가족 유물론, 돌봄 공동체

Abstract

This paper discusses the following. First, based on analysis of Engels’ ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State’, the family abolitionism of Marx and Engels is reinvestigated in relation to the discourse on ‘family dissolution’ that has become a major theme in today’s society, while revealing the current significance of the family abolitionism. Second, through criticism on the socialist feminism on the ideas of family, it introduces the discourse on family of socialist feminism that urges for ‘invention of the family that goes beyond families’. Third, the socialization of caring labor and caring communities that are being actively discussed in the feminism sector was pointed out as a practical method to overcome the traditional family model, while simultaneously proposing it as a realistic alternative for the coexistence of family models. From such discussions, this paper understands the family as a social outcome that has continuously changed in the relationship within specific socioeconomic conditions. Therefore, it adopts the perspective that accurate analysis and understanding on family can be appropriately guaranteed only within the relationship with the socioeconomic conditions. Based on such perspective that can be called the ‘materialistic understanding of the family’, this paper positions the cause of social symptoms of family abolition and family crisis in the fragmented individual desires to break away from the series of conservative trends that claim to return to traditional family values, or the series of conceptual flows that claim for the recovery of emotional ties among family members while ignoring the objective conditions that the family is placed in. In fact, in order to understand the source of family abolition and family crisis, it is necessary to pay attention to the socioeconomic structural inequalities that today’s families are faced with, and because it is necessary to understand that such structural inequalities have various pressures and suppressive modes that are applied on family members. The key thesis of this paper is that the common idea on families that it is a place of emotional ties of love and affection that can be realized through the socialization of family functions, and that the socialization of family functions is ultimately on the same orbit of socialization of caring labor and the spread of caring communities.