Do We Need to Destroy the “Family Institution”?

Since the 1960s, from Europe and the United States, and under claims of being “leftist” and “progressive”, the need to get “liberated from the family institution” all the way to its destruction has been widely promoted. That was done pursuant to different kinds of justifications and excuses, starting with wearing the hat of women’s and children’s rights, all the way to talking about the “right of the individual” to live alone without any “social influences”. This also included talking about the family institution being just an institution of social oppression since its inception.

Flashback

If we want to establish a few landmarks within the path of the comprehensive disintegration, the 1960s wave was only the beginning, followed by main milestones along the same path, perhaps the most important of which are three:

• The 1975 Rome Conference (the older version of the Davos conference, which includes the “global elite”): At that conference, a number of policies were approved under the broad title of Neo-Malthusianism, which started from a basic consideration that it is not possible for this elite to continue controlling and dominating if the population growth continues as is, and it has become necessary from their point of view to put an end to global population growth. Among the methods the were adopted were direct ones (such as civil wars, epidemics, etc.), and indirect ones (primarily economic ones that aim to reduce the average absolute age, and implicitly extreme trends in birth control policies, all the way to the expansion of “sterilization” areas as a condition for obtaining work in some the countries). The plan focused on Asia and some countries in Africa and Latin America as the main carrier of the total human mass. Of course, this approach includes a radical reconsideration of the role of the family as an institution

• Neoliberalism: the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and at the hands of the Thatcher-Reagan duo, an additional shift took place. In addition to redefining the role of the state apparatus with regards to its relationship with society, work started on openly not only to undermine any positive social role of the state apparatus, but also to undermine the idea of society altogether, and to deal with all humans as individuals and families. Thatcher applied this belief with iron and fire through her brutal suppression of workers’ strikes and by working to break up any chance for workers’ solidarity among themselves, whether at the political or union level. This was an important step that would be followed by the work to destroy the family itself. Perhaps the most important thing to remember in this context is Thatcher’s famous saying: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men, there are individual women, and there are families”.

• Corona and the Great Reset: The third stage, which aims to break up the last units of society, to get to an isolated and besieged individual, is the stage we are currently experiencing. This is not because of Corona, but using “Corona measures”. Klaus Schwab, President and Founder of the Davos Forum, has very blatantly and brazenly theorized about this stage in his two books (The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016) and COVID-19: The Great Reboot (2020)).

Within the historical development of this trend, additional elements were introduced thereto, contributing to the same framework. This includes such things as transforming the issues of homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, birth control, and other issues from their social level into “political issues” whose function is to replace the most fundamental issues, foremost of which is the issue of wealth distribution. The most important field of experiments in this context was the US itself, within which the “democratic process” was adapted to become, in an essential part, a referendum on the position on these “political issues”.

Two Extremes

In our broader region, that is, throughout the East, and under the influence of many cultural and historical factors, as well as because capitalism in our region took special forms, including specific forms of the state apparatus, two extreme trends emerged in dealing with the family institution:

The first trend (nihilistic): fully agrees with the “elite” propositions about the family and seeks to undermine it and looks down on all values of cooperation and inherited social values and puts them all in one basket.

The second trend (Salafi): which rejects Western propositions altogether and calls for going back in time towards a form of the family that is highly traditional and authoritarian, and oppressive particularly towards women and children.

Both trends are dangerous and converge in the end; they go towards the destruction of the family and society, either openly (as in the nihilistic trend) or by destroying it from within and turning it into an institution of lies and hypocrisy by trying to isolate it from reality and its developments (as in the Salafi trend).

The Suspended Third!

We believe that the following should be taken seriously with regards to this matter:
First: It is necessary to understand the historical role of the family institution starting from its first formation with the emergence of private property, and to understand that it has played progressive and reactionary roles, and that it is not a sacred thing in itself. Rather, it must be understood within the framework of each specific historical stage.

Second: Within the current stage in which we live, and in the context of the process of atomization and fragmentation of societies to facilitate controlling them, the family institution is one of the most important targets of the global elite (which we noted above). Therefore, the family institution plays an impeding role in the ongoing major fragmentation processes, which ultimately aim to destroy any kind of social solidarity in order to transform all of humanity into isolated and docile individuals in the hands of the ruling regimes.

Third: Destruction of the family is almost the last step in the destruction of the various types of social solidarity institutions, after most of the unions were divided, corrupted, and diluted, as was the case with the majority of political parties, and with other institutions.

Fourth: Preserving the family as one of the social solidarity units, requires ridding it of the various reactionary factors that control it, and this requires a real struggle for the rights of women and children, and their economic and social rights in particular, and implicitly legal and so on.

Fifth: If the attempts to destroy the family, and most importantly, destroy social solidarity, are based on dividing the oppressed by separating the injustices from each other and prioritizing some above others (particularly focusing on the injustices of gender and discrimination, and decreasing the importance of socioeconomic injustices), then the opposite, progressive action should proceed from the unification of the oppressed, based on the main socioeconomic injustice, in which the 1% minority owns the greater part of the labor and work of the overwhelming and downtrodden majority. This is, however, in parallel with acknowledging other injustices and working to solve them in parallel with the knowledge that a fundamental solution can only be achieved as part of an integrated package, the key to which is ending the socioeconomic injustice.

We can also quickly point out that what applies in the general framework to the family institution also applies to the state institution as well as to values and traditions. Dealing with any of these historical institutions should be in a historical manner, i.e., dynamic, looking at them in their evolutionary context, and taking an objective position on them based on the actual mission they play within the ongoing conflicts.

(النسخة العربية)