Can't touch me!

‘Tis true what angsty teenagers have long suspected: the family unit is a corrupt building block of civilization. No other social grouping has been used to oppress individuals in such a deeply personal and intimate manner. No other social construct has been used to categorise, judge and delineate boundaries, awarding punishment, pain and plenty.

At once a unit of oppression, at once itself oppressed, the nuclear family unit is the tool of the patriarchy and the capitalist class; it is itself the gadget with which states, countries, nations, continents, cultures have replicated power inbalances in social and material relations at the macroscopic level. It is, in other words, the whipped bitch’ of the ruling classes. Look yonder, her tail doth tremble between her shanks!

How so? Clearly, when we are but wee toddlers and our brains as soft and addled as custard (or a delightful pan of scrambled eggs), we absorb at pernicious rates the practices, ideas and beliefs of those from whose loins we spring forth from, and from whose seed we germinate from. These we know as our parents. It takes years, decades even, before our minds are truly our own, and even then, vestiges – oh those dreaded, calcified remnants of thoughts, speech, beliefs, habitualised actions that do not truly leave us!

And therein lies the crux – the way family units replicate unjust social roles and unequal divisions of labour. Just look at how boys and girls are treated (‘tis but a small difference in gonads, but it makes a world of difference in every other way!) are duplicated through eons and eons of one representative of each major gender. Yes, Father, you are all powerful and knowing. You are the light, and the conqueror of nature, and the bringer of bread. Yes Mother, you are nurturing and loving. You are the provider of the Teat of Plenty, and you are warmth and moist and darkness. And you are the Ideal, and you are the Absolute, and yes, that means that boy babies will wear blue and girl babies will wear pink because I TOLD YOU SO, and you better DO AS I SAY, AND NOT AS I DO. But in this case, I DO, I DO, I DO, because the ones who came before me have done so, and the ones who came before them did so too. Verily I say, Hegel would be proud, for we are at the end of history, a comet with a trail blazing behind it from which we see all that came before us.

But in what other ways has the family unit become a replicator of ruinous lies? Here we must cease to judge it mercilessly, and instead look at it as an object of pity and contempt. For the family unit, as has been stated before, is the bitch of the ruling classes, the polity. The government, our dear, good, Roman government, uses the family unit like it uses a slatternly girl from the harem – as a receptacle for its odious substances, to be discarded and called forth whenever desired. It is the family unit that bears the expense – oh the US$18k per child (and more so, if one attends a private school, thus becoming one of the snobbish ones most likely to send one’s own malefalous offspring to two decades of lacrosse and golf lessons) that the polity durst rather laugh then reach into his (with great, great deliberation do I use ‘he’… were it not ‘she’!) layered pockets.
The notion of the family unit must at once cover up its hegemonic tyranny by insisting on its own necessity… but soft! Do we not need our families? Can we not imagine a world without our families? Would we not die, of loneliness and devastation without our families? Is it not, as Marx would say of religion, ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’? Yes, yes and more.

These contradictions will render the family unit torn at its seams, the seams of which the polity stitch together with all speed and intention. And we must both tear it apart yet mitigate its worst effects, but with our hearts heavy and souls dark… for if it continue to be its instrument yielded by the people against the people for the people, we durst not dare live as we do now nor forever, a future too deep and distraught to parse.
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No, I am not drunk. Nor high. But since lefties are so 'dreadfully against the family unit', I thought it high time someone actually set it out in writing. Yes, we hate families. Yes, we eat babies. Yes, we go out and get abortions to spice up our lazy Sunday afternoons.

Labels: Straw-leftism