How (Some Homies Argue) Sex-Positive Communes Will Replace Families
.jpg)
My friend, who I'll just call A, lent me Pinko, Issue One, a publication whose "task is not to deliver a new agenda or program, but to clarify and reflect the activity that trannies, dykes, faggots and militants are already taking up." In short, it is a queer-centered radical press, with a anti-authoritarian Marxist (or perhaps anarchist bent) clearly influenced by the likes of Tiqqun ("Pinko," by the way "is a pejorative coined in 1925 in the United States to describe a person regarded as being sympathetic to communism"). A hit me up yesterday saying they wanted me to mail the little book back to them (presumably because they are in need of entertainment during this Corona time). I asked if I could read at least one piece in it before I returned it (though I asked with shame, because I've had the thing for months), and they gave me permission.
I chose ME O'Brien's piece on "Communizing Care," exploring the notion of what care would look like in a world in which the family was abolished. Radical queer writing often centers the destruction of the family as a necessary prerequisite for having a society in which people are free from coercion on matters of gender and sexuality. Of course, in the present day, the family tends to be patriarchal, divides labor in particular ways (with most of the "reproductive" labor falling on femmes), and very much un-chosen (and in this sense coercive). For many radical theorists, this nuclear family is not worth saving through feminist interventions into the home; it is fundamentally corrupt.
O'Brien enters the conversation to say that, while all this may be true, the family is nevertheless a respite under the current capitalist macro-structures. Despite its worst elements, it tends to provide the material needs for those who are not themselves workers (the young, the old, and all those unable to work themselves) and often provides emotional and social support, i.e. love. The combined material and social-emotional support that families currently offer—what can be generalized as "care"—is not something to brushed over lightly. How will these needs be met in a family-less world?
For O'Brien the answer lies in the "commune" (cue eye rolls). Obscurantist leftist writers love to throw around commune-based language without ever explicitly defining it, and in practice using it to mean everything and nothing at the same time. O'Brien does better than most, suggesting that the antecedents of utopic communes can be seen every time there are large mobilizations that wind up building communist infrastructure, such as Occupy Wall Street and Standing Rock. In physical spaces where (in addition to supporting the specific political struggle of the moment) people's material and emotional needs are met, the family is essentially replaced. A general ethic of care, giving freely (as well as generally opening to unfettered sexual and gendered possibilities) trumps all the narrowness of mainstream life.
To drive the point home, O'Brien goes on a deep dive into the writings of Joseph Fourier, a French socialist utopian writer, and contemporary of Marx. His imaginative works took the abolition of the family to a truly wonderful extreme (albeit in the mid 1800s, way before it was cool). He envisioned communes of 1,600 people in which all activity was organized around desire. People would do the work they were most drawn to, each commune attracting a diversity of people based on the kind of work they liked. Thus the central organizational principle of society would be desire, rather than—what he argues it was at his time of writing—coercion. Furthermore, Fourier suggested that utopia would guarantee everyone not only a "social minimum," meeting their material needs, but also a "sexual minimum." Indeed, it would be the collective responsibility of each commune to make sure each of its members psycho-sexual desires were realized. Of course, there would be no such thing deviant gender or sexuality expression, all would be open. Yet further, and this is where it gets truly wild, rather than resolving conflict through war, roaming bands of horny teenagers from each commune would engage in orgies with those they had conflict. The "best" sexual performers would win, and the conflict dealt with. Needless to say, I was SCREAMING (in the recent, colloquial sense) while reading the piece, pausing often to read sections aloud to my house-companion.
Ultimately, in line with the Tiqqunist strains of communization theory I've read, O'Brien argue that communism will not come from some big plan (e.g. programmatic Marxism), but spontaneously through insurrection. At the moment of massive revolution, communized spaces will replace the family, taking over social reproductive labor (meeting material and emotional needs) on a large scale, and doing so in much more liberatory ways. Importantly, even where people voluntarily chose to hang onto ways of living that resembled the current family structures (e.g. monogamous couplings, kids raised by biological parents) they would no longer be tied to economic survival, removing their coercive necessity. Today families are lifeboats in a turbulent, stormy sea that people cling to for dear life. To be disowned by a family is to loose not only love (if there was any there), but the means to survive. In the future utopia "families" will be formed by mutual desire and flexible and, always, exitable.
To hear O'Brien tell it, this is inevitable: After the insurrection, "isolated households would lack the means of materially reproducing themselves [i.e. surviving] without access to the market and market-based systems of distribution like supermarkets and box stores and their associated supply chains. Disrupting capitalist production, the state and family would necessitate their rapid replacement with new institutions, chiefly, the collective life of the commune (54)."
In short, take out all O'Brien's fancy language, and they are saying that the commune (defined with disappointing vagueness) should replace the family, and is equipped to do so quite well. There is of course the likelihood that after an insurrection reactionary and counter revolutionary tendencies will emerge, pushing back towards the family. But who will follow them? One commune orgy should be enough to win dissenters over.
