Kiss the family good-bye.

Let's forget about the family. It's one of those concepts the left has been harping on for some time, without getting anywhere. I'm proposing a list of such terms that, as tar as I'm concerned, the right can have.

My main group of what we might call negative keywords includes the following: "family," "community," "neighborhood," "grassroots," "empowerment," "the people."

"Family" heads the list because it is both the most seductive and the most insidious. The seductiveness makes sense - after all, who actually opposes the idea of family? We're all aware that the right looks to demonize us as a fringe element of freaks, alien from and hostile to the values of a supposed mainstream. Pointing out that we have families counters the image of the left as rootless kooks or demons. So the temptation to try to "take the family back" from the conservatives is powerful.

The desire to make a left program symbolically consonant with "ordinary" Americans' attitudes isn't new. It's what prompted Eastern European immigrant Communists in the 1920s and 1930s to adopt "American" surnames. It also has undergirded a lot of sectarian groups' fetishes for stereotypes of working-class behavior - beer-drinking, homophobic, macho style. And, as comes through most clearly among defectors from the Democratic Party's liberal wing, it's a slippery slope.

There are two main problems with the "take back the family" stratagem. First, the "family" in American political debate still means the patriarchal, nuclear household. So we must load cumbersome qualifications onto family imagery. We have to point out, for instance, that by "family" we mean any set of individuals who understand themselves to be committed to one another in a primary, durable way. We have to do that, rightly, to make clear that we don't want to diminish the legitimacy of a wide variety of nonheterosexual, nonnuclear household arrangements.

It's certainly necessary to combat the use of family rhetoric, which the right uses as a weapon against anyone who doesn't conform to conservative patriarchal ideals. Contesting for ownership of a label whose popular usage is saturated with evocations of a narrow, conservative moralism, however, is not obviously the most effective way to do battle. The real issue, after all, isn't whether "families," by whatever reckoning, are suffering or being undermined by rightwing policy initiatives. It's that the right's program impoverishes and otherwise endangers large numbers of individuals - without regard to their household arrangements and patterns of intimate attachment.

A simpler, more direct approach is to point out that the thrust of a progressive, egalitarian policy agenda is to make certain that individuals have access to the resources - among other things, decent education, health care, a safe environment, a living wage, freedom from discrimination - that they need to realize their capacities as autonomous members of the society. Under those conditions, the family issue will largely take care of itself. Autonomous individuals can choose whatever domestic arrangements they wish, with whichever specific partners they wish, free from the sting of bigotry or the lash of the market.

The best single "family policy" would be to end wage discrimination and labor-market segmentation by race and gender. Only when women are free, without fear of impoverishment, to order their intimate lives as they choose on an equal basis with men will we have a sense of what a "natural" family form might be for our society. This is also a key component of the struggle against domestic violence.

Charles Murray and other reactionary bemoaners of the demise of "the family" know what's up. They object forthrightly to the system of social support - not just social welfare spending, but even housing patterns that make smaller units available, thereby reducing the cost of living alone - that makes it possible for women to live independently. They recognize, in principle at least, that Engels knew what he was talking about in the late Nineteenth Century: that the economic and political subordination of women is the sine qua non of the sacrosanct nuclear family as we know it.

This connects with the second disturbing feature of the "take back the family" strategy. It often masks a fundamentally left-in-form, right-in-essence acceptance of conservative family ideology. I've learned from responses to my criticisms of underclass ideology in The Progressive and The Nation that all too many people who identify with the left nonetheless maintain blind spots about the intrinsic superiority of the two-parent, "intact" nuclear form of household organization.

Jacqueline Jones's generally well-intentioned book, The Dispossessed, is a clear example of how a misty-eyed concern for family can produce blindness to the abusive and exploitive relations that frequently characterize real families. This blindness is also why William Julius Wilson's silly idea that we should direct employment programs to inner-city men to make them "marriageable" (his macroeconomic dating service) hasn't ruffled more feathers on the left, despite its blatantly anti-feminist premise that women should marry their way out of poverty.

"Family" has the aura of a natural relation that occurs outside the system of hierarchies associated with a particular social division of labor. But what we tend to reify - even to the extent of imputing it to other animals - as The Family is more usefully and accurately seen by anthropologists as only one of a very large variety of actually functioning kinship and household systems.

Community," "neighborhood," "grassroots," and "the people" work the same way. Like "family," these notions appeal partly as a counter to the right's charges that we're marginal. Each is supposedly popular, authentic, collective, and organic. Each appeals to the image of a group that exists apart from - and prior to - external identities and interests, including larger institutions like government. Each is construed as a direct pipeline to the general will. Invoking the community, the neighborhood, the grassroots, or the people is a self-contained political justification.

There are at least two problems with this view as well. One is that each of the four categories is too neat an abstraction. There is no pure, organic solidarity. Communities and neighborhoods are not pristine with respect to their alliances, nor are they joined by general will. Each category (really four versions of the same category) exists at best as what Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs in his 1923 book, History and Class Consciousness, described as a unit of "objective historical possibility." It is invoked as part of an attempt to create it, as part of the effort associated with generating constituencies for specific political interpretations and programs.

Communities and neighborhoods are sites of political disagreement and contest just like every place else; "the "grassroots" and "the people" are only more abstract and diffuse forms of the same imagery. They aren't pure, and they don't act with one mind. Their political affiliations are defined by the same kinds of struggles and negotiated meanings that occur in households, workplaces, co-ops, union locals, or editorial boards.

The disposition to appeal to that imagery for political validation reflects a naive, Jeffersonian romanticism that equates smallness and informality with democracy and justice. And that's the second problem with this imagery.

Presumption of that kind of organic collectivity as the font of political legitimacy is a double-edged sword. Ever since the anti-abolitionist riots in the Jacksonian era, racist whites have justified their exclusionist, anti-egalitarian politics in terms of appeal to the collective will of "the community," "the neighborhood," "the grassroots," and "the people."

As anyone who has lived in a small town knows, the small community can be ruthlessly oppressive for those defined as outsiders, and internal democracy is by no means necessarily the norm for establishing the "community's" dominant points of view. Think of the Jim Crow South.

"Empowerment," like the other negative keywords, speaks more of process than of program. This notion is perhaps the emptiest of them all, as the ease with which the Reaganauts appropriated it attests. It covers the waterfront: from self-help psychobabble to bootstrap alternatives to public action, to vague evocations of political mobilization. It's currently particularly seductive because its vagueness provides an apparent basis for broad agreement.

The allure of these symbols points to serious conceptual problems among progressives, who - especially in this perilous time - must think more clearly. At the moment, I'm working in an election campaign against a smooth, black neoliberal creature of the philanthropic foundations whose appeal rests almost entirely on clever deployment of a rhetoric driven by these keywords. His substantive program is all bootstrap economic development, victim-blaming, corporate-partnership stuff. Surprisingly, many progressives have shown themselves incapable of looking beyond his patter about empowering the grassroots, mobilizing at the community and neighborhood levels, and so on.

Our response as leftists to such rhetoric should always be to ask, "Empowering whom? To do what? Mobilize which communities in support of what program?"

Of course, we invoke those contested symbols in our propaganda as do all other interested forces in the society (though I am convinced that "family" in particular is at best a dead end), but we must be clear that they are rhetorical, not analytical, categories. They help us advance and sell a vision and program, not define, clarify, or substitute for them.

Least of all now can we afford to become victimized by our own propaganda or to fall prey to wish fulfillment. Our politics must always proceed from a clearheaded analysis of substantive programs and a determination of who benefits and loses from them.

A final irony about these counterproductive keywords is that their attractiveness stems from our own sense that we are fundamentally alien from the American population, that our politics can be validated only by showing that we have support from supposedly more authentic, popular constituencies.

There's a subtly anti-democratic undercurrent to this view. It amounts to defining ourselves as outside the political culture, and it feeds a reluctance to be forthcoming and direct about our politics with others. This is an understandable reflex, given the isolated and demoralizing position we're in (which also leads to flights into irrationalism and the make-your-own, virtual world of "cultural politics"). It's a variation of liberals' current ideas about slipping decent social policy past the electorate by dressing it up in different rhetorical clothes.

As any decent organizer knows, however, such stratagems inevitably backfire. People can sense that they're being sold a bill of goods, and the result is a further discrediting of the left. Our only hope is to hold firmly and self-confidently to our politics, approach others as equal citizens, and stand or fall on the strength of our analysis and practice.

We have to recognize that we are the people as much as anyone else. Our job is to propagate our vision of how the world should be, reshaping the vision (and in the same process, the world) along with those who join us. That's what a progressive, democratic politics looks like.

Adolph Reed Jr. teaches political science at Northwestern and is co-chair of the Chicago-based Coalition for New Priorities.