The Death of the Family [antikvár]

In this critique of the family most of my paradigmatic references will concern primarily the nuclear family imit in capitalist society in this part of this century. The broader reference, however, and most of my general statements, will cover the social functioning of the family as an ideological conditioning device (the non-human phrasing is deliberate and necessary) in any exploitative society -slave society, feudal society, capitalist society from its most primitive phase in the last century to the neo-colonizing societies in the first world today. It also applies to the first-world working-class, second-world societies and third-world countries in so far as these have been indoctrinated into a spurious consciousness that, as we shall see, is definitive of the secret suicide pact conducted by the bourgeois family unit, the unit that labels itself the' happy family'; the family that prays together and stays together through sickness and health till death us do part or releases us into the terse joylessness of the epitaphs on our Christian tomb-stones erected, for want of any other sort of erection, by those who mourn for us in the curious mode of remembering very hard to forget us very hard. This false mourning is just and poetic in so far as no authentic mourning is possible if the people who mourn each other have never met each other. The bourgeois nuclear family unit (to use something like the language of its agents - academic sociologists and political scientists)