Toward a Cybernetic Communism: The Technology of the Anti-Family

Abstract

In The Dialectic of Sex Shulamith Firestone declares her version of communism to be the most radical yet incorporating and extending the vision of hitherto existing revolutionary thought through the inclusion of two often-ignored components of human and social life—the unconscious and the family. In her own words, “[i]f there were a word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.”1 To this polemical end, she seeks to combine a reading of Freud with a radical critique of the nuclear family in terms of the possibilities presented by reproductive and workplace technology. Among Firestone’s ultimate demands are the freeing of women from the “tyranny” of reproduction and the equal and collective sharing of childrearing. The implication of the former change would, Firestone thinks, threaten the family in radical ways. Coupled with her second major demand, “the political autonomy, based on economic independence, of both women and children,”2 this combination of economic, political, and biological freedom as a whole Firestone calls “cybernetic communism.” The complete “integration” and “sexual freedom” of all women and children would accompany and follow from the political freedom granted by the reorganization of the family structure in the wake of technological emancipation from childbirth.