Ruthless Criticism (February 2011)
Von webmaster • Feb. 14th, 2011 • Kategorie: InternationalRuthless Criticism (February 2011):
On the occassion of Valentine’s Day:
Love and the bourgeois family:
Scene of happiness, psychological terror and mass murder
[Notes on a December 16, 2010 lecture by Peter Decker in Nürnberg, Germany]
A few decades ago, a generation rebelled against the constraints of the family: women freed themselves from patriarchal oppression and refused to obey marital duties as well as to have children. Young people escaped their parent’s house, not just to start a family all over again, but to try out freer forms of living together. For love, it was said, they didn’t need a marriage license or the blessing of the state.
That’s all over now. For all social layers, beliefs about a successful life again revolve around family life, “the relationship” and often the happiness of children. Nothing is left of the rebellion; even gays want one thing: recognition of marriage and themselves as full spouses.
The state power has done a lot for this: it has reformed the institution and for once does not adapt the people’s way of life to the compulsions of the law, but adapts family law to mores as they are lived: today marriage is no longer necessary to live together in bourgeois respectability, and if one marries it does not have to be forever. The wife no longer has to obey the man’s will in a marriage, and children who do not grow up in “intact families” are no longer stigmatized; they are almost the majority. With no legal or moral coercion, it turns out that in this society there is a need to form a family, to make love binding through marriage and to convert partners‘ affection into a relationship of duties. In fact, when the state puts the family under its “special protection” and regulates gender relations, it does not prescribe marriage, but serves a need of its citizens.
Hence not much has changed since the bad old days in the conditions of the institution of the family: the transformation of love into a mutual demands mentality with accusations and open or concealed marital strife is still the norm, while jealousy dramas to the point of extreme violence are the exceptions associated with it.
This article follows the logic of the need for marriage and the family to its tragic consequences; and explains what all this has to do with capitalism.
