Well, its about time I started one of these and what better time than just after you've made the decade-long-desired step of resigning from your family. To make myself feel better, I just re-read the parts of that hoary old chestnut, the Communist Manifesto, that refer to why its OK to not feel bad about having such bad thoughts about that most hallowed of institutions, the family. Here is the text verbatim: (god I love the first line! Marx had *such* a way with words ...)

"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists ... on what foundation is the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution ... The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social ... And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class ... The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor ... But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production ... For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial ... Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private."

Wow, I feel humble in the presence of such extraordinary clarity. There's nothing like a most wickedly sharp rejection of the claptrap of capitalist ideology regarding social relations and what is natural and what's not. I think I'll use this blog as a cathartic exercise - the pressure to reneg on my determination to stay resigned from my family is enormous, so I'll take what ever steps necessary to keep my spirits up. And if there is one aspect of the new internet culture that brings hope, it is the blogging phenomenon - suddenly, millions of people previously denied the tools to express themselves can tell it how it is.

It is my belief that the most brain-washed gerneration of all time lived on this earth only about 50 years ago. Think about it: the world was just entering into the age of world-wide communication - huge amounts of capital were expended to create the communication infrastructure that allows the awesome amount of information to travel around the world. But back then we were without the internet and you could count the lines of communication on one hand. The people who owned the newspapers, radio & TV stations controlled the flow of information. The schools were teaching the most crudest of class-biased visions about how the world really worked. Never before had so few people controlled so much of the total proportion of information people had access to. Combine this with the reaction of the capitalists in the 80s (in retaliation for the 60s & 70s) which was to renew their ideological offensive (Gordon Gecko gets up in the movie "Wall Street" and states that 'Greed is good' was the highpoint for them) and we have the world we have today - virtually no opposition to the current overseers of the prevailing money ideology. Why I say virtually no opposition instead of just simply no opposition is that I know from very clear evidence that there are millions of people like me around the world, already organising some sort of resistance. Our main organising tool is the internet so its obvious its very early days with regard to how much resistance and opposition we can create.

Its no accident that the cultural revolution that occurred around the world known as the 60s & 70s happened. What else explains the phenomenon of the Beatles? Four young men were the symbol of the most widespread occurance of a (partial) sexual liberation the world will ever know. The home economics text books of the 50s are the most damning evidence that Marx was right about the family, and in my mind, the cultural explosion of the 60s and 70s has no better explanation than the one I give above. SO I just have to tough it out ... Marx said lots of interesting things but the quote that springs to mind at this point is the one about the nightmare (changed to the present tense):

“We make our own history, but we do not make it as we please ... we do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.�

How true. With regard to the family, it is the tradition of at least 6000 years of class society that provides the source of the enormous pressure I feel to returrn to the bosom of my family. I'm relying on the tradition of the entire period that preceeded that - the tens of thounsands of years where humans learnt to be human by forming social relations steeped in solidarity not competition. This was the age of the clan, the age without class, the age that formed the basis for the fast-disappearing but stubbornly lingering humanity of today. The age of the internet ushers in the rise of the world-wide clan. Most of us are still unconscious to the exact nature of the Matrix (a good euphemism for the capitalist system as any) but the point is that never before have so many people been inches away from the startling truth. And more and more people are taking the red pill.

This is my new family.

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