They are serious.
They want to abolish the family.
Mum, dad and the kids, finito. Everyone go live in a Soviet-style commune.
They are not joking.
An article posted last month on the prominent left wing OpenDemocracy website advocates leveraging the global coronavirus lockdown to further this goal.
This is not some random blog (like mine), it is a lavishly-funded organ of the global left.
OpenDemocracy is paid for by some of the same organisations that fund Australia’s GetUp, such as Avaaz which donated $200,000 to the green-left activist group at the 2016 election.
Two Avaaz entities are listed as providing tens of thousands of UK pounds in funding for OpenDemocracy’s journalism.
The University of Bristol is also listed as a supporter, which given the state of Western universities is no real surprise.
OpenDemocracy is also funded by the Hungarian billionaire George Soros who uses his vast wealth to promote radical left wing causes around the globe, such as same-sex marriage.
Last month’s article legitimately raised the issue of increased domestic and family violence during the coronavirus lockdown and how that put women and children at heightened risk.
But then it makes the illogical jump to a solution requiring the nuclear family to be abolished.
A click through to author’s bio reveals that Sophie Lewis is a Philadelphia-based communist. Communists never waste a crisis.
In urging readers that this is “no time to forget about family abolition”, Lewis links to Six Steps to Abolish the Family from the communist Commune website.
She brands anyone not wishing to live in a commune as a “counterrevolutionary”.
Sadly, the likes of Lewis and anyone under 50 have forgotten the horrors of European and Asian communism – a brutal political system which killed far more innocent people than the Nazis.
Because people didn’t want to voluntarily give up family life, their businesses or farms, they had to be forced. For their own good, of course.
Forced labour in the Gulags and bullets in the neck awaited those who resisted and were deemed “counterrevolutionary”.
But hey, the left thinks, let’s go with it. Marxist violence in the past is just terribly misunderstood, modern communists like Lewis think.
Sorry Sophie, but we’ve been to this rodeo before.
She goes on to say:
“…even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’ It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings’ life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out – absurdly – with its own kitchen, micro-crèche and laundry). It blackmails us into mistaking the only sources of love and care we have for the extent of what is possible.”
That’s it. The family sucks so let’s destroy it.
There’s no thought for children who derive security and social adjustment from the love of their mother and father and the family home.
Heck, the evil family even teaches kids that they are “gendered”, according to Lewis.
Can’t have kids with a penis thinking they are boys.
That’s it. The family must go.
I wonder what GetUp, Labor and the Greens make of their fellow travellers.
The media should ask them. I’m not holding my breath.