For the past two years or so I have been in an accidental personal project which consists of reading all of Dussel’s body of work. His immense, encyclopedic, amount of texts make this task daunting, but so far so good. Recently, however, writing my thesis I have stumbled upon a text by Mark Fisher, or rather, a book which transcribes his last lectures. 

The Post-Capitalist Desire book is beautiful, while also tragic. The book transcribes Mark Fisher’s lectures for the course “Post-Capitalist Desires”. The general question guiding the course is that of the title. Do we have a desire for a post-capitalist future? And, in answering the question, or looking at sources which may answer the question, Fisher discussed Ellen Willis’ text “The Family: Love it or Leave it” in her Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll. It is a marvelous text depicting the failures of the counter culture movement from the sixties, in her view as participant, and in retrospective. The text is important for a number of reasons, one being that it illuminates an emic perspective of what a movement filled with post-capitalist desire would look like, and one which actually tried to overcome capitalism with some self-organization. 

Now, I say Fisher’s book is tragic, and this is so in several ways. First, the lectures were the last Fisher gave before he passed away by suicide. The course as such could not continue. There is a sense of tragedy in all of this. Without saying much on Fisher’s psyche, it is haunting to think of a professor giving lectures on postcapitalist desire while struggling with depression. In a sense this shows Fisher’s will to supersede capitalism, in that despite his inner dealings he somehow sublated them into a set of lectures. A second way in which the lectures are tragic is in that it shows the multiple failed experiments of post-capitalism that haunt the left nowadays. There is an argument to be made that the left is always mourning, that it is always trapped in the ‘what could have been’. And indeed it may be so because it could have been better. We could be doing better. Now, a third sense in which the book is tragic is in that Ellen Willis’ text shows an important and yet forgotten aspect of the left. The family situation. By saying that it is forgotten I do not mean that it is altogether abandoned, but, as Fisher claims, there is a “domestic realism”. 

We cannot think of a different family structure than the nuclear family. And, do not get me wrong, I love my family, but at the same time the solitary confinement of a four person community (if such a thing can be named community) is daunting. And, simultaneously, I yearn for a time where I can pick up my children, and take care of them. The nuclear family, as an institution, and as has been shown in multiple historical accounts, is a fairly recent invention. So it could be that child rearing could be communal. I remember reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel portraying two different worlds. One, anarchic, communal, and free. The other, full fledge capitalist (or at least what we see from it). The anarchic planet, or moon, Anarres, has a family structure different from ours. To start, no one owns anything. Partners can decide to live together in an apartment-like room provided by the state, but it is socially frowned upon to live with someone too long. Children live in what seems to be their school. And while parents visit, it is rare for them to take the children to their house. This novel was my first encounter with a different family structure. Without making any judgement claims regarding the family structure in Anarres, it shows that it is possible. Perhaps what is most genius about Le Guin is, in the words of a classmate of mine “that she shows you how the world could actually be different”. Indeed, her depictions are so human that one cannot help but think her worlds could actually be here on Earth. 

Le Guin aside, and Fisher aside, what the problem of the family structure in a post-capitalist system reveals is that it must be thought. The family is a powerful structure in the present system and it works for a specific function. One cannot deny Foucault’s adage that power runs through everything, and it runs through families as well. They are the seed of inception for our political views, our pre-determination for success in the capitalist world, the seeds of trauma and of love. And yet, in no Dussel text have I found a profound critique or assessment of the role of the family in the Philosophy of Liberation. Why would it be that such an obvious site of interest escapes Dussel? In a sense, a true love-for-the-other that Dussel invokes, would also mean having everyone as family. Or, rather, if it is true that in the Other who I cannot fully grasp, but in who I see freedom, is someone I love as an Other, why are there special people I love? This would attain to the question of agápe versus philia; a love that is disinterested, boundless, subject-less, versus a love that is interested, bound by something, and directed to a specific subject. Dussel tells us to have the victim in a privileged position analytically, but who of us would turn an eye for a victim when our family needs us? That is, if we were to save one, a victim who is unknown to us, and a family member, most of us would save our family member even if such a member is not a victim. Now, I do not think this is because the family has some intrinsic phenomenic value which we cannot fully grasp. On the contrary, domestic realism also operates by giving the family a privileged position in our subjectivity. I also do not think a silly scenario like that would be of interest to Dussel. But just in general, what is the role of the family? Victims can arise within the family in a number of different ways, and many of them precisely because of the structure of the family. 
Philosophy of liberation thus has to develop an understanding of what the family should transform to in its own post-capitalist vision. Hopefully one day I will write about it. Until then, I direct whoever is reading this to Ellen Willis’ text, to any book by Ursula Le Guin, and to Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family, which I wish to comment on soon.