We have unpaywalled this essay by Dustin Guastella from our new print issue, "Mothers," in preparation for the issue launch event in Queens, NY on Saturday, November 23rd at 4pm. Help us spread the word about that event, and subscribe today to receive the full issue in print or digitally, or order a single copy of it in the Damage shop.

In the late 1990s a Japanese retiree moved into one of Tokyo’s sprawling public housing complexes alongside thousands of other aging residents. His modest pension was supplemented by his life’s savings. His rent and other bills were deducted automatically from his bank account. One day his funds ran out. The rent payments stopped. Officials came looking for the delinquent tenant. They entered his apartment only to find his maggot-picked skeleton next to the door. His corpse rotted there for three years. No one knew he had died. Very few people, it seemed, even knew he was alive.

This year, some 68,000 people in Japan will die completely and utterly alone, so alone that many of them won’t be discovered until long after they’re gone. The phenomenon is so common it has a name: kodokushi—the lonely death.

The rise and persistence of kodokushi is one of the more disturbing signs of crisis in Japan, where birth rates remain stubbornly below replacement level and where the elderly increasingly live in fixed-income public housing ghettos devoid of youth. Here, residents complain about the lack of vitality, the absence of young people, and the creeping sensation that everyone is simply waiting to die. Without new life—even just the proximity of youth playing in the street—the end of life becomes even more lonesome and arduous.

If nothing changes, the future is set for kodokushi to become a global problem. Rising costs and demanding labor markets have put downward pressure on birthrates everywhere. To name just a few: Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the USA, the UK, Poland, Latvia, and Ireland all have below replacement birth rates. As these societies age, gruesome symptoms appear. Lonesomeness, especially in old age, becomes acute. With fewer young people available to support the mass of people aging into chronic health problems, care for the elderly becomes strained. Meanwhile, national pension systems, built on the notion young people will pay for the old, face a death-spiral the moment the old outnumber the young. Developed countries are facing down a demographic doom-loop.

There is a pretty simple solution to all this, one that would go a long way toward curing the loneliness epidemic, addressing the care crisis, and resolving the impending Social Security cliff: more and stronger families.

Yet, for some reason, progressives have shunned the family as a solution to anything. There seems to be a consensus that a pro-family politics is a conservative politics. This needs to change. A brief survey of modern history suggests that strong family life, in any given society, is not contrary to progress but coincident with it. And if the Left ever wants to build a majority, we shouldn’t shrink from the family, we should embrace it.

The Family, No

In the political imagination of the Left, “The Family” plays an insidious role: it oppresses women, it forces conformity, and it constrains freedom. It has been blamed for everything from fascism to neoliberalism. Since the 1980s, pro-marriage attitudes on the Left have dramatically declined, and today progressives studiously avoid any positive appraisal of family life. The New Yorker recently noted that liberals talk about kids as little more than “impositions, or means to an end.” Radical environmentalists go further, seeing children as a threat to the climate. Worse still, so-called “abolitionists” treat the nuclear family as if it were an actual atomic weapon in need of dismantling.

None of this has been helped by J.D. Vance’s recent comments that the Left is effectively a cabal of “childless cat ladies”—a comment that sparked a wave of criticism and risks driving leftists even further from the pro-family attitudes of yesteryear.

At the same time, progressives recognize both the acute “crisis of care” and the danger that dwindling birth rates might pose in advanced economies. In response to the former problem, a large and growing body of literature has been devoted to the notion that we need something of a “revolution” in our care infrastructure. We need socialized health care, elder care, etc. to help ease the burden of caring for the last generation and the next. All of this is for the good. But why no role for the family? It’s sort of like preaching about the need for solidarity and then dismissing the role of trade unions. On the other hand, the crisis of declining birth rates has led many progressives in large rich economies like the US to embrace an open-borders mindset—once the exclusive opinion of free-market conservatives. Since it’s far too expensive to invest in making babies, we should probably just import them.

Families have many faults (just like trade unions!), but they remain the best examples of an organic social relationship built on selflessness, uncalculated care-giving, and fraternity. And they even provide a few things that a deluxe, Nordic-style welfare state cannot: companionship, love, and babies. All things our society seems to be lacking right now.

Across the developed world, it’s become something of a cliché to talk about family life as a luxury, reserved only for those with means. While the metaphor captures an important part of the problem, the characterization isn’t quite right. Luxuries are, by definition, ostentatious, extravagant, and most of all unnecessary. Families, by contrast, are common, plain, and essential. 

Most young people today want to get married and have kids, and people increasingly prefer larger families to smaller ones. Families make illness less painful, death less lonely, and life more meaningful. There is ample evidence that family life is rewarding in and of itself. Survey data from the GSS show that the most consistently happy people are those married with children. This result holds even among working-class respondents, despite assumptions that the “cost” of children would outweigh their benefit. Meanwhile, the stability of a two-parent household arrangement has long been recognized by psychologists and sociologists as the best way to raise happy and well-adjusted children. And despite the burdens posed by a vicious labor market, stagnant wages, and almost no state-sponsored help for raising kids, a staggering 87% of American mothers and fathers rate “being a parent” as the most or one of the most important aspects of who they are. Families still offer that “haven in a heartless world.” 

Whatsmore, families don’t have to be patriarchal, traditionalist, and oppressive. And most today, aren’t. Sixty years of feminism have made families measurably more equal and less tyrannical. And this is very good for families. Recent research suggests that egalitarianism in parenting seems to be one of the keys to flourishing family life and fixing the baby-bust. When child rearing duties are equally distributed, kids become less of a burden on mom, and families become more attractive. It also proves that family life is both more durable, and less inherently backward, than many people (on the Left and Right) once assumed.

Instead of treating families as a problem to be solved, the Left ought to see them as a major part of the solution for our social ills. It's wrong to assume that a pro-family attitude is inherently anti-progressive, and indeed, it is out of a duty to the future of society that we ought to care about families. 

Modernity, Progress, and the Family

The history of the family is usually told as a story of decline. Historical progress is associated with shrinking families. More progress, less family. This narrative is useful because it affirms existing political preferences. For those on the Left, to fight for the family is to fight against progress. For those on the Right, to fight for progress is to fight against the family. Both sides accept the decline narrative as basically correct. Is it?

Not quite. As it happens, for most people, strong family life was only made possible by very modern and progressive developments. Consider Catholic Ireland: long stereotyped as a land of large broods and tight clans, in the early twentieth century the Emerald Isle actually posted anemic birth rates and, according to Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole, the rate of unmarried people was “the highest in the world.” Irish family life was mostly wishful thinking until the nation truly industrialized—at which point birth rates soared from 2.6 in 1930 to over 4 in 1960. And as birthrates rose, so too did life expectancy. More mothers survived childbirth, more children survived their early years, and more parents survived to meet their grandchildren.

Across the world, as society became more equal, more democratic, and more prosperous, family life became more, not less, attractive. Mid-century moderns were rushing to start families. In the 1890s the average age of first marriage for men was around 26 years, almost the exact same average as recorded in the 1990s. Yet from 1950 to 1960 the average was markedly lower, at less than 23 years. Record high rates of marriage were posted between 1948 and 1960. Not before and not since.

That couples hitched and babies boomed in the 1950s is not news, but it does conceal a remarkable story. If you were to ask a group of sociologists what might happen to family life in a society where women suddenly started going to work and college en masse; while men, returning home from a terrible war, were given ample disposable income to spend how they pleased; where traditional social norms were rapidly changing; and where divorce law liberalized—even the sunniest among them wouldn’t predict that marriage and birth rates would soar. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

This is no paradox if we simply reconsider what we mean by progress. Today progress appears to us as little more than technological advance and the affirmation of more individual freedoms. But this is a peculiar definition. As traditionally understood, progress was measured by greater levels of human equality, solidarity, and dignity, along with the development of technical capacities toward those ends. The measure of progress, then, is the degree to which we have widened the circle of human flourishing; the degree to which more people have better lives. From the abolition of slavery to the establishment of unemployment insurance, it is (or should be) self-evident that modernity has brought about genuine achievements that have helped make our existence a little less “nasty, brutish, and short.” It was the distinctly progressive achievements of the modern era—in medical science, social policy, and cultural norms—that made the world more conducive to family life. It wasn’t modernity and progress that destroyed the family; it was these things that enabled its widespread enjoyment.

Lately, we haven’t made much progress. Rising levels of inequality, anomie, and indignity characterize our age. On virtually every measure of social progress, the past fifty years have seen stagnation or decline. What’s more, our half-century of social regress has been sold to us as a new type of progress. Literally.

As unions shrank, poverty ballooned, and cities deteriorated, we got better, faster and cheaper cars, larger detached homes, and all sorts of labor-saving devices from microwaves and dishwashers to smart phones. Much of the new unchecked consumerism helped deepen our alienation from our neighbors, friends, and family. We were encouraged to adopt a new public philosophy that says that the ever-expanding means to express our individuality and identity (through buying things) is the final frontier of human development. 

This is a facsimile of progress and getting back on the right track means rejecting it.

The Market Against the Family

With the reversal of social progress came the dissolution of families. Today, marriage and birth rates are about half what they were in the mid-century. The United States hosts the largest share of single-parent households in the world. Among the youth this makes for a lot of domestic instability. Among the aged, loneliness abounds. The familial recession has generated a host of social challenges.

“There is a lot of disintegration of families,” said Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the progressive former President of Mexico, when asked about the drug crisis in the United States. “There is a lot of individualism, there is a lack of love, of brotherhood, of hugs and embraces.” While Mexico is far from blameless for the expansion of the drug trade, AMLO has a point. Without families, social life becomes thin. Atomization and alienation predominate. There is something about liberal democracies today that seems to be accelerating the trend toward family dissolution. To confront that, we need to face the real enemy: not modernity or progress, but the relentless marketization of everything.

It is no coincidence that families grew fastest at the height of social democratic governance worldwide. Similarly, family life (alongside virtually all forms of social association) began to fall to pieces the moment we made markets the main organizing principle of our world. The very real achievements of the last century have been dramatically undermined by the increasing exposure of each of us to market forces in our personal lives, and the creep of the market mentality in public life. That mentality is transactional, utilitarian, and philosophically individualist. It is in constant conflict with the spirit of family life, which is characterized by dependence, altruism, and philosophical collectivism. So, when market logic comes to dominate a society, family life gives way.

This helps explain the seeming paradox of stubbornly low-birth rates in conservative countries that ostensibly place a high value on family ties. Consider that traditionalist (and often patriarchal) societies in Eastern Europe and East Asia have experienced some of the largest collapses in birth and marriage rates globally—coinciding with the moment these countries were plunged into the world market. Lithuania has a birth rate of 1.34 kids per mother. South Korea has a rate of 0.72.  Both countries are far more culturally conservative than, say, Denmark (at 1.72) or Sweden (1.67). That suggests that cultural traditionalism is no great bulwark against the corrosive effects that market forces have on family life. The Scandinavian model—which emphasizes egalitarian parenting while sheltering families from the whipping winds of the market—offers us a lesson in “unintentional pro-natalism.” Indeed, stubborn patriarchal norms could be making things worse. When men see women alternatively as sex objects or dutiful passive mothers, while the labor market treats them as cheaper workers, women have good reason to view family life with suspicion. In Japan many men have famously swapped female companionship for pornographic cartoons and literal dolls. Not exactly exuding “good father” material.

Still, a political and ideological commitment to family life does matter. Material support alone is not enough. While the progressive pro-family and feminist arrangements of Nordic social democracy have made raising kids much easier and more enjoyable, these countries still have birth rates below the replacement level. As the Norwegian sociologist Catherine Holst has argued, the fact that family formation is a “silent topic” in debates about the welfare state might be part of the problem. While social democrats are very proud of their hard-won family programs, they are wary of suggesting that family policy ought to encourage family growth. That needs to change. There is much reward in family life and, in order to make society more friendly to families, we ought to celebrate those things.

The Family and the Social

When Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as society, only “individual men and women and there are families”, many took this to be a classic statement of conservative dogma. Accepting Thatcher’s view, the sociologist Melinda Cooper, in her acclaimed book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, argues that neoliberalism is not a regime built around the individual, but one built around the family. Meanwhile, the “cyborg feminist” and family abolitionist Sophie Lewis makes a case against families (and motherhood itself) on the basis of combatting the supposedly conservative impulses of family life. 

The logic is simple: if conservatives idolize the family, then capitalism/fascism/neoliberalism must in some way depend on the family. Ipso facto, to be anti-capitalist/fascist/neoliberal is to be anti-family. But Thatcher was of course wrong to see “society” on one side and “individuals and families” on the other. It was this anti-social philosophy that helped make families responsible for what should rightly have been the domain of the state. By doing so, Thatcher did not encourage familial solidarity but instead exposed the family to increasingly frenetic market forces while placing ever rising costs upon it.

It’s no surprise that families dissolved in the neoliberal era. As Mark Fisher noted in 2010, “family ties are unsustainable” today. It’s not just that the stress of “conditions of permanent instability” make it more difficult for parents to stick together and raise children; it’s also that the sociability engendered by those conditions makes it difficult to even want families: “The values that family life depends upon—obligation, trustworthiness, commitment—are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism.” As Theodor Adorno recognized, thanks to the market, “the negation of the family gains the real upper hand.” Capitalism needs no help abolishing families. 

We can see then how a public commitment to family life could be the basis of a progressive politics. Because a family needs income and stability, the state should ensure permanent full-employment, thereby undermining the power of the labor market. Because a family needs reciprocity and cooperation, the state should provide generous parental leave, thereby encouraging egalitarian domestic duties. Because a family needs time together, the state should shorten the work week, thereby encouraging social relations over transactional market relations. Because families need to have fun, the state should sponsor sports leagues, arts councils, and collective forms of entertainment, thereby undermining the power of the markets for personal entertainment and social media (the latter of which should be systematically dismantled). 

In short, in pursuit of the family, socialism.

But there is a deeper point to be made. Because all these nice things cost money, we need to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporations. Because the wealthy and the corporations will bitterly oppose such taxes, we need to encourage the growth of powerful unions and mass organizations to prevail against their opposition. Because we need such organizations, we need individuals to build them—individuals that prize social virtues like solidarity, self-sacrifice, and fraternity, over the individualism and utilitarianism that characterize the ethics of the market. It just so happens that just such virtues are characteristic of family life. This is one reason that union members refer to one another as “brother” or “sister.” Meanwhile, the virtues of liberal individualism (supreme autonomy, the exaltation of personal wants over collective needs, a “what-do-I-get-out-of-it” theory of justice) are, in practice, social vices.

We need families to solve a host of social crises like the falling birthrate and the crisis of care. In order to grow families we need to advance policies that shield them from the dislocating effects of market forces. To achieve such political goals, the Left ought to embrace a progressive belief in the family as a common good in and of itself, for it is through the growth of families that we can restore that sense of social solidarity, camaraderie, and meaning that is missing in our empire of alienation. 

And, if nothing else, the growth of family life—and closer connections between the generations—will help ensure that one day we won’t end up half-eaten by maggots waiting for the landlord to know they’re dead.

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and an associate researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics.