Alexandra Kollantai

Then perhaps we should not look to the capitalist family, but pre-capitalist notions of family as a basis? Why abolish it completely? What would be the alternative you propose? Chiang Kai Shek did not like the Communists partly because they wanted to destroy the family.

Pre-capitalist families also tend to be very patriarchal and oppressive in their own ways, so I'm not particularly in favor. Confucian-influenced families in Asian cultures, for instance, had their advantages of being more oriented toward the whole. Nevertheless, they had similar problems with patriarchy and excessive strictness (the words of the older male are practically treated as if they were the words of a deity) that ended up doing harm to stifling the personality growth of the younger generations. A good friend of mine is South Korean, and he knows his parents mean well, but at the same time, there is a certain degree of dislike for what is perceived as an excessively stifling nature in the family model that they try to enforce.

Korean parents are very much Confucian in their outlook of the family. The way they treated him and their expectations, as well as their response when those expectations were not met, have led to some pretty bad psychological trauma, particularly with regard to anxiety and depression on his end. I've had similar experiences in my own life, but while my parents can get overbearing and very demanding, they are not very "Confucian" or traditionalist in how they raised me. My own reactions as well as how my parents are to me are not nearly as bad as what he has described, though I still had similar experiences with psychological problems. On the other hand, in my case, I can say that my own perfectionism combined with familial relations had something to do with my own psychological problems, so obviously it's entirely on them, and I wouldn't blame them for all of my problems.

Personal anecdotes aside, I don't see how going back to pre-capitalist family structure is either desirable or even possible. The "family", both in terms of the actual structure and ideas on what it should be like, have never been exactly set in stone. These things come from both the ideas of those in position to influence culture (meaning the ruling class) as well as the social structure and societal evolution. Usually it's not the ruling class at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy says this, and it becomes this, but rather the result of a long period of solidifying into what it is during a certain period (and even then, it's not homogeneous), while the ruling "ideology" of the time promotes an idea of what it should be like, with lots of interplay and interactions between what's going on "on the ground" so to speak and the ideas of the time.

Political Interest wrote:

Why abolish it completely? What would be the alternative you propose?

No, not destroying the family unit completely. And the Communists didn't believe in doing so either. It's not the family that they want to abolish, but the idea of what a family should be like, based on values that were deemed to be unsuitable for the modern world.

I wrote:

Still, I can't say I am entirely against the idea of abolishing the concept of the "family" as it exists now, which is what she [Kollontai] wrote about.

I think there can be a new idea of family, but on more communitarian principles, where one views society as an extension of the family or the family as an extension of society, but not one based on patriarchy, bourgeois individualism and propriety. I don't have a real answer for how this will look like, exactly, because this has never been fully brought into existence. Nevertheless, it's something to work toward. Also, as a clarification, Socialist thought isn't supposed to offer a solution to all of society's social ills in one day, but rather to try to change society by first changing it at its roots, and then help along the evolution of new social norms and structures. I don't think the bourgeoisie had an idea of what an ideal bourgeois family would look like, until the bourgeois family started to take shape. Then they promulgated this idea on to the rest of society. No ideology has ever been able to fully prescribe, set down, or predict what an ideal society from the top to bottom would be like. Most things evolved out of the attempts to reshape society, and not always according to design.

PI wrote:

Chiang Kai Shek did not like the Communists partly because they wanted to destroy the family.

Chiang Kai-shek's opinions are irrelevant, because he believed in and said a lot of things, most of which was wrong and stupid.
His policies toward the Communists only served to make the CCP more militarized and hierarchical in structure, which is what partially led to some of the CCP's bad policies later on after the Communists won in China.
He was also a bad leader in general with a ridiculous love for conservative Confucian traditional values and Fascist sympathies that didn't work in his favor. His New Life Movement in trying to reshape the Chinese people to be modern while promoting traditionalist values were not effective. His attempts to model China on the right-wing states of Europe also didn't pan out, and neither did his attempts at cooperating with Nazi Germany.
His opinions on the Communists and its relation to ideas on the family are probably based on his own conservative fetishism of traditions. It's really not relevant, because the Confucian family model, though it has its merits in its collectivist worlview, was still messed up and stupid in its patriarchy and stifling nature.*

* I'm not saying that children should always be allowed to challenge their parents and such, but I'm just saying that the "old ways" of doing things are not entirely appropriate.

Quote:

there is a certain degree of dislike for what is perceived as an excessively stifling nature in the family model that they try to enforce.

Your Asian-ness really becomes obvious there. I'm pretty sure "Western" people would just have said "They're too strict", but this reminds me of the convoluted language the Japanese used to announce that they lost the war, and that Asian people generally seem to use to try to talk their way around having to admit unpleasant things.

Wow, I don't even remember writing that, and it looks really awkward and terrible. It's either my Asianness or that I've been hanging out in academia for too long, where I have (in my early days, and unfortunately still do, but to a lesser extent) cranked out papers and filled up the word/page number quota with crap like that.

But yes, my Korean friend's parents have been excessively strict. They combined the worst of Confucian ideas on the family, conservative Christian family values, and idealized bourgeois notions of what the proper family should look like. All in all, he had a pretty bad time. Not that he hates his parents or anything, and their relations have improved, but um, there's a lot of discontent there, to put it mildly.