Abolish the family, free all prisoners, and take vacant properties without permission is the preferred response to the coronavirus according to openDemocracy – a media organization funded by billionaire social justice financier George Soros. The group published an article last week, the main thrust of which asserts: “In short, the pandemic is no time to forget about family abolition.”
Author and radical marxist Sophie Lewis further states: “We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”
Staying home with family to practice social distancing in an effort to stop the spread coronavirus represents “the mystification of the couple-form; the romanticization of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property.”
The assault on the family continues: “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?”
It also focuses on how “queer and feminized people, especially very old and very young ones, are definitionally not safe [at home]” despite providing no source to corroborate the absurd allegation.
And the “pitfalls” of normal family structure predate coronavirus:
“…even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family 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.’ It minimizes costs for capital while maximizing human beings’ life-making labor (across billions of tiny boxes, each kitted out – absurdly – with its own kitchen, micro-crèche and laundry).”
OpenDemocracy goes further than just bashing the American family.
It glorifies people confiscating private property as a means to “beat back gentrification” and demonstrate how “comfortable housing” is a “basic human birthright”.
“Meanwhile, by taking vacant properties without permission, and living in them (“self-quarantine in progress,” reads one mom’s window-sign), Moms 4 Housing is leading the way in beating back gentrification in California and enacting an understanding of comfortable housing as a basic human birthright.”
Even Los Angeles’s efforts to “provide individual trailers and pop-up isolation cabins for the houseless” are apparently not enough.
Instead, Lewis advocates “a far more logical response might be: open all the hotels and private palaces on the basis of airy and light-filled, sanitary (uncommodified) housing for all.”
Another component of this radical plan?
To “free 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.”
The piece leaves readers with the thought: “We do not know yet if we will be able to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression” – yet the organization wagers “with some certainty that, in 2020, the dialectic of families against the family, of real homes against the home, shall intensify.”
Even in times of crisis, the left’s radical quest for social justice doesn’t stop; it intensifies. Proving once again, there’s no rest for the wicked.
Soros’s Open Society Foundation contributed four sizable donations to the “global media organization” in 2017: three were in the $100,000 – $120,000 range and one was an unspecified amount above $120,000.
