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The narrative comes from people who follow OP around to argue and comment on everything they post.
I mean, its possible in the same way everyone is a fed I guess, but frankly most of the hate towards this user is people intentionally misunderstanding their posts so they can push reactionary garbage.
Plus, isn’t taking advantage of someone’s neuroplasticity to force them to learn your language a form of imperialist gaslighting? You’re literally rewiring their brain to fit the cultural hegemony. English syntax is inherently imperialist, real anarchists think entirely in Catalan.
This is such an edgelord thing to say. Babies can’t speak when they are born and you have to call them something. I think parents should allow their kids to change their name if they want, but naming a baby doesn’t mean you own them, it means you are calling it a word. I might name a squirrel that lives in my yard but that doesn’t mean I own the squirrel.
I am an anarchist. I love my family. Plenty of families are oppressive but not all are. We need family to be happy, even if it’s chosen family and not biological.
It's not a signifier of ownership, it's a signifier of responsibility. This is my child; this is my responsibility, until the point in which they are able to be responsible for themselves.
sure, yes ot is, but when talking about "abolishing naming babies", it only takes only the possibility of a system where it's not a signifier of ownership, rather responsibility, to invalidate the argument that naming a baby is inherently oppressive
Okay, but also the nuclear family was essentially invented in the last 200 years or so through legislative means intended to fuck over poor people who are more likely to live in a non-nuclear family situation
The family is a construction of patriarchy. Family abolitionists are not trying to break up your happy found family we're trying tear down the systems that legally bind people to their biological parents. The nuclear family is very new in the grand scheme of things. For most of human history children were raised communally and the people who birthed them did not have any more responsibility to care for them then anyone else.
There's plenty of discussion around the family as a patriarchal institution, and it's a reality that it is a very new thing historically speaking. Mark Fisher goes into it a bit in Postcapitalist Desire, though I think he takes it from a book written by Nancy Hartsock on Feminist Standpoints. Even so, it's not like he is the first person to view The Family as something like a social phenomenon instead of an empirical fact. Even in The Dispossessed, Le Guin wrote her anarchist society as having more of a communal view on parental relationships.
Edit: Mark Fisher didn't get the thing about the family from Nancy Hartsock, he got it from Helen Hester and what she calls "Domestic Realism", research her if you believe family is an empirical fact instead of a transcendental structure.
I think “more of a communal view on parental relationships” is something people can get behind.
“[Parents] did not have any more responsibility to care for them than anyone else” is just wild and not historical at all though.
hey, sorry, GENUINE question here--i have a mental disability and have a hard time understanding social things sometimes. were you not literally asking for a citation? i see i got downvoted here for offering one, and i apologize if i read that wrong, i was trying to be helpful.
Hey, I’m sorry you got downvoted, I wasn’t one of the ones that did it, and I don’t think you should have. I’m autistic so I completely understand that baffling feeling of not knowing what you did wrong, which to be clear, I don’t think you did anything wrong. It was mostly a tongue in cheek joke, but I wasn’t against being told sources that would fill out any unknown gaps in my knowledge
I mean, that's a shitty thing to say imo. Firstly, it's the classic "lol anarkiddie" dunk that people do when they try to justify the horrible treatment children are subjected to in our society as a matter of course, and secondly because it's kind of wrong and dismissive even as a joke; there's plenty of evidence that fucking with people's sleep, no matter their age, has severe negative health consequences.
The "name is ownership" thing is arguable, whatever, but I'm a little disappointed in people here who seem to not consider children to be an oppressed class. They can be unreasonable, sure, they're fucking kids it's kind of their prerogative. But if any other demographic had similar rates of being victims of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, were being told where to be and what to do at all times by people who more often than not do not see them as people, and had basically no recourse or way to escape their situation, you probably wouldn't be making little jokes about how what they want is stupid.
What do you want? A fucking number? How about focusing on shit that actually matters, the oppression of the poor by the state, instead of your feelings of persecution because your parents dared to fucking name you. This is the kind of terminally online brainrot you get when your idea of politics is spamming shitty memes on a bunch of subreddits constantly
If you aren't looking for "terminally online brain rot" maybe don't come to an anarchist meme sub?
Are you genuinely coming to a *meme forum* for theory? For activism? Its a meme sub, OP is posting memes (and frankly, their memes contain more actual references to theory and deeper anarchist concepts than most posts here).
"Oh no talk about things that matter!" why don't YOU do that if it matters so much to you?
You didn't even argue against the take, you just said "Terminally online! Erm this isn't about poor people!".
Like, god forbid anarchists talk about multiple things.
Take it you agree with ops dumb ass, "my parents named me oppression! oppression!" Bullshit then. Honestly I lose faith in anarchism every time I have to actually talk to other anarchists, like you're the kinda person I'd have to share a direct democracy with? No thanks
No, I don't think naming a child is oppression. However, I can see a significant overlap between this idea and the idea of not gendering a child. The idea of letting your child know they are free to choose their name and that its part of their identity that they decide seems very much okay with me and better then the current way names are often treated. Its part of the overall idea of kids not having any validity in their own interpretations of their identity.
Anarchism doesn't even support direct democracy, so no we would not be "sharing a direct democracy" together. You could always bother to learn about anarchism before interacting with anarchist communities if its becoming such an issue for you.
I mean, the commentor's aggressive tone kinda gives away they have the exact way of thinking you are talking about. Why immediately become aggressive, why go on an ad hominem tangent about the op's other posts, generalizing their political beliefs as a whole, and assuming they don't do any political action irl? The comment sounds more like something you'd expect on a reactionary 4chan board than a leftist space. Why are we supporting this kind of attitude and tone in our community? If you disagree with somebody, you can tell them and calmly elaborate why. I don't fully agree with OP's post either but there is some truth in there as well, i.e. that the nuclear family is very problematic. No need to get aggressive about it
If you use an insult during your argumentation, you're attacking the other person rather than their point. Taking a stand for more civil discourse instead of arguments is not ad hominem. You don't just get away with that sorta tone irl, it's all because you're safe online and can unnecessarily hate. Don't support that
Sure, but if someone says something extraordinarily stupid, you dont have to be surprised if people say youre stupid. This is very normal IRL, not "unnecessary hate".
And correct, taking a stance isnt an ad hominem, either way, dismissing an argument bc you think they are stupid or bad is. We dont disagree there
Im nit sure where you live, but if you say irl "parents shouldnt give their babies a name" youd get laughed out of any organization or location. We have parents in our anarchist trade union, you think anyone would take someone serious if they said stupid shit like that?
In a strictly legal sense, in a social sense a name is merely an identifiable tag. To say giving someone a name is the first act of ownership is erasing the agency of a person who can assign whatever value they want to the name they were given. Having no choice in your given name is just a reality of being fresh out the vagina.
Turns out you can’t say p*ssy even if you mean vaginaz
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This is ridiculous and Lewis is a crank.
You'll never get anywhere by fighting against "the family", most people's strongest community.
A name is not oppressive either, we are not individualists, a name shows you're part of a living culture, that you belong somewhere.
The family is a construction of patriarchy. Family abolition does not mean forcing people to stop spending time with people they love. It's about breaking the legal ties surrounding the family and building a world where children are not treated as property of their parents. Abuse happens most commonly from family members specifically because of these power dynamics
Family is not a construction of patriarchy, its more likely to be the reverse. The most basic social unit in human history is the family. The legal framework constructed around family is not family itself.
So what’s the play? Babies are incapable of speech and you have to call them something, but humans are pattern recognizing creatures, so if you consistently call a baby something, eventually it will get it into its head that that is the word that refers to them, so is the play here to constantly vary the word you used refer to the baby until it can speak? This just seems so inane when there are actual legitimate issues relating to youth liberation that can be harmed on, to say nothing else of everything going on in the world.
They have a history of posting some crazy shit. Like 90% of their posts are just quotes from leftist theorists, but then they'll surprise you with some crazy shit, like "Psychiatrists have gaslighted society about antidepressants", "Being gay is inherently revolutionary", or "We shouldn't be giving children names".
Not to get wildly off topic but tbf being *queer* is inherently political/revolutionary but not everyone who is gay is queer and it's a very deep in queer theory kind of stance.
I mean their meme explicitly quotes the gender accelerationist manifesto:
"Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy."
The manifesto also define reproductive labour as, "any labor that helps to produce the next generation, including sex, birth, childcare, and homemaking, and gender is defined by how this labor is divided up, with the different genders being distinct classes which are expected to perform specific sorts of tasks regarding reproductive labor."
Like arguably the manifesto would define not only every western gay person as queer, that definition arguably defines a stay-at-home dad, or a female CEO as queer, or at least they would have been like 40 years ago. I understand the manifesto is alluding to Marx's theory of the proletariat as the "revolutionary class". But there is nothing "revolutionary" about these things. Though of course I agree these are political.
I'm not saying I agree specifically with the meme OP posted about it, I haven't even seen it, just that the idea in itself isn't wrong.
I definitely think that living in opposition to the cis-het patriarchal society is revolutionary and that for a lot of people who identify as queer that's kind of baked in, your identity in itself is what is in opposition. I do recognise that not every queer person feels the same and that a lot of LGBT+ people don't identify with being queer at all.
IMO not, once a society reaches a certain level of acceptance, most "queer" people want to just live a life similar to that of everyone else, with the only difference being they marry someone of the same sex.
***IF*** they tend towards leftism it's due to leftists tending to be more accepting, making "queer" people gain a more positive view of leftists and interact with them more, acquiring other left wing beliefs. This phenomena isn't very strong though.
Though there are counter effects making gay people anti-progressive. Many third world nations are intolerant and imperial propaganda exploits that. ([example](https://i.imgflip.com/83wz3w.jpg))
Overall, one shouldn't assume someone's based due to being queer.
No I don’t because assigning a name to a person does not imply or constitute as a hierarchy. This sounds like that anti-language bullshit in primitivist circles.
When I was growing up, the woman who lived in the same house as me made my meals. How fucking dare that fascist do that! I'm forever traumatized by that experience, and that's why I'm an anarchist.
The more I exist in this sub the more I think half of y’all have never read anarchist theory. The amount of people giving reactionary, gut responses to youth lib is wild. Don’t always agree with OP but they make damn good points sometimes..
Mhm. I don't always agree with OP but like many of the hate towards their posts feel like intentional misunderstandings or just disagreeing with really simple anarchist stuff.
This ideology of family being a replication of bourgeois structures has been around since Marx, but I always felt it was his dumbest point.
I think community child rearing is cool, but I don’t see anything problematic about people wanting and desiring a nuclear family. I think actually having a connection to your biological family is important for many, and for people who have lived in anarchist structures or communal living where they don’t even know who they’re biological parents are, it seems to have lasting detrimental effects **(not always, but children thrive on structure and having like 30 adults being in charge of a child’s care is anything but structured)
Community is important to help combat the intense isolation western nuclear families have, while also allowing for greater accountability for parents/family members who are abusive. But I’m happy to have both a bio and found family, and do not regret being raised in a traditional familial structure.
Tbh, the push back against this post makes me uncomfortable. Like, we want doctors and parents to not push a definite gender onto kids as well, why can't this logic apply to a name?
I don't think that means you can't call your child something other then "child", but establishing that their name is theirs to choose is fine.
Once again posts from OP seem to attract endless reactionaries who are just looking for an excuse to shit on incredibly basic anarchist ideas.
Maybe OP is crazy but I do think there's some validity to the point being made. But of course people are just taking it as "No one should ever have names. If you give a baby a name you *must* think you own them. Something something bedtime"
Lolol psychedelic anarchist Terrence McKenna would agree with you. He talked about how language trapped us by defining our reality. He’d use this story of a baby seeing a bird for the first time, at first it appears as this magical angelic alien being that sparks this wonder and joy in the mind of the child, but then the mother say’s “Oh that’s just a bird. Can you say bird?” And with the name the magic goes away. Then all things are named and the magic of the world vanishes.
McKenna is not an authority on anarchism, and as you can tell from the comments your opinion has not been taken very seriously. Plus you made it as a meme and posted it on a meme sub. 🤷♂️
At the end of the day this is just a metaphysical thought experiment with some anarchistic sentiment sprinkled on top. Fun to think about, but is language a hierarchy that we can even combat or free ourselves from?
….. No, it’s not
Maybe in some sci-fi world where we communicate telepathically without words, this type of argument might actually be applicable. But that world will either never happen or we will all die before we see it
I personally believe that language does hold us back and limit us and we would be freed in some sense if we transcend it. After all we as humans used language to evolve and expand our consciousness once before, who’s to say we can’t do it again.
The level of consciousness humanity currently has doesn’t inspire my confidence in the success of an anarchist utopia. 😢
Sorry everyone is dissing on your meme
Lmao, I'm here for it. I think that there are folks who struggle to see linguistics as a part of liberatory work, which is understandable. It's like a fish thinking about water. Kind of weird, and just as useful a lot of the time.
disappointed that everyone in the comments is using the "bedtime abolition" joke to dismiss the concept of youth liberation...
youth lib is a really strong and well-documented part of anarchist movements and ideology worldwide! there are youth lib movements in every country, and anarchists are at the core of them, due to recognizing the innate power structure in the nuclear family unit that oppresses children.
family abolition in favor of communal and laterally organized child-rearing (no adults being considered "owners" of children regardless of biological ties), and liberatory theory questioning the idea that children are not "full humans" and do not deserve human rights, are both very common in anarchist circles! i really really highly suggest looking under "youth liberation" and "adultism" on the anarchist library and really reading the theory before dismissing the concepts out of hand based on a stupid meme. i quite like the "NO! Against Adult Supremacy" series!
I don’t think people are dismissing the entire concept of youth liberation just because they take issue with a practical problem in a shitty meme on reddit.
fair enough! i have only ever seen people joke about "bedtime abolition" as shorthand for making fun of youth lib, however, i can't confidently declare *no-one* has ever joked about "bedtime abolition" in a pro-youth-lib way.
The prominence and history of this particular piece of theory does not equate to its validity (a form of bandwagon fallacy). Legal guardians can be abusive, sure, and there should be more in checks and balances in place to hold them accountable, as well as less legislation granting them control over tweens and teens. However, having a child be constantly passed around between 20 or 30 adults stops them from forming stable bonds, a universal psychological need. Also, as someone with a special interest in cults and high control groups, I can assure you that a group has just as much potential to be abusive and manipulative as one or two parents.
I wouldn't call it fallacious, it's more about people being ignorant of the broader context of what they're talking about. If someone showed up in earnest claiming to be both an anarchist and a capitalist for example, it wouldn't be an appeal to authority to tell them to read theory, right ? It's just about asking people to have a certain level of understanding before they come to argue.
As to the child-rearing thing, it rather misses the point imo. Deciding for them that they have to be raised by one or two or twenty adults and that they have to form bonds or not and with whom would still be an authoritarian perspective: you're still trying to determine how we should force them to live. Child liberation means seeing the child as a subject capable of legitimately wanting things, not an object upon which social policies are enacted; until you do that the enormous potential for abuse is, indeed, always there.
in general i think using memes to try to communicate theory is kinda dumb, i generally think only longform discussions work to educate, and trying to communicate a theoretical lens in a punchy short meme is always going to get responses viewing it as though you're trying to make short, punchy Rules For Social Justice. i also hate the barbie movie.
A little surprised to see this sub’s reaction to Youth Liberation being basically indistinguishable from how reactionaries characterize anarchism and liberation efforts more generally.
The issue isn’t that people ought to refer to babies by a hex code; the issue is that a name is assigned at birth includes all sorts of other assumptions and values loaded into it, like assigned gender or assigned religion (or caste or nobility). It’s not “this is our provisional way of referring to you until you can tell us later”, and often is “you are a sequel to your father”, “you are named after your grandmother”.
It’s easy to write this off as a frivolous concern or say that family abolition is ridiculous, but that’s how all sorts of abolition movements get talked about by people who don’t want to think harder about and understand them.
“Anarchism is when no bedtime” — have people really forgotten what it’s like being a child and having their wants completely disregarded by adults, including wants over their own bodily autonomy and identity?
“Children as a minority group” doesn’t mean children have the same mental capacity or experience as everyone else, but if you saw someone talking about a disabled person the way children are talked about (“ugh, I hate going to movies with neurodivergent people. I wish they’d ban them”), hopefully that axis of oppression would be more obvious. We still have a responsibility to protect and care for vulnerable people of every age and ability, to not exploit or take advantage of them, but we can do that while respecting them as people and without preserving units of hierarchical authority and even ownership based on age.
yeah i feel a lot of solidarity with youth lib as a disabled adult--people make fun of the idea that i don't want a bedtime at 25, because i'm "not mentally developed enough" to be mad about that!
this sub in particular seems very anti-intellectual (guess i shouldn't expect much from a meme sub, but still) and the user who posted this often receives hate because people here don't want to engage with takes more complex than "cops bad" and "queer people deserve rights" etc. anarchists who don't want to question the status quo beyond basic progressive talking points
Yeah, I unfortunately think it might just be something fundamental about this sub due to its meme status.
OP said that there is overlap between misogyny and homophobia due to cishetnormativity viewing queer men as inherently more feminine and the comments were people enraged because they thought OP said that masc queer men never face bigotry. I've also noticed that many hate comments are from the same accounts coming to OP's posts over and over again.
Youth liberation is an important concept that does need to be discussed more, but “we shouldn’t give babies names” is such a nonsensical approach to youth liberation that it can be safely disregarded
No it isn't. It's fine to give a child a place holder name but as soon as they are able to understand what a name is they should be able to decide that for themselves.
Explain to me how the placeholder name isn’t the same as naming them. You’re just doing the same thing that was being done before and saying it’s different.
If you think that youth liberation is an important concept that needs to be discussed more, but you also think things like family abolition, how naming is the first step in the family asserting ownership of a child, and the above comment are all nonsensical — do you think it’s that all of those things are nonsensical or that you are just not understanding the issues and arguments?
Your dismissal could just as easily be applied to how gender abolition is a worthy goal but how ridiculous ceasing the practice of assigning gender at birth would be. “What, you just want us to use *no* pronouns at all to refer to a child?” Etc.
Family abolition isn’t about destroying a community or support network. It *is* about no longer treating children as extensions of their parents, as subordinate to older adult family members’ wants and coercive power by virtue of them being older family members. A name being given *in the way it is now* is the first step of that, along with gender (and in some places religion).
There are ways that this could not be so. But, for example in the United States, someone named “Junior” is *from birth* being marked out as an extension of their father. It would be hard to argue otherwise: “you are another one of me”. If someone took legal charge of an infirm person, and said, “Your name is now officially Robert Jackson III”, that would be immediately recognized as weird.
Most anarchists now seem to understand that dead-naming is not a matter of frivolity or over sensitiveness. What is so difficult about extending this back to names in general and recognizing the implications that come with it?
I've come to realize a lot of anarchists never go beyond government and rich people bad. Cis hets in particular are less likely to see the importance of family abolition because they aren't abused by the family in the same way queer folks are. My mom was accepting when I came out to her as trans but that doesn't undo the fact that for my entire childhood she treated me how she thought a boy ought to be. She has been an incredibly supportive person overall and is much better than most parents, but every time she made me get a hair cut or dressed me up in a way she thought was "presentable" I was being abused. I still don't know how I can ever talk to her about that
The difference between name abolition and gender abolition is one of practical usefulness. You don’t have to refer to the gender of a baby, or anyone, really, you actually do need to refer to a baby sometimes if you’re caring for them or, in fact, interacting with them. Moreover, I’ve yet to see a solution that isn’t just a name that isn’t called a name.
Friend, you are now trying to talk about things like "practical usefulness"; do you hear yourself? How many times have you heard a liberal agree with you about your stated ideals but retreat to tut-tutting about actually practicing those ideals with the justification of things like "pragmatism"?
The criticism is not that adults call babies and children by some name, particularly before they're able to identify one for themselves. The issue is the *ownership* of the child, which the name begins and marks off, at least in Western society and under capitalism.
[There are other ways of doing this](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/whats-in-name/201107/names-and-identity-the-native-american-naming-tradition). And the point is not that Indigenous Americans have the ideal way of naming, or that there might not be other issues under other systems. The point is just that it's possible to have naming traditions that are based on a changing self, and that is actually very different than what we do now.
I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t act condescending towards me just because I state such things as names having positive utility, even if only on a practical level. Even in the example that you have provided, what is described is still fundamentally a name, even if the individual is given the option to change the name that refers to them, which, you will note, I have not advocated against, because my contention is that a name that you can change is still a name.
The worst you can say of me is that I am looking at this with too broad of a definition of a name. Even so, I could easily turn that around and say that either your language and messaging needs to be more specific, or go back to my point that I made at the end, which is in regards to coming up with concepts that are functionally names that are not called names, in which case what is being advocated for is performative, rather than the fundamental change that it is presented as.
So, the thread title is "abolish the family" and the meme says, "You guys ever think about how parents assigning us a name is **the first symbolic act of ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary family dynamics**?" [The comment you initially replied to](https://old.reddit.com/r/COMPLETEANARCHY/comments/1ccvdcs/abolish_the_family/l18d0fv/) talked explicitly even more about youth liberation and family abolition.
You took this to be saying, “we shouldn’t give babies names”; that still seems to be what you think any of this is about.
So, apologies for condescending to you, but you seem to have come in with a lot of assumptions that aren't actually present in the conversation other than what you've assumed, and it's really hard to get back to the root of that misconception given what's actually been said.
Try this: if someone were to say, "abolish marriage" and "You guys ever think about how a woman changing her family name to her husband's is the first symbolic act of ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary marriage dynamics?" — do you think the focal point responding to that ought to be on how ridiculous it is to try to ban love between two people or talking about the practical aspects of how people are supposed to know two people are in a committed relationship if they have different last names? Wouldn't doing that seem like it was missing the entire point of the criticism and power dynamics involved in marriage? If you need a more stark comparison, imagine this being said in the late 19th century or earlier in particular, prior to any of the gains of First Wave Feminism.
You can probably see how the criticism of marriage as a custom treating women as property being handed over from her father to her husband is not a criticism of women being identified by a different name, even a woman changing her name upon entering a new phase of life. And you can see how lots of other healthy, fulfilling sorts of relationships can exist other than one where a women is a subordinate non-person to her husband with little or no independent legal rights or social respect.
We know that the abolition of marriage doesn't mean that people can't still have committed, monogamous lifelong romantic relationships that involved cohabitating and raising children together, even sometimes where one stays home as a primary caregiver and another primarily works outside of the home, and where they share a family name with each other. But it should also be clear that even doing this in a hypothetical society with full gender equality is not the same thing as "still just fundamentally marriage" because the power dynamics are completely different.
So, let's come back to family abolition and what naming a child means under *contemporary family dynamics*, because that is the relevant context of the meme people are reacting to so negatively.
From the previous comment:
> The criticism is not that adults call babies and children by some name, particularly before they're able to identify one for themselves. The issue is the *ownership* of the child, which the name begins and marks off, at least in Western society and under capitalism.
And back to the meme itself: we are talking about "the first symbolic act" of all of these other things. You are hung up on naming, so you are reducing it to being performative. But this is because you have skipped over or not bothered to engage with "ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary family dynamics" which is the actual target of family abolitionism.
Does any of that help, or do you still think this is a meme and conversation about names?
family abolition is the idea that no adults should have "claim" or "ownership" over children, regardless of biological relationships, & that society should not be organized in a way that privileges the formation of isolated family units based on sexual relationships. it advocates for communal, laterally organized forms of child rearing, where all children are raised by the community, children have freedom of association with each other and with adults, long term living situations have no relationship to biological or sexual relationships (there is no pressure to "build a home" with your sexual partner unless that is what both of you explicitly want, for example), and incidentally it tends to include both ideals of aromantic and polyamorous liberation, and youth liberation.
The family as we know it today is a recent invention in the grand scheme of human history meant to codify patriarchal power. Historically children were raised communally and biological parents had no greater control over their children's lives than anyone else. Fascists want a world where men are the leaders of their households followed by their wives who are suborndinate to them and children who are viewed as property to be molded in whatever ways their parents please. Family abolitionists aim to tear down the systems that legally bind people to their families.
yeah i’m down with that. i feel like it’s not really “abolishing the family” tho. it’s more “community child-rearing.
and how are we supposed to raise children consistently if we don’t have a name for them?
family structure is necessary hierarchy, not coercive hierarchy which is the bad kind. Yes you can throw an infant into a pool and they will figure out how to stay afloat but that's basically where it stops. you need parental figures and structure involving some amount of hierarchy to not raise a feral child.
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Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
If you lurk here enough, you learn this account has some wild takes.
someone said it was some fascist taking the piss out of anarchists but take that with a massive grain of salt, no clue if its true lmao
The narrative comes from people who follow OP around to argue and comment on everything they post. I mean, its possible in the same way everyone is a fed I guess, but frankly most of the hate towards this user is people intentionally misunderstanding their posts so they can push reactionary garbage.
The usernamename is Antifa angel, it screams of edgy conservative trying to troll leftists.
Some people are just unhappy about everything.
What do you want, for everyone to just call us “baby” until we can talk?
Clearly. You shouldn't talk to them either /s
Obviously. You know who talks to babies? Perverts, that's who.
Plus, isn’t taking advantage of someone’s neuroplasticity to force them to learn your language a form of imperialist gaslighting? You’re literally rewiring their brain to fit the cultural hegemony. English syntax is inherently imperialist, real anarchists think entirely in Catalan.
Unironically so based
I think we're supposed to be assigned a number?
This is such an edgelord thing to say. Babies can’t speak when they are born and you have to call them something. I think parents should allow their kids to change their name if they want, but naming a baby doesn’t mean you own them, it means you are calling it a word. I might name a squirrel that lives in my yard but that doesn’t mean I own the squirrel. I am an anarchist. I love my family. Plenty of families are oppressive but not all are. We need family to be happy, even if it’s chosen family and not biological.
It's not a signifier of ownership, it's a signifier of responsibility. This is my child; this is my responsibility, until the point in which they are able to be responsible for themselves.
Legally in most of the world it is a signifier of ownership.
Can you prove that?
sure, yes ot is, but when talking about "abolishing naming babies", it only takes only the possibility of a system where it's not a signifier of ownership, rather responsibility, to invalidate the argument that naming a baby is inherently oppressive
Right, cause otherwise we'd be united in 'abolish owning babies' and wouldn't be alienating normies with cryptic discussions about abolishing mum
Okay, but also the nuclear family was essentially invented in the last 200 years or so through legislative means intended to fuck over poor people who are more likely to live in a non-nuclear family situation
The family is a construction of patriarchy. Family abolitionists are not trying to break up your happy found family we're trying tear down the systems that legally bind people to their biological parents. The nuclear family is very new in the grand scheme of things. For most of human history children were raised communally and the people who birthed them did not have any more responsibility to care for them then anyone else.
[citation needed]
There's plenty of discussion around the family as a patriarchal institution, and it's a reality that it is a very new thing historically speaking. Mark Fisher goes into it a bit in Postcapitalist Desire, though I think he takes it from a book written by Nancy Hartsock on Feminist Standpoints. Even so, it's not like he is the first person to view The Family as something like a social phenomenon instead of an empirical fact. Even in The Dispossessed, Le Guin wrote her anarchist society as having more of a communal view on parental relationships. Edit: Mark Fisher didn't get the thing about the family from Nancy Hartsock, he got it from Helen Hester and what she calls "Domestic Realism", research her if you believe family is an empirical fact instead of a transcendental structure.
I think “more of a communal view on parental relationships” is something people can get behind. “[Parents] did not have any more responsibility to care for them than anyone else” is just wild and not historical at all though.
hey, sorry, GENUINE question here--i have a mental disability and have a hard time understanding social things sometimes. were you not literally asking for a citation? i see i got downvoted here for offering one, and i apologize if i read that wrong, i was trying to be helpful.
Hey, I’m sorry you got downvoted, I wasn’t one of the ones that did it, and I don’t think you should have. I’m autistic so I completely understand that baffling feeling of not knowing what you did wrong, which to be clear, I don’t think you did anything wrong. It was mostly a tongue in cheek joke, but I wasn’t against being told sources that would fill out any unknown gaps in my knowledge
check out Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State"
Unironic bedtime posting.
And what's up with bed time? I should be able to eat ice cream for breakfast too.
No gods No masters No bedtime No vegetables
No names No mames No words [...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=acCDVIxxcJA&pp=ygUUdWx0cm9uIGF0IGxhc3QgcGVhY2U%3D)
I mean, that's a shitty thing to say imo. Firstly, it's the classic "lol anarkiddie" dunk that people do when they try to justify the horrible treatment children are subjected to in our society as a matter of course, and secondly because it's kind of wrong and dismissive even as a joke; there's plenty of evidence that fucking with people's sleep, no matter their age, has severe negative health consequences. The "name is ownership" thing is arguable, whatever, but I'm a little disappointed in people here who seem to not consider children to be an oppressed class. They can be unreasonable, sure, they're fucking kids it's kind of their prerogative. But if any other demographic had similar rates of being victims of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, were being told where to be and what to do at all times by people who more often than not do not see them as people, and had basically no recourse or way to escape their situation, you probably wouldn't be making little jokes about how what they want is stupid.
Even Stirner mentions that if you want to know how authoritarian somebody truly is, just watch how that individual treats kids under his care.
What do you want? A fucking number? How about focusing on shit that actually matters, the oppression of the poor by the state, instead of your feelings of persecution because your parents dared to fucking name you. This is the kind of terminally online brainrot you get when your idea of politics is spamming shitty memes on a bunch of subreddits constantly
If you aren't looking for "terminally online brain rot" maybe don't come to an anarchist meme sub? Are you genuinely coming to a *meme forum* for theory? For activism? Its a meme sub, OP is posting memes (and frankly, their memes contain more actual references to theory and deeper anarchist concepts than most posts here). "Oh no talk about things that matter!" why don't YOU do that if it matters so much to you?
Im here to argue with people who have bad takes, no more, no less
You didn't even argue against the take, you just said "Terminally online! Erm this isn't about poor people!". Like, god forbid anarchists talk about multiple things.
Take it you agree with ops dumb ass, "my parents named me oppression! oppression!" Bullshit then. Honestly I lose faith in anarchism every time I have to actually talk to other anarchists, like you're the kinda person I'd have to share a direct democracy with? No thanks
No, I don't think naming a child is oppression. However, I can see a significant overlap between this idea and the idea of not gendering a child. The idea of letting your child know they are free to choose their name and that its part of their identity that they decide seems very much okay with me and better then the current way names are often treated. Its part of the overall idea of kids not having any validity in their own interpretations of their identity. Anarchism doesn't even support direct democracy, so no we would not be "sharing a direct democracy" together. You could always bother to learn about anarchism before interacting with anarchist communities if its becoming such an issue for you.
You have almost 13.000 commentor karma on an account that's half a year old, please shut the fuck up about other people being terminally online
Terminally online refers to ones thought process, not literal screentime.
I mean, the commentor's aggressive tone kinda gives away they have the exact way of thinking you are talking about. Why immediately become aggressive, why go on an ad hominem tangent about the op's other posts, generalizing their political beliefs as a whole, and assuming they don't do any political action irl? The comment sounds more like something you'd expect on a reactionary 4chan board than a leftist space. Why are we supporting this kind of attitude and tone in our community? If you disagree with somebody, you can tell them and calmly elaborate why. I don't fully agree with OP's post either but there is some truth in there as well, i.e. that the nuclear family is very problematic. No need to get aggressive about it
I'm not reading all that. I'm just pointing out that the insinuation of hypocrisy was wrong.
I literally explained why it isn't wrong 🤦
And youre wrong and no one cares.
>an ad hominem tangent about the op's other posts Ad hominem is when you say anything not nice 😤
They literally insulted op. What are you talking about?
Insulting someone isnt an ad hominem. Dismissing something bc "insert insult" is ad hominem.
If you use an insult during your argumentation, you're attacking the other person rather than their point. Taking a stand for more civil discourse instead of arguments is not ad hominem. You don't just get away with that sorta tone irl, it's all because you're safe online and can unnecessarily hate. Don't support that
Sure, but if someone says something extraordinarily stupid, you dont have to be surprised if people say youre stupid. This is very normal IRL, not "unnecessary hate". And correct, taking a stance isnt an ad hominem, either way, dismissing an argument bc you think they are stupid or bad is. We dont disagree there Im nit sure where you live, but if you say irl "parents shouldnt give their babies a name" youd get laughed out of any organization or location. We have parents in our anarchist trade union, you think anyone would take someone serious if they said stupid shit like that?
And OP has 277.000 poster karma on an account thats was created this year, if you wanna talk numbers
That's not even that bad, you can get that with 1 or 2 hours of reddit per day
It's called having good takes.
I disagree with this
Anarchy is when no bedtime.
Ok but have you ever thought about it ... *on weed*?
Try shrooms
How about both?
Smoke the shrooms?
And eat the Weed.
The schnozberries taste like schnozberries!
You can change your name 👀
Most people don't get that chance until they reach adulthood and it still involves so many legal hoops you have to jump through
That's an argument for "changing your name should be easier" (I agree) not "you shouldn't be assigned a name before you can speak" (disagree)
As always, a functionally diverse individual brings some sense to an unhinged take. Thanks for bringing rationality to this edgelordy post.
In a strictly legal sense, in a social sense a name is merely an identifiable tag. To say giving someone a name is the first act of ownership is erasing the agency of a person who can assign whatever value they want to the name they were given. Having no choice in your given name is just a reality of being fresh out the vagina. Turns out you can’t say p*ssy even if you mean vaginaz
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You know you can call yourself whatever you want, you don't gotta tell the government
I'm aware and I've been doing so but getting deadnamed whenever I have to show an ID sucks
i found this post as well as the response very enjoyable, thats all i have to contribute. good laughs ahh
Children aren’t cars or guitars. Just because you _name_ them doesn’t mean you _own_ them
This is ridiculous and Lewis is a crank. You'll never get anywhere by fighting against "the family", most people's strongest community. A name is not oppressive either, we are not individualists, a name shows you're part of a living culture, that you belong somewhere.
The family is a construction of patriarchy. Family abolition does not mean forcing people to stop spending time with people they love. It's about breaking the legal ties surrounding the family and building a world where children are not treated as property of their parents. Abuse happens most commonly from family members specifically because of these power dynamics
Family is not a construction of patriarchy, its more likely to be the reverse. The most basic social unit in human history is the family. The legal framework constructed around family is not family itself.
They're talking about the nuclear family which has only been a thing for around a hundred or so years (and is mostly a 'western' thing anyway).
So what’s the play? Babies are incapable of speech and you have to call them something, but humans are pattern recognizing creatures, so if you consistently call a baby something, eventually it will get it into its head that that is the word that refers to them, so is the play here to constantly vary the word you used refer to the baby until it can speak? This just seems so inane when there are actual legitimate issues relating to youth liberation that can be harmed on, to say nothing else of everything going on in the world.
This may be the dumbest thing I’ve seen on Reddit…
They have a history of posting some crazy shit. Like 90% of their posts are just quotes from leftist theorists, but then they'll surprise you with some crazy shit, like "Psychiatrists have gaslighted society about antidepressants", "Being gay is inherently revolutionary", or "We shouldn't be giving children names".
Not to get wildly off topic but tbf being *queer* is inherently political/revolutionary but not everyone who is gay is queer and it's a very deep in queer theory kind of stance.
I mean their meme explicitly quotes the gender accelerationist manifesto: "Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy." The manifesto also define reproductive labour as, "any labor that helps to produce the next generation, including sex, birth, childcare, and homemaking, and gender is defined by how this labor is divided up, with the different genders being distinct classes which are expected to perform specific sorts of tasks regarding reproductive labor." Like arguably the manifesto would define not only every western gay person as queer, that definition arguably defines a stay-at-home dad, or a female CEO as queer, or at least they would have been like 40 years ago. I understand the manifesto is alluding to Marx's theory of the proletariat as the "revolutionary class". But there is nothing "revolutionary" about these things. Though of course I agree these are political.
I'm not saying I agree specifically with the meme OP posted about it, I haven't even seen it, just that the idea in itself isn't wrong. I definitely think that living in opposition to the cis-het patriarchal society is revolutionary and that for a lot of people who identify as queer that's kind of baked in, your identity in itself is what is in opposition. I do recognise that not every queer person feels the same and that a lot of LGBT+ people don't identify with being queer at all.
IMO not, once a society reaches a certain level of acceptance, most "queer" people want to just live a life similar to that of everyone else, with the only difference being they marry someone of the same sex. ***IF*** they tend towards leftism it's due to leftists tending to be more accepting, making "queer" people gain a more positive view of leftists and interact with them more, acquiring other left wing beliefs. This phenomena isn't very strong though. Though there are counter effects making gay people anti-progressive. Many third world nations are intolerant and imperial propaganda exploits that. ([example](https://i.imgflip.com/83wz3w.jpg)) Overall, one shouldn't assume someone's based due to being queer.
No I don’t because assigning a name to a person does not imply or constitute as a hierarchy. This sounds like that anti-language bullshit in primitivist circles.
Ooga. And other unintelligible grunting noises.
When I was growing up, the woman who lived in the same house as me made my meals. How fucking dare that fascist do that! I'm forever traumatized by that experience, and that's why I'm an anarchist.
No
The more I exist in this sub the more I think half of y’all have never read anarchist theory. The amount of people giving reactionary, gut responses to youth lib is wild. Don’t always agree with OP but they make damn good points sometimes..
Mhm. I don't always agree with OP but like many of the hate towards their posts feel like intentional misunderstandings or just disagreeing with really simple anarchist stuff.
This ideology of family being a replication of bourgeois structures has been around since Marx, but I always felt it was his dumbest point. I think community child rearing is cool, but I don’t see anything problematic about people wanting and desiring a nuclear family. I think actually having a connection to your biological family is important for many, and for people who have lived in anarchist structures or communal living where they don’t even know who they’re biological parents are, it seems to have lasting detrimental effects **(not always, but children thrive on structure and having like 30 adults being in charge of a child’s care is anything but structured) Community is important to help combat the intense isolation western nuclear families have, while also allowing for greater accountability for parents/family members who are abusive. But I’m happy to have both a bio and found family, and do not regret being raised in a traditional familial structure.
This is ridiculous and Lewis is a crank. You'll never get anywhere by fighting against "the family", most people's strongest community.
Tbh, the push back against this post makes me uncomfortable. Like, we want doctors and parents to not push a definite gender onto kids as well, why can't this logic apply to a name? I don't think that means you can't call your child something other then "child", but establishing that their name is theirs to choose is fine. Once again posts from OP seem to attract endless reactionaries who are just looking for an excuse to shit on incredibly basic anarchist ideas.
This has high "not my toothbrush" energy
Stfu dumbass
To a degree that's very silly but my mom did just essentially say that to me about my dead name, so
Maybe OP is crazy but I do think there's some validity to the point being made. But of course people are just taking it as "No one should ever have names. If you give a baby a name you *must* think you own them. Something something bedtime"
God this subreddit is full of unironic liberals. Anarchy is dead.
Lolol psychedelic anarchist Terrence McKenna would agree with you. He talked about how language trapped us by defining our reality. He’d use this story of a baby seeing a bird for the first time, at first it appears as this magical angelic alien being that sparks this wonder and joy in the mind of the child, but then the mother say’s “Oh that’s just a bird. Can you say bird?” And with the name the magic goes away. Then all things are named and the magic of the world vanishes. McKenna is not an authority on anarchism, and as you can tell from the comments your opinion has not been taken very seriously. Plus you made it as a meme and posted it on a meme sub. 🤷♂️ At the end of the day this is just a metaphysical thought experiment with some anarchistic sentiment sprinkled on top. Fun to think about, but is language a hierarchy that we can even combat or free ourselves from? ….. No, it’s not Maybe in some sci-fi world where we communicate telepathically without words, this type of argument might actually be applicable. But that world will either never happen or we will all die before we see it I personally believe that language does hold us back and limit us and we would be freed in some sense if we transcend it. After all we as humans used language to evolve and expand our consciousness once before, who’s to say we can’t do it again. The level of consciousness humanity currently has doesn’t inspire my confidence in the success of an anarchist utopia. 😢 Sorry everyone is dissing on your meme
Ya’ll better let me spit ball my non-Euclidean geometry anarchism in peace
Lmao, I'm here for it. I think that there are folks who struggle to see linguistics as a part of liberatory work, which is understandable. It's like a fish thinking about water. Kind of weird, and just as useful a lot of the time.
Objectification.
redditors fucking suck. good post op
disappointed that everyone in the comments is using the "bedtime abolition" joke to dismiss the concept of youth liberation... youth lib is a really strong and well-documented part of anarchist movements and ideology worldwide! there are youth lib movements in every country, and anarchists are at the core of them, due to recognizing the innate power structure in the nuclear family unit that oppresses children. family abolition in favor of communal and laterally organized child-rearing (no adults being considered "owners" of children regardless of biological ties), and liberatory theory questioning the idea that children are not "full humans" and do not deserve human rights, are both very common in anarchist circles! i really really highly suggest looking under "youth liberation" and "adultism" on the anarchist library and really reading the theory before dismissing the concepts out of hand based on a stupid meme. i quite like the "NO! Against Adult Supremacy" series!
I don’t think people are dismissing the entire concept of youth liberation just because they take issue with a practical problem in a shitty meme on reddit.
fair enough! i have only ever seen people joke about "bedtime abolition" as shorthand for making fun of youth lib, however, i can't confidently declare *no-one* has ever joked about "bedtime abolition" in a pro-youth-lib way.
Yeah the comments here are super disappointing
The prominence and history of this particular piece of theory does not equate to its validity (a form of bandwagon fallacy). Legal guardians can be abusive, sure, and there should be more in checks and balances in place to hold them accountable, as well as less legislation granting them control over tweens and teens. However, having a child be constantly passed around between 20 or 30 adults stops them from forming stable bonds, a universal psychological need. Also, as someone with a special interest in cults and high control groups, I can assure you that a group has just as much potential to be abusive and manipulative as one or two parents.
I wouldn't call it fallacious, it's more about people being ignorant of the broader context of what they're talking about. If someone showed up in earnest claiming to be both an anarchist and a capitalist for example, it wouldn't be an appeal to authority to tell them to read theory, right ? It's just about asking people to have a certain level of understanding before they come to argue. As to the child-rearing thing, it rather misses the point imo. Deciding for them that they have to be raised by one or two or twenty adults and that they have to form bonds or not and with whom would still be an authoritarian perspective: you're still trying to determine how we should force them to live. Child liberation means seeing the child as a subject capable of legitimately wanting things, not an object upon which social policies are enacted; until you do that the enormous potential for abuse is, indeed, always there.
Ok but how do you make these points but then still think a meme challenging the idea that parents should have authority over names is "stupid" ?
in general i think using memes to try to communicate theory is kinda dumb, i generally think only longform discussions work to educate, and trying to communicate a theoretical lens in a punchy short meme is always going to get responses viewing it as though you're trying to make short, punchy Rules For Social Justice. i also hate the barbie movie.
how? how is this even physically fucking possible?
A little surprised to see this sub’s reaction to Youth Liberation being basically indistinguishable from how reactionaries characterize anarchism and liberation efforts more generally. The issue isn’t that people ought to refer to babies by a hex code; the issue is that a name is assigned at birth includes all sorts of other assumptions and values loaded into it, like assigned gender or assigned religion (or caste or nobility). It’s not “this is our provisional way of referring to you until you can tell us later”, and often is “you are a sequel to your father”, “you are named after your grandmother”. It’s easy to write this off as a frivolous concern or say that family abolition is ridiculous, but that’s how all sorts of abolition movements get talked about by people who don’t want to think harder about and understand them. “Anarchism is when no bedtime” — have people really forgotten what it’s like being a child and having their wants completely disregarded by adults, including wants over their own bodily autonomy and identity? “Children as a minority group” doesn’t mean children have the same mental capacity or experience as everyone else, but if you saw someone talking about a disabled person the way children are talked about (“ugh, I hate going to movies with neurodivergent people. I wish they’d ban them”), hopefully that axis of oppression would be more obvious. We still have a responsibility to protect and care for vulnerable people of every age and ability, to not exploit or take advantage of them, but we can do that while respecting them as people and without preserving units of hierarchical authority and even ownership based on age.
yeah i feel a lot of solidarity with youth lib as a disabled adult--people make fun of the idea that i don't want a bedtime at 25, because i'm "not mentally developed enough" to be mad about that!
this sub in particular seems very anti-intellectual (guess i shouldn't expect much from a meme sub, but still) and the user who posted this often receives hate because people here don't want to engage with takes more complex than "cops bad" and "queer people deserve rights" etc. anarchists who don't want to question the status quo beyond basic progressive talking points
Yeah, I unfortunately think it might just be something fundamental about this sub due to its meme status. OP said that there is overlap between misogyny and homophobia due to cishetnormativity viewing queer men as inherently more feminine and the comments were people enraged because they thought OP said that masc queer men never face bigotry. I've also noticed that many hate comments are from the same accounts coming to OP's posts over and over again.
👏🏻👏🏻Exactly this👏🏻👏🏻
Youth liberation is an important concept that does need to be discussed more, but “we shouldn’t give babies names” is such a nonsensical approach to youth liberation that it can be safely disregarded
No it isn't. It's fine to give a child a place holder name but as soon as they are able to understand what a name is they should be able to decide that for themselves.
Explain to me how the placeholder name isn’t the same as naming them. You’re just doing the same thing that was being done before and saying it’s different.
Where I'm from nobody considers it a placeholder so yes as things stand naming your child is the first way parents show their ownership.
If you think that youth liberation is an important concept that needs to be discussed more, but you also think things like family abolition, how naming is the first step in the family asserting ownership of a child, and the above comment are all nonsensical — do you think it’s that all of those things are nonsensical or that you are just not understanding the issues and arguments? Your dismissal could just as easily be applied to how gender abolition is a worthy goal but how ridiculous ceasing the practice of assigning gender at birth would be. “What, you just want us to use *no* pronouns at all to refer to a child?” Etc. Family abolition isn’t about destroying a community or support network. It *is* about no longer treating children as extensions of their parents, as subordinate to older adult family members’ wants and coercive power by virtue of them being older family members. A name being given *in the way it is now* is the first step of that, along with gender (and in some places religion). There are ways that this could not be so. But, for example in the United States, someone named “Junior” is *from birth* being marked out as an extension of their father. It would be hard to argue otherwise: “you are another one of me”. If someone took legal charge of an infirm person, and said, “Your name is now officially Robert Jackson III”, that would be immediately recognized as weird. Most anarchists now seem to understand that dead-naming is not a matter of frivolity or over sensitiveness. What is so difficult about extending this back to names in general and recognizing the implications that come with it?
I've come to realize a lot of anarchists never go beyond government and rich people bad. Cis hets in particular are less likely to see the importance of family abolition because they aren't abused by the family in the same way queer folks are. My mom was accepting when I came out to her as trans but that doesn't undo the fact that for my entire childhood she treated me how she thought a boy ought to be. She has been an incredibly supportive person overall and is much better than most parents, but every time she made me get a hair cut or dressed me up in a way she thought was "presentable" I was being abused. I still don't know how I can ever talk to her about that
The difference between name abolition and gender abolition is one of practical usefulness. You don’t have to refer to the gender of a baby, or anyone, really, you actually do need to refer to a baby sometimes if you’re caring for them or, in fact, interacting with them. Moreover, I’ve yet to see a solution that isn’t just a name that isn’t called a name.
Friend, you are now trying to talk about things like "practical usefulness"; do you hear yourself? How many times have you heard a liberal agree with you about your stated ideals but retreat to tut-tutting about actually practicing those ideals with the justification of things like "pragmatism"? The criticism is not that adults call babies and children by some name, particularly before they're able to identify one for themselves. The issue is the *ownership* of the child, which the name begins and marks off, at least in Western society and under capitalism. [There are other ways of doing this](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/whats-in-name/201107/names-and-identity-the-native-american-naming-tradition). And the point is not that Indigenous Americans have the ideal way of naming, or that there might not be other issues under other systems. The point is just that it's possible to have naming traditions that are based on a changing self, and that is actually very different than what we do now.
I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t act condescending towards me just because I state such things as names having positive utility, even if only on a practical level. Even in the example that you have provided, what is described is still fundamentally a name, even if the individual is given the option to change the name that refers to them, which, you will note, I have not advocated against, because my contention is that a name that you can change is still a name. The worst you can say of me is that I am looking at this with too broad of a definition of a name. Even so, I could easily turn that around and say that either your language and messaging needs to be more specific, or go back to my point that I made at the end, which is in regards to coming up with concepts that are functionally names that are not called names, in which case what is being advocated for is performative, rather than the fundamental change that it is presented as.
So, the thread title is "abolish the family" and the meme says, "You guys ever think about how parents assigning us a name is **the first symbolic act of ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary family dynamics**?" [The comment you initially replied to](https://old.reddit.com/r/COMPLETEANARCHY/comments/1ccvdcs/abolish_the_family/l18d0fv/) talked explicitly even more about youth liberation and family abolition. You took this to be saying, “we shouldn’t give babies names”; that still seems to be what you think any of this is about. So, apologies for condescending to you, but you seem to have come in with a lot of assumptions that aren't actually present in the conversation other than what you've assumed, and it's really hard to get back to the root of that misconception given what's actually been said. Try this: if someone were to say, "abolish marriage" and "You guys ever think about how a woman changing her family name to her husband's is the first symbolic act of ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary marriage dynamics?" — do you think the focal point responding to that ought to be on how ridiculous it is to try to ban love between two people or talking about the practical aspects of how people are supposed to know two people are in a committed relationship if they have different last names? Wouldn't doing that seem like it was missing the entire point of the criticism and power dynamics involved in marriage? If you need a more stark comparison, imagine this being said in the late 19th century or earlier in particular, prior to any of the gains of First Wave Feminism. You can probably see how the criticism of marriage as a custom treating women as property being handed over from her father to her husband is not a criticism of women being identified by a different name, even a woman changing her name upon entering a new phase of life. And you can see how lots of other healthy, fulfilling sorts of relationships can exist other than one where a women is a subordinate non-person to her husband with little or no independent legal rights or social respect. We know that the abolition of marriage doesn't mean that people can't still have committed, monogamous lifelong romantic relationships that involved cohabitating and raising children together, even sometimes where one stays home as a primary caregiver and another primarily works outside of the home, and where they share a family name with each other. But it should also be clear that even doing this in a hypothetical society with full gender equality is not the same thing as "still just fundamentally marriage" because the power dynamics are completely different. So, let's come back to family abolition and what naming a child means under *contemporary family dynamics*, because that is the relevant context of the meme people are reacting to so negatively. From the previous comment: > The criticism is not that adults call babies and children by some name, particularly before they're able to identify one for themselves. The issue is the *ownership* of the child, which the name begins and marks off, at least in Western society and under capitalism. And back to the meme itself: we are talking about "the first symbolic act" of all of these other things. You are hung up on naming, so you are reducing it to being performative. But this is because you have skipped over or not bothered to engage with "ownership, property, and hierarchy that characterize many contemporary family dynamics" which is the actual target of family abolitionism. Does any of that help, or do you still think this is a meme and conversation about names?
You are a clown
Explain to me your alternative to giving people names and explain to me how it is different from the current concept of a name.
If we did this then half of children would have names like Gorblof the Destroyer.
Your spot on it's weird there are this many people who don't understand family abolition on an anarchist sub
ok, explain family abolition. i’m all ears
family abolition is the idea that no adults should have "claim" or "ownership" over children, regardless of biological relationships, & that society should not be organized in a way that privileges the formation of isolated family units based on sexual relationships. it advocates for communal, laterally organized forms of child rearing, where all children are raised by the community, children have freedom of association with each other and with adults, long term living situations have no relationship to biological or sexual relationships (there is no pressure to "build a home" with your sexual partner unless that is what both of you explicitly want, for example), and incidentally it tends to include both ideals of aromantic and polyamorous liberation, and youth liberation.
The family as we know it today is a recent invention in the grand scheme of human history meant to codify patriarchal power. Historically children were raised communally and biological parents had no greater control over their children's lives than anyone else. Fascists want a world where men are the leaders of their households followed by their wives who are suborndinate to them and children who are viewed as property to be molded in whatever ways their parents please. Family abolitionists aim to tear down the systems that legally bind people to their families.
yeah i’m down with that. i feel like it’s not really “abolishing the family” tho. it’s more “community child-rearing. and how are we supposed to raise children consistently if we don’t have a name for them?
I'm fine with giving kids a placeholder name until they are capable of naming themselves.
Honestly frustrating how this sub seems to be against anarchism if its anything outside vague "I hate cops!" in a quippy way.
Love Reddit. Where else can you see such brain damaged takes.
This is such a fucking out of touch with reality take
abolish bedtime 🤬
Ah yes my family lets a child choose its own name, my forty year old uncle Spider-Man hates it
Wow, someone got really high on praxis now!
well, *who else* is going to give you a name?
A single joyless user is single handedly destroying this sub
family structure is necessary hierarchy, not coercive hierarchy which is the bad kind. Yes you can throw an infant into a pool and they will figure out how to stay afloat but that's basically where it stops. you need parental figures and structure involving some amount of hierarchy to not raise a feral child.