Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 2: Reimagining the Family w/ Kristen Ghodsee

This episode of Upstream is produced in collaboration with EcoGather, an experimental educational project focused on heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an in-live-and-world. EcoGather hosts gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life. This is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this EcoGathering in the show notes, or by going to www.ecogather.ing. As EcoGather's active phase comes to a close, its self-paced online courses are being made freely available at ecogather.ing and its vibrant community is reconvening in a new organization called otherwise. Find out more at www.otherwise.1. [Music] The nuclear family and monogamous marriage and all of these institutions of exclusive bi-parental care are historical products of particular ways of arranging social relations. And so what I try to do in everyday utopia is to say, wow, human beings are incredibly creative, flexible, and adaptive. That's one of our evolutionary advantages. That's one of the reasons why we have thrived as a species over time. And when we look out across the world, we see so many different types of families. We have lionized, reified the heterosexual monogamous family with exclusive bi-parental care of biological children to such an extent that we have forgotten about all of these other models. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Deladuncan. There is nothing natural about the way we arrange families under capitalism. In fact, there are many who would argue that there is something quite unnatural about narrowing the experience of romance and child rearing into the rigid form of the nuclear family. That there are much better ways of arranging things might come as a surprise to some, but for those who have researched it, it's no shock that there are better ways of arranging things. And there's quite a bit of evidence to back this up. Kristen Gottzee is professor of Russian and East European studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the critically acclaimed author of several books, including Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life. Why women have better sex under socialism and red valkyries, feminist lessons from five revolutionary women. In today's episode, part two of our ongoing series on post-capitalist parenting, we take a deep dive into Kristen's work around the family and parenting. What restraints and barriers are imposed upon us through the capitalist nuclear family? What do the pro-natalists get wrong about the obsession with birth rates in the quote, return to tradition when it comes to child rearing? And what alternative arrangements are out there, which can provide parents and children alike with an experience that is arguably much more healthy and sustainable than the way we do things now? These are just some of the questions we explore in this conversation with Kristen Gottzee. And before we get started, upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to biweekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com/upstreampodcast. And if Patreon's not really your thing, you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website, upstreampodcast.org/support. Through your support, you'll be helping us to keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Della in conversation with Kristen Gotsey. All right, welcome back Kristen. So happy to be in conversation with you again, and for this topic of Post-Capitalist Parenting, even though we have had you on the show twice now, let's start with an introduction. So how might you introduce yourself, and particularly in relationship with our topic for today? Post-Capitalist Parenting. Yeah, well, Della, thank you so much for having me on yet again. It's always a pleasure to be on upstream, and I am Kristen Gotsey. I am a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I am the author of Everyday Utopia, and Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, as well as a book called Red Valkyries. All of these books in one way or another deal with this topic of Post-Capitalist Parenting, and I'm really pleased to be back on the show to chat with you about it. And may I add that you're a parent yourself? I don't know if that feels relevant, but. Yes, that's absolutely great. Yeah, I have one daughter, but I also have been involved in the lives of my two stepchildren. And, you know, as a professor, I also spend a lot of time with young people. And precisely because my daughter is about the age of my students right now, I feel in so many ways like I have this kind of parental role in the lives of many people, not just my own direct children. So yes, I have a lot of experience with like traditional quote-unquote parenting, as well as sort of like aloe parenting. This idea that you can be an important part of somebody's life, even though you are not their biological relative. Absolutely. And perhaps we'll weave in both our personal and our, you know, research or theoretical experience and relationship to this topic today. And, you know, to dive in, when you think about or reflect on parenting under capitalism. So before we get into that post-capitalist parenting, but when we reflect about parenting under capitalism, both from your own experience and your research, what is it that breaks your heart or concerns you most? What are some of the points that your most concerned about or its most heartbreaking to you? Well, so there are a lot of things that are heartbreaking to me about capitalism and its influence on our personal lives. But just to start off this conversation, I'm getting a name too. And then as we continue through the conversation, I'm sure I'll come back to some of the others and, you know, touch on those. But the first one I would say is that I think that capitalists parenting actually destroys romance. I think it actually destroys relationships because the stress of parenting and the absolute sort of scramble for getting the kinds of resources and support that you need in order to be a parent in a hyper capitalist country can really strain a relationship. And I'm old enough to have seen many otherwise beautiful relationships crack under the weight of parenting, especially parenting of very young children. I think a lot of people go into this endeavor not quite realizing how hard it is because there's so much romanticization about being a parent that sometimes you don't realize how hard it is, how tedious it can be and how much you need the support of people outside of the romantic relationship. We have this kind of ideal of biparental care. And that, as I will talk about at grade length, I think, over the course of this interview is a real sort of problem of capitalism. But then the only other thing that I would say, and I speak as both a parent and as somebody who works with young people, that sort of breaks my heart, is the number of people I know, young people in particular I know, including some of my own children who say that they want children, but they won't have them. They don't want to have them because the world is just too hard. It's just too difficult, it's too expensive, it's the world is too uncertain. There are all these sort of good moral reasons for not having children, and yet I know deep down, and they'll admit it. it if asked directly that they would actually love to start families. They would actually love to be parents. They would actually love to be a part of this endeavor of bearing and raising the next generation. And they feel as if the conditions of our society are so hostile to this endeavor that they're just not able or willing to participate in it at all. Wow. And yeah, I have heard that as well. And I also found that in your book, Every Day Utopia, that piece around the impact of romance or impact on romance for parents that that felt very sad for me to read as I am becoming a parent. This idea that, you know, you said the first part is the you know, kind of the birth. There's this just such a special time, right? And of course, I'm also feeling that in the pregnancy and they'll lead up to the birth. But then I believe you said in your book, it was like around two or three, you know, where and just the financial as you mentioned, the tediousness, the expectations, just the pressure. Never be perfect, right? There's so many pressures. My own marriage, my for, you know, my marriage to my daughter's father broke up when she was three. And it was an incredibly difficult set of circumstances. It's obviously this was quite a while ago, but I remember at the time thinking, this is so hard. Why didn't anybody warn me? Why didn't anybody tell me how hard this was going to be? You know, and I think my ex-husband who is a really decent human being felt the same way. We just, we were blindsided by the difficulties of raising a young child in a society where nobody helps you where nobody is, there's social safety nets for families are so threadbare. And as I've gotten older and I've seen more of my colleagues and my friends and then eventually my students get married and then madly fall in love and decide that they want to start families and build a life together. And then the children come along and then the world is, it makes it so difficult. And then those relationships just, they can't survive, they don't survive. And it's such a tragedy to me when I look at other countries where there are social safety nets and where people do have support from wider communities of care and love. It's so much easier to bring children into the world and to feel like you're doing a good job because if you're parenting under capitalism, it's like a contact sport and you're always feeling as if you're not doing enough to give your children the advantages and privileges or whatever that they need to survive. There was literally a book by Melissa Kerney just published called the two parent privilege, I think it was two years ago. And it's all about the ways in which parenting is a way of giving privilege to the next generation, which is that's such a capitalist way of thinking about parenting. Yeah, that is really an interesting frame. And bringing this out to capitalism, you know, a particularly neoliberal capitalism, one of the tendencies of capitalism is to privatize the commons and erode public expenditures or welfare programs, right, to continue to privatize and commodify and financialize. And you write about this in everyday utopia. One of the quotes from the book is that it is the at-home labor that allows states to cut or reduce public expenditures for provisions of childcare, elder care, health care, and education, thereby lightening tax burdens often for the wealthy. You also have another quote which is women's self-sacrifice is the ultimate backup plan. And I thought this tendency of capitalism and then noticing how it, like who it falls on and that it's kind of this catch all this women's self-sacrifice is the ultimate backup plan. That's definitely a point of this heartbreak. So can you talk a little bit more about that, this tendency of capitalism that really leans on parents and the impact that this has on parenting and maybe even romance in general? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think the pandemic really showed that when everything kind of shut down schools and daycare centers and, you know, uphairs and nannies or whatever weren't allowed in the houses anymore, that the labor of caring and educating and nurturing the next generation really fell disproportionately on women. And this is an argument that goes back to people like Sylvia Federici. There's a whole school of social reproduction theory that talks about the ways in which capitalism extracts an incredible amount of surplus value from the reproductive labor that women do, largely women, not exclusively, but largely women do in the home. And I think what's really fascinating is you have to kind of stop and think about capitalism requires labor. It also requires consumers. It also requires taxpayers. In times of war, it requires soldiers. All of those categories are essential inputs into the system of capitalism, but they don't just roll off an assembly line fully formed. They have to be born and they have to be nurtured and educated and raised to adulthood before capitalism can get the hands on it to exploit them. And so all of that work to create this essential input into the capitalist system is done largely for free in the home by the private family. And I have a really interesting perspective on this because in March of 2020, Gus Vezarek and I, he's a data journalist at the New York Times, we co-authored an op-ed called Women's Unpaid Labor is worth $1.9 trillion. And the New York Times actually put all the zeros, like wrote them all out, which was pretty impressive. It was a really interesting visual, one of those like graphically visual articles. And the comment section exploded. Like once this thing appeared, so many people wrote into the New York Times. And I can't tell you how many people wrote in almost all men and said, but women love doing this work. They don't need to be compensated because women are like naturally nurturing and naturally want to you know care and provide for children for the elderly, for the infirm. Like this is what women love to do. And so therefore, it would be disrespecting them if we somehow commodified it. And I think that's a really insidious narrative in a capitalist society because basically what it's trying to do is say, well, here's this really valuable labor that capitalism could not thrive or function without. But rather than recognizing it as essential labor, we are saying that, oh, well, it's really important, but it should not be transactionalized or commodified in any way theoretically, because other women, you know, they do it for love, right? It's a very, very strange narrative. But a lot of women in our society have internalized that narrative. That's why we have all these tradwives. You know, you go on ballerina farm or SD Williams, you know, on Instagram. This whole idea of embracing the role of the domestic. And what you're really doing is saying, yes, capitalism can exploit me, but I'm going to pretend that it's not exploding me because I love this labor so much that even though it benefits the system, I'm going to just pretend that I'm doing it for my own personal reasons. And I think that it's really, really hard to talk to people about how important this reproductive labor is. And yet, if you look at the right wing and these, like the Natal conference that just happened in Texas a couple weeks ago, I also think that Elon Musk was recently asked on Fox News what keeps you up at night. And he said, oh, the falling birth rate. So these people who benefit from all of this pre-labor are really concerned that women families, broadly speaking, are going to stop providing it for free. And we see that that's actually happening with the falling birth rate. So there's a long history of socialist critiques of what we call reproductive labor, right? This way in which capitalism not only extract surplus value from workers in the formal labor force, but it extracts a massive amount of surplus value from people who care in the home. Yeah. And you know, it is interesting the way that that phrase was written in every day utopia that you wrote it, add home labor allows states to cut, reduce, you know, public expenditures. It really speaks to the power of the no there, right? And the, um, whether it strikes, right? You know of like, or calling this out or really like demonstrating this. And then also it alludes to the antidotes as well. And that there may be many that yes, financializing, like placing a financial value is one way and doing something like a universal basic in the income could be a way to address this. And then another way, as we're going to look at more, you know, at, at socialist countries and examples, is making universal access to basic services. Right? So it doesn't actually have to be everything is financialized or that people are paid for their care work. It could be that all of their needs are met through the economic system. Exactly. And that's personally where I think that it's very important to distinguish between sort of different strands of this argument because, you know, some countries are like willing to pay women to stay home. And I don't think that's a good way to go. I think what we need to do is to socialize this labor as much as possible. And it's not just the East European countries that did this, right? Plenty of countries like France and Sweden and Denmark, countries that are democratic countries, even Germany, guarantee child care to families. They have job protected paid parental leave. Things in this country that are like pipe dreams for us are totally completely normal parts of a functioning democratic society in Europe or Canada for that matter. So I do think that we have to understand that there are multiple ways of going about this. And I just want to shout out something, which is that, do you know who Lyman's stone is? No. So he's sort of kind of one of the main figures of this kind of pro-natalism movement. When they write about pro-natalism, he's somebody he's a demographer I think and he talks a lot about how important it is for us to have children. And even somebody who's more on the conservative side of the spectrum will admit that if you want to raise the birth rate, if that's your concern, and I'm not saying that that's a legitimate concern because there are other reasons why we might not want to raise the birth rate. But if you're concerned about the birth rate, all of the evidence does, in fact, point two, just a reality that the more society steps up and supports families through things like universal childcare, childhood allowances, job-protective paid parental leave, all of those things make it easier to start a family and also to increase the number of children in individual families. A lot of people in the United States, when we do surveys, it's very clear that they say they want more children than they ultimately have. And when we ask them why haven't you had the number of children that you say you want, they'll almost always say it's too hard, it's too expensive, it's too exhausting. And so this is a real empirical question and we actually have really good high quality data from all over the world to show that reducing the burden on families will, in fact, increase the birth rate. But we also know, and this is something that comes back to the answer to the first question about romance. When we look at social surveys and of course these are also going to be self-reported, we find that parents are less happy than non-parents. That's really interesting. In Europe and in the United States, and in Canada, around the world, we have pretty good empirical data to show that like becoming a parent, you take a happiness hit. But there's a spectrum about this and the people who are the least happy about becoming parents are in the United States. And the researchers, and I cite this study in everyday utopia, the researchers argue that the reason why people in the United States are so happy is because they have so little support to become parents. So capitalism is actually an antagonist to happy families. And so I really think that there's an interesting way in which we, if there's a weird coalition that's possible here, but post-capitalist parenting is basically going to become all parenting if we don't do something about the way that we've organized our society because we have created a world in which it is really, really difficult for people to start families. Capitalism is an antagonist to happy parenting, yeah. It's true. It's sad. It's true. But like you said, things that break my heart, that's another one. Absolutely. And staying with pronatalism for a minute, because that's a very interesting topic. You know, I just find it so interesting that we have our governments, you know, tracking demographic data or demographic trends and then trying to influence it through these types of policies. And also looking at the why, right? Why are they doing this? And so you brought up Elon Musk and there is, you know, a fascist effort to increase populations for more exploitable workers. And this is also done through banning gender affirming care and also making abortions and contraceptions more difficult to access. So that's a really interesting trend as well. And so maybe can you just talk a little bit about, you know, because I'm hearing within what you're saying, the ideal is that folks can make this decision if they want to have children they can and they feel supported in that. But that there's not this like coercion or this like pronatalist dark side where there's this creation of work forces so that there is more exploitation possible. Can you just talk about that dichotomy a little bit? Right. Yeah. And I do think that we do have to make a distinction between creating a society that supports families versus some kind of weird pronatalist project to increase the birthrate for capital to exploit more people. And it's also about consumers, right? Because two thirds of the American economy is consumer spending. And so the smaller your population, obviously that's going to also affect GDP, right? Because fewer people are going to be consuming. And then of course we have to think about population, graying and things like social security and taxpayers like smaller population means less revenue for the state, which it can do whatever it wants, you know, with. And so states always have an interest in growing their population. That's the state's prerogative. But independent of the state, there's also the personal prerogative. Like if I want to have a child, if I want to grow my family, have more children, for instance, it's so much easier to do that if I'm embedded in a community that is willing to see that not as an individual decision. But as a community responsibility to help raise that next generation, children, if you understand the concept of public goods, children are almost the perfect public goods because they, even though in our country, we, everything is individualized in terms of their care and raising. But they contribute to everyone. Anybody who's getting social security now is benefiting from other people's children. Anybody who has stocks or dividends where value is being created from workers and is creating profits, you're benefiting from other people's children. Anybody who's making profits off of things that are being sold, you know, and a much higher price because of the difference between use value and exchange value is benefiting from other people's children who are consuming those good. So children are almost an ideal public good. The economist Nancy Fulbright talks about this a lot. And I just think that we have to understand that children are of great value. And that's precisely why these pronatalist guys on the right are so worried about the "childless cat" ladies, right? The idea that women don't want to be parents or, you know, anybody doesn't want to be a parent, but particularly they're focusing on women because, you know, that's their view, the right wing. So it's very important to try to kind of cut through this discourse and say, if you don't want to have kids, fine, that's your absolute right. You don't want to raise children, you don't want to participate in this, that's absolutely fine. For your own, that's your own personal decision. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't support other people who have made this decision because ultimately you're going to benefit from other people's children. And there's so many ways that you can be involved in the lives of children in your community, in your neighborhood, you know, in your extended family, in many religions, there is the practice of God parenting. So I have to, I'm really, and I write about this again at length, I'm really a proponent of this idea of cooperative breeding, this idea of collective parenthood. And I think that's much more evolutionarily anthropologically rooted in our species than this weird vision of exclusive biparental care in the nuclear family, in the single family home, surrounded by hordes of our privately owned stuff. This model that we hold up as an ideal is utterly ridiculous from an evolutionary anthropological point of view. And from the point of view of just recent history, like this model is a very recent vintage. And the reason that so many parents are unhappy is that the ideal that we have of parents is completely out of sync, I believe, with our longer evolutionary heritage. And another heartbreak related to the model that you touch on that really struck me is how parenting under capitalism encourages us to become even more individualized, isolated, and then competitive against each other. It almost reinforces this mainstream view of humans as homo-economicists. And here's another quote from every day utopia that relates to this, you said, "Because parents remain primarily responsible for their children's current and future welfare, our competitive economic system pits us against each other and undermines solidarity and community." So we really have to like fight for our own children and advocate for them. And you know, one example that you give that I found interesting is, you know, just watching your mind is how you are very happy to share your personal property in your clothing, your corset. I think it was one example with your vintage corset with your daughter. But then when you thought about, you know, whether you would share that with your daughter's friends or someone else, it just gave you something to think about. And so I just found that real that's so interesting that what it does to our minds and are like sphere of care or concern. So can you tell us a little bit more about this, this dynamic of kind of closing in our care or concern on our biological children and how that relates to capitalism? Yeah. So okay, if you think about capitalism as a system that accumulates wealth into the hands of a smaller group of people at the expense of a larger group of people like like this is a very simplistic thing. There are a few people that have a lot of money and there are a lot of people that have very little money. So what you have to do in order to maintain this system is to have a very clear way in which the people who have money can transfer that money to their own biological children. And so the nuclear family is basically a technology that allows for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege, usually from fathers to their biologically quote unquote legitimate children. And the whole sort of history of like monogamous marriage and the nuclear family really comes down to things like plow agriculture. Like it's a very specific set of social relationships that allow a certain level of inequality to persist over time. And you know if we think about feudalism or if we think about countries or places where there's something like a caste system, people who are born into one class or caste are convinced either through religion or through some other kind of discourse that this is the way that God wanted it or this is just the natural order of things and so they accept their fate and people who are born to the higher classes or the higher caste believe that they completely legitimately deserve their wealth and privilege because they were born to the right parents, right? There's this way in which in previous eras there was a narrative that sort of justified this inequality. Thomas Piketty writes beautifully about the narratives we have to tell ourselves in order to justify inequalities in society. And so in our society the family and particularly parenting becomes a way to justify the transfer of wealth and privilege from one generation to the next. Parenting in the United States is a contact sport. You have to like fight for a place in a preschool. You have to fight for a place in a private school. You have to fight for a place in a university. Everything about parenting is zero sum. If other people's kids get something that means there's less for my kids. If my kids get something that means there's less for other people's kids. And by creating the conditions by which parents and families are constantly competing against each other, we are sickening our society. We are actually making our society a really unpleasant place to be a parent and to be a member of family because the sort of natural solidarity, the natural kind of tendency towards cooperative breeding that humans have and have had historically. We can I can give you so many examples. I give many examples in the book about this. But it's undermined by this fear, absolute fear that you won't be considered a good parent. And I talk about in the book exactly this thing about sharing all of my clothes very freely with my daughter. But then feeling very hesitant when I think about would I open my closets to any of her friends in the same way. And I'm like, well, why do I feel this way? What is going on in my mind that allows me to sort of blithely transfer money to my daughter's bank account when I wouldn't do that for just some other child who is probably in greater need than my own daughter. And I do think it's because I feel like if I were to live up to my own sort of principles, I would literally be depriving my daughter and I would be a bad mom. And people would think of me as a bad mom who put my own sort of political ideological principles above my own child. And at the same time, I also feel like there's this strange way in which people who are opposed to, for instance, redistributive policies that would support the poor in our country or the broadening of social safety nets, they'll say things like, oh, well, we can't just give handouts to people. We can't just give away free stuff because that will make people lazy. But if you stop for one second and you think about that, isn't that inheritance? If you're inheriting money and privilege from your parents, how is that not making you lazy? Like, so we, what we say that we don't want for a certain group of people, we completely allow for another group of people. And why? Because on some level, and I write this in my book, all parents are nepotists, we are conditioned to believe that in order to be a good parent, you have to give special privileges to your own biological or adopted children. And I think that that is a unique ideology of capitalism. I think that is what creates such a difficult set of circumstances for people who, you know, you may, I certainly know in my case, my daughter had many friends in high school that were constantly over at my house. I treated them like my own children. I fed them. I hung out with them. I cared for them when they had troubles. You know, if they were fighting with their own parents, I was perfectly happy to have them come over and spend the night at my place. And yet, at the same time, there was like a limit to how much I was willing to completely give of myself. And certainly, if I like finances to these other kids. And I kept asking myself, why? Why? And it's capitalism. It's capitalism. It's because I've been raised in a society that has taught me that if I do things for other children that diminishes the things that I'm able to do for my own children, somehow I will be a bad mom or a bad parent. And I think everybody out there is struggling with that same set of issues. And it's something that we don't talk about because we just take it for granted. Yeah. And one way to think about this is for all of us to contemplate, you know, what is fair in terms of inheritance? How much money or even we could say capital properties even should one child start out with? Like, right? Is it $100,000? That's good to set them up. Or like, they should all inherit one house. Like, to set them up well. And should there be a 100 per like a sliding scale or a progressive taxation on inheritance? And is there at all a cap where it's like, no, for a child to receive $500,000 or a million dollars at birth or, you know, when they're 18, that that's just ridiculous. And no one needs to start with that kind of money. And even has a detriment to themselves as well as, you know, the rest of the economy, the rest of the people. And would we even ask that question about how much is necessary for one child to receive in terms of inheritance? Would we ask that? If we had a socialist or communist country, a post-capitalist economic system, where we knew that child care was going to be provided for adequate quality education that is free and public is cared for. Healthcare is provided for decommodified housing. Like, would we even advocate for any inheritance? Or would we be happy with 100% inheritance tax, you know, of any kind? So yeah, maybe talk a little bit about that difference there. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, And just to say, I just read something this morning that, like, for every child that Elon Musk fathers with some random woman he gives, that woman $15 million to, like, start out for the child in life. I mean, think about that. If you were born with a $15 million kind of trust fund from your absent father. And then there's also the work of somebody like Thomas Piketty, who talks about universal basic inheritance. Exactly what you were saying. Like, maybe everybody should start out in life with a certain amount of money so that there isn't this incredible inequality. But I also think that your final point there is that money only matters in a society where basic things like healthcare and education are not quality education anyway are not provided by the society. And if we had a world in which everybody could see a doctor when they were sick and everybody could get a really decent education through the university. If that's what they wanted to do, there would be so much less need for these basically unearned privileges that children get when their parents give them money, when they inherit money from their parents. The capitalism thrives, as I said, the intersections of capitalism and patriarchy are in this intergenerational transfer of wealth from fathers to their quote unquote legitimate children. And so there are many different ways and many different examples of how you organize the family in a world where there isn't inheritance. And I think, you know, when we go back and we actually look at sort of early utopian socialist theory or even early anarchist theory, some people want to banish the family so that you can do away with inheritance, but you can also do the other way around, right, which is to banish inheritance so that you don't necessarily need the family. The nuclear family, and especially socially imposed universal monogamy, is what allows for this intergenerational transfer of wealth to happen. And it only matters for people who have wealth to give. So, you know, and I'm not, I'm not, I can, you know, I can get really worked up about talking about the role of this sort of exclusive by parental care within nuclear family and a single family home surrounded by hordes of your own privately owned stuff. And yet I also see in my own life and in the lives of some of my closest friends and colleagues the same sort of pressures at work, we may disagree deeply with the system, but we also don't want to be bad parents. We don't want our kids to hate us. And it's really, I mean, especially when you have teenagers, I mean, they're going to hate you anyway for at least a certain number of years. But at a certain point, you have to, you have to feel like you're doing the best that you can by them and they have a different set of standards sometimes than you do. And so it is a very, very sticky and difficult problem to solve. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Kristen Godsee. We'll be right back. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] That was Venus featuring Alex Mansour by Stratus. Now back to our conversation with Kristen Godsee. [Music] If we move now into post-capitalist parenting, one thing I want to stress is that I don't include a dash between post-capitalism. And this comes from Al Nourlata who we've had on the show. He really articulates that post-capitalism without that dash is not simply a temporal state that exists after capitalism, but post-capitalism has existed and exists right now. And so if we're looking at this kind of expanded idea of post-capitalist realities, let's go into some of the examples that you have researched and written about. So these are awesome examples and they're all across the both time and also geography. So what are some alternative models of parenting, some post-capitalist models of parenting, or child-waring more broadly that have existed and that are really inspiring to you? So yeah, and I want to emphasize here that some of these are like non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, right? In this sense that I take a very, very long view. I really want to go back and say, okay, the nuclear family and monogamous marriage and all of these institutions of exclusive biparental care are historical products of particular ways of arranging social relations. We have lionized, reified the heterosexual monogamous family with exclusive biparental care of biological children to such an extent that we have forgotten about all of these other models. So historically, obviously there has been polygene, which is one man with many wives, or the kind of Elon Musk reproductive heron that he seems to be developing where he's paying women to have his children. -Rorgangus con. -Rorgangus con. Right, I write about Gingus con as well. But we should also think about polyandry. There are especially high up in the Himalayas communities where you have brothers, sometimes, or two men who are married to one woman. And this is a natural way that human beings have adopted to conditions where you want to keep the population low. We also, in certain parts of the Amazon and South America, we have partable paternity, where people believe that a child needs to have multiple fathers in order to thrive. Basically, we are historically cooperative breeders. And what this means is that, and I think, I talk a lot about this in the book, mating practices, and child-rearing practices are separable. We have been convinced that the romantic relationship between a heterosexual couple that is exclusive with each other is the only appropriate container for parenting. In the United States, we've now expanded that, so same-sex couples, as long as they're monogamous and married and they take on all the trappings of this nuclear family, they're also an appropriate container for parenting, at least for now. This idea that you can have a primary relationship with somebody, but then raise your kids collectively with other people. This is a very, very normal way of raising children. It's this whole idea of it takes a village to raise a child. We know that children thrive in communities of multiple loving, caring adults. We have so much empirical evidence, and some of the best empirical evidence that we have is actually from the pandemic, because little babies that were born during the pandemic, who didn't have social contacts beyond their immediate nuclear family, they are cognitively delayed compared to children that had access to a wider range of loving, caring adults. This doesn't mean that you have to run out and join a commune. What it means is that you might have your kids spend more time with the neighbors, or with your aunts and uncles, or with their grandparents, or with their grandparents, or with people that you know from work, or your college buddies. It means expanding the circle of love and care and support that children can get from other responsible adults. I can give you so many examples of this, but one of my favorites is actually the social palace at Gis. The reason I mention this is because so few people know about it. It was an experiment by a follower of Fourier, and it lasted for 109 years. Gis is a small town in the north of Paris in France, and they raised their children collectively. The children came home at night and slept with their parents in this sort of big philanthropy kind of thing, but they were raised collectively. The children really thrived in this environment, and I just think that we, as contemporary Americans or people living under late capitalism, we have forgotten how beautiful it is that human beings are flexible and creative and adaptive in terms of their family forms. And that the family form that we've inherited, this nuclear family, is not the ideal form for raising children in the world that is to come. If we want to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we have to have a much more capacious notion of parenting than we have today. And I appreciate your pointing out it's not just for the children, but also for the parents. It's better for everyone. And also for those community members, those allo parents, right, people who do not have biological children, it's better for everyone. Exactly. And everybody, you know, this idea of alloparenting, it's the most natural thing in the world for people to have alloparent. And alloparentes themselves get an incredible amount of validation and satisfaction from being involved in the lives of children. It doesn't matter that they're their own biological children. I mean, we forget that this is such a natural part of the way that human beings have raised children. One of the examples that I talk about at length in the book are celibates. Communities of non-concentraneous, not blood related celibates who live together in communities. These could be nuns, these could be priests, these could be monks of all different denominations. And one of the things that's really fascinating about celibates is that in almost all of these communities, without exception, if you look at the shakers, for instance, in Maine, who are also celibates. They always take in children. They take in orphans and they take in children that were born out of wedlock or otherwise unwanted, runaways, children who nobody else wants. And they raise these kids in common, in their community. And this has a very, very, very long history of groups of people who are not blood related, raising children collectively. So why would that develop if it wasn't good for the children? And it wasn't satisfying in some way for the people who are raising children that are not biologically their own. It's interesting that it's persisted trans-historically and cross-culturally. There have always been communities of people that are raising children that are not biologically their own. And I think that's just absolutely fascinating. Absolutely. And one of the elements to this that you point out in your book, every day atopia, is around the scale, right? That there is an appropriate scale to domestic work. And just this kind of, just as like we would have a share shop, a library of things, and this kind of ridiculousness that each household must have one of everything when we actually could share things and have more of a library of things. There's this scale to domestic work, whether it's grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, laundry, particularly, and taking care of children, that perhaps each of us doesn't have to do individually, maybe that's not necessary, or even efficient. So can you talk a little bit about what you found in your research around the scale of parenting, but also domestic labor? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there are quite a few empirical studies here that compare, for instance, co-housing communities versus traditional subdivisions. And they actually go through, and they look at chore-sharing, and they look at the amount of time that members of the community spend on domestic work versus other types of activities. And it's very clear that when people are collectivizing domestic work like laundry, like cooking, like cleaning, like child care, you know, that there are massive economies of scale here. And this goes back really interestingly to somebody like Alexander Kolentay, who is the commissar of social welfare in the very early part of the Soviet Union. And one of the things that she did was to institute things like public cafeterias, public laundry, mending cooperatives, you know, child care facilities. There were all of these ways in which the early socialist state in the Soviet Union tried to really allow the state to kind of come into the family. But not in a various way, but to kind of support women's labor in the home so that women could go out and do other things. And, you know, I think it's really interesting because I've spent a lot of time really thinking about the collectivization of domestic work. And some things are just not easy to collectivize. So laundry is a really great one, you know, like we all kind of want to wash our own underwear. But towels and sheets can easily be taken to a centralized laundry. And this is what, you know, in countries in the eastern block where they had socialized laundry facilities, people did their big laundry, curtains, towels, sheets, bedspreads, whatever, all the big bulky things that you kind of need a big machine to do anyway. And then they did their own kind of personal laundry at home. Similarly, a lot of these countries had either public cafeterias or they had canteens where in the workplace you would actually get a meal. And at the end of the day, many of these workplaces would actually prepare a box with like some basic ingredients. And then you could take that box home and, like basically most of it would be kind of a prepped meal. And then you would just sort of do the finishing touch at home and you'd be able to serve that to your family. In a place like Poland, they had these milk cafes. These were basically publicly subsidized restaurants where people could go after work with their families and have a pretty decent traditional Polish meal at a very subsidized price. And all of these were attempts to basically get the economies of scale of certain kinds of domestic work, which when you do it individually is so much less efficient in the first place, but also deeply isolating. And I talk about in the book, you know, when I lived in this academic community, how I did laundry collectively and I basically ate in what was essentially kind of a fancy dining hall. And when I left that community, my daughter was about four or five years old, four to five, when I was living in that community. And then I moved into basically a single family home in a kind of traditional neighborhood. And I had to cook and clean and shop and do everything by myself. I was so isolated. It wasn't just that it took me more time because it did take me more time and it did really feel less efficient. And this is like, this is just common sense because I'm a very busy person. And so often I will take a couple of hours on Sunday and I'll make meals like a big pot of something that I'm going to eat for the rest of the week so that I don't have to cook for the rest of the week. So we know intuitively that like cooking in bulk is a really useful way to save time. You do one big grocery shop, you plan one meal, and then you basically eat the same thing for five or six days, fine, whatever. I live alone, so it doesn't matter. But I think that we don't spend enough time really thinking about the ways in which our single family homes with our private kitchens and our private laundries and our sort of private spaces. It's not just that we're duplicating labor that would be much more efficiently distributed if we were doing it somehow more collectively, but it's also that we're isolating ourselves from each other in ways that are actually like increasing this absolute horrible pandemic, epidemic, whatever you want to call it, of isolation and loneliness. The surgeon general has talked about something, what does that know? Being alone is like smoking a certain number of cigarettes a day or whatever. I can't remember exactly what the exact figure was, but we know that isolation and loneliness are destroying people's lives. People are spending more time online, they're getting radicalized because they don't have social connection with other people. And it's the very built environment, it's the very ideals of the family that we have that are exacerbating this problem. And we don't talk enough about that because for most of us having your own apartment and your own kitchen and your own laundry, I remember actually we talked about, Ravi and I talked about laundry, one of the last times I was on this podcast, how laundry is one of those things that is there's such a huge economy of scale, not only from an environmental perspective, but from a time perspective, from an efficiency perspective, but we all kind of idealize having our own washer and dryer. And I think that that's, you know, it's something that we can really think about as a product of capitalism convincing us that we will all be, you know, somehow more valuable human beings if we have autonomy in our kitchens and in our laundry. And I just think that's a lie. I just think that that's an illusion that's making us much more unhappy and making it, you know, consequently much harder to have a family and a happy family. - Yeah, and not to mention how much more do we have to work so that we each have our own washer and dryer and we can pay for a babysitter for our own child instead of sharing, you know, childcare, et cetera. - Exactly. And God forbid you're putting that stuff on credit cards, right? You're buying a washer and dryer on credit. I mean, I learned at some point during the pandemic because I was craving so much food, my refrigerator broke. And it was the first time I had to buy like a new refrigerator in a long time. And I went to the local, you know, locally owned sort of appliance store and I was talking to the guy there. And I'm like, I want to, you know, a refrigerator that's going to last. He just said, no, they only last about 10 years. And then they just go to landfill. That's what you're going to get. That's just heartbreaking to think that everybody in the United States is aspiring to have their own refrigerator, brand new refrigerator every 10 years. And then to those old ones that break down that are like planned, obsolescent are just going to end up in landfills. Think about the environmental waste. Let alone, I mean, just the expense is terrible. And the fact that we're working longer hours or having to hustle harder and harder in order to afford all these appliances individually, OK, that's awful and wasteful. But then there are these environmental consequences as well. And so I think when you put it all together, the way that we're living is not only ecologically unsustainable, but it's so psychologically unsustainable for us that we have to really have some hard conversations. And I think that the reason that we idealize the private laundry and we idealize the private kitchen and we idealize our sort of single family boxes is because we have been sold a narrative that the only way you are a successful adult is that when you become a parent, you have your own home. I say this in the book, we tend to live collectively when we're young. When you're in university, you're living with lots of other people in dorms. And then when you're old and you move into some kind of over 55 retirement community, you're also living more collectively with other people. But at the very moment of time, when you need social support more than anything else, it's at this time when you're having kids. And guess what? That's exactly the moment that society tells you, oh, well, that's when you have to have your own single family home with your own washer and dryer, with your own refrigerator, and your own stove and your own blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's because of this competitive contact sport of parenting under capitalism, which justifies this intergenerational transfer of wealth from legitimate, from fathers to their legitimate children. And I just think like you have to like widen out the aperture and really see the whole picture. And most of us don't do that because we're so stuck in the day-to-day realities of just surviving what is an incredibly dehumanizing system of lay capitalism. Yes. And so going into the alternative systems, I love that you're leaning on your book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism for a few of your examples. And so let's go into that systemic view. What does parenting under socialism or communism both in the examples that you write about and in actually existing socialism, but also in the ideal or the utopian realm. For example, I know that the 10th point in the Communist manifesto is free education for all children in public schools. So paint that picture for us in socialism as it has existed, as it does exist, but also in the theoretical, how does parenting under socialism or communism differ from our current system? OK, so just it was easier. It was a lot easier. And one of the things I spent some time working with demographers and looking at fertility patterns, for instance, in Western Europe versus Eastern Europe. And one of the things that you see in Eastern Europe, which is very different from Western Europe, is you have almost universal marriage and universal child bearing, meaning that almost everybody gets married at a pretty young age and almost everybody has a child at a pretty young age. But then they only have one. And there's pretty easy support. As I said, there are childcare allowances. There are free kindergarten, there are job protected parental leaves. There are a lot of single moms because the state is going to support you. Divorce is not a big deal because there are no financial consequences. So basically the decision to have a child is very easy. It's not like a big major life decision. It's just something that you do. And everybody does it. And then you-- if your relationship doesn't work out fine, you're not going to face any financial consequences. And in why women have better sex under socialism, I spent a lot of time detailing all of the ways in which the state really tried to socialize some of the socially reproductive labor that is required in order to raise the next generation. So I think that there was a really existing socialism, which I talk about. And then in everyday utopia, I sort of talk about some of the ideals. And I think that I can talk about differences between theoretical communism versus really existing socialism until the cows come home. But the basic idea is that children are public goods. And socialist ideal societies, and as you pointed out, in the Communist Manifesto-- in fact, a very interesting side note that you may not know is that there were two draft versions of the Communist Manifesto in 1847, which were written by Engels before he collaborated with Karl Marx on the one that we know from 1848. And in the earlier versions of the Communist Manifesto, the sort of drafts that Engels wrote, he actually said that all children should be raised collectively after they're old enough to leave their mother's care. It was a much more radical vision than just free public education at public expense for all children. But it got kind of got backed down, I think, partially, because I think Jenny Marx had a little hand in the framing of the Communist Manifesto. She doesn't get nearly as much credit as she should. But I do think that in the ideal-- if there is some kind of ideal collective communist future, at least as it was imagined by many Utopian socialists and then quote-unquote scientific socialists in the 19th century, there would be a much more collective endeavor for childbearing than there was even under really existing socialism, and certainly more than there is today, under late capitalism. Yeah, thank you for that. And that's the transition. That's the post-capitalism in terms of the alternative system. And then next, I want to ask about the reforms, the more mezzo-level-- but also macro-level reforms that would support us. And then I want to end with the prefigurative. What can each of us do in our day to day? So part of the re-imagining our economies is our infrastructure, right? And our systems in our collective and community spaces. So for example, you write in everyday Utopia, what if our individual flats are single-family homes, which feel so normal to us, also represent a particular cultural ideal perpetuated by an economic system, which seduces us into the belief that square footage and privacy are both desirable goods for which we should pay a premium. And so there would be things that would need to change, like a reclaiming of commons or of more spaces for collective childcare or for-- communal washing that would need to happen. So let's talk at that, you know, mezzo level of like what are the infrastructure, the physical space changes that would need to happen to move us more towards this communal raising of children and this more socialization of domestic work. Yeah, that's a great question and this is almost kind of an architectural and a city planning question and I have some wonderful colleagues and students at the University of Pennsylvania who are really thinking a lot about what architecture of the future needs to look like and you know how we can design cities, design, challenge our built environment because one of the things that we have a problem with in the United States is that we've inherited the architecture and the city planning of the 20th century which was a very sort of hyper capitalistic and individualistic and nuclear family patriarchal version of how we thought we would thrive in our lives and it's obviously not working. I mean when when sort of people like David Brooks right in the Atlantic, the nuclear family was a mistake, right? It's even even people who understand or as I mentioned earlier, limestone, who's you know somebody who associates with the pronatalist movement but who also recognizes that we need sort of social infrastructures of support for families if we're going to value them. So in everyday utopia I talk about the ways in which yes it would be ideal if we could build sort of phalansteries kind of a Fourier vision of the phalanster or go down social palace which I talked about earlier like these sort of big collective spaces where we could still have individual private space but there would be much more of a commons, right? And to decommodify and detransational on these so much more of our social lives. So there's like the utopian vision of what it would look like if we could start from scratch, right? If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow and the world ended and we had to build Jackson Wyoming from scratch, what would our lives look like? That's one set of questions but then there's like we have the built environment that we have. Can we repurpose it? Can we take single family homes and break them up? Can we have multiple couples living together in the same house raising their children in common? It's actually remarkably hard to do that. You know and places are like passing laws against co-housing. They don't want people who are not blood related or married to be living together. So there's a real threat to capitalism if people started to collectivize their living situations. And I think that we have to see the reality of the built environment that we've inherited and we have to think, okay, there's like several levels upon which we can operate. One is at the high, high, high sort of policy level of getting rid of zoning laws that prevent the construction of multi-family housing units in single-family neighborhoods. There's, you know, restrictions around school districts and things like that. There are high density housing initiatives that would be environmentally more friendly but would also have the effect of creating tighter communities and expanding our kind of networks of support and care into our neighborhoods in a way that our single-family homes do not today. So there's that policy level of certain kinds of changes. But then, you know, it's all the way down to the very personal you were talking about having a library of things, right? I talk about in the book this example of a woman who was living in a co-housing community where everybody shared a wheelbarrow. And then she had to move out of that community and she moved into like a sort of suburban subdivision and she had a wheelbarrow and she was really shocked to see that her neighbor went out and like bought another wheelbarrow because he was like embarrassed to borrow theirs even though their wheelbarrow just literally was sitting in their garage doing nothing. This idea that we don't share and that we feel embarrassed to share. I think like on a very personal level we can open ourselves up to being a little bit more like again, you know, I think about myself and maybe I should be lending clothes and and and and and and and you know and to my own credit in fact just I did do this. One of my daughter's friends was at my house and she was starting a job and she didn't have any kind of professional clothes because she'd literally just graduated from college and I gave her a bunch of stuff that were like sort of like professional clothes that she could wear to get her started and in that moment I realized we should all be just doing this more free cycling and sharing and there are ways to do that. Look, why do we have to allow ourselves to share property only through commercial platforms like Rent the Runway when we could create our own libraries of things or free cycling communities or mutual aid societies. There's so many things that we can do even in the absence of a state because why women have better sex under socialism is really a book about what the state can do, what policy can do and everyday utopia is about okay well if the state isn't working for us what can we do and I think that there are multiple levels in which we can create new built environments but we can also repurpose and rethink our own inherited built environments from the 20th century. We have multiple avenues here to change the world history is contingent. We have so much power as people and yet we allow ourselves to be seduced by fixed narratives about the way we should and shouldn't live our lives as individuals as romantic partners and as parents and I think that one of the most important things that we can do is to question how did we come to these ideas that's what I'm trying to do in everyday utopia. I'm trying to say why do you think that this particular way of living your life of being a parent of being a romantic partner is quote unquote natural. Where did you get that idea from? Because many of the preconceived notions that we have around the right or wrong way to live are very very recent phenomenon. They're of recent vintage and we can challenge them and the more of us that challenge them the easier it is for other people to challenge them and so that's what I would say there's so much that we can do both on the high policy level but also on the level of our everyday lives. So thank you for that meso-meso level like what we need to shift on the the practical in the transition points and you know I want to move to these final invitations this kind of prefiguration right like what is it that we can do on our day to day as we're building this new system as we're moving towards post-capitalist parenting and you know one of the things that I'm hearing I'm hearing a couple of invitations one of them is you know appreciating our kith not our kin or leaning into aloe parenting just really seeing ourselves in relation with children beyond those of our biological children and widening our sphere of care for children just that invitation of you know debunking or unlearning homo-economicus and turning towards a more widened sense of care as humans and then I'm also really appreciating all of your stories and models of post-capitalist parenting and I will say in your book you even go into the evolution which I found so interesting around chimpanzees and gorillas I found like really fascinating so maybe if you want to say a note on that that could be interesting but also just the examples in socialism both theoretically but also in in in what has been tried and what is is working around the world I find that really useful but I do think people are very curious as to like how do they take what we're talking about and really start implementing it and practicing it so maybe a little bit about the evolution just because I brought that up and then if you just want to end with you know what are your invitations for people who are currently living under capitalism who are inspired by the examples and the stories that we're offering today you know what are some of those tangible next steps that they can do those things that are practical but also possible okay yeah so that's a huge question and the the evolutionary anthropology and like the primatology is a big chunk of the book there are two chapters on the nuclear family so you know there's a chapter about housing and a chapter about childcare and chapter about education there there's so many bits and pieces but the real I think meat of some of the argument is in the two chapters about the nuclear family and I do go back and question like okay so where did monogamy come from for instance where did this idea of exclusive biparental care because I'm less interested in monogamy than I am in where this idea that children do best through exclusive biparental care so I mentioned earlier this book by Melissa Kerny the two parent privilege and in that book she makes you know this claim which I don't think is that controversial that having two parents is better than having one parent because children are going to need multiple sources of support and care that's just the nature of children parenting is a very intensive occupation and just having One parent is often not enough, and so she makes this argument, but particularly within a capitalist context, that kids that have two parents thrive versus kids that have one parent. But the interesting thing about her argument is that it doesn't explain why we should just stop it too. Because if two is better than one, then clearly three is better than two, and four is better than three. And there's a lot of interesting philosophical argument about what's called multi-parenting or aloe parenting. Like how many adults should be in a child's life, like in a kind of quasi-parental or directly parental or aloe parental role? And I think that's a really interesting question. And I think that the answer is if two is better than one, then three is better than two, and four is probably better than three. And so we should really actively, if you're a parent, make sure that you are allowing your children to spend quality time with other loving, caring adults that you trust. And these can be your parents, your parents and law. These could be the God parents of the child. These could be aunts, uncles, colleagues, neighbors. It doesn't have to be joining a commu, raising your children collectively in an intentional community. It can just be allowing your children or your child to develop a really close relationship with other people that are not the biological parents. So this is such a simple thing. And as I said earlier, many religious traditions allow for things like God parents. And God parents have batheinos, right, in certain Catholic traditions. But batheinos have a really important role to play in the lives of the children and their backup parents. If God forbid something happens to the biological parents, this is a set of backup parents that the children will have. In intentional communities, you have, sometimes in some communities, you have primes, you have multiple adults that are kind of there for you. And so if you're a parent, allow your children to develop close relationships with people outside of the relationship. And we have very good child psychological literature around attachment theory that shows that even if a child has a strong attachment with a non biological parent, it does not undermine their attachment to their biological parent. And a lot of mothers are worried that if a child has a really strong relationship with somebody else, that somehow that will diminish the child's relationship with the mother. And that's just not true. We have very, very good empirical evidence to show that that is not true. So if you're not a parent, then spend time, make an effort to spend time with other people's children, even if you don't want children. You know, I've had so many conversations I've been on Booktour all around the world with everyday utopia. And I've talked to so many people, especially parents of young children, who say some of the greatest gifts that they've been given as parents, is when some other adult that they trust agrees to watch their children for an afternoon or for a weekend. It's such an incredible gift to give to somebody is like, hey, I know that you're a parent. I know that this is hard. Hey, let me take, let me help in some way. That's an incredible generous gift. So on this very, very practical level, you can allow other people to participate in the raising of your children. And if you don't have children, you can participate in the raising of other children. It is this idea of it takes a village. It is this idea of we can breed, you know, cooperative breeding. This is a very technical term, but it's just that we can all support each other in this endeavor to create the next generation, which are all going to, you know, benefit us collectively in the future. So, so that's a very practical set of things. And I spend a lot of time at the end of everyday utopia talking about different ways of imagining, of expanding our networks, our lateral networks of care and support. And by the way, and I really want to emphasize, this is not only good for the children, it's incredibly good for the parents too. And it often preserves romantic relationships. Even, you know, just sort of garden variety, heterosexual romantic relationships can be so helped if there are other people who are willing to contribute to child care and just supporting the couple in this really, really difficult but valuable effort. So that's the first thing. But the second thing, and I really want to emphasize something very simple here, which is that all of us want a feeling of love and security and belonging. And most importantly, we want to be validated. We seek what the philosopher William Godwin coined this term. He says, we all want esteem. He wants to be seen. Everybody wants to be appreciated. And this, Della, this is free to see people, to appreciate, to validate them. And when we talk about the enclosing of the commons, when we talk about the ways that capitalism commodifies and transactionalizes everything, unfortunately, capitalism also understands very well that this esteem, this validation, is something that people desperately want. And so they're trying to limit the sources of that esteem so that they can sell us crap that we don't need, basically. Happy satisfied people are very bad consumers. They don't need new junk from China to make them feel good about themselves. And so what can we do as parents or what can we do as allot parents? What can we do as friends? What can we do as comrades, colleagues, neighbors? What can we do as romantic partners? What we can do is we can see and validate and esteem people. And we can raise the next generation to be confident and strong. To understand that sources of esteem are not just ones that you buy on a market, right? Especially, I would say, for I just had another podcast conversation recently about the way that young men in the United States, they believe that either they have to have wealth in order to be considered worthwhile as men, or they have to be very physically strong and dominant over women and other men. There are very few alternative sources of esteem, which is one of the reasons why we have all of these sort of manosphere proliferation on social media. So what can we do? It's so simple on some level. It's so simple that it's actually complicated. It's that we can see and appreciate each other and we can tell each other that we see and appreciate each other. But most importantly, for this younger generation, I can't tell you how many young people I see who are so desperate for validation and esteem and they're not getting it. They think that they'll get it from having lots of followers on Instagram or they think that they'll get it, is they got a great internship at Goldman Sachs or getting into a PhD program or whatever it is that they think that they need in order to be a "success" in our capitalist society. But all they really want is esteem, is validation, which is such a human thing, cross-cultures, trans-historically. And this is something that exists and can exist, historically, has existed outside of the market. And if we can get back into some kind of world where we are able to give and receive validation and appreciation and esteem in a non-commodified way, not only laterally but also intergenerational and so forth. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Kristen Gottzee, professor of Russian and East European studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the critically acclaimed author of several books including "Everday Utopia" what 2000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life, why women have better sex under socialism, and red balkyries, feminist lessons from five revolutionary women. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Stratus for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover-on. This is the first time I've ever seen a film in the history of the music that was composed by me, Robbie. This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, an experimental educational project focused on heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an in-living world. Find out more, including the date and time for this eco-gathering in the show notes, or by going to www.ecogather.ing. As eco-gather's active phase comes to a close, its self-paced online courses are being made freely available at eco-gather.ing, and its vibrant community is reconvening in a new organization called Otherwise. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. And for more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, and Facebook for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps to get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you. [Music]