the complement of what abolishing the family can do for children is what it can do for the elderly, by the way. when the family is the unit of resource and care allocation, what happens to the elderly with no family? who cares for them? what about parents whose children are unable to take care of them? what happens to the older generations if they don’t have the class position and familial wealth to get their own care as they age? who protects them if they have a family that wants to exploit them? can you imagine the anxiety of having to account for any of this in the later years of your life? no need to imagine it—you can just talk to someone going thru this right now. I truly hope that won’t be you in 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
familiarising yourself also with what that life looks like materially and how it is produced- in the care home- is also crucial. the deliberate segregation of older people from society serving not to reveal the contradiction in the enshrinement of retirement as goal in conjunction with its reality. which is a routinely abusive, repetitive tedium facilitated at the lowest possible cost because there is no profit to be made in being more accomodating. life in care is atomised, isolated, and full of drudgery. this segregation is crucial to the pacification of the populace wrt post-working life, encouraging people to live as though they will never die. which is crucial to accumulation and consumption. i worked in care. my boss once told me over a mcdonalds that she thought this life was hell, and if when you die you were good, you got to go to heaven. lots to say about this, but enough here to note that it is interesting how the promised future has to be deferred beyond death for those familiar with how awful the intermediary stage often is.
Too many people are forgetting these things too quickly:
-SESTA/FOSTA passed. Despite the many, many warnings of sex workers.
-A bunch of apps started their censorship policies because Apple directly threatened their revenue if they didn’t promise to cut down on the amount of porn on their sites
-MasterCard and VISA tried to outright stop processing OnlyFans work SPECIFICALLY because of the association with sex work, and no other feasible financial reason.
There is not a sudden regressive movement among individual people. Free The Nipple didn’t fade into obscurity because people didn’t care. It was stopped. By policies. By laws. By arrests. By censorship. These things have been purposefully put in place by companies and politicians. They saw the work we were trying to do wrt bodily autonomy, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom, and they forcibly put a stop to it.
