Amid lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders and social distancing from strangers and even friends, the coronavirus pandemic has been a time, for many of us, of reaffirming the centrality of ****** in our lives. For utopians of the radical left, though, the pandemic is an opportunity to deconstruct flawed, traditional familial bonds and remake the world along the lines of new-and-improved, collectivist possibilities. As author Sophie Lewis (pictured above) puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open Democracy: “We deserve better than the ******. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”
The author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against ******, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist ****** abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.
Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the ******,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”
“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly ******** goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an ******’s ***** – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”
Lewis approvingly quotes feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, who had this to say in a tweet about the shelter-in-place imperative: “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also ***** *****, ***********, intimate partner ****, psychological *******, and more.”
Imagine the warped mind that equates the ****** home with “a pressure cooker” of ***** *****, ****, and psychological *******. Do such things happen in some homes? Tragically, yes; of course they do. But ****** abolitionists see these horrors as inherent in the ideologically “coercive” institution of the nuclear ******. They pay lip service to acknowledging that families can be a source of love, comfort, and safety, and they claim that their goal “is not the destruction of kinship ties” but an “expansion of that protection into broader communities of struggle,” as ME O’Brien writes at Pinko (which describes itself as “a collective for thinking gay communism”). And yet they relentlessly denigrate the nuclear ****** as an institution poisoned by what O’Brien calls “compulsory heterosexuality, misogynistic subjugation and familial ********.” They sneer at “****** householders” as “white property owners, abusive patriarchs, homophobes and others most invested in the normative ******” (O’Brien again).
But the domestic ******** aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. The ****** is also apparently a capitalist plot for churning out – gasp – productive individuals. In an interview last year with the far-left The Nation titled “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the ******,” Lewis stated, “We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of ***** can happen. And then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.” In her Open Democracy article, Lewis adds that “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no ***** ****, and no queer-bashing – the private ****** qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”
The vision of anti-****** theorists like Lewis is to replace the ideological straightjacket of the ****** with a world of communes of “collective social reproduction,” in which the entire community cares for ******** and rescues them from “abusive parental relationships.” Apparently communes will be free of spouse beating, ***** *****, and all the other dark shadows of human nature. Oh, and no compulsory heterosexuality.
They will also supposedly be free of homelessness. Calling comfortable housing “a basic human birthright,” Lewis recommends that we “open all the hotels and private palaces” for “housing for all,” “[f]ree all prisoners and detainees now, remake the care facilities as spacious self-led villages, and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can leave their bunks forever, move in with their friends, and pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”
One would be forgiven for thinking that this kind of talk is Swiftian satire, but sadly, Lewis and her ilk are deadly serious – and ******** honest about it. Last year, for example, Lewis dispensed with the left’s usual ******** justifications for abortion and expressed her view that taking the life of the unborn is indeed *******, but “a form of ******* that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.”
So for Lewis, the current pandemic is not a time “to acquiesce to ‘****** values’ ideology”; on the contrary, it’s “an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of – and refugees from – the nuclear household.” In addition to hoping “to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression,” she looks forward to this crisis ratcheting up “the dialectic of families against the ******, of real homes against the home.”
The nuclear ****** is the most elemental relationship building block of civilization (of course, civilization as we know it is precisely what the left wants to dismantle.) It is a refuge, a source of strength and support, of identity and history, of love and forgiveness. It is home. Husband, wife, ******, ******, ***, ********, *******, ****** -- the bonds these incredibly evocative words imply would not be expanded under the system Lewis is proposing; they would be dissolved. Are families perfect? Of course not. None of them is, because human beings aren’t perfect and never can be. We are fallen beings in a fallen world – this is the reality that the far left refuses to accept. There is no insanely totalitarian, collectivist nightmare that the left will not pursue with an evangelical passion to achieve their ***** of the perfectibility of mankind, of paradise on earth. But that *****, as has been demonstrated in all places and in all times where it has been put into practice, is a mass-********* lie.
And yet as extreme as Sophie Lewis’ anti-******, anti-capitalist animus sounds, everything she proposes is simply the end game of mainstream Progressivism: the abolition of capitalism; the abolition of private property; the abolition of traditional kinship; the abolition of literally every single tradition and institution of Western civilization, to be replaced by the enlightened, peaceful, self-regulated structures of communism – just as Karl Marx envisioned. ****** abolitionists like Lewis are mainstream Progressives; what makes them seem extreme is simply their unabashed openness about their aims.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/20...ty-pandemic-perfect-time-abolish-mark-tapson/
The author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against ******, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist ****** abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.
Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the ******,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”
“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly ******** goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an ******’s ***** – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”
Lewis approvingly quotes feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, who had this to say in a tweet about the shelter-in-place imperative: “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also ***** *****, ***********, intimate partner ****, psychological *******, and more.”
Imagine the warped mind that equates the ****** home with “a pressure cooker” of ***** *****, ****, and psychological *******. Do such things happen in some homes? Tragically, yes; of course they do. But ****** abolitionists see these horrors as inherent in the ideologically “coercive” institution of the nuclear ******. They pay lip service to acknowledging that families can be a source of love, comfort, and safety, and they claim that their goal “is not the destruction of kinship ties” but an “expansion of that protection into broader communities of struggle,” as ME O’Brien writes at Pinko (which describes itself as “a collective for thinking gay communism”). And yet they relentlessly denigrate the nuclear ****** as an institution poisoned by what O’Brien calls “compulsory heterosexuality, misogynistic subjugation and familial ********.” They sneer at “****** householders” as “white property owners, abusive patriarchs, homophobes and others most invested in the normative ******” (O’Brien again).
But the domestic ******** aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. The ****** is also apparently a capitalist plot for churning out – gasp – productive individuals. In an interview last year with the far-left The Nation titled “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the ******,” Lewis stated, “We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of ***** can happen. And then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.” In her Open Democracy article, Lewis adds that “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no ***** ****, and no queer-bashing – the private ****** qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”
The vision of anti-****** theorists like Lewis is to replace the ideological straightjacket of the ****** with a world of communes of “collective social reproduction,” in which the entire community cares for ******** and rescues them from “abusive parental relationships.” Apparently communes will be free of spouse beating, ***** *****, and all the other dark shadows of human nature. Oh, and no compulsory heterosexuality.
They will also supposedly be free of homelessness. Calling comfortable housing “a basic human birthright,” Lewis recommends that we “open all the hotels and private palaces” for “housing for all,” “[f]ree all prisoners and detainees now, remake the care facilities as spacious self-led villages, and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can leave their bunks forever, move in with their friends, and pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”
One would be forgiven for thinking that this kind of talk is Swiftian satire, but sadly, Lewis and her ilk are deadly serious – and ******** honest about it. Last year, for example, Lewis dispensed with the left’s usual ******** justifications for abortion and expressed her view that taking the life of the unborn is indeed *******, but “a form of ******* that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.”
So for Lewis, the current pandemic is not a time “to acquiesce to ‘****** values’ ideology”; on the contrary, it’s “an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of – and refugees from – the nuclear household.” In addition to hoping “to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression,” she looks forward to this crisis ratcheting up “the dialectic of families against the ******, of real homes against the home.”
The nuclear ****** is the most elemental relationship building block of civilization (of course, civilization as we know it is precisely what the left wants to dismantle.) It is a refuge, a source of strength and support, of identity and history, of love and forgiveness. It is home. Husband, wife, ******, ******, ***, ********, *******, ****** -- the bonds these incredibly evocative words imply would not be expanded under the system Lewis is proposing; they would be dissolved. Are families perfect? Of course not. None of them is, because human beings aren’t perfect and never can be. We are fallen beings in a fallen world – this is the reality that the far left refuses to accept. There is no insanely totalitarian, collectivist nightmare that the left will not pursue with an evangelical passion to achieve their ***** of the perfectibility of mankind, of paradise on earth. But that *****, as has been demonstrated in all places and in all times where it has been put into practice, is a mass-********* lie.
And yet as extreme as Sophie Lewis’ anti-******, anti-capitalist animus sounds, everything she proposes is simply the end game of mainstream Progressivism: the abolition of capitalism; the abolition of private property; the abolition of traditional kinship; the abolition of literally every single tradition and institution of Western civilization, to be replaced by the enlightened, peaceful, self-regulated structures of communism – just as Karl Marx envisioned. ****** abolitionists like Lewis are mainstream Progressives; what makes them seem extreme is simply their unabashed openness about their aims.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/20...ty-pandemic-perfect-time-abolish-mark-tapson/
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