“Abolishing the Family” and the intergenerational transmission of the Irish language
The Irish language has been a personal and political passion of mine from a young age. Today in Ireland, there are many individuals, organisations and collectives fighting to improve the status of Irish, Europe’s oldest vernacular, thereby preserving and developing the cultural legacy that it carries. Misneach (the Irish word for courage) is one such organisation that takes an impressive and uncompromisingly political approach to Irish language activism, seeking not only to protect and preserve but also to decolonise. I chose this article, written by a member of Misneach, because of how clearly it demonstrates the alignment of the collective’s political values with those of Guerrilla Media Collective.
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A big debate has been brewing as of late around the “abolishment of the family” as a political goal. But what exactly does this entail? The idea emerged from within the feminist movment, and its supporters state that the patriarchal institution of the nuclear family is one of the primary causes of many of our society’s woes. The slogan “abolish the family” comes from the ideas of Marxist and feminist theorists like Silvia Federici, who was the first to famously demand “wages against housework” back in the seventies.
The term “nuclear family” refers to the archetypal image that comes to mind for most of us when we hear the word “family” – father, mother and children. This model excludes grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins or any other organisational family unit that does not follow the heterosexual norms of said image. A white family living in a semi-detached house in some suburb or other with 2.5 children, the father working and the mother preparing his meals – this is what most people will imagine. We are fed this image from movies and the media, even though it bears no resemblance to how most of us were raised.
What Federici and her comrades pointed out was that the institution of the nuclear family was central to the social regeneration of the capitalist system. Men working for capitalist industry are raised and fed at home, under the care of women: they are nurtured and all their needs are met; they are provided for after a long work day; they are given food and a bed and clean clothing; they are cared for when they’re ill, injured or when they grow old. Furthermore, all of this is done without any monetary compensation at all from those who benefit financially – it’s free work for the capitalist system, if you will. This makes the family a central cornerstone of regeneration for the capitalist system – without this care work, there would be no working masses to keep the system running.
But Federici was not the first theorist to call for the end of the nuclear family as a political goal. Marx himself suggested the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto:
“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. […] The bourgeois family will vanish […] with the vanishing of capital.” (Samuel Moore’s 1888 translation)
Marx was also not the only early-Communist theorist who laid out his thoughts on this issue. In his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx’s comrade Friedrich Engels described the link between the emergence of the monogamous family – and its oppression of women – and the capitalist state. “Within the family,” he wrote, “[The man] is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat.” (Alick West’s 1942 translation)
The family, a social institution, is also known to be the setting for much of the violence and sexual abuse committed against women and children in our society. Nevertheless, there is a considerable amount of pressure on young people to seek out a partner to settle down with for financial, rather than romantic reasons. For one, it’s much more difficult for a single person to get a mortgage. Likewise, it is extremely difficult for people to escape an abusive relationship when their only other alternative is homelessness. At the same time, society trivialises any other type of family organisation that does not conform to the established model of the nuclear family – single parents, women without children, same-sex couples, and non-monogamous relationships, to name just a few.
Since the early Soviet era, one of the central demands of the feminist movement, rooted in the ideas of Alexandra Kollontai, was not only that men should do as much work within the family as women, but also that a vast network of community-based support services should be created and made available outside of the home. Such a network of community services would remove much of the burden of care work from women, reallocating it outside of the home and therefore distancing it from the nuclear family unit.
Kollontai and feminists who came after her demanded services such as nationalised nurseries, community kitchens and neighbourhood laundry services. The goal of these plans was to remove the burden of care work from women and give them the space to participate in the political, social and economic life of the community. To that end, it was necessary to abolish the family as an economic unit that oppressed women and others who did not conform to it.
However, in these times of austerity and neoliberalism, we have created more dependence on the nuclear family, not less. With cutbacks on community services on which both young and old rely, there is now extra pressure on the family unit, and on women in particular, to fill in the gaps.
The Case of Irish
If such is the case, and if it’s true that we must destroy the family as an economic unit to achieve a level playing field for everyone, how might this impact the situation of the Irish language? After all, when we talk about the intergenerational transmission of Irish, we often think of it as a process based on the family.
Statistics from sociolinguistic studies show us that it is the mother’s language behaviour, not the father’s, that has a greater impact on the likelihood that their children will speak Irish. If the mother speaks Irish, the children are more likely to speak it too, regardless of what language the father speaks. One take on this is that the nuclear family plays an important role in the intergenerational transmission of the “mother tongue”. From another perspective, not only are women generally responsible for most of the care work at home – especially childcare – but the entire future of the Irish language rests on their shoulders as well.
However, in a society that is dominated by and revolves around English, it is an immense challenge and nearly impossible for most families in this country – including families with parents who are fluent in Irish – to raise their children through the medium of Irish. You really need to assume the role of “language activist” and “always be on guard” when taking on this challenge, explains Peadar Mac Fhlannachadha in his essay on the topic, An Tuismitheoir mar Ghníomhaí (The Parent as an Activist).
The latest statistics emerging from the research of one organisation, Tuismitheoirí na Gaeltachta (Parents of the Gaeltacht), are quite bleak in terms of how effective this strategy is in keeping Irish secure – only 23% of families in the Gaeltacht1 are raising their children in Irish.
We clearly need to understand the intergenerational transmission of Irish in a community context, not as something limited to the efforts of a few individual families. After all, isn’t language transmission a community process as well? If so, we need to focus our efforts on all community networks that support the younger generations as they grow up, and not simply leave the future of the entire language up to small individual and marginalised family units.
In the Gaeltacht, and once upon a time in former Gaeltacht areas2, Irish was always the community language, not just a family-oriented language, and it was passed down from generation to generation across all areas of community life. Nowadays, as Dunbar demonstrates in his new book Síolta: pobail Ghaeilge úra agus na daoine a thóg iad (Seeds: new Irish-language communities and the people who raised them), it is through tight-knit networks in specific local communities that Irish will be able to be revived and strengthened, not just within individual families, though he himself does emphasise the importance of the family unit in passing down the language as well.
We cannot claim that families raising their children through the medium of Irish are not incredibly important in the face of the staggering pressure of English, nor that they don’t serve as examples for the rest of us. It is important, however, to recognise that the lack of community infrastructure necessary for transmitting the language from generation to generation presents a battle against the odds.
If the future of Irish is to depend solely on the efforts of individual families and parents, this creates a huge burden for the parents themselves. Not only that, but it leaves the rest of the greater community of Gaels – from seniors to single people or those without children – completely excluded from the struggle to pass Irish on to the next generation, regardless of how dedicated they are to the language or what competence, expertise and life experience they could offer. It also excludes children and young people all over the country that are growing up in families that do not speak Irish – especially children in the Gaeltacht who could potentially form part of an unbroken intergenerational chain of Irish speakers, even though their parents may not speak the language.
A broad network of community support services is needed to help the people of the Gaeltacht successfully transmit the language to the next generation on a community level. Therefore, perhaps the whole community, and not just parents, should take part in saving the language and passing it on to subsequent generations. Unfortunately, though, much of the social infrastructure of the Gaeltacht has been in decline for many years as a direct result of unemployment, the housing crisis, and government cutbacks. Taking this into account, we could suppose that it was an intentional decision on the part of the authorities to cut back on support services in the Gaeltacht, thereby leaving the fate of the Irish language up to individual families.3
Without such a support network, and without Irish being spoken among neighbours and friends, any family raising their children through Irish will be nothing more than an isolated exception. As thinkers like Federici and Kollontai demanded, we need public services to remove the burden of duty for social regeneration from the nuclear family.
On that note, how can we build upon other community efforts throughout the country and regenerate the diverse community networks needed to support young Irish speakers and those who are raising their children with Irish? It is clear that we cannot simply place the responsibility of community language revival on the nuclear family alone.
Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License
– Translated by Timothy McKeon
– Edited by Alex Minshall
– Original Irish-language article published on Misneach
- Translator’s note: The Gaeltacht is the collective term for all officially designated Irish-speaking districts in Ireland. These isolated, rural communities have traditionally been seen as the heartland of the Irish language in Ireland, as they are the only areas in which the language has continued to be passed on from generation to generation and has remained (at least to some degree) the community and home language for a significant portion of the population. Due to issues such as emigration, cultural and economic isolation and tourism, the Gaeltacht has been in steady decline over the years and will be threatened with extinction without drastic action.
- Translator’s note: This refers to areas that had official Gaeltacht status in recent memory but, due to severe language decline, have ceased to be recognised as Irish-speaking areas.
- Translator’s note: Recent government policy has proved to be particularly hostile towards the Irish language and unwilling to assume the cost of its preservation.