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Recently, projects to reconstruct (or abolish) family relations have come back into fashion. Sophie Lewis, for instance, asserts that the family is part of a “traditional practice of grooming kids into cis-genderism and heterosexuality”, which demands to “inseminate the minds of kids” with sex-based pronouns. M.E. O’Brien, meanwhile, has argued that the family is a primary enemy of “gender and sexual freedom” that ought to be replaced with “communes”. Both are supporters of “youth liberation”.
What our current family abolitionists don’t acknowledge, however, is that the Left does not have a good record when it comes to changing society through children. In fact, some radical projects centred on them have gone very, very wrong. The late Sixties offers an illustrative, if extreme, case: that of the West German Kinderläden, or “children shops”.
Many radical parents were immediately convinced: within two years of their founding, there were Kinderläden in at least 30 cities. Few alternatives were available for parents who needed childcare during the working day, besides church or government-run centres, where discipline was strict and complete obedience was expected. The Kinderläden fulfilled a clear material need. Unfortunately, some of the radical Leftists behind the project believed it could do more than simply provide affordable childcare; they believed it could actually eliminate the psychological causes of fascism.
According to historian Dagmar Herzog, “the Kinderläden movement represented a nationwide experiment to put into concrete practice theories about human nature gleaned from young radicals’ rediscovery of … the Frankfurt School”, a school of sociology influenced by Marxism and Freud that was popular in interwar Germany.
Herzog describes how the Kinderläden attempted to disrupt familial relations: because they judged “the nuclear family to be ‘rotten to the core’, many Kinderladen activists … actively worked to rupture what they called parent-child “fixations”. Children as young as two were actively encouraged to be self-directed; adults were discouraged from intervening in their interactions. The aim was to make children independent, and less reliant on external authorities such as bosses, the government or the church.
Even more controversial, however, was the focus on freeing children from sexual inhibitions. Many of the Kinderläden were influenced by the work of
Wilhem Reich, who believed that childhood sexual repression led to authoritarian and even fascist tendencies. Thus, in the Kinderläden, children were not corrected when they touched their own genitals or those of others; in fact, such behaviour was actively encouraged.
Disturbingly, some of the educational tracts produced by this movement explicitly supported sex between children and adults. One,
quoted in a Spiegel article, proclaimed: “Children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse … It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults. It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during cuddling.” The notes published by a Berlin collective, the
Rote Freiheit, described in detail how pornographic material and simulated sex were daily parts of the children’s education.
Though we could learn much from paying attention to the role of Leftist ideology in justifying abuse, the case study of the Kinderläden is not well known on the English-speaking Left. The Right, however, has learned to wield it. Their criticisms too often form a part of antisemitic conspiracy theories about “Cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurt School (which was associated with several high-profile Jews). This makes it quite easy for Leftists to dismiss the lesson of this moment in history: that our radical imagination can stray dangerously far from reality.
The Frankfurt School in many ways embodies this danger, and the Left should not be afraid to say so. Its belief that authoritarianism was caused by sexual inhibitions — and reproduced by the nuclear family — strayed quite far from traditional Marxist understandings of material struggle and physical reality. The School might more usefully have imagined the best way to organise the working classes to lobby for higher wages — rather than trying to re-engineer the sexual expressions of the masses, in the belief that revolutionary change would necessarily follow. Instead, what followed was a major shift in Leftist analysis, which has resulted not in revolutionary change but in identitarian strife.
Source: The sordid lessons of Kinderläden – UnHerd
