Chapter 09 - Crisis of the Family

Section Notes¶

Unraveling Families¶

• Family binds care and coercion, so is always ambivalent, conflicted, and failing

• Capitalism accelerates, universalizes crisis

• Families destabilized by:

  • Dynamics of long-term capitalist development

  • Demands, uncertainty of reproducing oneself and household in the market

  • Precarity of proletarian existence

• The (white, cis, het) fantasy of the family can hide its problems temporarily but the destablizing nature of capitalism always uncovers them eventually

• Unraveling of proletarian families under neoliberalism

  • Pros: more LGBT acceptance, ability to live alone

  • Cons: stagnant wages, dismantling of welfare states, collapse of public health, expansion of racial terror, absence of sustained social movements

Closing of the Workers’ Movement¶

• Since 1970s, manufacturing overcapacity = overaccumulation of capital

  • First side of Marx’s “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”

• Deindustrialization of West, slowing industrialization of East Asia, expansion of informal workforce

  • Core strategy of workers movement fails

  • Growing surplus population

    • Other side of Marx’s “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”

  • Instead of unifying, working class has become highly fragmented

• Movements which previously tried to abolish the family turned to liberal reformist strategies

  • Such as gay liberation movement, welfare rights movement

  • Generally more limited legal gains; sometimes moving backwards

Stagnating Wages, Transforming Families¶

• Decline of male-breadwinner family form among white working class households

• 30% of women worked in the 1930s -> 60+% in the 1990s

  • Pushed into workforce because of falling real wages

  • Lower fertility

• Reproductive labor becomes a commodity

  • “Global care chains”

  • Paid domestic labor by international migrants

Conflicted Freedoms¶

• Growth in gay relationships, transitions, complex nontraditional families

• Global migration: tech improvements help maintain contact, send remittances

• Personal domination (by husbands, father) -> impersonal domination (by wage)

Welfare Austerity and the Private Household¶

• Since 1970s, declining global profitability -> rise of neoliberalism

  • Welfare cuts enforce dependence on family

  • Push for traditional families, antiblackness on the rise

• Overview of Margaret Thatcher’s (UK) and Bill Clinton’s (US) policies/attitudes

• Welfare reform worsened Black poverty

Solitary Miseries¶

• Increasing dependence on family especially hard for those without access to it

  • Fear of being alone in old age

  • Fear drives toxic relationships and dating dynamics, people don’t leave when they should

  • Increase of abuse & lovelessness

• Society is unequipped to care for those without families

Persistent Fantasies¶

• Family in crisis, but rhetoric persists, mostly reactionary

• Right-wing and religious uses

• On left, against “distractions” of women’s & gay liberation to class struggle

  • Homonormativity

• Continued ideological power of family as claim to moral, social, cultural legitimacy

• All yearn for care, support, and love

Quotes¶

“Crisis is inherent to the family. As an institution of class society, the family is perpetually destabilized by every period of economic and political transformation. The psychic development of each generation necessarily entails the interweaving of both identification and differentiation against their upbringing. In binding together both care and coercion, the family is necessarily ambivalent, conflicted, and always failing.” (pp. 145)

“Capitalism accelerates and universalized the inherent crisis of the family. Both capitalism (according to Marx) and the family (according to Freud) are constituted through perpetual crisis built into their basic structure. The dynamics of long-term capitalist development, the demands and uncertainty of reproducing oneself and one’s household in the market, and the precarity of proletarian existence all destabilize any given familial arrangement, As a fantasy of white heteronormativity, the nuclear family form can momentarily obscure its myriad constradictions and forms of violence. But the social binds and structures of class society that enable family formation always also rupture their false unity.” (pp. 145)