The Reality of Bourgeois Promises: A Discourse on Family and Class Dynamics with Daniel Tutt

And today I'm back with the friend of the show , daniel Tut , and we are talking about , specifically , an article he wrote called Matrimony and the Market for Eon Magazine , which I think is was probably fairly controversial , although I find it kind of funny that it was , because I was like , it's pretty much just a list of sociological facts that are pretty much

agreed upon , even by critics of marriage , but I think I think it does bear some discussing , given the discussion of family abolition , the history of that term , the way that it was viewed , say , when August Babel wrote his book on women all that almost 200 years ago and what is meant by the term .

And you and I have both talked about Christopher Lash on this . It is one of the few places where I'm critical of Lash as some of his writing on the family .

However , I remain largely unconvinced that family abolition , as it is stated by socialists today , is either necessary or even preferable , because the conditions of which that term originally was coined no longer exist , which was , society has moved past that . So I find that interesting . You mentioned a book , the End of Love , by sociologist Eva Alu .

Oh yeah , thank you , daniel , here to make sure I don't mispronounce everybody's name , alu , which I find was kind of funny , because I'm like , isn't what she's arguing ? Basically the companion at marriage thesis that we've had since maybe the 1980s .

And it's done that by basically centering the concept of self-worth and maximization of pleasure as the primary end for which romantic relationships are sought out and desired , and so on . So that is the kind of enforced norm , that is the kind of the reigning possibility of the meaning of romantic love .

So , therefore , in order to make a relationship work , the partner and we see this in reams and reams of survey data from married couples and from romantic partners everything is about the fulfillment of the stability of the emotional life of your partner .

This is the most cited reason for middle class divorces , this is the most sought after trait for men in heterosexual relationships , that men must have emotional maturity , right , this kind of .

And so her argument is that , in a sense , romance and love now has created this instrumentalization of the very sphere of intimacy Commodification could be another term for that and it's created a certain backlash on behalf of people , this process of unloving whereby , if you take just an interesting example of a very famous book on the working class Family by Lillian

Rubin , written in the 1970s , and then she's written kind of updates to it all throughout the 90s , it's this book right here actually I have . It's called Worlds of Pain Life in the Working Class Family by Rubin . Feminist author Chris .

One of the interesting things you find there , as a clear case that kind of proves my argument and Eva Alouza's argument and Jennifer Silva's argument and others , that there's something that's changed now in the kind of romance , marriage , matrimony , bond , is that the working class youth , when they were asked what was the rationale by which you decided to get married ,

what was it ? And the funny thing is that they didn't have an answer . They didn't have an answer as to , in other words , there was no calculated interest Marriage . This goes back to the question of the working class conflict .

That is a present that I wrote about , present today , which is not so much a conflict over traditions that's kind of how it's translated in the public sphere but it's more about the fact that we have imposed upon matrimony , romance relationships , whether they be gender normative , heterosexual , homosexual or whatever .

Every relationship must adhere to this maximization of pleasure , maximization of self-worth , which requires all sorts of extra support networks , including therapy , including immersing yourself in self-help and so on and so forth . So it becomes extremely onerous and alienating for working class people to adhere to all of these new protocols .

Therefore , we in a sense have lost this kind of disinterest that used to govern the romantic bond . I would call it disinterest , you could call it spontaneity , a kind of spontaneity , a kind of naturalness . With that there was of course also I think importantly a kind of notion of a different idea of sacrifice involved in romantic relationships .

That , from a psychoanalytic point , is worth teasing out and worth discussing .

Precisely the fact that if the bond is one of disinterest , that leads to a relationship that allows for a certain deeper form of comfort , a deeper form of safety , a deeper form of connection and bond , because that defines the idea of the family in a sense , the family , in a sense , to the extent that we can say that it's a liberatory institution .

I think we could say that its capacity for non-instrumentalized forms of love and care would be the way to define that . Now the question is is the bourgeois middle class family capable of producing such a liberatory possibility ? That becomes a big debate .

There's some folks who want to say on the family abolition side that there's really no liberatory potential within , and of course , for them they don't really make a distinction between the family as a class unit , which I think is essential to do . But let's just follow their line .

They almost idealize the family as one structure , without an analysis of its class composition and difference , which I think is problematic . But they don't find anything liberatory about its promises . Now this , I think .

In Lash's Haven in a Heartless World , his book on the family , he follows a different line of thinking , the possibility , which is a very Frankfurt school line of thinking , that yes , in fact implicit in the Victorian family before it was introduced to the American middle classes around the turn of the 20th century .

Actually you have the trappings of something quite liberatory which is primarily for the working class . Liberatory because the Victorian bourgeois family was premised on the subtraction from the degradation of work . It was premised on the cultivation of leisure time .

Cultivation of leisure time was afforded and was put forward as a means by which each subject can develop their own sense of self-worth .

So you see , that notion of self-worth , I think , is interesting because post-sexual revolution right , that has modified and become marketized and become commodified and in a sense it's become ultra individualized because the marriage bond of disinterest has severed and in its severing we basically are atomized agents responsible for building up our own sense of self-worth .

So what we're finding now and I don't want to jump too far ahead , but what we're basically finding now is that what it takes financially in order to follow these protocols of self-care , self-worth , maximization of pleasure , providing emotional stability for your partner , et cetera , et cetera , is so financially onerous that the working class is tending to and this is

a question about the data we have available , about how extensive this is , and it's a debate we can have , a conversation we can have they are tending to , by and large , reject marriage .

Reject it On the one hand , on the other hand , because of assertive marriage after the 1970s , which is , people now get married vis-a-vis their class position , which is also meaning that working class people are getting divorced at far higher rates . So they are getting married , but those marriages are not are quite rocky .

The other thing to note is that , by and large , for both middle and working class people , marriage remains extremely popular .

So its popularity , you see , that points to a contradiction for me , because if the working class finds it popular , on the one hand , they're both experiencing a kind of repressive frustration over not being able to engage in the family , both at the level of this new post-sexual revolution , you know , capitalist , commodified , self-worth version , and they are also

experiencing a sense of penalization in the public sphere if they were to advocate for a return to a more traditional disinterest bond of the family or of marriage , et cetera .

So they're kind of screwed in both ways right , and that , to me , is what I wanted the article to spark and that , I think , is probably why people were quite agitated with my position , because it's sort of one of those deals where I'm trying to bring out an antagonism that is often covered over , you know , yeah .

And yet we have seen the rise of single mother lead families . We've seen the rise of end cells .

We've seen so much in that direction and one of the things that I started looking at , I got interested in end cells and like trying to deal with them , because I teach young people and sometimes see these attitudes start to develop and I want to nip it in the butt .

But one of the things that I started asking people to do , particularly on the left and this ties into your thing is like ask yourself what all the self-actualization that I keep on saying , like people say that these end cell men should do , requires . Usually it's therapy and I'm like that's actually a highly class good .

Most people do not have good enough insurance unless they have a fairly upper middle classist job or even , for example , as a public school teacher which , despite popular opinions , is still in the upper 50% of income regions , which that says less than people think , but still it is the truth . So it's slightly higher than average pay .

Most school insurance may include , depending on the state and depending on the school district , maybe one mental health session a month if that . And so even for the normative middle end of the middle class , this is actually the therapy and stuff required , even though it has gotten cheaper . There have been all that , that's all the case .

But even if you were I don't know of moderate means and you use something like BetterHelp , you're still probably looking at between $80 and $100 a session , which that's out of reach for a lot of people .

So it's not necessarily what in statistics they call a representative sample , so we can't extract from her work a claim on the entirety of the American Millennial Working Class , but it is an extraordinarily diverse sample of interviewees that she interviews . By diverse I mean racially , gender-wise , geographic-wise , et cetera . So it gets .

The findings from the book are demonstrative and convincing and persuasive , and one of the findings is the idea that the therapeutic , while they're not necessarily working class millennial youth , are not necessarily engaged in rigorous forms of therapy , whether that be CBT , cognitive behavioral therapy or psychoanalytic methods or psychotherapy . It's different than that .

It's more that there is an awareness that , because of the normative turn to self-worth as the glue of romantic bonds and because of the concurrent experience that attempting to have relationships with other working class people creates situations of profound risk for each individual involved , which tends to be the basis of the severing of that relationship because of economic

precarities . Basically , what you have developed is what Silva calls a mood economy , a mood economy in which the goal shifts to self-improvement .

Specifically and this is where family abolition comes in in an interesting way Specifically , for most of the people she interviewed , self-improvement involves overcoming the traumas of one's own familial past , because the truth of the working class family experience is that you have compounded generations of traumatic experiences that have to be worked through .

This also introduces us to Lash and in a sense to Philip Reef , in the triumph of the therapeutic . And one of the things I argue in my piece is that perhaps Lash was slightly off about this notion of a narcissistic epidemic , because now , in fact , perhaps he couldn't see the way that the precarity would affect the young generation .

And what I mean by that is my argument would be that the therapeutic is now what we lean on in the absence of the old promises of the disinterest-based family and so on . So it's a kind of logic of yes , we accept the self-worth maxim , we bring it upon ourselves , and it's interesting to think even of the concept of authenticity .

So there's a kind of pervasive notion of self-help culture which is now internalized , not necessarily in some cheap , commodified way , but actually what we find is a sincere , a sincere interest on behalf of the people that Silva interviews to seriously work out their issues and that that becomes the basis of their success and their social recognition in life .

For example , one respondent says if I can grow up not to become my mother , I will have been a success in my life and the recognition that my friends and loved ones will give to me .

To that and because let's say that her mother was a drug addict , for example , or an alcoholic if I can survive and not become an alcoholic and not fall into the same repetitions of my family , this will be a success . So it's a different level of measuring one's own self-worth that the therapeutic is offering to working class people .

So therefore it's not necessarily a totally something which is sort of imposed or no . People are strategically picking and choosing forms of spiritual , self-help therapeutic modalities that are helping them face these deficiencies , these social breakdown of the family . The social breakdown of the family is leading to an embrace of the therapeutic .

So , with family abolition , I don't know what folks would say to that empirical , sociological set of events that are occurring . What does it mean in that sense ? Another point to note here is that middle class families that do stay together . I'm not necessarily arguing that this public opinion is sacrosanct .

Of course it's problematic , but what we do find is that , overall , they live longer and they are happier as individuals .

So we both see the popularity of the family continuing , we see its deprivation , its opportunities literally being removed from the working class by and large , and so these things concern me and I think that they need to be discussed , and this is a problem . This is a serious issue . Maybe we can discuss the strategies by which we raise this .

I think it sparks people's emotions In the Marxist sociologist at Oxford , goron Thurborn .

He wrote a really interesting book on the long-durace study of the family , and his argument is that the family , even after the Communist revolutions in Russia and China , all the way through the sexual revolution , in essence it is the least flexible institution . It is the least flexible institution . It's the most sunk and the most constant , if anything .

Actually , what he shows , apropos the socialist revolutions , is that that is the site where you saw the first infusion of the egalitarian expansion of family rights , which was completely unprecedented , and so , yeah , these are some lines of inquiry .

So the irony is that we have a kind of I mean , this is the great lie of the bourgeois family that has always been a bit of a lie , which is that its promises are very egalitarian , seeming , and it remains this kind of allure for people which is unfulfillable , and it's kind of always been that way .

The proletariat finds the promises of the bourgeois family to be unfulfillable , and this is a common trope stretching back to late 19th century , and I think this is exactly what we're dealing with today , and this is the site of a new class conflict , I would say as well . How do we make that class conflict legible ? How does that formulate into ?

How do we politicize this ? Is this domain politicizable ? Those are the questions I want to have . Those are the debates we should have with both family abolitionists , but whoever on the left .

But it is an interesting problem Because looming in the background of all this and you haven't stated it this way , but I'll state it bluntly is since about the 1960s we've seen partial lumpenization of large swaths of the working class and we even see it in non-Marxist values polls .

So you look at someone really basic like Ruby Payne , who used to do this for schools , trying to teach teachers how to deal with class in schools , and one of the things that you notice is the quote values associated with poverty , which would be the low end of the working class and the lumpen .

You see these values actually become more standard , that more part of the population that we would have traditionally seen as middle class in America . None of the Marxist terms middle class is mentioned in Marx , but inconsistently blah , blah , blah . But that conception in America we see more and more of the kinds of values across the board .

Now I want to talk about this because I think this actually adds into what you're talking about in an interesting way , and I'll talk about silver here too , because I read that book after you told me a few months ago .

One of the things I've been thinking a lot about , somewhere between Silver and Melinda Cooper and this problem in specific , is that the traumas dealt with by the working class and why everyone seems to have fucking issues with their parents , which we used to basically associate with post 1960s upper middle class , bourgeois and petty bourgeois obsessions .

That was not a model for everybody . My grandfather was a bricklayer and a brick maker . His grandfather killed himself during the Depression . I never once heard him talk about his father in a way that would be recognizable to us under traumatic terms which were clearly there , like yet his son .

My father was totally riddled with that conception and these conceptions of family . So I started trying to analyze my own life and history through these terms , because I come from a working class background .

I have managed to work up , but in working up I can also say I have not been able to secure the kind of social goods that my parents , who were clearly and squarely working class .

My mother did the thing that many women did in the 80s and 90s and became a nurse late to stabilize her life and it did actually dramatically end a lot of the lumpenized problems not all of them , and for her sake I won't go into what they were but they got better as she got up and self-actualized through labor and also my family had a lot fucking more

resources than when she did that .

But the tension for me is there's been a lot of very subtle things that the left doesn't recognize have been taken away . Silva talks about something that I think is actually interesting .

People have commented on how the poverty draft isn't real and I've been like , no , the poverty draft has just gone away and what we've seen is the military Keynesian largesse that save large parts of the country after deindustrialization has been gradually chipped back and for a lot of the quote working class family , that was the one source of stability that a lot

of these people have . It is no longer there's , like we always think about . Oh , you know the tragedy of the poverty draft and that's true that .

But that's undialectical because there's this other side of it where , like , we had a social welfare system that was basically ran for poor people through the military and less and less poor people benefited from it by the time we get to millennials , it's non existent .

So that out that Jen Xers had , and to into a great degree , the boomers in the last generation have I mean , that's why there was a college movement in the first place was gone . Yep , um yeah . And so I started really thinking about this in terms of family abolition , because , you know , I find it interesting , there's a lot of people .

For example , if you're upper middle class , you tend to associate polyamory with the lower class .

If you're lower class , you associate polyamory with with the with the upper middle class and personally going in and out of those circles , um , I would say that if it calls itself polyamory , it's actually probably middle class and above , and one of the things that's actually interesting about that is marriage is actually still a good for a lot of these people .

So this abolition of the family is not ended marriage at all , it's just made it where , like , sexual fidelity is not an expectation of a certain kind of marriage .

This is not a broadly popular position and but it is one , and I think it's an interesting one to think of in class terms , because what that indicates is like , even though people may be unfulfilled in parts of their marriages , or maybe they think monogamy is too much blah , blah blah .

They do still see the value of marriage in the terms of self actualization and in the terms of social stability , and and so one of the things I've been talking about about this and like let's be more honest about it , is that when we talk about this in terms of family abolition and we now mean something different than what socialists traditionally meant by it ,

because one of the things that they wanted was like a free love , but that meant you could choose your own partner for real , real and as opposed to just superficially and and basically something like no fault divorce , which we already have nearly universally .

So we have to ask ourselves why is family , you know , as you said , such such a , such a good and why is it incapable of disinterest ? And I think what loons for me and a lot of this is like we aren't talking about how much more lumpenized the atomized family is , although , interestingly , and the debates with .

The reason why I mentioned with you the last debates with really in Ruben is that I actually think I'm one of the few people think Lillian Ruben run the debate Because she didn't consent the family as such . She didn't actually , she wasn't taking the position . Actually that last was attributing to her , she .

She was pointing out that , like the bourgeois family was always presented as an aspirational good and working class people never had full access to it and even when there was the family wage through one way and older , it was always precarious and forced people to work , which lash , like it emits back , but still is like , well , but nothing replaced it , right , and

yeah , and , and I just I remember reading that exchange and thinking that , like lash wasn't actually getting how much Lillian Ruben was actually agreeing with him .

Now , lillian Ruben in her study , and Silva and her study and many other studies from what's called working class studies in academia , which is a pretty cool Multidisciplinary field of research . There's problems with it I can mention in a moment . We can talk about that , but nonetheless it's youth it's worth looking at .

They have the Rutledge handbook of working class studies , which came out just two years ago , I think , and it's very good . But they're really talking about the working poor .

Yeah , they are , they're really talking about the working poor and you know there's there's time of the working poor and they're talking about a remnant of the old Fortist era working class which which no longer has the capacity for its own autonomous culture building and this is the crisis the working class is facing is this I would .

I would say it's that which is why their prescriptions differ from lashes and differ from socialist prescriptions , because for them , everything is about how do we , through sheer luck , through sheer Nietzsche and force , help these , these subjects , you know , cast off subjects enter into the middle class . That's what . That , that's their prescriptions .

And I will only push back on you on one thing , but the socialist position needs to be much better than that , like we need to think of a much better . That's all that . It's a classic kind of academic liberal . You know , solution , go ahead .

The reason why he didn't consider himself a socialist , interestingly , was defense of the working class , and he was very annoyed particularly with , with sectarian Marxist both Trotskyist and Marxist London , as to were blaming everything that happened on the false consciousness of the working class .

And so , like he said this , like an extension of what we began to saw in the Frankfurt School , you know , yeah , writing the working class off , which is fair , right , I think I think that's fair , but I point that out because I don't think he had a socialist solution to this , and this is partly why he got so , yep , so contentious , because , well , you're

absolutely right that there's a problem with working class studies , because it basically is .

It basically argues that you know , we need to , at best , we need to return to , like some kind of fortism that that , however , is more gender equal in some way , like that's , that's the best , that's the most left wing you're going to get from this , from from this group of people .

And for reasons that I'm not going to go into here because I've gone into a lot of other places . I don't think that's possible . I don't think we can have fortism again and the way that it existed in 1950 . Right , because that's predicated on a whole lot of events that'll probably never happen again . Yeah , exactly . Exactly .

I often see these kind of bland or very generalized positions for a kind of greater redistributive state apparatus which is , you know , let's , let's and so , but there's , there's a whole strategic question , a political organization which is sort of thrown out the window in that , and so I think there's that's this thrown out the window .

But the other thing that's thrown out the window is , I think , the more Marx theological insight that and maybe even look hot in insight that in fact what's actually needed at this moment is working class culture building , even in the face of its own deterioration , even in the face of its own precarity , even in the face of these facts that we're talking about ,

what would it look like to organize within those arenas , right , knowing full well of their difficulties , their emotional difficulties , their atomizations and so on ? Because that to me is the , is the , is the is more of the question , is the culture building piece as a kind of , as a , as a necessary politicized action to be taken .

And I think that , and I think it's interesting also that you know people so many people do identify as as working class , and that actually is positive for me .

I don't see , I don't want to lean on a definition of class in America as a kind of reducible to the working poor or the most lumpenized , or even , as we were saying recently , the 15% of kind of traditional what's left of traditional factory . Industrial yeah , workers yeah . I think that I'm very much in favor of that .

At the same time , some of the conclusions that working class studies scholars will develop are quite interesting .

For example , they develop this , these lines of argument that there are character development differences between middle and working class people , such as a propensity for more honesty for working class people , a propensity to be more drawn to the family structure for working class people , as a negative proof or outcome from the from this it's a basic psychological point .

Right , the fact that working class people experience families with greater precarity just simply leads to their own reliance and dependence on the family form . There's a whole unconscious dimension to that as well . So they the working class studies , essays and theorists in writers . They develop a whole kind of itinerary of different personality commonalities .

So I don't know how to feel about that . I mean , in a sense it's positive to at least know that empirically , those , those things are real as it .

Because if my , if the Marxist proposition , and even here you know , psychoanalysis is helpful , frankly , that like , class conflict actually cannot be made legible , like , like , or rather a task of a socialist politics is to help make class conflict more legible .

I think that's what we're dealing with here in this debate on the family is it becomes an arena for increasing the literacy and the legibility of an otherwise quiet or an otherwise covered over class conflicts right , which I find interesting and valuable .

I mean , he became a working class whisper and he like claims to speak for them now , but he , when you read him , he like many upwards former working class people and I say this has as , as I've said many times before , I am potentially this person , I was almost this person who holds the working class responsible for their own pathologies in a way that , like ,

basically , is a pick up your bootstraps you say you believe in God , but you don't . You guys say you believe in family , but you're all divorced and fucked up , and it removes all the inputs that we've been talking about for why that happened and blames people individually , and so I think that's one of the things that I always struggle with .

This is like , what have you talked to working mothers Like , who are married in their and their experience of the sex sex of sex actualization loose , and I'm going to call it a sex actualization actually , because it's actually kind of accurate to what's , to what's being done here .

It leads to very unhappy , you know , men , but also leads to very unhappy women , and somehow in this discourse we don't actually talk about that that much . However , you're right , I mean this . I think this goes back to like you know , I'm not Pierre Bardouin , but there is a lot of people who are not really interested in this .

I think it's a precursor to these working class studies in the studies of culture and how to approach culture , which are aggregates , and I think this is a very , very important point and I think that's one of the things that I think is very important to me by Ruby Payne , which was , I think , is a precursor to these working class studies in the in the studies

of culture and how to approach culture , which are aggregates , and I need to point that out . These are aggregate and I type you can't actually reduce them solely to the individual , but but there are things in that that Marxist probably don't want to hear .

One of the things is is that relationships , and casual , even down to the casual level , are valued more by impoverished people , but they are not as much as they are highly instrumentalized and the reason why they're highly instrumentalized is relationships is something you can have for seemingly free , and , and the cost of bad families and whatnot , or something these

people have experienced , and the cost of not having social support groups or something these people have experienced so they will tolerate , and so I think that's one of the abusive relationships , not just in the family , just in general .

Even the same token , because of that there's I think that's part of where this hesitation to Mary has really come in , because , again , not to say like , we have to look at both sides of these things .

Like the experience of a good marriage is something these people would see , would see people enjoy , have seen people in their families going back to their grandparents , probably have , if you hear for like , if you read the descriptions of like family life made by women in the 1960s , based on class and like the middle class , see , you know , sees these changes in

marriage and women entering work as a big liberation . I find it interesting because the working class by that we will mean the working poor here did not perceive it like that , because women have worked the whole fucking time anyway , like you know it's- .

mobility , but class movement right that allows for that heterogeneity of multiple experiences to be lived like , for example , we no longer have . We have in some cases we do , but it's pretty rare to see families that have not experienced some infusion of wealth at some point . But you know , I mean speaking anecdotally myself .

It's very interesting because one of the dynamics that's been a part of American capitalism , stretching back really to , you know , the movement West , the 48ers , that whole kind of cowboy mystique , wild , rugged capitalism is that American wealth falls , rises and falls by generations .

So you can have a generation that is working poor , you can have another generation which is middle class , maybe even upper middle class in some sense .

So there's these oscillations that make the mythology of the family this kind of strange , almost impossible to pin down class formation to an extent right , not in all cases but in some cases and that's actually part of the reason why , just speaking and I'm interested in class because I've seen that heterogeneity almost from a 360 degrees where actually I have on one

side of my father's family , people who went to like Stanford University . They were Spanish , my grandmother's name is Rita , she's full Spanish , and she was basically from a kind of minor aristocratic family . I never touched her money , we never had any access to it , but I kind of she was a part of my family . So there's this cultural influence that I have .

So you see , it's this heterogeneity that makes the family this kind of very interesting thing . And I think , from a socialist point of view , what matters here is the greater capacity that we can concentrate an analysis on the acute sufferings and experiences of working class families , the better off we're going to be in our analysis .

I think these analyses of the family that put forward a non-class analysis of the family as purely just patriarchal or purely just one thing , end up with almost like a quasi religious theory of the family in a weird sense , because it's a non-materialist analysis ultimately , and I really am troubled by that . I don't think that it's quite useful .

And I think the other thing I'll say to your point regarding egalitarian aspects of family and marriage as defined after post-60s sexual revolution .

It's an interesting dynamic because on the one hand , we see non-normative , gay , lesbian et cetera forms of matrimony way happier in terms of like their personal survey responses , as individuals , way happier , more content and more having their marriage consecrated on the basis of love .

We see that the fulfillment of the sexual revolution , which really was not a revolution and Phillip brief mentions this , I think to his credit . He's right was not really a revolution which was meant to fundamentally have an economic overhaul of the status , of the material status of the family .

It's defining egalitarianism in the field of pleasure , sexual expression and the sense of the family , sexual expression and power and gender relations , which are all extremely valuable and extremely important . We have that for people that can afford it right , and this actually comes down to a question of like , how you theorize also .

This is why the working class is important too as well . How do you theorize the working class's spontaneous relationship to those promises ? Do you theorize the working class as hostile to non-standard , non-normative forms of sexual expression ?

Or do you feel that the working class on their own , without the mediation of experts and college educated people , can do that stuff on their own , can figure that stuff out on their own . I would take the latter point , which is a question of trust . Do you trust them ? And I think we have to in a certain extent .

To some extent we have to trust them that in fact , there's not necessarily a desire and Silva shows this to us not a desire for the repetition of an old patriarchal family . That's actually one positive thing of the therapeutic . Working class people turning to the therapeutic are also aware of the downsides of the patriarchal family .

That are aware of it , because people are not stupid . They put this together , they put together the past familial traumas that they experienced and they attribute it to things like patriarchy . That's happening . You don't need experts to you know .

So you see , I'm trying to articulate a sense of a kind of critique of how the sexual revolution was co-opted by elites and how it's still mediated by experts and how yet , at the same time , the therapeutic now can be taken up by working class people without necessarily relying on experts , like people are figuring it out in their own auto-didactic ways , right ?

But in general it's like well , you know , peasants could always marry for love . You know , aristocrats cannot .

The property and family associations are too important and we see that fade from the 17th to the 20th century and the way that that is organized changes dramatically over and over and over again , from gentlemen collars to modern dating and also the gender power relationship in that more than people realize , for example , in the , even before the sexual revolution , you

started seeing a shift in dating where men took a bigger financial hole and families were forced to step back as dating was privatized .

So instead of going to meet in the woman's family's house , where there would inevitably be a chaperone but you were allowed plenty of time , and this was true particularly in upper middle class families , but you even see it in like I wouldn't call these working classes . This is one thing Lash does .

That I don't think is actionable , but like , basically you know , sharecropping families , things that are , you know , the closest thing in North America that we had to peasantry , that this shift dramatically changes in the early 20th century and then changes again with the sexual revolution .

But one of the things that we can talk about and I think this is where Laili and Rubin was actually somewhat pressing in her argument with Lash is that we can definitely say that working class families historically were more communal and less adamantized until forwardest development policies , and that is why that's kind of like the romantic period for the reactionary ,

even though it's also in some ways what all these , you know , socialists want to go back to . Is that time period which I pointed out . It's actually quite short , like you know . At most you can date it between like the end of the war and the re-sorting after the end of the war and to about 1961 , 62 , maybe 63 .

That's not even a generation , that's more like half of one , right , but that's when the baby boomer happens and that's when all this stuff kind of gets frozen . Then you throw in the sexual revolution and you see , yes , it's been highly commodified , yeah no , exactly it's been .

That , he says , makes a taboo on making explicit those exchanges , those family rights , gifts , inheritance , et cetera . He says all of that makes a taboo on making explicit the fact that the family is a fundamental part of social reproductive life and labor .

So that's an interesting idea because , he says , this is why in Marxist ideology studies more attention should be paid to the family , because the family serves as the first bastion for how the logic of capitalism conceals itself to each subject , right and commodity . Fetishism occurs at an elemental level in the structure of the family right .

And that is interesting because in the neoliberal era that structure of this kind of haven , this kind of form of exchange , which is still tied into capitalism but which is perceived by the members as not that's the key point breaks down in neoliberalism .

Breaks down , I would argue , and now we have what I call the proletarianization of the family , and it's a really dark turn , and here I'm talking at the level of ideology .

This is super superstructure , let's say , whereby what's needed is a kind of return to a conception of the family that actually is more liberatory and was premised on leisure , on subtraction from wage labor , et cetera . All that's pretty much gone now .

I mean that name one person that's really able to articulate that and either A not get accused of being a kind of right wing traditionalist or something like that right , or a Republican or something like that . But the irony is is that this is the sort of interest in the desire mostly of working class people .

This is what is wanted , in other words , some kind of reconfigured breadwinner type structure , in a sense is still , or at least a form of family in which these leisurely outlets are more widely available and therefore the project of self-worthmaking and self-making et cetera is simply given more resources , more strength .

I mean as an anecdote , I don't know , like my grandparents both fought in the Second World War and it was a breadwinner family . My grandfather died in his 60s because he smoked and drank and he was traumatized at Guadalcanal .

But my grandmother never worked a day in her life and she became a legend of our family , which is kind of afforded by the fact that she had that subtraction . She had that . You know what I mean . So there was something deeply that also that my mother wanted to repeat for her life . But she couldn't . She had to work and she didn't want to work .

She didn't want to work . I mean , you know , she had to suck it up , right .

So I feel that there's this weird moment we're at right now where there's something about how we might resurrect some kind of strange liberatory promise in old forms of the family , while not being nostalgic of them , while not fetishizing them , but recognizing more honestly that what they afforded somehow .

I don't have that fully figured out , but I'm just trying to at least provide some analysis for people so we can kind of make it more apparent at the minimum , you know .

I don't want to take that away , but as you pointed out and actually in my own family history I see the same thing Marriages to people who were from other classes were not uncommon in the beginning of the 20th century , even if no wealth transfer came with it .

That's the technical term was present Now , when you have non-assertative marriage and you have a cost of living which is low , you have this is my theory you have the possibility for cultural innovation in art and music and writing , literature , et cetera , increases the overall egalitarian matrix possibility of their culture increases .

So in a sense , those are the ingredients for the kind of culture that we want to build towards , in my view , right . In other words , it's extremely healthy and positive when you have cross-class marriages .

But the strong social and often legal prohibition on interracial marriages was also effectively a prohibition between interclass marriages of one group singled out , so that advantage was not allowed to them in any formal sense . Right , and you know , this disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous communities .

Actually disproportionately affects Black communities , because the racial status of many other groups was actually in the original kind of binary framework of a lot of states , actually really hard to parse out . So where the Portuguese white ?

dependency to working class people , and so I'm very much opposed to this libertarian . I mean this . I mean , obviously I'm in good company here , but you know that idea of contingency is a repressive contingency .

In contingency , I mean like , oh well , everyone's just telling you to just take the chance and take out the loan , do this , do this , you know , throw caution into the wind .

But again , as Silva says , you're facing so much risk and the sense is so onerous , combined with the cost of living crisis , combined with the rent crisis , that people are opting out of that . They're opting out of that , and then my question is in the opt out , are they politicized to the left ?

Is the left communicating to people who are opting out of this , which is a very radical subjective gesture to do is to opt out ? But I think I feel , derek , that this is happening . I see it , and it's just a sense of my subprime emission of mine .

But what I would say is we are speaking to some forms of that and not others . We are pathologizing some forms of that , like the movement of the instrumentalization of relationships .

We can see amongst and I think we need to be honest , this is specifically this was less common amongst the working poor , but more common amongst the downwardly mobile , formerly middle class of people being invested in the things like pickup artist culture and then , when that failed and they had to realize that that was a sham , they become invested in stuff like

incelism and resentment and feeling like they're entitled to these relationships .

But what I see is offered as a solution in almost every single case and left in liberal press is like well , they just need to improve themselves , they need to go to therapy , and I'm just like they could be investing the time they're investing in video games and this , and I'm like , okay , but why are they doing that , Like , let's ask ourselves for a second

why has that happened ? Like what has incentivized that choice ?

. But then that creates a sort of tragic reflection on my part where it's like , well , actually I don't want to be seen as like in this Nietzschean luck thing , like oh well , he's just , you know , he persevered , and this American rugged thing . There's nothing worse than this vision . For me , that's the mythology that needs to be destroyed .

If you want to talk about abolishing things , this needs to be abolished , right , like that's what needs to be . It's an ideological , educative thing of somehow right . And yeah , I mean I think Silva's right that we're in a culture of such profound risk and precarity that everything needs to be gauged from how people are positioning themselves within those arenas .

be . I think I want to tie this into my own life because I think this will get get to people . You know , as you're saying here about this , this you know you have two kids . I am happily partnered but I have a lot of friends who are not in the same family .

But I have been married twice and both my marriages failed and both times I was married to different kinds of working class people and I want people to understand that , like one family was aspirational and wanted a kind of family that their grandparents had and they were able to kind of maintain it , but their children have not been able to unless they were able

to marry up and the pressures psychologically on self actualization that were put on , that actually may exactly what you said , particularly actually when we , in my case , when my , my , my ex got cancer and then we also came back to America because we lived abroad and we had all kinds of new pressures that neither one of us had actually felt when we were abroad

and fundamentally changed our relationship and my first marriage ended basically because of economic precarity I had I lost my job , my partner had dropped out of school , had a ton of debt that she couldn't discharge because she had studied to be a musician . Because I think this part of the class narrative for older millennials is often missed .

A lot of the working class families were like well , you're the first , you're you , we're going to invest education and you're going to be the first , you first are maybe the second If somebody , like in my case my mom , went to college in her 40s and we started school like around the same time .

I mean she graduated when I basically was a was a sophomore in college .

But my , my , my experience is this is we were also told by people who had seen because it's intermarriage the benefits of education but , however , did not know the risk of telling your kids to do whatever they wanted and and what that would mean , because no one had a realistic viewpoint about what , like non blue collar jobs really were and what the social

capital you needed was Right .

So there were a lot of mistakes made , but then , like in the case of my , of my first wife , she , she , I mean this is almost like a working class fucking , like social realist novel , but she was studying to be a musician , which requires you playing the piano during the summer to go to college she worked at a plastic injection mold in upper Pennsylvania .

There was a machinery accident and it cut her tendon , which means that she could never play piano again , and it was like you know , I mean almost like like I say that story and it almost sounds too fucking cliche to be real , but it was very much real and she had no idea what to do about that , because no one in her family had the experience with that

end of education directly and how to negate . You know what to do with a shift of plans .

This meant that we started off as a couple in pretty severe debt , but we also wanted to be a couple and when the economic crisis happened , I left the country and she and again to get to educational goods in the Habit-Hoss of class that I think often Marxists are not good on , right . You know , even though we both have working class origins .

I was able to get a master's degree . She did not finish her BA , so when we went abroad , or when I went abroad , she couldn't be nothing but a housewife .

There was no way for her to get a working visa , so she didn't follow me and after a year we divorced , because what are you going to do when you live several countries apart and we don't have a culture that supports that kind of marriage where people don't live together for long periods of time , because that has nothing to do with self-actualization .

Right , yeah , sure , right . And so when you talk to me about this , I'm like , yeah , I have experienced this directly .

I'm going to talk about this stuff , but this is the stuff that informs people's life . Now , as what you said , should we trust people on like these nontraditional marriage relationships and whatnot ?

My implication is , yes , like I've always thought about the fact that , even though you know that little Richard , who grew up actually about 20 minutes away from me in one of the poorest parts of of Macon , would in the 50s , be able to drive in that neighborhood that we would now call a ghetto , crossdressing openly in the 30s , not even in the 50s .

In the 30s and 40s and historically speaking and I think this is like there's a certain logical sense of this even those nonstandard relationships were not really a threat to working class people because property wasn't all that much involved . So who the fuck cared Like ?

Like it's not that there was an individual bigotry I'm sure there was tons , but the pressure seemed less there and now that we've seen kind of this commodification of a lot of a lot of this . If there's a backlash against that , I think it's actually because this is now seen as a class good .

And occasionally when you see , like people like I'll just name a name here , paul Cox shot , try to celebrate , you know , traditional heterosexual families as being more working class than , say , gay families because gay people have a more indiscretionary income , I'm always like , if that exists at all , that's actually a result of this kind of commodification of the

sexual revolution .

It is not anything inherent that I've ever seen to the working class , because , while , because working class people you know , for example , religious institutions were important but not as restrictive a lot of ways it almost like , as you said , a lot of the responses this actually pretends that marriage amongst working class people was basically the Christian marriage as

promoted by middle class Protestants , but only in those terms , which I just think . Yeah , I mean everybody was kind of religious back then , but , like it's , we don't see the strictures being followed that strictly at all and actually , if you like , look at family Bibles and stuff . That's pretty clear Like , and I think we do just need to have more faith .

You're right , have more faith in people that , like a lot of the big , if there is , if there is , more bigotry coming from the section of the working poor .

I don't want to excuse it , but I think anytime that we try to impose these norms from above upon them , we are , we are far more likely to make it worse , because it will then make something that is not inherently experienced as class or class aggression seem like it is Absolutely .

I mean one I always liked that Jonah Hill movie , the what was it ? The late 90s a movie . I don't know if you've seen it , but it's you know . It depicts it .

It depicts the culture quite well of a kind of feral youth and frankly I had very much a feral youth , you know , divorced parents , set off on my own , really just kind of figuring things out on my own .

My mother got a divorce when I was a senior in high school , so a second divorce which was very dramatic , and so you know , the conflicts that I experienced were were were helped by the fact that I lived in a world which was non meritocratic , non hunger games , not to not this .

I mean my kids now , you know , 11 and seven , they are already interested in college .

Yeah , I didn't think about where I was going to go to college until I was a senior in high school . I literally didn't think about what I was going to do for college . I didn't even read when I was in high school . I wasn't an intellectual , I , you know .

I had the chance to go to a very modest state school a few hours away from my home , and that's when I became a thinker and , you know , somebody interested in books . But my , my , there was no way that I could have cultivated a life of the mind in my in my childhood . It was too chaotic , but it was also very free because I didn't really have pressures .

I didn't have pressures from the family , but it didn't have institutional professional pressures , if that makes sense .

There are more and more people in the working class who just do not believe in but and again I mean I'm using this , I'm saying I'm using this more than the working poor , but less than what , like the Marxist definition of worker would be right .

So basically , if we put this in like liberal income quartiles , basically like the lower 40th , you know income quartile , I see I see less and less people in that group feel like they will ever , ever have a chance and they are completely opting out .

And so , while you know , I can often talk them or talk their parents and disname them to a community college or something , just so they can get professional certifications and some stability that way . The idea that I see amongst them that , like , they could use school to climb out , is almost unheard of Now .

In my generation of late Gen X , early millennial people , we all thought since it wrongly , I will add , but we did all think that things were meritocratic enough that we could use this to get out , and some of us did , or other of us used the military to do that .

Both those two options , when I go back to my hometown , are foreclosed to most of those students Like . And then , conversely , on the other end of things and this is not so much , even this is almost more of a cultural class thing here Say something like PMCA .

You know my opinions about the category , but I think this does maybe help us clarify who we're talking about . The competition amongst these people has gone down to the point of like we're thinking about it when we're seven and there's no , and if you don't , you're utterly fucked .

And if you don't have helicopter parents , you're utterly fucked , which also means that the class in Colger has gotten worse , and this is one of the things I've challenged a lot of people who get mad at me when I talk about . Well , these diversity things in education have not worked , and they're like well , why do you say that I'm like ?

Well , okay , let's take two things . We know that in America , that black people are disproportionately in the lower quartiles of the kind of liberal class structure . We know that . We know that there's a wealth gap .

We know that in America , university has become more diversified in terms of racial preference , but we also know that in America , it's become more economically homogeneous than it has been since the GI Bill . Now I have a question for you how , then , are most black kids benefiting from that ?

And the answer is they're not right , that this has actually become an interleague competition thing , and it's actually interleague competitions , not just from this one country .

Like , for example , I have had experiences in my journey because I graduated from college , didn't have any economic prospects , so I went back to work in construction and how sat for somebody in DC on a whim , got lucky , made friends with a network here , met a professor who agreed to write me a recommendation to grad school and that's the only reason that I got

in . But that was all contingent luck , totally on a whim . I've been in arenas where I felt as if I was tokenized as , like , the class guy right , and it's very alienating to be tokenized . You know , it's not just race that they tokenize , people tokenize class , and this is an issue , it's a problem . It's a problem on both fronts .

I mean it leads to feelings of imposter syndrome , which thankfully I haven't dealt with myself , but it's real because you get tokenized and it's not good at all . But then the problem is that you then have to . You are being used as a tool to further the mythology that the system's working .

Yep , you are used as that tool and that has to be rejected , especially for working class people that are at the elite schools . When you participate in that . When you allow yourself to be tokenized like that , you need to think twice . In my view . You know this and I don't know . I mean , maybe we need to start calling these things out more .

It's a part of the system . Ideologically , you have to tokenize in order for its coherent logic to work , which is even a Zizekian point on ideology when Zizek says ideology is inescapable , I think this is exactly what it means . In other words , the elite schools have an ideology of meritocracy which is inescapable .

On the other hand , let's be honest , a secondary function of schooling , particularly once you get past eighth grade , is sorting the population . That is what you are doing Like this . You know I've always hated the teachers or cops metaphor , but I'm like , but we're not far from it . Now , what does this have to do with family ?

It has everything to do with family , because now the competition for families to get goods like education for their children and able to secure any kind of viable future for them is now even tied in economic competition .

That's very subtle , like the fictitious valuation of your home in relationship to its proximity to a good school , which may be public or not , like , and it doesn't matter if even you get a good education in some of these areas , like I got a pretty good education from a moderate public school .

But what people know and yet don't really talk about is like the influence that your zip code has on how you're evaluated by a college program , for if they're going to accept you and so they will take a few people in as basically like , look , we do this .

It's actually more now elite schools than in like state schools , because state schools don't have the same pressure , and it's actually interestingly led to leftist supporting the removal of things like testing or whatever as means , because they're racist and against and some degrees , because all cultural language norms have norms in them .

There's almost no way for a test not to be . However , this is one thing Freddie DeBoer is actually good on . I have many disagreements with Freddie , but he's right about this .

The class and racial bias in grading is actually far higher than on the standardized test , and yet the left does not say a damn thing about that , and one of the reasons why they don't is you have to start dealing with these complications of family and working mothers in ways that I think are not easy to fix and I know that doesn't seem directly related , but

it absolutely is and in some ways it came to the fore during COVID in ways that made all this very obvious , like what were we supposed to do with all these working families who have single mothers , when the schools are shut down . And then we saw for the first time kind of a total dead freezing of women entering the workforce . And why did they do that ?

Because , well , they don't have social support for their kids and they know it .

I mean , one of the things that Silva , her book , leaves us with is a feeling that the way that all this is internalized by working class people is total depoliticization , which , whatever you can chalk that up to the success of liberal meritocracy , you can chalk that to the success of capitalist ideology , however you want to chalk it up and parse it out , that's

a problem , right Like . There needs to be some politicization at an experiential level about these things we're talking about . Somehow , this terrain of experience is largely repressed .

I mean , this is why you need psychoanalysis , right , this is why psychoanalysis and the politics of the family are so inextricable , I feel , and even for Marxists , you know , yeah , you need to stoke some fires , like of the class of people you mentioned which was very harrowing to hear you say that that these opportunities which you perceive as opportunities when you

were their age , which weren't really opportunities , they were kind of partial opportunities , those partial opportunities aren't even what else they don't table , they don't table at all .

So what is happening in this movement ? That's our question . Like , how are these energies being expressed , communicated , seized upon ? The incel thing seems to be going away , thank God . It's a movement of total self-pity and , frankly , trumpism only accelerated it . Correct , he only accelerates it .

You have to shame them , because that's going to be and , yes , that will lead to some retrenchment , but in general , you have to make the social costs for these attitudes quite high . However , I would love to deal with the problem of why such anti-social , self-pitying attitudes would ever be attracted in the first place , and that is a larger project .

So maybe we have , we may have won the battle against this particular instantiation of end to seldom , but we have not won the battle on the way we talk about family and also I guess I want to end on this point a little bit , because I have a very I am of like four or five minds on my actual experience of family and marriage , social reproduction , etc .

And I want people to understand that , like I also think that you know that the heterosexual pair bonding thing is pretty common , even in non-monogamous societies , frankly , and that our inability to figure out what to do with that right now on the left , where , like , sometimes it's just completely stigmatized , like and for reasons that I understand , to defend other

marginalized groups . But I'm always like you don't have to do one at the expense of the other , like there is an acknowledgement of difference that should be allowed .

That I'm not seeing being done in left-wing rhetoric at all , and this is where a lot of the I think a lot of the family abolition stuff really loses its way , because it's like , okay , on one hand , we're telling people , you know they need autonomy and self-expression and whatever , and on the other hand , you are talking about like a large portion of the

population has utterly shut off from this liberation that you speak of both genders . But you know , and the hostility one thing I have been reading amongst Zoomers is the you know and social surveys is the hostility between genders has dramatically increased in social surveys and I am interested in why that is .

There's also , interestingly , a whole lot of identification with LGBT identity , but also not a whole lot of and I'm going to I'm very careful about high status because I don't want people to think that I'm condemning this .

I think there's something , there's an interesting tension in this , but a whole lot of like people who are basically still in functionally heterosexual relationships are . For the great majority of young people , it seems like in no relationships at all .

It can be perceived as a kind of individual liberation in which you work on self actualization and you , you know , get hobbies and you , you know , whatever , try to raise money and whatever , right . But there's a void , right , there's still some kind of void .

And I think that the fact that Lash points out in his book on the family , that Eli Zaretsky points out , that a lot of socialists have pointed out , which is kind of counterintuitive , is that in reality , for working class people the family becomes a site of non-commodified living , that is , that is , that is mutual , shared , and is a site for meaning generation .

That's just a fact .

And because what we're facing is , all of us must adhere to this new norm , which is very Foucaultian kind of you know , foucault in California the culture of the self , that whole notion , culture of narcissism we all have to , you know , reluctantly , I mean , it's like this funny thing with my father who's like a Rush Limbaugh conservative , who now has a girlfriend

who's a deadhead , so he can make a pivot from Rush Limbaugh to being a deadhead , because he's a part he's , you know he's just , irrespective of his own traditional , conservative , classical views , he still , too , is inducted into this new norm and regimentation .

So we're all a part of it and I think that , and I think that the fact is we have to redefine , redefine the family somehow in a way which takes some historical analysis quite seriously about how the working class has historically had different periods of capitalist development related to the family .

And we're at a juncture right now of a transition where something is , something is a foot of some kind of demand from below . And my question is again the politicization question you know like , to what extent are the ? Is the fact that the family now is deprived to people politicizing people ? How is it politicizing people ?

That sounds like it could be a recipe for a lot of reaction , a lot of maybe even right wing reaction , maybe even proto fascist reaction , given how sacred the family is . If this is , if these trends are really happening , at what point is it going to catch up with us ? At what point is this young generation going to fucking have a breakdown , right ?

What's going to happen ? When they do , what's that going to look like ? How are we going to seize that ? So we need to be in the arena of this and I think giving people and if assertive marriage is happening at the extent to which it is , that means that , like it or not , class consciousness is going on .

It may not be politicized , it may not see itself as that , but it's happening because that's just the kind of natural sociological assortment of people . But the question is one of how can the class begin to see itself as a class ? How can this , how can something be initiated in this way and that's ? And yeah , I mean , you know these are the questions .

I mean , and this is sort of just . I mean , whenever we talk about these things , it always feels like we're just opening up a huge thing and I mean it's a very emotional topic . So thanks for your personal reflections on it .

How do we D class this , this kind of stability ? I don't really care how individuals particularly find that stability .

and so on . Again , by the way , for the record , I dialogue with family abolitionists . I'm not hostile to them , I appreciate them as comrades etc . That must be said , and I think Lash did too to a certain extent , even though I did catch a in his , in his preface to a French book on the ego ideal .

I don't know , I'll send you the passage he did say . He did make a comment which bothered me where he said the left's obsession with LG , not LGBTQ , but with homosexual expression , is regressive . He said that was not necessarily a homophobic point for him to say , but it's lash it like his worst .

But nonetheless I think Lash is right about this other point , which is that family bonds need to be rethought by the left in ways which and I've seen this anecdotally with so many friends who have kids and the way that this kind of transmutes their , their worldview , but not not again , not towards some reactionary worldview that is regressive or for the status quo

or politicized doesn't have to be like . That would be my insistence we can sort of rethink leftist politics with the kind of know , some fidelity to the fact of the family as such and its necessity to be , to be thought and to be experimented with .

But I suspect that under current conditions , and particularly the way we've seen a right really dig down recently on hostility towards not just transgender issues , which I , when I say not just , I don't mean to say that's not serious , but that it has been a backdoor to like trying to impose this by force on the general public without any materialist understanding

about why this is all happening in the first place , and so the stakes for talking about it are going to be higher at the very moment where it's actually more necessary , and that's going to take some bravery that , frankly , I'm not sure that a lot of our humility and him right .

I mean , I'm 100% in solidarity with their struggle and I'm fine and is correct empirically that they face persecution , and I should be acknowledged .

When you start , when you start saying that trans people don't face discrimination , or you start to wonder , you know , this is , that's a reactionary position which I think we must reject in all cases , without question , you know that that really bothers me . When you start to say , oh well , oh , other people suffer , you know , I don't know , are they ?

Are they experiencing ? Can you show me proof ? Those lines really bother me and at that point I'm like you know what , I'm not going to participate with somebody that's going to hold that view . I'm not going to .

people , frankly , where this is some kind of a strapped battle for them , of which the working class can be a cudgel . That's . That's the line that I think we have to kind of draw on the sand , whether it comes under the name of the cycle analysis or if it tries to present itself as populism , etc .

There are a lot of things about family , about all these forms of family , that are going to make every participant of it uncomfortable , and so I'm with you on just being like , yeah , I can't . I I'm going to just admit I can't speak to the trans experience at all . If I do , it is by analogy .

Having to do with the fact that , unlike other mammals and other animals , we have a extended period of infant dependency on the mother , creates a psychic set of attachments , dependencies that it takes almost a lifetime to overcome , right .

So so , like the overcoming of paternal dependencies through the unconscious desire system of our own subjectivity Is radical , right , and that is a kind of family abolition effort , right , a kind of A movement out of the like I was saying before , and this is something we see in the turn to the therapeutic .

Which is a positive thing about the therapeutic Is yeah , I don't want to be victim to the repetitions and the traumas of my parents . You know , we need to be free of those , those , those binds , and I think psychoanalysis is powerful in that regard .

background , and I do think we need to .

I mean , I would love for just more data .

The data I'm getting right now is depressing as fuck , but I also feel like I don't really know enough , like , for example , when I hear about whether or not , like zoomers are reactionary on gender relations , I'm like , yeah , well , on some hand , we're relying on self reporting about LGBT , qia stuff , of which of which there is plenty and that seems to be

expansive . On the other hand , we also see this like reaction amongst young boys in the media , with stuff like from from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate , where it's both things seem real , but I really can't get a sense from our experiences as media phenomenon and how on , where this actually is located in the class , how large it really is like .

I don't know that and I haven't found good ways , you know good studies on it , the , the , the . The silver book is probably the best thing we have , and it doesn't quite go into all of that .

I think we need more quantitative social science applications to these phenomenon , but you know , there's not actually that much academic interest in working class studies , unfortunately , so it's pretty Surprise , yes , surprise , surprise , but anyways , it's been great man . So much for this conversation . I really benefited from it . Thank you so much .