to be blunt.
Where the family is an obvious synecdoche of nation, Nagle’s convenient narrative of its decline dovetails with her isolationism. This is a unified position, and a fascist one; such talking points have always traveled by way of a superficial socialist concern, and aren’t difficult to spot in their enthusiasms and vendettas. One might even ask whether Nagle herself is worth the trouble. But arguments like hers prove oddly persuasive in certain socialist circles. The Class Unity subgrouping of the DSA, who profess a materialist Marxist politics, enthusiastically promoted Nagle’s article on social media, for example; and her prejudices mirror those of a “traditional left,” characterized by Donald Parkinson as “socially conservative, economically leftist.” As the meaningless abstraction of “populism” tempts a back and forth traffic between these conventional poles, it is more vital than ever to insist upon the Marxist legacy of abolition; “to find the new world through criticism of the old one,” one might say. For communists don’t rally to the recent, nor the distant, past. Our real descendancy is in a better future—one in which family chauvinism, white supremacy, and class privilege are given to history in their entirety.
Rudy and Annie join the two co-chairs of Philly Socialists, Mara and Janaya, for what starts as a conversation on the issues women and non-men comrades face when organizing, and ends up being a discussion of Philly Socialists’ base-building activities and their philosophy on the party. The episode starts off with a discussion of the experiences in PS to make the spaces more welcoming to everyone, the role of child-care and of strong sexual harassment policies, and how to provide spaces for everyone to become leaders.
This is grounded in what PS calls base-building: for example, their English as a second language classes, their work in the Philadelphia Tenants Union and their community garden, where PS organize neighborhood residents to fight back against gentrification and reclaim land in Philadelphia. The conversation continues to PS’s view of how the party should arise, before cycling back to the issues that started it.
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Donald and Lydia join human rights lawyer and fellow Marxist Anne McShane to discuss her recent PhD thesis on the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They discuss the origins of the Zhenotdel, how it attempted to solve the shortcomings of the women’s movement in the second international and its role in women’s liberation after the October Revolution. The conversation then pivots to the specific focus of Anne’s thesis: the changing role the Zhenotdel played in women’s emancipation in the Central Asian Republics. They discuss how the Zhenotdel related to and incorporated indigenous women into organizing, the Central Committee’s takeover of Zhenotdel policy that resulted in the hujum campaign of mass unveiling and the disastrous reaction that followed, how this campaign can be contextualized within the rise of Stalinist policies. They end the episode with the final dissolution of the Zhetnodel in 1930 and the sanitization of Nadezhda Krupskaya’s figure.