Sophie Lewis

What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition. Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

A Manifesto for Care and Liberation

Abolish the Family

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When you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them, privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling-place, class, and very identity in law, and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties.

The family’s function is to replace welfare and to guarantee debtors. Masquerading as the choice, creation, and desire of individuals, the family is a method for cheaply arranging the reproduction of the nation’s labor-power and securing debt repayments.

Meanwhile, most public or common spaces are not only dedicated to commercial leisure, but designed to cater pointedly to the couple-form or the nuclear brood.

Of course, the administrative grid of the family does organize where certain forms of help (are legally obligated to) come from. But this has nothing to do with solidarity. The family—predicated on the privatization of that which should be common, and on proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed—is a state institution, not a popular organism.

To be a “working family,” an artisanal team ordained by the cosmos itself, is a deeply seductive idea; an evocation of security, of harmony, and “right reproduction.” No wonder consumers, voters and pundits love the notion of a “family business,” a “mom ’n’ pop shop,” despite clear evidence that workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions are worse, not better, within such establishments.

The word “queer” has widely been emptied of its communist meanings, yet here and there, and certainly in this writer’s heart, it still carries some abolitionist freight, signifying resistance to capitalism’s reproductive institutions: marriage, private property, patriarchy, the police, school.

The Black Women’s Revolutionary Council, among other organizations, and her wide-ranging statement (which addresses imperialism, the Klan, and movement-building) purposively ends with the family: “As long as women are bound by the nuclear family structure we cannot effectively move toward revolution. And if women don’t move, it will not happen.”17 The left, along with women especially of the upper and middle classes, “must give up … undying loyalty to the nuclear family,” Parker charges. It is “the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move to revolution it has to be destroyed.”

And while assimilated modes of life have certainly taken significant hold among First Nations throughout the Americas (a function of the ongoing catastrophe that has been the past four hundred years, from their perspective), familialization is also an ongoing, not just “historic,” process of colonization.

In the nineteenth century, the US and Canadian federal governments’ Indian policies typically demanded marriage as a way of dissolving tribal models of collective ownership that went along with gender-nonbinarism, non-monogamy, and/or matrilocal open marriage: they instituted private property and then concentrated it in the hands of “heads of household,” that is, husbands.15 It is in this sense that we can say that family abolition—as a project of resistance to and flight from bourgeois society and a defense against colonization—was a horizon raised via the practices of stolen, captive, colonially displaced, and/or formerly enslaved people who defied the institutions and modes of citizenship the US attempted to acculturate them to, namely: private property, secularized Christian monogamy, and the marriage-based private nuclear household.

However, especially before colonization—and sometimes continuously, into the present—most Native tribes practiced few or no forms of patriarchy; raising children collectively, honoring more than two genders, placing only loose social strictures on sexual pleasure, counting nonhuman relatives among their kin, and sometimes conceptualizing mothering-practices (such as breast-feeding) as gender-inclusive and diplomatically important.

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