Morning Comrades and welcome to the 2nd part of this series in which we will go through the conceptual and material ideas around “Family”, how it relates to Property, Patriarchy and ultimately Capitalism. Today we are predominately going to look at the history of the concept and why we should talk about it, today.
Again, a few disclaimers before we start: I write from a Marxist Materialist perspective that is socialized in North Western Europe and from a male perspective. There are heaps of other perspectives that are not only valid but important to read and understand to finish out tapestry of understanding and action.
Family. The word alone carries with it so many heavy emotions, infinite interpretations and performances that examining it feels like walking over a spider web of immeasurable proportions. It is precisely this seemingly infinite reality of possible performances of “Family” that makes it so relevant in todays quest for a better tomorrow, as on the one hand it is one of the main building blocks upon which capitalism exists and it also proves capitalisms universality. The reason why the discussion around Family is so essential in our understanding of our world and how to change it is because the metaphysical and material performance of Family is rooted in the idea and and again, performance of Property. If one wants to understand the patriarchal reality, the material relationship of us all, then we have to understand Property and what it means. This is precisely why Marx & Engels called for the abolition of Private Property, not to be edge-lords that piss off rich bastards but because they understood that root issue behind all of societies ills. To be absolutely clear, Family and Property are tightly connected and in their presently understood form cannot exist without one another.
Let’s backtrack though before this email gets too theoretical. As a child I never questioned my own reality and our Family. I had a mum and dad, a sister and we lived in an apartment, both parents worked and that lived experience defined what a Family was to me. Until the trauma set it - whilst there are some patriarchal anomalies in my own experience lets just say that my entire frame work broke into irreparable pieces by the time I was 13. Around this time I mostly relied on my grandparents ( that lived in Spain, and not Poland like I did ) for any sort of guidance / framework but that only went so far. So I decided to build a new family that offered the potential of stability, guidance and love, mostly around my friends, a few teachers that knew what was going on and so on. By the time I was 18, I semi-understood that “Family” was nothing but an idea that I could shape according to my needs and essentially divorced myself from the material, but certainly not the emotional, confines of my genetic / socialized family. Honestly, not the greatest of journeys but for what it is worth I led me on this path and here we are.
In short, not only is it worth asking what Family means but more importantly why does it function the way it does? At this juncture it is absolutely vital to make a few very clear points. Whilst “patriarchy” exists in all social classes as an underlying engine of sorts, the experience and definitions between the Upper/Bourgeoise and the Working Classes is vastly different. The lived reality of “Father” working and selling his labour for wages to “Mother” engaging in all reproductive and care work for no wages applies mostly and almost exclusively to the upper classes. In the case of the working classes, the “Mother” engages in wage labour for less wages AND unpaid reproductive and care work. A lot of the analysis’, especially when reading texts written by Marx / Engels etc where written in entirely different tapestries of economic and social relations - and their conclusions have to be understood as a framework to apply to whatever regional / social / economic realities you exist in - welcome to dialectical materialism by the way.
At this juncture, another disclosure. I am using predominantly heteronormative, binary constructs of relations here. This is not to erase the infinite other realities, absolutely not, they have always existed and will always be cherished / defended / supported from this author and this community - however, a lot of these realities are missing from the historical records and since we are going down a historical rabbit hole I can only use the sources known. Just so we clear on the subject.
It is undeniable that our understanding of the idea of Family is based on a patriarchal structure - that is to mean, that the “man” is in charge and “his” needs are the top of the needs pyramid. Every relationship that exists, exists to serve the productivity of the “man”, be care, reproductive and so on. The questions really here then is why? All too often this will get brushed off with “it’s the way it has always been” and the occasional abstract “god wills it so” and even more occasionally you’ll get the deepish “men are stronger and utilize force to establish their superiority” or “it’s genetics”, or even “it’s how capitalism works” - all of which are wrong.
Here is an important take for you to remember: patriarchy is not caused by capitalism but uses the concept for its survival. More important, the deconstruction of Capitalism will not mean the end of the patriarchal structuring of relations. The patriarchal structuring of the Family is much older than capitalism yet, according to the latest anthropological science, is at best an aberration and it has everything to do with our understanding of property and ownership. Human societies weren’t always male-dominated. This aberration came about when we, as a species, became farmers – and that suggests ways to roll back towards a more equal system.
For most of our history, we have been hunter-gatherers, and patrilocal (n.b.: relating to a pattern of marriage in which the couple settles in the husband's home or community.) residence is not the norm among modern hunter-gatherer societies. Instead, either partner may move to live with the “in-laws”, or a couple may relocate away from both their families. According to Hrdy ( University of California at Davis ), a degree of egalitarianism is built into these systems. If they reflect what prehistoric hunter-gatherers did, women in those early societies would have had the choice of support from the group they grew up with, or the option to move away from oppression.
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led said study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
This changed around 12,000 years ago. With the advent of agriculture and homesteading, people began settling down. They acquired resources to defend, and power shifted to the physically stronger males. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers began living near each other, property was passed down the male line, and female autonomy was eroded. Obviously, this wasn’t a sudden event - similar to a meteor crash, but more realistically, a regression that place over hundreds of years. As a result, the argument goes, patriarchy emerged. In other words, at the point in time when our ancestors decided to claim land as theirs ( for reasons that still eludes most scientists- the most likely theory at this point are ecological factors - something to keep in mind as we are approaching a massive disruption to our ecology ) we created the concept of ownership and property was defended physically- and this reality in turn then extended towards people, especially those physically “unable” to provide the same level of protection that the “stronger” individual did. The shift from an egalitarian contract between all possibly sexes to a male dominated one ultimately rests on the idea of property. At first, physical land and subsequently and literally everything else. All ideologies, be they religious, economic, social and thereon exist to defend to right to ownership and ownership is defended through violence and to be clear, that includes all types of physical and non-physical violence, as well as the threat thereof.
Again, I am not a psychologist let alone a medical doctor but there seems to be a reason that “greed” is the main cause of concern for all philosophical and religious movements based around the idea of peace and harmony. I have no idea if it is possible to trace or link, scientifically, the understanding of property - ownership - greed - to maleness, genetically and / or presented but it is an undeniable reality we all exist under since then. It’s tempting to assume male dominance is the natural state of human society. It just isn’t. It is a construct that is based around the reality of property, at its core, of course, that has developed into the reality of what we have now, with all its proverbial tentacles worth deconstructing.
The question remains why this is important and why spend time on this subject, and furthermore, why a development that took place well over 10`000 years ago should be of note today. The way I understand it is that at the core of our ills, the question of property, in the grandest of concepts, remains the ultimate question. If we can establish that property includes people, than property is the first and biggest concept to deconstruct - in order to establish a just and egalitarian societies. For too long have we, and that includes all sexes, too quietly submitted to the aberration that is a patriarchal construct of relations. Specifically, this of course ties into the existence of what we call “Family” and that, my dear comrades, is something I will get into tomorrow. Families as a concept, their history, how it has changed since Feudalism, Proto-Capitalism, our current dystopia and what do do about it.
Thank you for your time, attention and support, until tomorrow!
Yours, without compromise,
V.
Burn the patriarchy boys club down as a societal model and return to matriarchy systems/councils.