This is ultimately a dichotomy between having the family unit or "the state" as the central point of governance. Many totalitarian regimes looked at newborns as "belonging to the state". The result is a unified mass person who dresses, thinks and acts in predictable ways.
The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.
> Have you ever been there and met the uniform mass persons?
I was born in Eastern Europe in a society headed in this direction. I observed its transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You felt the overarching power of the state from as early as the kindergarten. Signs of individuality were suppressed and all children were supposed to do things "the right way". When such an institution decided that a child "systematically misbehaves", it was able to take the child away from its parents in another orphanage-like institution that was supposed to teach them good socialist manners. Eventually some of them would end up seriously harassed, physically-ill and sent to an anonymous grave in the backyard of that institution.
I grew up in the USSR, and in the kindergarten, our teacher actually tried to convince us that the correct 5 year old kid's answer to the question, "which person do you love the most?" ought to be Lenin, and not e.g. "mom".
That said, in practice, the quality of indoctrination was extremely variable for the same reason why it was variable for everything else - most people weren't really buying into it themselves, and so even if they were in a position where they were expected to indoctrinate, they did the bare minimum that was demanded of them, which usually wasn't very convincing. I didn't get to witness it as an adult, but according to my mother, by the time you were old enough for Komsomol, very few still had their rose-tinted glasses on.
"Care" doesn't scale. You can't just replace "the family" with some industrialized system of raising children and get the same results. Not being able to scale "care" and make it more efficient is almost tautological, really.
> Besides, what countries are you talking about?
North Korea? Former Soviet Union?
At the very least appearance of conformity was ruthlessly enforced and even private conversations were infiltrated to detect dissent.
Totalitarian regimes often uphold traditional values like family as a means of control, promoting unity and loyalty to the state-yet they’ll redefine these values whenever it suits their ideology.
That's not really true. Marxism-Leninism famously sought to abolish the family and the Soviet union performed quite a few experiments in communal rearing of children in it's early years.
The reason why totalitarian regimes end up promoting traditional values relations is that to them the only imperative superior to ideology is survival.
There is a reason the Soviet Union backed off from it's repression of religion in the middle of WW2.
> the only imperative superior to ideology is survival
I think it's more that well-meaning ideologues are easily replaced by self-serving pragmatists in post-revolutionary turmoil. There were plenty of Marxists in Russia vying for power, in the early days. Lenin didn't win based on ideological purity; he won based on political strength. And say what you will about Lenin—he did have beliefs and he did have a real ideology. Stalin only cared about Stalin, and he claimed to believe whatever was convenient for him in the moment.
Early Soviet Union did try to reshape family, but it went back on it eventually, seeing the value of the conservative family model in building social cohesion and loyalty.
Expressed differently: they tried to abolish the family, found that doing so created more problems then they solved, and backed off in order to avoid tearing their country apart.
They discovered that in some things doing nothing is better than doing something, but Westerners of all political stripes (both for or against authoritarianism) chronically make the mistake of assuming that everything that a totalitarian state does is done with some grand plan in mind rather than them just flailing about to find a centralized policy that kinda-sorta works.
Your comment reminds me a lot of modern speculation about China's grand plans. Sometimes a government chooses not to touch something because they learned from bad experience that they'll break it if they do, not because they're playing 4D chess manipulating it behind the scenes.
Bolsheviks were absolutely pushing quite radical ideas on sex, rekationships and family in the early 20s e.g. Kollontai with her Glass of water theory.
> 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship
> One year after the Bolsheviks took power, they ratified the 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship. The revolutionary jurists, led by Alexander Goikhbarg, adhered to the revolutionary principals of Marx, Engels, and Lenin when drafting the codes. Goikhbarg considered the nuclear family unit to be a necessary but transitive social arrangement that would quickly be phased out by the growing communal resources of the state and would eventually "wither away". The jurists intended for the code to provide a temporary legal framework to maintain protections for women and children until a system of total communal support could be established.
Not really, just the notion that trying to abolish family is somehow the hallmark of totalitarianism doesn’t seem like sound reasoning, and indeed it isn’t confirmed by historical examples.
I would argue that the main reason why USSR changed so spectacularly circa WW2 is because Stalin was personally very socially conservative in many ways. It wasn't just religion during WW2 - the country reverted to traditional gender roles in general in many ways, banned abortion, made homosexuality illegal again etc. Most of the early extreme experiments that really didn't work out were already long abandoned by then.
Our principal exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Songs of Education: II. Geography by G. K. Chesterton
You’re describing the extremes on a spectrum, but you only go to one of the extremes, which exposes your bias.
And it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, since shifting more care work towards society doesn’t equate to a path toward totalitarianism. You’re conflating socialism with totalitarianism. Understandable, but misguided.
Frankly, your whole premise is based on a capitalist narrative that keeps workers in their place because individual care work is so inefficient—it drains energy that could otherwise be channeled into organizing worker councils to balance out the power now disproportionately held by banks, IT corporations, political parties, and the military-industrial complex.
I’m aware that I may come across as an arrogant prick in this comment. I wish I had more time to craft a friendlier response with more sources and explanation, but I simply don’t. I need to work to feed my children and their mother, but anyway, here’s a reading list for anyone who’s interested:
"Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher - Fisher discusses how capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, including care work, and critiques the idea that alternatives like socialism lead to totalitarianism.
"Workers of the World: Essays Toward a New History of the Working Class" by Philip A. H. G. D. Van der Linden - This collection explores the historical context of labor movements and the importance of organizing against disproportionate power structures.
"The Care Crisis: What’s Wrong with Care and How to Fix It" by the Institute of Public Policy Research - This report outlines the societal implications of care work and its impact on worker organization.
"Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
The whole point is scaling "care work" is almost oxymoronic. Care is only quality care when there are a small number of carers per those being cared for. To make it "efficient" is to turn children, the addicted, the disabled, and the elderly into cattle.
> "Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
This reveals one of the poorly hid secrets of progressive ideology. Progressives LOVE Capitalism and want to spread it to encompass every human interaction. Caring for your own home, your own children, anything someone might do for a friend or a loved one MUST be turned into a financial transaction with an explicit contract.
> This reveals one of the poorly hid secrets of progressive ideology. Progressives LOVE Capitalism and want to spread it to encompass every human interaction
this is one of the fascinating consequences of "capitalist realism". often people who attempt to criticize the system end up describing a form of capitalism that they would prefer to participate in. picturing a world that isn't the one you know is really difficult. questioning everything is a painful and slow process.
I didn’t advocate for "scaling" care work in any way. The point is that care work needs adequate support and funding—not efficiency measures to turn it into a production line. Right now, schools and childcare services are chronically underfunded, with too few teachers and caregivers for the number of children needing attention. Meanwhile, parents with limited support systems work full-time just to make ends meet, only to watch a large portion of their income go straight to childcare costs.
The conservative approach you’re defending offloads all responsibility to the individual and the nuclear family, which means that in reality, women often end up trapped in unpaid care roles, increasingly dependent on their spouses' income. That’s not freedom, nor does it offer any dignity or choice; it’s a conservative agenda dressed up as “individual responsibility,” which only entrenches inequality and dependence within families.
And let’s address this twisted notion that anyone who wants state-funded support for care services somehow thinks of people as "cattle." It's laughable—except it’s also insulting. So, to put it bluntly: go fuck yourself for even suggesting that. Care, when adequately supported and dignified, recognizes people’s humanity rather than ignoring it.
As for the accusation that progressives want to monetize and commodify every human relationship, look at who benefits from the status quo. Conservatives would rather sacrifice people’s well-being to "traditional values," while keeping corporate interests safe from any pressure to reinvest in the society they profit from. I don’t see any corporate executives or capitalists hesitating to send their own kids off to private schools and exclusive care, expecting other people’s children to manage with nothing.
So let’s be clear: asking for social investments in care isn’t “capitalist.” It’s about making sure people aren’t left to fend for themselves, and about affording everyone—children, the elderly, those with disabilities, and the rest of us—a dignified life. And if that offends the conservative agenda, then good.
Then I'm completely lost on how it is relevant to an article that specifically mentions the care of orphans as its central example for how care does not scale.
I think the idea is that many totalitarian systems treat every child as an orphan, in some cases taking them physically away from their parents and then have people look after the children as a job. Hence the comparable situation.
And, of course, all such systems I've ever read about do not care about the practical limitation of 1 caretaker per 1 child. I believe youth services in the Netherlands, for example, has 1 caretaker (effectively available to the child) per 15 children, or 7 or 8 if they're trouble. Does this work? No, of course not. They don't care. The kids grow up caring for nobody, probably because effectively nobody cares for them. One person watching 15 children can only hope to prevent disasters, if that, they cannot provide decent attention to children. By the standards of this article, there's probably 2 people who work in the same "group". If there's a third one, they will be shared between at least to groups. So 2 to 2.5 per 15 children ... comes to one parent figure per 7 children, which is a third to a fourth of the care children would receive in even a huge family, and much less than in a small family.
> I think the idea is that many totalitarian systems treat every child as an orphan
This idea is just wrong. Wrong isn't strong enough, it's conterfactual. At most some of them treated female bodies as owned by the state. I do not remember any example of totalitarian society where a child of a political opposant would be treated the same as any military child. Maybe Salazar? But even then, it was so corporate-aligned I doubt children from owners were treated the same as children from workers at anytime.
The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.