Post-situationist text originally published in California in April 1974. It argues that the family helps reproduce capitalism by teaching children dependence, obedience, and value-based relationships from an early age. Cooperstein sees children as being treated like a form of “human capital” and concludes that true liberation requires transforming the wider social and economic system, not just reforming family life.
What is truly horrifying about Count Dracula is not that he drains away the blood of his living victims, for that in itself would constitute naught but just another, albeit unusually unsettling, method of murder. If Dracula horrifies, it is because he steals life without killing, transforming his victims by a process of gradual addiction into UNDEAD predators, into living corpses like himself, who, thus initiated in his vampire army, engage in a total war against the STILL LIVING.
The following remarks will pertain for the most part to the child's immediate position within the familial situation, and not to his more extensive relation with the spectacle in its entirety. An expanded critique would consist of an up-to-date account of the family, private property, and the state. Nonetheless, even though he encounters wherever he turns this world's miserable publicity, it makes sense here to focus on family life because it is the mediation through which the child is introduced into the totality, especially in his younger formative years. The family, tentatively defined as any collection of individuals who on a daily basis support and maintain one another in a state of mutual survival, is an essential ingredient of capitalist society. Briefly, it is that first factory of alienation that renders-all subsequent degradations possible, while at the same time the sum total of these degradations make the family possible. It must be stressed that the family is not at the center of this process, nor could the capitalist tree be cut town by amputating one of its branches, for it would merely grow back in another form. But while it would be erroneous to base a critique of the totality on one of its details, it would be equally erroneous to neglect it; all of daily life is colonized and all of daily life must be criticized.
The family keeps pace, although usually behind, with all the developments in the production sphere proper, updating its mode of repression in keeping with all the new techniques that work themselves out on every terrain of social life. For example:
1. When the bourgeoisie in the twentieth century reluctantly decides to abandon direct physical violence in dealing with a rebellious proletariat in favor of more sophisticated forms of thought control, with a time lag the family declares itself opposed to beating their recalcitrant children (morality works better);
2. While capitalism attempts to raise productivity by improving the conditions of work, as part of a larger program to dissimulate any remaining contradictions between leisure time and ordinary work, Montessori-style preschools, which improve the. efficiency of learning by transforming play into work come into age;
3. A little bit after the psychologists of industrial relations decree that managers must integrate workers in to the organization of their own alienation by granting them a vote in the economic decision, parents proclaim a "children's liberation front" which announces that "children are people too."
In other words, if the requirements of capital accumulation in the modern epoch give the family both its modus operandi and raison d'eire, then the abolition of the family is just one part of the program to abolish capitalism. Just one part.
Voyer in Reich: How to Use1 shows the functional identity of character structure and value-mediated social relations, which is to demonstrate that character is subjective capital through the use of which the alienated individual produces falsified social relations with others. Since it is an indubitable law of capitalist development that capital must accumulate, growing up in the spectacle requires the progressive intensive and extensive accumulation of character. The vital spontaneity so visibly present in young kids, so much diminished in older ones, and so visibly absent in adults, is the irrefutable proof of it. Growing up is a gradually increasing and forced addiction to value deformation. “Forced” because the dictates of simple self-preservation in the familial cold war obligates the …