Honestly, child support is dumb. The state should subsidize children. The entire concept of individuals paying child support is to push the onus of social reproduction onto the worker. Obviously, getting rid of child support without state subsidies is even dumber than child support itself.
I’m so glad people here feel this way. In my experience even the most progressive people suddenly turn into some kinda weird traditionalists when it comes to child support. I think there was a thread a while back that got nuked cuz of this (b/c the person suggested that the state take care of children instead of putting the burden on a parent that didn’t want the child). It seems the opinion has changed tho, thank god.
In my experience even the most progressive people suddenly turn into some kinda weird traditionalists when it comes to child support.
Absolutely. It’s because liberal feminism, like all other forms of liberal anti-oppression, can only conceive of “here is a type of person we should be nice to”. There’s nothing systemic or dialectic in any way. So because the proximate target here is male, there’s no self-reflection or external shaming when someone is a regular-ass reactionary. “maybe if they didn’t want to have most of the remaining value of their labor extracted for 18 years non-consensually they shouldn’t have slept around”
The state should make sure that every worker earns enough to support their children on their own (“to each according to their needs”) and there should be free and universal access to child daycare. Combined with free and universal access to family planning, including abortion, this is the only way to achieve true reproductive freedom, where nobody is forced to have children, but nobody who wants to have children has to decide against it for monetary reasons, and where nobody is economically dependent on their partner. All of that is also an absolutely indispensable part of truly emancipating women - as long as these material needs aren’t met, feminism is largely symbolic and can’t fully deliver on what it promises.
BTW, the states that came closest to this ideal all where AES states like the DDR, for obvious reasons. Women cannot be free under capitalism. Pushing the onus of doing reproductive labor for free on women, while simultaneously objectifying us and making us romantic and erotic prizes for men who perform in accordance with capitalist norms, shoehorning all of us into the madonna / wh*re dynamic, has been an economic success story for capitalism, and the liberal feminists’ pushback against that has only led to a softening of these norms that they easily adapted to. Liberal feminism failed because giving women the much needed access to the workplace, the freedom to become workers, isn’t liberating, but enslaving under capitalism. It can only lead to growing the reserve army or labor and ultimately had the outcome that most working class people now need two incomes to support a family.
True feminism begins where capitalism ends.
