International Socialists

In the lead up to the last general election, all major political parties promoted their policies as "family friendly," and the National and ACT parties in particular tried to portray itself as the party for "New Zealanders and their families," creating policies for families by family people. Collective nostalgia for a non-existent past seemed to sweep the rank and file of the right, with a collective yearning after old-time suburban uniformity, picket fences, The Waltons, and mums in aprons worming its way into the rhetoric of all major parties' campaigns.

 

Jenny Shipley and Jim Bolger based both much of their political personas around their status as "family people" and defenders of the family. Yet the National and Coalition Government's policies - involving cuts to jobs, welfare, health, education, social services and so on - have hurt families very badly. Clearly there is a rhetoric of "family values" which serves a purpose separate from the actual maintenance of family life.

 

There is a mythology of the family promoted by politicians, the media and leading figures in society. Firstly, the family is seen as "natural and traditional," a universal, eternal, unchanging institution reflecting fixed biological and psychological drives. It is "normal" to be in a family, and therefore anyone who is not (especially lesbians and gays, single parents and people choosing to live in alternative communal households) can be branded "abnormal, "unnatural" or "unfortunate."

 

Secondly, the family is promoted as "loving and secure." How many times do we hear that children need to have two parents, one of each gender, as role models - as if somehow this is the only way they will learn respectful and loving behaviour? So if you are not in a family, not only are you "abnormal," you are also "deprived."

 

The reality of family life for many, if not most people is very different to this idealised image of love and security. Hidden behind those quaint smiling family photographs are the physical and psychological violence of wife beating, child battering, rape, repression, inhibition and victimisation. The family home is the primary site of violence, both physical and sexual, towards women. Even where these extremes of brutality do not occur, the pressures of trying to live up to the idealised family life we are presented with leads to stress and everyday unhappiness for millions.

 

Why, then, do most people still choose to live in families? The social pressures to do so are enormous, and easily lead to feelings of isolation, loneliness and inadequacy for those who do not meet social expectations. But even though families are widely recognised as pressure cooker environments, they still provide a measure of love and comfort; some kind of security in a world which offers ordinary people little else.

 

This point is crucial: when socialists criticise the way families are organised and moralised over in capitalist society, we are merely recognising the reality that lies behind the ideal picture, not saying the ideal picture (albeit an impossible one in this system) isn't nice. We want to fight for a world where people can love and nurture each other and depend on each other, not where they feel trapped by fear and isolation into a dead marriage. We want to champion friendship and trust and support and all the things which capitalists promise in their rhetoric and never deliver in their sordid reality. We see the flaws of a system which leaves our private lives distorted and dominated  through stress, poverty, alienation and isolation. Ours is the politics of hope: optimism of the heart combined with realism of the intellect. We want real change, and recognise that the model currently offered in this society is rotten to the core, and so are its family values.

 

The nuclear family plays a very important role for capitalist society. Those with the wealth (the ruling class of big business people, senior government bureaucrats and large shareholder parasites) have a mechanism by which they can pass on that wealth to children who will be the next generation of rulers.

 

Meanwhile, those without wealth (ie the majority in society - workers and the unemployed) will cheaply reproduce, through their children, the next generation of workers in their private family units - all of this at little or no cost to the governments which will later tax these children as citizens and to the businesses which will later exploit them as workers.

 

So what is the socialist alternative to the capitalist family? We are for people living in whatever arrangements they desire, provided that they are not drawn together through economic coercion or constraints. So if you do want to commit to a person of the opposite sex, have children and live happily ever after, go for it. But if you'd prefer an alternative to this, it should not be judged abnormal or deviant and you should not suffer discrimination as a result.

 

It is easy enough to say this, but how can it happen? There needs to be an economic basis in society for such an alternative. With real social equality and an end to discrimination, women will not fall easily into the role of wife and mother confined to the home. With the scrapping of the system which sees massive profits go to a few wealthy tycoons, there will be plenty of resources to provide child care, domestic services and quality restaurants to everyone, thus freeing women from the eternal provision of necessities.

 

Of course people will want to look after their children, enjoy the pleasures of cooking, and still want "quiet nights in," but the point is that these will become opportunities for human development and happiness, not overwhelming and depressing tasks in some routine. Socialist views of the family are about rediscovering the real community, not that of politicians' empty speeches, but the one which produces the wealth of the country.

 

When whole communities share in the tasks of child development and support - as they have traditionally done in Maori and pre-capitalist English society - then some of the images so prevalent and yet so impossible practically under capitalism may translate into reality. The Norwegian novelist Agnar Mykle sums the socialist position up brilliantly when he writes of socialism as "more friendship and less marriage" - real feeling, real support, and an end to the illusions of the nuclear family, which causes so much terror, depression and misery in New Zealand today.