M(arx)SNBC? Host: 'Kids Do Not Belong to Their Families' - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
M(arx)SNBC? Host: ‘Kids Do Not Belong to Their Families’
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I came across this video of MSNBC host and Tulane faculty member Melissa Harris-Perry on Facebook. I will let her speak for herself to begin:

The full transcript:

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children — “Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility” — we haven’t had a very collective notion of “these are our children,” so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

The purple passage:

[W]e have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

Compare to Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

So much to say. A blow-by-blow breakdown:

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children —

Here she seems to be referring to children as human capital, capital which is best and most directly enriched by public education spending. Never mind that inflation-adjusted education spending has more than doubled between 1970 and 2009. Never mind that children are individuals and that societal well-being cannot supercede or be separated from the happiness of individuals.

Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility

“Bourgeois claptrap.”

— we haven’t had a very collective notion of “these are our children,”

Which is a problem, because individualism is the enemy of the processes by which a society can be enriched according to the systemic implementation of scientific principles.

so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,

Including parents who are in a stable, lifelong commitment? Presumably. How silly of me to miss the larger social point. Note her use of the word “break,” deconstructive, disruptive. Antithesis to the thesis, seed of the synthesis! Catalyst of a new social order?

or kids belong to their families,

To which Marx and Engels would optimistically respond:

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

Comrade Harris-Parry continues:

and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

Not communes?

Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

I really wish Ayn Rand were still alive to respond to this. Though in a way, she did.

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