Who Cares?
Today, as Rupture 12 is published, two referendums to amend the Constitution as it relates to care and the family are taking place in the south of Ireland. The outcome won’t make much practical difference to families and carers, unfortunately. A ‘Yes Yes’ result would recognise unmarried families for the first time and delete archaic sexist language about “woman’s life within the home”. However, a new gender neutral article that says the state will “strive to support'' family care will continue to relegate care to the domestic sphere of the family, rather than seeing it as a collective right and responsibility. The government has yet again refused to do anything to recognise the rights of people with disabilities. They are not explicitly mentioned in either the constitution or the proposed new text and are there only implicitly, reduced to objects of family care that the state will "strive to support".
This article appears in Rupture 12, as part of our special feature on ‘The Family’, subscribe today:
There is also a certain hypocrisy in portraying care as gender neutral when it so demonstrably is not. But even if care really was gender neutral, “responsibilising” the family for it means that the family will remain oppressive for parents and children alike. Is gender-neutral oppression the maximum we can aspire to? Or should the institution of the family itself be abolished - and what does that actually mean?
Family lock-down
First, let’s take a step back to the first wave of COVID-19, which brought our collective atomisation into individual households into sharp relief. Told to stay at home, all we had were the people we share a roof with. For some this meant solitary confinement or a never-intended intimacy with flatmates; for most it meant ever closer communion with our beloved nuclear families!
For me, with a 5 month-old and a 2 year-old, lockdown didn’t make all that much difference. If anything, it was helpful - if it meant your partner was around more. When you have a baby you're basically in lockdown anyway, bound to an anarchic primal creature that lives by its own prehistoric evolutionary needs. Babies care not for capitalist creations like clock time - for them there is no future and no past, only an endless overwhelming now. The random and relentless frequency with which they feed, wake and shit is fundamentally incompatible with any form of capitalist productivity. Most industrialised countries acknowledge this by giving mothers paid maternity leave - but this also sends the clear message that this baby is the woman’s responsibility and no one else’s.
““When you have a baby you’re basically in lockdown anyway, bound to an anarchic primal creature that lives by its own prehistoric evolutionary needs””
In Ireland, the only way for a father to get the six months’ paid leave to which women are entitled on the birth of a child is if the mother dies. Death, incapacity or extreme wealth are the only ways out of compulsory primary caregiving for the vast majority of women. And in almost all those situations it's another woman - a granny, an aunt or a childcare worker, who carries the can. That's not to say childcare is straightforwardly a burden. It’s not like cleaning toilets, though cleaning up human excrement is a major part of it! It can be the most meaningful and emotionally rewarding thing you ever do - which no one would ever say about cleaning toilets.
““Parents are routinely expected to work a double shift: as paid labour units for capitalism and as parents””
The fact that it was so easy during COVID for the state to just abolish formal childcare and education overnight - but still expect parents to go to work, or to give up work to homeschool kids abruptly cut off from all real world social interaction - exposed the sheer unreasonableness of capitalism for families. Parents are routinely expected to work a double shift: as paid labour units for capitalism and as parents made responsible for caring for our children and ensuring that they in turn develop into functional capitalist labour units. If that’s not possible, for instance if our children have disabilities requiring full-time care, we are expected to take on a lifelong responsibility for caring for them and often to live in poverty for the rest of our lives while doing so.
Familiar inequality and injustice
Of course in normal times, the state takes on varying degrees of responsibility for different aspects of childcare and education. In Ireland, this includes subsidising childcare and education up to third level, providing some free GP and hospital care and so on. But the day-to-day labour and most of the cost of feeding, clothing and housing children overwhelmingly falls on parents and the family. One study estimated that to employ a full-time homemaker would cost €55,000 a year. Yet working parents are expected to do it all in their spare time. Responsibilising the nuclear family for child rearing is so ingrained that it is rarely fundamentally questioned. But it is at the root of so much inequality in our society - both for women who still do the vast majority of care work and for kids and the grown-ups they become.
In Ireland, 86% of lone parents, 77% of Carer’s Allowance recipients and 90% of people who work full-time in the home are women. Most women combine unpaid care work with paid full or part-time work and although men are doing more unpaid care work than before, women still do twice as much - 28 hours a week on average, compared to 14 hours for men. This means we are poorer and have less free time than men. These gender roles transfer into the workplace where women make up the vast majority of traditionally low-paid caring roles: 99% of childcare workers and over 90% of nurses are women.
““You could be born without anaesthetic and under bombardment in Gaza, or to a well-off family with the best of medical care in Tel Aviv””
The nuclear family is also efficiently transmitting gender roles to future generations. From the age of 9 girls do more housework than boys and by age 13, girls are seven times more likely to do the cooking while boys are five times more likely to put the bins out - which is far less time-consuming of course! The nuclear family is equally efficient at maintaining inequalities of income and wealth. Life expectancy at birth for boys living in the poorest areas of the country is five years shorter than for boys born into the best-off areas; for girls it’s four and a half years. Half of children from the richest areas go to the top universities, four times the rate for children from the poorest areas.
Globally it’s even more stark. You could be born without anaesthetic and under bombardment in Gaza, or to a well-off family with the best of medical care in Tel Aviv. The family you are born into is so totally arbitrary, a literal accident of birth that defies all notions of equality. Beyond socioeconomics, the happiness of families and their aptitude for childrearing varies dramatically with huge impacts on child development. For many kids, the family is a warm, safe and loving place but for others it’s a place of loneliness, violence and fear. Many of these inequalities could be significantly reduced through improved and universal free public services but it’s hard to see how they can be abolished completely while we are all still atomised into nuclear families with vastly varying standards of living, atmosphere and expectations. To do that we need go deeper - and look at the arguments of ‘family abolitionists’.
What does family abolition mean?
A common misconception of family abolition is that we Marxists want to split up families and force everyone to live in communes. This is not true, obviously: what we want is to abolish the capitalist invention of the “nuclear family” whereby parents are made almost totally responsible for childrearing and there is little or no escape for children either. Despite some improvements in children’s rights in recent decades, when it comes to healthcare, freedom of movement, or educational choices, they are basically still treated as the property of their parents.
A Marxist approach to childrearing would be very different. It would socialise care so it becomes the shared responsibility of a democratically organised communal society rather than the sole responsibility of parents. This would give greater freedom and autonomy for both parents and children and provide an antidote to late capitalism’s loneliness epidemic. Unfortunately, our associations with socialised care are likely to be negative: it can conjure up images of Romanian orphanages, mother-and-baby homes or profit-hungry crèche chains. At best, we might think of expanding whatever good public services currently exist, like a nice school or community centre. But it’s hard to imagine what an entire future caring communal society might look like. No one has any experience or frame of reference for that.
Marx’s general understanding of communism as a re-fusion on a higher level of earlier forms of communal society (“primitive communism”) with capitalist levels of economic development can give us some pointers. In contrast to the very centralised and undemocratic states that emerged under Stalinism, what Marx - and revolutionaries like Lenin and Gramsci - envisaged was a free classless society based on democratic workplace and communal self-organisation. There would be no need for a centralised state in a capitalist sense, wielding a monopoly of force to impose the rule of a dominant class over all other classes; so that kind of repressive state would wither away. Instead, popular assemblies of workers and communities could make the relevant decisions for their workplaces or localities, with coordination of these through what contemporary political scientists would call overlapping layers of democratic self-governance. Nowadays, that will likely involve a lot of regional and global coordination which will be necessary to deal with the climate crisis, re-organise production and work on a democratic basis and massively redistribute wealth away from the global 1%.
Imagining the future
““Through communal self-organisation, childcare, healthcare, education and many household tasks could be socialised””
In such a society, family abolition would not mean eradicating family bonds but supporting them alongside the development of new kinds of extended family or community that are not necessarily based on blood ties or monogamy. Through communal self-organisation, childcare, healthcare, education and many household tasks could be socialised - for instance through the establishment of communal laundries, canteens and creches. These could be made available to all on an equal basis with a democratically organised and rational distribution of tasks. With the end of pressure to over-produce for the sake of profit, the boundaries between work and leisure would also likely be less rigid - leading to a more relaxed society with plenty of time for hanging around and chatting.
Happy families would of course be supported but it would also be made easier for people to form and maintain meaningful bonds beyond the biological family and to receive whatever social support they needed to do that - for instance in setting up different kinds of social clubs or being able to easily nominate who your “chosen family” is. Well designed communities with plenty of free communal indoor and outdoor space where everything you need is within walking or cycling distance or accessible by free public transport would play an important role. This would enable much greater freedom for children and adults alike and greatly reduce the need for constant, atomised parental supervision. The ultimate ideal might be a society of extended chosen families embedded in supportive, democratically organised communities.
In trying to imagine all this, my thoughts keep returning to my best days as a parent of young kids. These mostly involved meeting up with other parents and being able to relax, chat and share food while the kids played away together, or bringing them to communal or extended family events or spaces where they can freely run and play. These are just tiny glimpses of what I imagine the eco-communist extended family-supporting society of the future might look like.
Diana O’Dwyer is a member of the Steering Committee of People Before Profit and part of the RISE network.