#SocialEcology #Anarchism #Socialism #Family #Cuba #QueerFeminism #GoogleMurrayBookchin

A book I'm currently reading that has offered a lot of insight into a lot of seemingly different things is The Ecology of Freedom, by Murray Bookchin (Google him, or better yet Ecosia him). I'm reading it for free, paperlessly, on The Anarchist Library.

For example, Chapter 3, The Emergence of Hierarchy, includes a description of early patriarchy's takeover and transformation of the family. Family was changed from a mostly egalitarian institution that provided the irreducible minimum in a particular ecological context, to a system of domination that gave hierarchical power to fathers over their wives and children. The rigidity of this new system would have marginalized queer families (although "queer" isn't the right term in a Neolithic context), in contrast to the fluidity of the old, organic family structure.

The Cuban family code makes huge progress toward reclaiming that fluidity. Now, I'm an anarchist. I don't believe that the State, even a socialist state, can fully liberate anyone through its laws, as that system is hierarchical and coercive itself. Still, this particular law redefines the family in Cuba as any group of people who love and take care of each other. That's organic. That's egalitarian.

The family code therefore not only legalizes same-sex marriage, but also encodes a legal right for disabled Cubans to live with their own families and not be institutionalized, for Cuban children to live in an affirming, non-punitive environment with their families, and many other things. But the corporate media couldn't let a socialist state be acknowledged for its successes, no! CNN and other outlets reported on this code as only legalizing same-sex marriage, with heavy emphasis on the Cuban ML state's initial failures and abuses of queer people. If they could have avoided the story entirely, they would have. But it was too big.

A fluid concept of family is also a major achievement for reproductive justice. About more than just abortion (although that is certainly an important part), reproductive justice is an intersectional feminist movement for access to safe, empowering, fulfilling, and consensual sexual activity and family, based on informed and non-coercive choice. For example, if you want to start a family of your own, you need food, money, housing, and education to access that choice, among other things. You will also need the communal support of others for things like childcare when it's too much for you. Essentially, you should have that right. And it materializes in the form of a group of people who love each other and take care of each other--that isn't necessarily limited to patriarchal/hierarchical structures or blood ties. A family.

Marxists have been known to advocate the abolition of the family. If that means abolishing the state-capitalist, Western, Christo-cisheteropatriarchal, alienating, nuclear family, then absolutely. Let it be replaced once again by the fluid, egalitarian, queer, organic family.

"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."
--Murray Bookchin