How do we handle child abuse or corporal punishment of kodsin a socialist or communist society...

This tbh. Makes the movement sound like some autistic workshy free love club that fell a few feet short of being edgy.

It's just fun to remind reactionaries that their spooky ways and beliefs will die out as soon as the material conditions allow them to and no amount of appealing to muh culture muh tradition will do anything to stop it.

but parents have raised their kids in the vast majority of human societies before and during capitalism, with a greater or lesser level of help from the wider community and more distant relatives

This. I don't understand how it's tied to capitalism at all.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with one man and one woman living in a monogamous relationship and raising kids together.

The important thing is establishing that such an arrangement isn't the one, true, glorious way to do things, with the corollary that children are not the property of the people that make them.

If we're talking about a society at an appreciable degree of socialist development where private property is effectively abolished then children shouldn't be considered the property of their parents, either. Childrearing should be a common, communal process where a child's development isn't placed at the mercy of only two people.

This isn't necessarily to say that they should be torn from their parents and put through some sort of agoge-esque program, but that children become the responsibility of all functional adults. How this will be expressed will of course differ from community to community, but it would be both a natural and necessary development in the shift from the competitive mode of production of capitalism to the cooperative mode of socialism.

In any event, every adult effectively becomes the parent of any child. If another adult witnesses abuse against a child (by which I mean for the sake of this example severe physical harm, psychological mistreatment, starvation, sexual abuse, or other such mistreatment, as opposed to a simple spanking or sharp word), that adult should be empowered to immediately remove the child from the guardianship of whoever is currently "in possession," if you'll excuse the phrase, of the child.

Ideally this would be a temporary situation contingent on finding long term care for the child and remedying, if possible, whatever caused this maltreatment in the first place. I would hope that under a socialist paradigm such incidents would occur more infrequently, but I don't doubt that under socialism there will still be people with mental disorders (narcissism), unhealthy sexual proclivities (pedophilia), etc.

From there I think it would be up to the community to decide whether the offending adult is sanctioned or provided rehabilitation or imprisoned or permanently separated from the child or whatever, depending on the circumstances and severity of the abuse.

So what? People used to divine the intentions of the gods by cutting a person open, nailing their intestines to a tree, and then making them crawl around it until they died. We (generally) don't do that any more, either.

During capitalism the state has taken over the heavy lifting of raising kids by forcing them through regimented, production-line education. That's been going on for a while too, so should we just keep doing it?

Okay.. but people in this thread and elsewhere have argued that the nuclear family is capitalistic, which is true, but in a way that implies that non-individual parenting was dominant before capitalism which is just silly and untrue. If anything familial blood bonds were stronger in feudal and earlier society.

If all you're arguing is 'people who abuse children shouldn't raise them' then you're making the edgiest way possible of saying it since abuse can get your kids taken away in our society right now, that doesn't mean there's no such thing as the nuclear family

Man, this is unrelated to your post, but this thread just reminded me of a dream I had about getting pinned down and pegged by a girl in a robot suit with a giant dick attachment. I never used to have those sorts of dreams before.

Plus lately my libido has been nothing. What is happening?

So it stands to reason that they're just as likely to dissolve further.

The nuclear family only became possible for most of society once capitalism provided an the means for two people to live and raise their children on their own, and even that development was relatively recent. And now that the material abundance available in the 20th century, we're starting to see a return to the "extended family" arrangement that existed for most of human history with children living with their parents, and sometimes their grandparents too, well into adulthood, so called "boomerang kids." Heck, it just came up recently with Hillary talking about people "living in their mothers' basements," so already we're seeing the destruction of the nuclear family.

i don't even know where to explain why this argument is stupid. but here goes, so is socialism a return to more natural patterns of existence as marx implied? because if so your argument makes no sense, not to mention it's the opposite of what you yourself said earlier

You're mistaken.

I don't know where you're getting this idea from. Children have always been a burden unless you're materially wealthy enough to support them, which even for the nobility wasn't a given. For peasants, once children were old enough to stand they were old enough to work, so if they weren't providing for/contributing to their own upkeep they were just a millstone around their necks.

Even for the nobility blood relations meant fuck all. Sons weren't shy about killing their fathers, brothers weren't shy about murdering their siblings, because it was the property that was important, not your numerous, resource-sapping family.

I established what I was talking about right in the beginning of my post you idiot.

There literally isn't any such thing as the nuclear family. It's just a social construct contingent on the material conditions of society to support it.

Aside from the diminished libido I don't see the problem.

Very good taste fam

Trying to claim that socialism is a "return" to "more natural patters of existence" is a bullshit argument. If you actually follow through with what he says, there is no one "natural" way of living, because the entire method by which you are doing things is shaped by the society you are in. The only alternative is if you lack a society and thus are shaped by that instead. What he's talking about as being made more "natural" is the removal of commodity-centered relationships with society and one another (ie. alienation), something that is unique to capitalism and its commodity-centric production and societal shaping forces.

Meanwhile, there's little reason to believe that life under feudalism or ancient slavery was a particularly "natural" way to live either. Were family structures under those systems not also influenced by their own status quo?

Socialism is a creative endeavour, it may take aspects of different systems but it isn't a return to any objectively 'natural' state of being. It's a new mode of production and will be encompanied by new changes to the superstructure.

By not having children.

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