Part three, Nasser Paydar
The emergence of the family and the evolution of its forms constitute a history of their own much like any other social phenomenon yet examining that history is not our concern here. The focus, rather, is on the contemporary family as a component of the civil and legal existence of capitalism; on the role this type of family plays in reproducing the order of wage slavery; and on the nature of love, interests, and familial affections under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. No social phenomenon can be analysed without reference to the society’s overarching economic force and without delving into the intrinsic, organic relationship between the two. The relationship between labour and capital is the all-encompassing economic relationship of the contemporary world a relationship in which all of society’s political, civil, and legal institutions are immersed and from which they derive their substance. Any judgment regarding the contemporary family that fails to address the rationale for its persistence and its role in reproducing the wage-labour process serves only to distort reality in favour of capital and to the detriment of capitalism’s wage slaves.
The existing family is an institution wherein the exploitation, inequality, humiliation, and human self-alienation along with all the economic and social phenomena of capitalist society manifest, are produced, and are reproduced as a culture or a natural way of life. This is a general principle applicable to the entire capitalist world; its scope is not limited to less developed capitalist nations or societies labouring under the yoke of naked capitalist dictatorship. Even in the world’s “most democratic” countries, the prevailing family structure serves as a veil masking the intensity of exploitation, deprivation, and the crimes of this system or put differently, acts as an instrument for the cultural and moral justification of such exploitation and compounded atrocities. Across the contemporary world, insofar as the working class is concerned, the conventional family generally bears the following shared characteristics:
1.It is an institution for the cost-free rearing of the labour power required by capital. This is one of the most critical functions the family performs within any capitalist society. Individuals acting as parents within the institutional framework of the family are compelled to willingly, and with a profound sense of human responsibility, devote a significant portion of the meagre wages earned from their own exploited labour to raising the workforce required by capital! Love, affection, and human bonds are effectively transformed into a vehicle for capital’s intensified and even more savage exploitation of the workers’ labour! On the surface, the situation appears entirely ordinary, manifesting as a completely conventional human relationship. People reproduce and following the ways of their forebears throughout history or indeed acting upon a trait shared by all living beings they feed and raise their children. Thus far, nothing strange or unusual is apparent; there is no sense of any violation of anyone’s rights; on the contrary, any objection or even criticism directed at this practice would provoke universal astonishment. Yet, this is merely the outward appearance of the matter. This common, natural human phenomenon does not unfold in a vacuum; rather, it takes place in the real world, under the dominance of wage-labour relations. The parents who bear the responsibility of procreating and raising children are not free individuals who control their own destinies or the fruits of their own labour. Their activity in caring for and raising children is not a free act undertaken in response to the imperatives of their own free human existence. Rather, they are wage labourers for capital, producing and rearing generation after generation capital’s reserve army of labour. Their share of the fruits of social labour and production amounts merely to the cost of reproducing their labour power; furthermore, childbearing, child-rearing, and the life trajectories of both them and their children are all subordinate to the dictates of profitability and the reproduction of capital. The contemporary family serves as a cell within the heterogeneous and contradictory organism of the capitalist order, playing a specific role in institutionalizing these relations and functions and presenting them as “civilized” norms. To grasp this function concretely, we aim to illustrate its objective manifestation in the current capitalist world through specific examples, examining two distinct and somewhat divergent cases within this system. The first example is Swedish society a small segment of the capitalist world where the working class has succeeded in imposing certain reformist demands upon the capitalist class and mitigating the pressures of exploitation and disenfranchisement relative to workers in other nations. Here, the bourgeois state reclaims from the working class via direct and indirect taxes and various other charges more than 70% of their *paid* labour (an amount that is itself negligible compared to their *unpaid* labour). These funds are then used to finance education, healthcare, so-called public services, and the costs of the state bureaucracy. To put it more clearly, the entire range of resources expended on raising 2,150,000 Swedish children and adolescents and preparing them for the labour market is funded by the paid portion of workers’ labour that is, the wages they receive or by the taxes they pay. If we add the costs of nutrition and other living expenses for this young population which are likewise covered by the paid portion of labour (workers’ wages) to the aforementioned items, it becomes readily apparent that every member of the working class devotes more than half of their annual wages solely to rearing the labour force required by social capital. The capitalist system conceals this entire encroachment and barbarism within the confines of the existing family structure; by wrapping it in the guise of natural human bonds or emotional relationships, it shields it from public scrutiny and critique. Undoubtedly, love, affection, and the mutual sense of responsibility among individuals such as the deep self-sacrifice and moral commitment between parents and children are cherished aspects of human life; however, the issue at hand concerns the specific social content and burden that capital, utilizing the family as a vehicle, imposes upon these natural human interactions and bonds. This social burden constitutes the very mechanism that intensifies the exploitation of labour, deepens human alienation from work and its products, and tightens the yoke of wage slavery around the neck of the working class. The capitalist system demands that the individual who sells their labour power and whose surplus labour serves as the source of capital’s life, profit, and self-expansion fulfil the obligations of parenthood by bearing the full cost of producing and rearing the bourgeoisie’s reserve army of labour, effectively dissolving their own existence for the sake of the capitalist class’s profit accumulation. Even Swedish working-class parents living in a society where children have secured far greater social rights than their counterparts in many other parts of the world are compelled by weighty family responsibilities to return at least half of their annual wages to the bourgeoisie!
The second example is Iran’s capitalist society—a society where the working masses and the downtrodden, much like the majority of the global working class, are consumed by the flames of disenfranchisement and deprivation of the most basic amenities. Here, the family is not merely an institution for the cost-free rearing of capitalism’s “reserve army of labour”; it is an extension of the factory itself, wherein half of society’s workforce women labour entirely for free for the capitalist class, receiving no wages and enjoying no human rights whatsoever. The role of the family in such countries is not limited to this alone. It is here that the slave-like labour of children for capital and the ruthless exploitation of the young by capitalist bloodsuckers is cloaked in the guise of custom, religious law, and “humanity.” Under the logic of capital, these children possess no rights; they are treated as subjects of an island called “the family,” which is expected to sustain them until they reach the age where their labour power can be sold all while relying on the meagre wages of its members. Because the family, besieged by the coercion and yoke of capitalist exploitation, cannot adequately feed them, these children face an inevitable choice: either perish or sell their child labour in the damp, soul-crushing confines of carpet-weaving workshops or medieval-style brick kilns, thereby contributing to the family’s subsistence. In Iran and similar nations, the family serves as a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie to slaughter children and sacrifice the young at the altar of ever-increasing capitalist profit.
In many capitalist countries, the long hours women spend on domestic labour within the “warm hearth of the family” constitute a significant part of the total labour power consumed by social capital. Workers, under the pressure of poverty, never set foot in restaurants, as the cost of a single meal out for themselves, their spouses, and their children would devour more than half their monthly wages. Consequently, cooking and meal preparation must take place entirely and perpetually within the confines of the home. There are no public laundries free or otherwise and the vast majority of workers do not own washing machines; they are thus compelled to dedicate substantial time to washing their own and their children’s clothes. A portion of the working-class population living on the outskirts of cities and towns, or in most villages lacks piped water, forcing individuals to travel long distances to secure their daily drinking water; this task consumes a significant portion of the workday. Home repairs and in many cases, the construction of housing units or shacks lacking water and electricity are carried out using the workers’ own unpaid labour. In many regions of the country, cooking and heating the home still rely on methods from the distant past gathering firewood and collecting tree branches a process that requires hours of labour. If we were to compile a comprehensive list of all such tasks large and small we would arrive at an extensive inventory; completing them all within a single day-night cycle would likely require the equivalent of two standard workdays in the capitalist world. In Iran and similar societies, this entire volume of labour which serves as a prerequisite for maximizing capitalist profit is continuously performed as unpaid domestic work within the confines of the home by workers, predominantly women. The bourgeois state, through the institution of the family, cloaks the process of appropriating this unpaid labour and adding it to capitalist profits in the guise of “civility.” Significant differences also exist here compared to advanced nations regarding the family’s role in rearing capital’s reserve army of labour. According to statistics from the year 1375 (1996–97), the number of children under the age of five in Iran cared for by their mothers exceeded seven million. Had the cost of raising these children been borne by daycares and collective childcare centres even excluding expenses for food, clothing, and housing it would have amounted to approximately 700 billion tomans per month, or 8,400 billion tomans per year, calculated at the fixed prices of that time. This sum is equivalent to the average annual wages of 14 million workers in that same year. Iranian capitalism adds this entire sum to its annual profits by offloading the burden of child-rearing onto mothers; it then sanctifies this ruthless exploitation within the framework of the existing family structure, branding it as the “routine parental duty toward children.” We shall demonstrate later that the role of the contemporary family in masking the intensified pressure of capital on workers’ living standards extends beyond what has been discussed so far; yet even this much suffices to grasp the secret behind the bourgeois sanctification of the family. It is hardly surprising that the weaker the labour movement and the feebler the workers’ offensive against the exploitation, oppression, and disenfranchisement spawned by capital the more rigid the structure of the existing family becomes, and the more vociferously the bourgeoisie upholds its sanctity.
The contemporary family in Swedish society differs from the current Iranian family to the same extent that the degree of capitalist exploitation and the pressure of disenfranchisement weighing upon workers differ. Wherever the protest power of workers has succeeded in imposing a baseline of fundamental labour demands upon the bourgeoisie, the family’s function of exerting pressure in the interest of capital has also been modified; conversely, where the labour movement has failed to exercise such power, the family has fully retained its role as a primary instrument for intensifying capitalist oppression and the denial of rights.
2. The family serves as an effective tool for capitalism to shift the burden of caring for the elderly, the disabled, and the infirm onto the shoulders of their children or even onto more distant relatives. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in societies where the labour movement, stifled by dictatorship and capitalist repression, has been unable to play a decisive role in mitigating the intensity of exploitation. In 1996, Iranian society included a population of nearly four million people over the age of 60 individuals of retirement age. Perhaps half of this demographic was unemployed and lacked any form of social security, medical or pharmaceutical insurance, or stable economic means for their livelihood. The costs of food, housing, healthcare, and other essential living needs for this vast multitude fall upon the shoulders of their working-class children. Here, too, the family serves as a pretext to humanize the lack of rights inherent in capitalism, acting as a vessel that transmits the pressures of this disenfranchisement.
3. The existing family structure acts as a deceptive, humanizing veneer draped over the grotesque form of private property. The “self” egoism and the “me-cantered” principle (where everything must originate with *me*, or where others’ lives are merely subordinate to *my* vital interests) finds the ideal environment for its nourishment and growth within the contemporary family. Loving one’s own child while remaining indifferent to the fate of others’ children; dreaming of one’s own children’s advancement and their outstripping of others; feeling responsible for one’s own children’s food and clothing while remaining irresponsible regarding the life and death of other children; prioritizing family kin while remaining unconcerned about other human beings these and hundreds of similar moral and emotional phenomena, which spring from the commodity economy and capitalism (or are preserved and reproduced by this system), don the cloak of virtue within the sanctified confines of the existing family, thereby being cleansed of their inhumane ugliness! Some defenders of the status quo and proponents of the current family structure might dismissively shrug and say, “No, that is not the case! We are altruistic people who, while cherishing the sanctity of the family, deeply care about all human beings on earth!” While there is no doubt about the existence of self-sacrificing, altruistic individuals across the globe, under the dominance of values and moral standards spawned by the capitalist system, such behaviour remains the exception rather than the rule. Some of these very individuals would be willing to abandon dozens of others to the flames say, in a fire just to save their own child from even the slightest harm! The contemporary family internalizes and circulates all the elements of private property specifically capitalist private property in the form of social, moral, and cultural values, thereby reinforcing the material and economic foundations from which they originate.
4. The capitalist system strips the concept of love between a man and a woman of its essential humanity, transforming the family that institution of shared life between a couple into a locus for the distortion and perversion of genuine human love. Even the purest and most sincere unions under the sway of this system are not free from the stench of the commodity economy. Greater wealth, higher academic credentials, superior physical beauty and allure, a more influential administrative position, and ultimately greater social renown and prestige dictate the dominant criteria for selecting a spouse and establishing a family life. Consequently, the toxic culture spawned by commodity production dissolves the very fabric of the family and the essence of love between man and woman. Individuals do not forge unions based on free, unfeigned human affection or a natural choice devoid of need and opportunism; rather, they “hunt” one another out of necessity and helplessness, in a manner akin to a commercial transaction. In parts of the capitalist world where poverty, hunger, and destitution run rampant, the formation of a family often manifests as a form of slave-like sale of a woman to a man. Here, love, affection, and human sentiment are the least valuable commodities on the market. A nine-year-old girl deprived of schooling and studies, and without any prior acquaintance is surrendered to the ruthless clutches of a monster’s sexual lust under the guise of marriage and family formation, driven by the coercive force and intimidation of others. Within the “sacred sanctuary” of these types of families, concepts such as choice, freedom, and personal inclination are regarded as the most profane; indeed, a significant portion of marriages and marital lives in these countries must be viewed as a human tragedy. Total enslavement, boundless degradation, the absolute denial of any freedom, and the complete stripping of a woman’s agency constitute the natural order of life within these “sacred family hearths.” Human affections and emotions play no role whatsoever in the formation of these families; instead, the true driving force behind the spouses’ shared existence is merely necessity and the terrifying dread of starvation. In many of these countries, this phenomenon is not an exception but the general rule governing family formation. In some instances, the marriage is not based on any prior acquaintance between the couple; rather, it is the parents or sometimes even distant or close relatives who decree the union. Worse still, any objection raised by the prospective bride or groom plays no part in halting or preventing the marriage; just as, in many cases, a passionate, life-defining love between a young man and woman fails to lead to a shared life when faced with parental opposition. These are common phenomena of marital life in societies labouring under the yoke of the naked dictatorship of capital; yet, even setting aside the prevailing norms of family formation and the criteria for marriage in this part of the world, the fact remains that in the most advanced capitalist societies, the double exploitation and mounting deprivation of women find both civil and legal sanction within the institution of the family. In a system where human beings exist primarily as sellers of labour power, whenever a man’s labour power for whatever reason might nudge the profit curve slightly upward, the woman is relegated to a secondary status; a woman caught in such a situation is deemed a “second-class human being” in the courts of religious law, social custom, and capitalist civil order. Within the marriage itself, she maintains her position as the possessor of a “lower-value commodity” vis-à-vis a spouse who often holds a “more marketable commodity,” and within a family structure aligned with the capitalist mode of production she is reduced to the status of a second-class human being. Naturally, in this context too, the level of struggle waged by the labour movement and the balance of power between labour and capital exert significant pressure on these dynamics and the role of the family. The lower the level of advancement and organized class strength of the working class, the greater the scope for capital to employ medieval traditions, laws, and customs to transform the family into a vehicle for the double exploitation and disenfranchisement of women; conversely, the more severely workers’ struggles have been suppressed, the more extensive the role the family plays in stripping women of all social and human rights.
5. In many countries, the capitalist system has aligned the most archaic traditions stemming from earlier modes of production with the imperatives of its own expansion and domination, utilizing them as levers to ensure its continued survival. Patriarchy, the denial of women’s rights, and the dictatorial imposition of parental and specifically paternal authority over children which characterize family life across vast swathes of the capitalist world are among these phenomena. When capital strips the working class of all freedoms and social rights in order to intensify the exploitation of labour, and when women and children are deprived of any form of human self-expression in society, it is only natural for the family to transform into a framework for enforcing patriarchy and the unconditional domination of parents over their children. In these countries, religion and the decayed superstructures of bygone eras gain ever-widening sway within the family; a woman’s “skilful management of her role as a wife” is hailed as her greatest revolutionary act! The stifling atmosphere and dictatorship of capital which dominate the lives of workers and the downtrodden permeate the entire social fabric, effectively subsuming and reshaping internal family relations. Parents exercise dictatorial control over their children even as they make the most extreme sacrifices for their sake. The child’s free development is stifled by the pressure of patriarchal culture which, in the current era, serves as a reflection of capitalist rule while their agency, freedom of choice, and liberty of action essential for the flourishing of intellect, personality, and creativity are severely damaged. I reiterate that the family is neither the originator, creator, nor guardian of any of these functions. They have all emerged from modes of production rooted in exploitation, and it is the prevailing capitalist system that sustains them based on the imperatives of its own survival and reproduction. The crucial point is that the existing family structure serves as the legal scaffolding for these functions and acts as an instrument for the cultural and legal justification of this compounded and escalating exploitation of women. In this context, the family shoulders the same responsibility as any other institution tasked with maintaining the social order and stability of capital. In the view of sociologists whether theist or atheist the family is the locus of pure love between husband and wife and the wellspring of the most tender human emotions. They point to the deep, self-sacrificing emotional bonds between parents and children’s bonds they believe stem from the very existence of the family itself asserting that the stronger and more stable the family structure, the more intense these feelings become. Yet, this sociological perspective is idealistic and illusory. The affections and behaviours of family members in general and of specific families in particular are essentially a reflection of the material foundation of their social lives. A simple observation reveals that the emotions of members of poor working-class families particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America appear more tender and profound than those found in other social classes, or even among Western European workers. Why? Naturally, the matter is rooted in people’s material living conditions.
Poverty, hunger, and the absence of basic means of subsistence or social welfare transform parents into the child’s sole lifeline for survival. Parents must somehow fill the void compensating for the lack of proper nutrition, clothing, hygiene, safe drinking water, toys, childcare, medical care, and adequate, warm housing by staking their own lives and sacrificing their sleep, food, and physical and mental well-being. Amidst this act of self-sacrifice or rather, this harrowing, forced self-depletion driven by the pressures and impositions of capitalism a profound sense of compassion, tenderness, and emotional attachment develops between parents and children. They and the mother, first and foremost spend every waking moment consumed by anxiety over their children’s health, survival, and future, for, deprived of all social support, these children face a constant threat of illness, death, and myriad other misfortunes. Malnutrition, environmental pollution, and the lack of sanitation and medical care leave the child perpetually ill and at risk of death. A mother is often compelled to stay awake from dusk till dawn, night after night, to care for her child. Every moment of her life is defined by fear, compassion, anxiety, and a sense of looming threat. In other words, she pours her very life drop by drop into her child’s existence, effectively channelling her entire personality and human essence into acts of maternal compassion. The reflection of such sacrifices and devotion manifests in the child’s mind and character as their own capacity for affection, mercy, and empathy. A son or daughter who whether in sickness or health grew up without broader social support, sheltered solely by a mother’s nurturing care and sacrifice, typically harbours a heart filled with deep compassion for her. In turn, and often under the crushing weight of widespread economic and social hardship, they feel compelled to repay their parents’ efforts in kind; indeed, elderly parents lacking financial or social security have no other pillar of support, but the aid provided by their children. The flames of mutual love and affection along with all the standards and values of familial self-sacrifice originate not from some unseen realm or an abstract “nowhere,” but from the very heart of people’s material living and working conditions. Quantitative variations in the constituent elements of living conditions across different sectors of the capitalist world give rise to differences in the composition of emotions, as well as in their modes of expression and their varying degrees of intensity. Where the working class, through years of struggle, has wrested a minimum level of livelihood demands and welfare provisions from the bourgeoisie, the content and form of emotional expression among individuals differ somewhat from those in societies lacking such amenities. One thing is clear: in both scenarios, the capitalist system breeds impaired emotions and damaged temperaments. In one instance, it unravels the fabric of human bonds, reducing individuals concerned solely with securing the barest necessities of life to isolated, fragmented, and atomized units; in another, it turns poverty, hunger, and acute deprivation into the breeding ground for fabricated, extreme emotions. These are emotions and attachments that far from stemming from freedom or a state of abundance arise from the depths of poverty, need, and destitution. Precisely for this reason, they lack genuine purity and authentic human validity; humanity requires a fundamental transformation of their material underpinnings to restore their true human character. Intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie particularly in societies suffering under the yoke of naked dictatorship point to these acts of self-sacrifice and these attachments to champion the existing family structure as the crucible in which they are nurtured. Through such demagoguery, they seek to obscure the role the current family plays in intensifying and deepening the capitalist exploitation of labour.
In light of the preceding explanations and an examination of the family’s position within the capitalist system, let us consider the fate that awaits the current family structure once the system of wage slavery is abolished. When the capitalist mode of production gives way to an organization based on the free, direct, equal, and council-based participation of all human beings in shaping their own labour and social production and when private property and wage labour vanish from human life the very foundation of the existing family will be radically transformed. At that point, the responsibility for raising and caring for children will rest entirely with society and the specific council-based institutions dedicated to this task. Domestic labour will disappear. Education at all levels from preschool through the final stages of schooling along with all matters concerning the supervision, care, health, medical treatment, and recreation of children and youth, will become part of the citizens’ voluntary socialist activity. Meeting all the material and non-material needs of the elderly and the infirm, and ensuring their care to the highest possible standard, will become a routine function of the councils. The family, as an economic unit, loses its reason for existence. Men and women become equals in every respect. As parents, they bear no obligation to resolve their children’s economic difficulties; any task related to child-rearing or care becomes a form of socialist voluntary labour. While still in the womb regardless of which mother bears them children are regarded as citizens whose birth is celebrated by the entire socialist society, which provides all necessary resources to unlock a life of communist abundance for them. Even before birth, the child is an equal citizen of socialist society, and the parents’ responsibility for the child’s care, upbringing, and physical or intellectual development is no greater than that felt by any other citizen of that society. Maternal affection, the mother’s embrace, and her special love are transformed into elements of the society’s psychological nurturing resources, and the free development of all children becomes contingent upon the free development of each individual child. Preoccupations cantered on “my child” and “my child’s destiny” along with any other form of possessiveness regarding children will give way to beautiful new sentiments embracing all the young ones in society, much like the way private ownership in economic and social spheres is superseded. Instead of gazing narrowly and exclusively at their own child’s future or devoting all their human passion to setting their child apart from others and striving for a life of privilege for them parents will come to view all the community’s children as their own. The abolition of private property in the economy leads to the abolition of the culture of ownership over children, as well as the elimination of mindsets and emotions rooted in private property. From the heart of these new living conditions which embody humanity’s united effort to secure a life of equality, prosperity, and freedom for all the purest human emotions will begin to flourish. Interactions between parents and children are cleansed of any taint of commercialism, dependency, discrimination, humiliation, or legal disparity, shifting the foundation from need to self-sufficiency; the concept of pity an echo of helplessness, victimization, oppression, degradation, and the struggle for survival is purged from people’s lives, replaced by solidarity, deep connection, and the free, compassionate bonding of human beings.
Socialism replaces the current form of the family with such a pure, ethical human relationship and, in doing so, eradicates the social roots of the prevailing institution of marriage which, in many instances, is nothing more than prostitution. Prostitution is the commodification of the self; as long as a person submits to living with another out of economic necessity or a sense of inferiority regarding what others possess but they lack; as long as occupation, credentials, and social status dictate the motives for a shared life; and as long as a woman is treated merely as a means to satisfy sexual desires or a source of domestic labour then prostitution remains a natural, omnipresent feature of life, even within ostensibly “respectable” existence. This is distinct from the formal, commonplace prostitution found in capitalist society.
By bringing about the disappearance of domestic labour, socialism liberates the family from the framework that erodes individuals both physically and mentally, transforming family life into a centre for leisure and voluntary activity aligned with the requirements for personal flourishing and physical and intellectual development. In a socialist society, the formation of a family and married life is cleansed of all the sordid foundations and criteria of a commodity economy. It is not the allure of careers, credentials, wealth, or a lavish lifestyle that draws men and women together; rather, the foundation of this new life is a free bond rooted in unity, shared understanding, and mutual love untainted by commercialism. Education, credentials, expertise, employment, and all other phenomena are purged of the pretences and artificiality of the commodity system, and access to the highest level of social resources becomes a natural part of everyone’s social existence. People become equal in all aspects of life from housing and employment to clothing, diet, essential recreation, and beyond and none of these factors play a role in the union of a man and a woman. The formation of a family in the socialist sense strips away any trace of need, compulsion, or desperation; as these repugnant elements vanish, the conscious desires and voluntary nature of shared life reveal themselves with utter clarity. Under socialism, the family as it currently exists an institution serving as a source of unpaid labour, a nursery for the employers’ reserve army of workers, and a mechanism for shouldering the burden of caring for the elderly will cease to exist; for there is no capital, and no one sells their labour power to any individual, institution, or state.
Bourgeois thinkers will undoubtedly take the moral high ground in response to these arguments, clamouring that the dissolution of the current family structure spells the end of morality and the destruction of emotional bonds between parents and children. In their view, morality and emotional ties are measured solely by the yardstick of private property and the exigencies arising from it. They believe that for human beings to share intimacy and affection, there must be a transactional, mercantile relationship based on ownership between them! Otherwise, they would feel nothing for one another! The bourgeois mind, corrupted by the pursuit of profit, cannot grasp the human criteria of emotion, affection, and morality. They fail to grasp that socialism by abolishing the state, eliminating bureaucratic and administrative relations, and entrusting the active, committed role of societal management to individual citizens transforms the entire society into a warm, vibrant hub filled with the purest and most beautiful forms of human affection. It liberates self-sacrifice, friendship, sincerity, intimacy, and love from the narrow confines of familial ties, extending them instead to the realm of free human interaction among all people.