Abe's reflections

A reflection by Naomi on the liberation from monogamy Part 3

Family was whomever you loved. I had a dozen husbands and a couple of children, four fathers and ten mothers. Of course, they all had brothers and sisters. The children were brought up where they they felt most wanted at any particular time and there were plenty who wanted, indeed, needed them around. Of course, when they were babies, all of us went to them and took care of their needs and made sure the others would be around all the time to make sure they didn't get themselves into dangerous situations, like being too close to a solar boiler or electric stove. Yeah, all of that came naturally and if it didn't, there were always others around, including those contributing their socially necessary labour time in nurseries and kindergartens.

Yes, formal education was still important for us. Formal just took on another shape. With the advent of common ownership, the means were there to provide each child with time in school until such a time when students would graduate at whatever level they wanted and were capable of attaining. Supporting this, was all part of what working that fourth hour was about. Hell, in terms of labour time, it only takes a social minute to make a decent beer.

We blissfully met each other and if we had desires, we fulfilled them right there on the spot. It wasn't uncommon to see couples making love, although most preferred the privacy of some secluded spot. I always did. Which is not to say that there weren't those encounters on those long electric train trips....

I remember reading about the history of State/religiously sanctified monogamous marriage under class rule during my formal education period. What a mess it turned the lives of so many into. Many suffered decades of silent desperation. Not that there weren't some good marriages and very successful monogamous relationships then or when we were living during the first years of communism. Once we established common ownership of the land and the collective product of our labour, the conditions became ripe for love, for what undermined love before were deeply embedded notions and practices concerning property which put a brake on our desires.

Women and children were treated as property of the father in marriage for millennia, all the way back to the time when chattel slavery was the norm. Of course, this plague on our sensuality also damaged polygamous marriages. Whole societies were permeated with myths about what was 'natural' for how human beings should to relate to each other. You can see it within their cultural expressions from comedy to tragedy, from novels to painting and film. It's all there: the history of how fucked up we were. Fortunately, that was changed by us changing the way we related to each other. No longer was a relationship a power play. This factor added a deep, ongoing, life/libido changing movement to our lives which carried over to how we thought about the environment and even the non-humans with whom we lived. Life truly became sacred.