We had a second kid recently and I was on baby duty this summer, taking some much needed time off to be with the little five month old, and as I walked around the city with him I’ve had thoughts about a socialism and having kids, some experiential and others intellectual, the latter of which I’ve had some critical and constructive ideas. 

As a disclaimer: none of this implies or is meant to signal that anyone should have kids. If you don’t have kids that’s great, this reflection is more about the having of them, specifically if you might be deciding whether or not to have them. 

First, before the intellectual, the experiential, with positives on top. Having kids is good! Parenting skills are generally applicable to all kinds of situations, including caring for the old and sick and disabled and dependent of any sort. You have to be prepared and ready to take care of people. It also generally builds up muscles for appreciating cuteness, silliness, animals. This was a skill I needed to learn, to do baby talk, eg., and it’s given me an appreciation for the silliness of life in general. Related to that, raising kids—particularly babies—can sometimes be like a literal high, experiencing basic sensations again for the first time as they see, hear, feel all kinds of things for the first time. 

There’s an organizing point here. Most of the diverse working class has kids, so it’s a great way to relate if you’re PMC, in all sorts of ways: at the playground, at school, at meetings, at work. You do have some control in the family to produce new relations that are more egalitarian and communal too, which can help teach collectivism and create new comrades. If you want to understand species being, what people are alienated from and could get back to, raising kids is a vivid way to do it. It’s very caring work, ultimately communal unto itself (though the capitalist family preys upon this element and neutralizes it as family abolitionists talk about). It’s a venue for self-critique where one can grow as a person and a comrade, learning how to be better. It also gave me some perspective on my own time and what’s important when organizing—meetings need to be to the point, no bullshit, I don’t have the bandwidth for anything else.

But parenting isn’t fun generally speaking. It’s joyful but it’s kinda gross and disturbing. Fluids of all kinds. Interruptions, rarely getting requisite rest, a near constant flow of needs to meet, some stupidly capricious and others so necessary as to be literally life and death. You rarely get to sit down or stay sitting for very long once you do sit down. The smallest, most mundane things become quite rare: walking at a reasonable pace in a straight line to get where you’re going. Holding doors and walking through them, no problem. Sitting and eating, whether at home or at a restaurant, and finishing the meal. Having a conversation with an adult that’s more than three or four lines of dialogue. Sustained periods of quiet. Making a spontaneous decision to go eat somewhere or do something. Regular intimacy with your partner. Probably not happening.

Politically, it’s harder to organize because there’s less time and energy. Meetings are a stretch, and when you do go to meetings, it’s hard to put up with wasted time. Every hour is precious. It’s harder to write and think and do (or put up with) the things socialists typically do.

Also, parenting can be like being in a horror film, with normal circumstances turning suddenly terrifying: the child falls, bangs their head, blood pouring forth, screaming; any and all effluents are present, feces and urine, snot, germs, spittle, the return of every repressed. Human children have to learn to do all the things they need to survive, which means not knowing how and when to sleep, eat, rest, pee, poop, talk—and if they don’t, it could mean a ruined future, a whole life led with more suffering than might otherwise be if you helped them better. And because they have to learn this basic bodily stuff they end up with complex feelings around them, making the task all the more difficult. They’re hungry but won’t eat. They’re tired but won’t sleep. They’re cranky but they won’t take a rest. They have to pee but they don’t want to or can’t. They have to poop but anything with the toilet is fraught. 

And this gets to the psychoanalytic stuff. Sometimes it really feels like Freud’s Oedipus Complex, at least Lacan’s less patriarchal version of it, is real. You have to confront your own traumas and miseducations, which neurotically and unconsciously tend to recreate themselves with your kids. You parent how you were parented. You have to confront that. Sometimes you have to watch your parents with your kids and it’s specular, as though you’re visiting your own memories or dreams, even traumas. Parenting is a hall of mirrors. A haunted fun house. 

And your relationship with your partner/coparent transmogrifies from romantic to logistical, as though you’ve started a new organization with the person who you love but that love, ultimately, is the basis for a new nonprofit with a limited budget, life becomes about completing the organization’s tasks rather than lying in bed together and having fun, traveling, going to movies, parties, events, concerts. Your body changes. Everything changes bodily: when you wake, when you sleep, what you eat, when you eat, how you eat. 

Now to get a little more intellectual, I’ve got a critical thought and a constructive one. 

The critical thought is what Sue Ferguson calls the contradiction of social reproduction in capitalism. The contradiction is simple: capital needs social reproduction to keep going (birthing, caring, teaching, cooking, feeding, cleaning, what socialist feminists call the work of life or carework, the drudgery men have forced women into for most of modernity), but everywhere capital makes it very difficult if not impossible to do that carework. Childcare, healthcare are too expensive, wages are too low, and generally the force of exploitation is unmitigated and prohibits the work of life. 

The way I’ve phrased this contradiction to myself is that, when I’m parenting under too late capitalism—which is what Anna Kornbluh calls our moment, a riff on Frederic Jameson’s late capitalism—is that it feels like I’m doing an unpaid internship for the ruling class. I’m doing this arduous work (and not even the gestation and birth part!) to nurture and raise new humans for the churn of exploitation and expropriation to chew up. I’m not being paid for that labor, following the Wages for Housework movement. It’s an internship because ultimately these kids will have to navigate the dominant relations of production, upheld by the ruling class’ social structure, even while contested and countered in myriad ways, at the end of the day, the relations that this kid I’m raising will bear will be the dominant ones. Those dominant relations are the ruling class’s preferred relations. So I’m just working for them, training new humans for these relations, unpaid, submitting new life to their world. It makes me mad. 

That’s a general statement, but I don’t think I have to go into detail about the specific moment of our social structure: chaotic authoritarian neotechnophallic necrofascists popping up everywhere in charge of so much of the whole terrain, choosing AI slop and imperial plunder over a green new deal. Only small points of victory here and there. The contradiction of social reproduction in this moment has never felt so fast-paced and densely dangerous, polycritical, so unlike previous moments but (also somehow like the agglomeration of all previous moments into one), all those having occurred at lower parts per million carbon in the atmosphere, during what Daniel Aldana Cohen has called Terraforming 1, with slower media for communication.  You hold your baby and scroll on social media watching videos of floods and explosions and then eventually you watch the floods and explosions through your window. 

Yeah so, having kids right now? Not an awesome prospect. And yet. 

An aspect of Marxist theory that doesn’t get as much play these days in the Discourse is the concept of alienation. Strictly speaking, because we’re separated from the means of production and the full fruits of our labor, and because we must deal with the labor market to reproduce ourselves—that private property as a relation stands between our life and its conditions, as Soren Mau says—we’re alienated, which meant different kinds of things to different social and political philosophers but for Marx had this material element. 

One kind of alienation is reificafion, or thingification. Because everything is a commodity in capitalism we start to treat each other and ourselves as commodities. We’re separated from our species being, the use value of life itself, as we’re made to live and exist within a world of exchange value, where things are diced up and priced in. 

Some critical theorists have said that recognition is the opposing force to alienation, when we understand each other’s consciousnesses as consciousness. But that’s not exactly material enough. I think there are certain moments of deactivation of relations, reconfiguration of relations, moments and times and instances of relating that go against or at least put at bay the relations of exploitation that render us so alienated. The deactivation is psychoanalytic I think, since the relations themselves materially don’t change but they are felt less or differently. The child-parent relation can be one of those, a space where, like Enrique Dussel would say, there could be a liberatory analectic that dis-operates the dialectic of class struggle. But of course it has to be liberatory, which for him means something like the parent being the child of the child, or the teacher being the student of the student, that is, not imposing the reigning sameness upon the radical exteriority, the Otherness, of the child. 

Liberatory analectics aren’t just recognition. When you’re the child of the child you do some material work as well, preparing this new person for a life of comradeship and in the process you ‘humanize’ yourself. It’s very deep. There’s a way that parenting, having a child, takes up and takes on the alienation of too late capitalism. In my summer of parenting for instance I’m starting to think about writing songs again, I’m reading novels, I’m reading and writing poetry, I’m walking around seeing the city anew through the eyes of the baby. That high I described earlier isn’t just individualistic-experiential, I’d argue it’s a sensation of the analectic. And there’s a moment when I’m putting him down for a nap and I hold him close to me, and sing him songs, that is fully unalienating. When he’s in my lap and he smiles, grabbing my nose or lip, or laughs when I make silly sounds (I make them often), neither of us are reified, in fact the reificafion I’ve experienced dissipates a bit—which makes it all the harder to go back to work. 

When my partner was pregnant with our first kid a close comrade asked how I felt about it. I said I wasn’t sure. She said she conceived of our having a kid as evidence of our commitment to possibility and the changing flow of history, that it can in fact be different, and while she didn’t want kids the sense that others were having them imbued a sense of horizon. I liked that and I hold it close even today. The ways that childrearing is an encounter with possibility pushes back, in a small way, against the reproduction of too late capitalism.