Communal child rearing and rejecting blood family ties

why would the traditional family be rejected?

I remember Alexandra Kollontai had a fair amount of stuff on the subject. Try Communism and the Family, for example (caution: it's been years and years since I read it, so it may be a lot shitter than I remember). Like all the early Bolshevik stuff, it's kind of depressing to read with hindsight, full of lovely-sounding predictions about how great Soviet Russia's going to turn out.

molly:
1: ignore weeler, he's got some chromosomal defect, maybe tourette's
2: i know you're only looking for reading, but just in case, please please please forget the idea that "after the revolution" the world will be one big loving kibbutz where people will realize some putative potential currently suppressed by nuclear families. me, i like most of my family. my 2 year old nephew is a freakin' treat (perhaps because he's my nephew). if i can't family, i don't want to be part of the revolution.

fair enough. because there are people who think the other thing.
you could start with current anthropological studies, there are matriarchal societies, and matrilocal and matrilinear ones, and communal ones, and even 19th-c american experiments like new harmony and oneida, and shakers (whom i just happen to be reading about myself, and who required rejecting blood ties). that won't cover all possibilities, but it's a start.

Some ideas most of which I haven't read myself:

'The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia' by Bronisław Malinowski.
'Sexuality and class struggle' by Reimut Reiche
Loads of stuff by Wilhelm Reich particularly what he produced up to 1936.
An '"anti-authoritarian kindergarten movement" was apparently an important part of the anti-authortarian movement that emerged in Germany in the late sixties. I don't know a good source on it.

The Israeli Kibbutz did radically question traditional childrearing and there should be plenty of stuff available researching the effects on the children.
One recent account about Kibbutz in general is The Israeli Kibbutz: From Utopia to Dystopia by Uri Zilbersheid in Critique, Volume 35, Issue 3 December 2007 I haven't read this but I was impressed by his 'The vicissitudes of the idea of the abolition of labour in Marx's teachings - can the idea be revived?' [http://www.critiquejournal.net/uri35.pdf]

where would someone get an idea like that?

What exactly are these horror stories? Fritzl you mean? Those are obviously mental cases that have nothing to do with the quality of parenthood and everything to do with psychological conditions.
Every family has its share of misery, but this does not mean that blood ties don't mean anything.
Ultimately, 'post-revolution' there would still be a community-based equivalent of child services, and obviously gross negligence or abuse toward a child are not any parent's rights, but that doesn't mean the Commune will send a bunch of men in white to go from door to door and collect children to be raised in the great big communist creche (and I'm not saying you want that)

fair enough, but I'm not sure what perspective you're looking for; criticism of the family as an institution under capitalism, or utopian manuals about raising children in common after the revolution?

those "dumb fuckers."

I can tell you from general studies I've heard of from the news through the years, and from people's personal experiences, that the old children's-house kibbutz was very traumatizing for children. One anecdote: there was one guard assigned to the children's-house, and he would be requested not to attend to weeping children, so as not to instill the notion of crying for attention within them. It's no coincidence that hardly any, if at all, Kibbutzes these days still use this child-rearing method. I think the Kibbutz can be used as a negative example for alternative rearing.

Things that are certfied 'Libcom OK' - stealing peoples' kids
Things that are certified 'Libcom Not OK' - telling them that's wrong

That sounds like the result of bad child rearing methods, lots of parents do the same thing.
So it doesn' tell us anything about whether a conventional family or more communal methods are better.

I think that for a materialist understanding of the development of the family there's no better book that Engels "The origins of the family, private property and the state" based largely on Lewis Henry Morgan's 40 year work "Ancient society or researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilisation".

Admin edit - please keep thread on topic.

Can we please keep this thread on the topic in the title? Otherwise this thread will be locked and binned.

What a bizarre reading of this thread? I think if either you or Weeler offered arguments against it then your idiot binary might just be undermined a little...

I think you know very well that was flippant, and actually there's been previous threads on community child rearing where I did articulate my opinion, molly0000s could probably have had a look for them instead of defending the idea of 'rejecting your bloodline' and then pretending they were merely innocently looking for books on it

There's a massive distinction between thinking that raising children would massively benefit from a more collective approach to child development and thinking people should outright, in-principle, 'reject their bloodline'. I think Molly000s should actually attempt to defend that portion of said rant.

And as for his insistence on using my real name on here when I've pm'd him twice not to do so, that's embarrassing conduct.

OK, this isn't strictly a book, or theorising about post-revolutiion, but presuming that raising kids post-revolution will to a large extent be self-managed by the kids then you might be interested on the comments on "community" in the Day Kids section of the Summerhill Parent's Handbook here. I (as a parent) have been surprised at their strong views on the detrimental effect of children having day-to-day contact with their parents.

Sure, workerists like to say that free schools are only for the middle-classes. But as Henri Lefebvre said: "The middle class is the class that denies the existence of classes." so perhaps we'll all be middle-class after the revolution?

Admin edit: off-topic arguing deleted.

I hope that this on topic because to see the possibilities of where the family is going it should be useful to see where it's come from and how it has developed.

The family starts with the horde coming directly from the animal kingdom and from there develops the first expressions of society, an advance from the animal kingdom from the herd and the troop, etc., probably generalised promiscuity and loose and very basic forms of "marriage" and though not a unilinear development a definite impulsion to the good of the species based primarily on Darwin's "sexual selection" ("Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex").

Here, as Marx insists in "The Ethnological Notes", mother right played a critical role and this is underlined by the importance given by Darwin of the mother-offspring relationship. This allowed the family to develop and strengthen through the hundreds of thousands of years of savagery reinforcing the morality and collectivity that further strengthened society and the survival of the species.

Lewis Henry Morgan ("Ancient Society...") shows the complexities of the growing relationships and regulation of the family, the tribe and the gentes, from the Hawaiian and Rotuman systems of relationships, the complicated Seneca-Iroquois and Tamil and then the Roman and Arabic systems. Engels shows the emergence of private property bringing forth patriarchal society, the overturning of mother right and the imposition of inheritance through the male line. The "pinnacle" of this being the bourgeois family, with its in-breeding, corruption and prostitution and all the hypocrisy that goes with it. This was the expression of the bourgeoisie and the values that go with capitalist society.

From the analysis that the overall development of the working class is positive in itself (ie, the perspective of communism), then the development of the proletarian family, though imbued, tainted and scarred by capitalism, is both positive and an enduring feature. Based on sex-love mostly, with echoes of Darwin's sexual selection, this is a positive expression of choice and "otherness" from basic social instincts. A communist society would see the further development of the family which we can only wonder about at the moment, but the fundamental elements are there within the community and the class.