The Family: What Do We Really Want?

...Of course, matters are not so simple...

...Parents make many "gifts" of their time, energy, and devotion to their children...

...Their members were subject to differential opportunities and pressures to engage in market exchange...

...Thus, especially in northern Europe and north America, rates of divorce, and of cohabitation before or instead of marriage, have risen substantially, to the point that in Britain about one in three marriages is likely to end in divorce and in the United States one in two...

...Some New Labour writers argue that the power of moral guidance is one of the chief levers available to modernizing governments, and this view is echoed in the speeches of Tony Blair...

...The dominant one nowadays is by markets— the exchange of commodities and services by individuals (or entities behaving as if they were individuals) acting from self-interest...

...MICHAEL RUSTIN is a professor of sociology at the University of East London...

...change...

...Consideration of what we really want from the family requires us to bring this back into the picture...

...The schema of production and consumption, though they dominate our current view of the economy, are ideological constructions that mystify the real economic process...

...It is a paradox of feminism that it deserves the main credit for reclaiming this area of experience as relevant to politics, while having also been highly critical of the institution that has hitherto been the primary location of intimate life—namely, the family...

...This schema makes work seem mainly a sacrifice that we undertake in order to earn the money to be able to consume the products of other people's work...

...This imposed severe strain on many families of the young unemployed, both materially and in the visible withdrawal of public assistance for the parental function...

...The Thatcher government tried, disastrously, to enforce parental obligations for the upkeep of teenage children aged sixteen through eighteen by denying the latter unemployment benefits and making them materially dependent on their parents...

...The common solution is to punish oppressive family members and remove the ill-treated children to hypothetical substitute families, found through procedures of fostering or adoption...

...The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life...

...This widespread exit from the family, and the wish of individuals to live more of their lives outside its constraints, generates demands that its functions be picked up by other agencies and forms of organization...

...Their forms of relationship and domination were, and are, structured by law...

...It is commonly the case that the more burdens the state or society assigns to the family (to look after children, the ill, or the old), the less freedom women will have...

...Recognition of the place of the emotions in the ordering of social life is crucial to arguments about the relevance of the family to democratic socialism...

...Perhaps the best way forward is to look to the state to provide support to family and other lasting relationships, not only through the financial incentives provided for individuals, but also in the resources that it can mobilize to sustain systems of social support...

...I want to argue that we cannot afford to neglect the sphere of the household, the informal sector, and relations of kinship and their chosen equivalents...

...But it is also true that the case for greater equality between the sexes is often made more as a demand for individual freedom, for stronger rights of exit for women too, than for more equal forms of partnership within freely chosen relationships...

...Cooking a meal for four does not take four times the work of cooking a meal for one...

...Most people probably prefer to maintain lasting ties to and responsibilities for family members and longstanding friends and neighbors if they can do so without unacceptable costs...

...This requirement was imposed irrespective of the age of their children, even though it is obvious that whereas children of four or five can be expected to spend time at school (and in the care of the state or other formal agencies) younger infants might well not do so, either by their own or their parents' preference...

...Whose interest is served by the emergence of a situation in which people become incapable of preparing a good meal, but depend instead on ready-made meals purchased in supermarkets or bought from take-out restaurants...

...Should democratic socialists in particular still have a commitment to this idea, on grounds related to their traditional antipathy to individualist market relations and coercive political relations, as dominant forms of social life...

...This despite the fact that she has two grown-up daughters living within fifteen minutes of her and a son less than an hour away...

...It is a paradox of the diminution of family responsibilities for the care of children or the old, on grounds of gender equality, that its outcome is that many women who might prefer to care for their own children or relatives in domestic settings end up caring for strangers in the emDISSENT / Winter 2000 • 69 THE FAMILY: WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT...

...A new conception of "Active Welfare" (the theme of a special issue of Soundings magazine, Spring 1998) needs to be worked out, in which priority is given to the enabling of participative and self-managed forms of welfare delivery...

...One could add to this the work of conversation, or attending to the needs of other people, or educating oneself, too...

...It is unclear, however, whether the punitive, rights-based approach that has developed over recent years in England in response to anxieties about child abuse is in fact as helpful to children as a system of family law that gives priority to support for the family, such as is found in France...

...The task for the state therefore is to keep these costs to individuals at an acceptable level, to provide services that are supportive and respectful of personal ties, and to organize mediatory arrangements that assist in the negotiation of difficulties, including the facilitation of "exit" where this is most appropriate or is deeply desired...

...These are very complex issues...

...There are only a limited number of ways of organizing relations among human beings in society...

...This is of course a positive development, and there should be no regression to the situation where choice was not available to them...

...Encouragement of parents to stay with children in the hospital, hospices that encourage the presence of relatives, obstetric THE FAMILY: WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT...

...The labor of consumption (cooking, gardening, travelling, home maintenance, child care) involves effort, and is by no means wholly painful, but its most significant feature is that it is undertaken in a context of gift and barter THE FAMILY: WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT...

...There are many ways in which this supportive conception has evolved as an enhancement of previously more impersonal and usurpatory social services...

...Young people too have exercised their freedom to live independently...

...Individuals of both sexes should be free to choose what they do, but not in these conditions, which reward one choice, and penalize another...

...Families are one of the principal means through which the obligations of one generation to another are recognized and enacted...

...The development of a convincing socialist way of imagining our society depends on working through these dilemmas...

...HE FAMILY" is still evaluated by many on the left in terms of the degree to which it impinges on the individual rights of its members...

...There are of course many ways in which families confer unequal powers and responsibilities on men and women...

...It is entirely reasonable to regard the time parents spend caring for such young children as no less a form of work than the time they might spend at the supermarket checkout counter or cooking school meals: it deserves just as much material reward...

...He recently co-edited and contributed to Welfare and Culture in Europe...

...The culture of individualism has a large role in this, all the more so because the alternative "anti-individualist" model, the idea of the social or welfare state, has been under such persistent attack...

...The standard of living, or goods of life, that citizens enjoy are substantially generated or enhanced by labor performed in the home or by family members working for one another outside the home.* They clean, shop, cook, drive, mend, build, garden, nurse, and perform many other services for one another...

...Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political sphere...

...And on the other side of the production/consumption divide, much work in the market has its intrinsic satisfactions, which are deeply missed by those who cannot enjoy them, for example the satisfactions derived from cooperation, mutual recognition, and the deployment of human capacities and energies...

...This has happened in part as a consequence of women's newly won freedom to enter the labor market and find gainful employment in it...

...He is co-editor of Soundings magazine...

...68 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 the market place...

...But in reality, most consumption is merely the location of another labor process...

...We have become so much captured by libertarian values, and so (rightly) suspicious of authoritarian moralism 70 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 one of New Labour's least likeable habits of mind—that it has become difficult to justify more solidaristic approaches in case they bring with them the coercion of individuals...

...If these activities are socially recognized and paid for (by child allowances, or allowances to support the care of the infirm), then individuals will make different decisions, not in every case but for the most part...

...They existed within a cultural and normative order in which the institutions of religion had, and continue to have, an important role...

...My own mother-inlaw, aged ninety-two and very infirm, enjoys the assistance of no fewer than four paid, caring caretakers, employed indirectly by the local authority, visiting her in her sheltered housing in an inner London borough at different times of the day or week and giving her various kinds of help, with getting up, shopping, cleaning, laundry, and so on, in return for a small financial contribution from her...

...As always, the advocacy of personal liberty can mask as well as represent real interests...

...It should be possible to recognize many spheres of work in the informal sector, especially those involving care across generations, and to ensure that they are materially rewarded on a gender-neutral basis...

...The greater part of caring for the aged and ill who remain at home falls to family members, especially, of course, to women...

...Opportunity costs have changed because women now have many choices, where formerly they had few...

...Whereas in Italy, France, and Spain, it remains normal for young men and women to live with their parents throughout their studies and until they marry, in Britain, America, and Scandinavia it has become common for young people to live in small communities of their own generation, on university campuses or in shared apartments...

...Well, on the one hand, there are the interests of busy women or men, who are spared the work of cooking and washing up and can spend their time in different ways, most likely, especially in workaholic America, at their places of employment...

...Indeed, some might see democratic decision making as only the top-dressing, framing and to some degree giving a general steer to structures that remain for the most part more hierarchical than they are democratic...

...Within families, gift and barter are ways of arranging cooperation between members of the same generation (spouses or long-standing partners who combine their different resources, energies, and talents for their mutual benefit), but more particularly between different generations...

...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 71...

...Given this inherited situation, it is not surprising that in the modern period the family has been subjected to a deep critique...

...It is hard to see how democratic socialists, properly critical of markets and capitalism as the dominant form of social relationship, and also of the state as an all-pervasive substitute for this, can neglect the sphere of the family, and of its informal cognates of friendship and voluntary association, as an essential dimension of the good society...

...Ringen's argument is that just as it seems quite proper for society, through its elected governments, to support and sustain the formal economy (by providing infrastructure, an educated workforce, security, rules, insurance), so governments should also be prepared deliberately to support families as a site of production and as a generator of social and individual well-being...

...The question I want to raise is whether the support and strengthening of the family, and of other forms of relationship and cooperation that depend on mutual identification, gift, and barter, is a proper object of public policy...

...Ringen's explanation of declining family size, and even more important of declining commitment to work within families, is that the opportunity costs of this work in contrast to paid work has changed in a way too favorable to the latter...

...A garden maintained by one person can be enjoyed by many...

...He also deploys this argument to explain the dissatisfaction many feel at the failure of rising incomes (where they have them) to generate an increased sense of well-being...

...Men were politically enfranchised long before women...

...But on the other hand, we see the interests of the capitalists (who may include you and me), who invest in the supermarkets and take-out chains, and who need an attenuated domestic economy in order to create this new marketplace for their goods...

...It is moralistic in face of the symptoms of declining social solidarity, but blind to their prime causes in the deregulated markets that its main policy agendas support...

...ploy of the government or of private agencies...

...He argues that this is not because people do not understand their own interests or have unrealistic or greedy aspirations, but because the gains made at the level of monetary income are in reality often being paid for by real losses in the informal economy...

...Ringen's solution is to regard marriages as binding contracts in which both partners and children have a legal and "democratic" stake— as if the family were a miniature republic...

...Families are the primary locus of identification between generations...

...Men were more free to exchange their labor in the market than women, who in some social groups were confined to virtual captivity at home...

...Working a fifty-hour week generates more money, but it means there is less time available to produce "goods" in the informal sector—through the "work" of playing with the children, making a garden, coaching a local children's soccer team, or producing a play with an amateur theater company...

...Is there a justifiable way of giving legal and normative support to lasting relationships and obligations, while not improperly infringing individual freedoms...

...The system of taxes and benefits, and of course the organization of labor and other markets, selectively rewards and sanctions different kinds of activity...

...How far should the state intervene not materially but legally to support the formation and maintenance of families...

...States were powerful in Europe long before democracy was the normal means of legitimating their power, and they still retain, as Ulrich Beck has pointed out, many attributes of their authoritarian heritage...

...Marx famously described the family as a haven in a heartless world...

...I I F THE "opportunity costs" of bringing up a child or caring for an aged relative or friend are high, because of the superior rewards available from the market, then individuals will reduce their commitments to these tasks...

...Families have never existed in a free space, as a kind of voluntarist, cooperative alternative to the regimes of political hierarchy or market ex THE FAMILY: WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT...

...There are thus demands for more and earlier child care, and for public provision of residential care for old and infirm people...

...Two people do not need to occupy twice the living space of a single person in order to gain equivalent benefit from it...

...Ringen points out that cooperation between family members is a highly efficient way of increasing the value gained from such commodities or from the returns from labor in *Stein Ringen, The Family in Question (Demos, 1998) and Citizens, families and reform (Oxford University Press, 1997...

...Ringen argues that the standard of living as measured by GNP grosslyunderestimates its real value because it does not include the value-added from the informal family or friendship economy...

...Stein Ringen, in a recent pamphlet and book that are in part valuable, in part misguided, has pointed out that the family is a very important locus of production, as well as of more readily recognized consumption...

...The new freedom seems to be the effect of economic as well as political and cul tural changes, as the growth of the service and information economies has reduced the comparative advantages men had in the preceding productive regimes of agriculture and industry...

...Does it matter that fewer people marry, that divorce is in effect obtainable on demand, that individuals may easily shrug off any responsibility they might have for the support of their children or parents...

...The situation must be especially painful in the United States, where enforced workaholism—long working hours, short holidays—is reported to be more rife than in Europe, but the British position is certainly worsening for those with employment...

...Such legislated compliance may be undertaken under a democratic mandate or not...

...A second way is by political decision, enacted into law, and implemented through lawfollowing organizations, often bureaucracies, sometimes professionals or enterprises acting under instruction from a government, or paid to carry out its wishes...

...Families are one of the principal entities of this kind, but there are also friendships, voluntary associations, churches, even 66 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 political associations, which may be founded on similar principles...

...Political battles about divorce and abortion have been an important aspect of this...

...Those who rightly demand jobs as an output of economic policy are not merely asking for the means of generating income, but for the underpinnings of a whole way of life...

...Women have sought a new balance between the part of their lives spent within the family, and the part they spend in the labor market...

...This is what child allowances, paid maternity leave, allowances for the care of the disabled, set out to do...

...delivery rooms that welcome fathers, counseling services provided in circumstances of marital conflict, public-housing allocation policies that recognize the need for family members to remain near one another, encouragement of reflection concerning decisions about abortion, are all examples...

...Women and children were even in the last century to a considerable degree the property of their fathers or husbands, who had legal license to control or punish them with violence...

...In their turn, children make similar gifts to their parents, especially when the latter become needy or infirm...

...Members of both sexes, but perhaps especially women, have also voted with their feet, avoiding the constraining relationship of the family or removing themselves from it when it became intolerable...

...The family has provided a rhetorical lexicon of norms with which socialists or progressives were supposed to identify...

...Paid holidays, educational leave, and even provisions for retirement come into this category, if one thinks of all of these, as one realistically should, as occasions for productive life-enhancing work in the non-monetary sector, as well as of relief from the regimes of work that are organized through the market...

...Far from a setting in which voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit was the norm, families were often a setting of domination and subordination—of one gender over another and of one generation over another...

...She gets a great deal of help from her family too, but the point is that the public system provides impressive services...

...Most commodities and machines are inert and useless objects unless labor is invested in creating value out of them...

...Socialists have often used family relationships as a metaphor for the social relationships they wish to see, for example in the identification of fellow workers as "brothers" or "sisters" or in the ideas of community, mutual care, and responsibility that sustained the postwar project of the welfare state in Britain...

...Here, if anywhere, is a sphere where complex and not simple forms of equality should apply...

...But the fact that work in the market is materially rewarded is not a good reason why work outside should not be...

...The effects of these various structures were to impose on the supposedly voluntary order of the family extremely constraining and unequal features...

...relationships, not of monetary exchange...

...Women in particular have organized and campaigned to weaken the constraints exercised in the name of family values but, as they saw it, largely in the interests of men...

...Demands have been made that government agencies take on the responsibilities that families no longer meet...

...Claims made in terms of "family values" are critically reinterpreted as claims that enforce the covert domination of men over women...

...Since it represents so substantial an alternative to commodification, individualism, and alienation, one might expect democratic socialists to be sympathetic to the family as a form of life...

...He argues that our present economy undervalues, or indeed entirely fails to recognize, the work that is done in these settings, and far from giving it support colludes with the interests of capital in undermining and draining it of human resources...

...This is especially the case if, as socialists, we are also sensitive to the natural and necessary emotional dimension of human lives...

...I want to argue that they should have, and that they can do so in ways that nevertheless defend an equal division of rights and powers between men and women...

...The rationalism of the Enlightenment tradition, both in its liberal and Marxist versions, has tended to disregard the affective dimension of human existence...

...A car can be driven by one person but may comfortably transport five...

...DISSENT / Winter 2000 • 67 THE FAMILY: WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT...

...One of the chief scandals of the Blair government in Britain has been the "welfare to work" legislation targeted at unemployed single mothers, which requires them to retrain or reenter the labor market as a condition for receiving benefits...

...HOW SHOULD democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society...

...Nor does resort by government to moral persuasion and re-education in family values seem a feasible or desirable remedy to the individualization brought about by the market...

...And third, there is the form of relationship that depends on gift, barter, or submergence of the interests of the self under that of some larger entity...

...I remember a remarkable speech by Mario Cuomo to the Democratic convention many years ago that revolved around the ideal of America as an inclusive family...

...In Britain, concerns over the well-being of children are often formulated in terms of children's rights as individuals, even in terms of their implicit claims against their parents for injuries done to them...

...But this imports a conception of rational self-interest and contractual exchange into a sphere whose essence seems to be more open ended and unspecified so far as the precise shape of mutual gifts and obligations is concerned...

...The increased incidence of homelessness among the young, so visible in city streets in Britain, was in part a consequence of this punitive and counter-productive attempt to enforce family solidarity...

...In this respect, however, New Labour seems to be latently authoritarian...