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dominguezraquel95's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
4.0
A really interesting overview of what family abolition is, why it matters, and its history as its own movement but also within/between other movements.
hzcyr's review
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
4.25 - It's a really interesting, engaging book. I'd go so far as to say love (certainly beyond like) but and I would highly recommend others read it (why above 3.75) but it's written in such a disengaging way with constant references to terms that would be a turn-off to those not already comfortable with these terms. Even if idealogically sound to others and worth sharing, I couldn't recommend this book to many because of its inaccessible starting point. While many may agree that "it's difficult to personally care for others without mass support from others ourselves", many may not agree or care to enage with the same idea that "privitised care burdens the proletariat with unwaged labour and excuses the bourgeois to maintain the capitalist system by promoting individualisation of welfare" because of its phrasing (preventing it from being 4.5 and above or obssessed). Even for me it was hard to read and I needed to make summary notes and highlight constantly to understand the ideas.
Emotionally charged, reasonable arguments made, and offers alternatives (sort of). Engaging but linguistically off-putting.
"Conceptually interesting but such a mash of just so many leftist (dare I say dog whistle) words. This is just one page (and in larger font too). The amount of times I've read "racist, patriarchal, heteronoramtive capitalist...held by the majority White, cishet, bourgeoise descendents of colonisers..." in just 34 pages is nuts."
Uses a lot of inaccesible turn-off, dog-whistle leftist words. You have to be pretty far left to just even engage with this I feel
Very, "as proposed by [name] and akin to what [name2] wrote and expanded upon by [name3]" Just feel it could be more clearly referenced.
Time-specific coding. Re: Palestine
Lol, only actually realised it was a (communist) manifesto when Jonty mentioned as such (at 46%). Obviously, I got it was communist-focused early on.
Reading this helped me to guess why I brain-rot a lot. This was so linguistically and idealogically dense to read through, it feels like a lecture but more intense information.
Summary Notes Below
Chapter 1: But I Love my Family
The idea of abolishing the family invokes fear and a protective reaponse from many who value family. But if we truly love others and want change at one level, we must undergo change at all levels. Family abolishment is fundamentaly an anti-capitalist issue influencing all stretches of life: it exacerabtes societal discriminates, places unfair labour expectations on individuals (pribvitises care responsibilities) that should be provided by society, and models and indoctrinates capitalist values such as hierarchy and competition at a smaller level. Families statistically cause harm to individuals more than strangers (abuse, rape, robbery etc.) and is weaponised for labour rather than given by choice. Family isn't in decline, or rather, the family has always been in decline and to say so is a requisite to reinforce the idea of family. Why should we force people to stay in unfulfilling relationships just because of luck of birth when we know other types of cohabitation and communal living work? Simply, we shouldn't.
Chapter 2: Abolish Which Family?
Whilst the family system does seem to protect from other oppressive structures, it is inherently aligned with them and so must go too if we are to truly be free. This is even the case for queer alternative or Black families where family roles like motherhood is pedestaled which places its own excessive stressors and may reinforce other forms of oppression for the sake of the family. There comes a point queer or Black identities become subsumed into the capitalist wheel of property and we should not turn to them for alternative structures, historically there was a point they could've been a different structure but they have instead tried to follow the White, heteronormative, capitalist, nuclear structure of family. We can acknowledge the family's benefits whilst still proposing to abolish them, because it is not just the family that offers these same benefits.
Ultinately, we cannot choose a medium position between family or none, either some family must go or all family must go. If some families stay, it may romanticise or place unseen, additional burdens on those families whilst excluding a majority people's needs. Therefore, all families must go.
The family once helped us survive but now causes us more harm and little use than good and utility. We can now survive, we should let go of the family.
The family is historically rooted in ownership ideals akin to slaver / master and parent-child dynamics are oppresively equivalent as the men-women dynamics of patriarchal oppresion.
Family abolition historically occurred in two patterns: dismantling family and its oppressions from within by changing and and providing alternatives to family outside of it.
Chapter 3: A Potted History of Family Abolitionism
Fourier (France) - Invented word "feminism", proposed "kitchenless" cities (open common kitchens and free canteens), he hated work so hated "civilisation", "Harmonian" happiness. Among other leftist propositions, proposed adults and children share labour and labour is allocated according to what people enjoy. Every instance of Fourierism failed due to implosion or state-interfernce, or didn't fail but rather never got a chance to truly ucceed
Indigineous, Marooned, and Queer (Americas) - Native Americans women had political power. Tribes were open to non-monogamy, non-binaryism, sexual freedom, collective child-raising, and collective property ownership before being forced to change to Christian marriage and private property. They started by killing them, then forcing them to change culture by legally holding children hostage. Queers appropriated this culture but it's one worth modelling. Slaves also practiced non-mogamy and open marriage, and created a sense of family with strangers as they were taken away (marooned) from theirs such as raising others' children and sharing wives resulting "kinning" and "polymaternalism". Though this shouldn't be romanticised as it gave about reproductive rights and relational-commitments changed because of forced separations. Freed people comfortable with marooned life continued open marriage and non-monogamous child-rearing until the state cracked on down on this "failure" of marital indecency of divided labour with policies like forcing any men who spent to much time with Black women to be forced to pay childcare fees instead of the state [Is this where the belief men and women can't be friends came from]. Criminalised women also practiced family anobolition by being unwed mothers, female breadwinners, siblings and aunts child-raising, and but it is the shared identity of the poor banding together, not found-family that resulted in this being possible.
Communists (Russia) - Capitalistic order is maintnained by State, Family, and Religion. All three must go for communisism and families undermime proletariat bonds. Marx's family thinking was inspired by Fourier by not slavery's impacts and concluded that capitalism had hollowed out sentimental family for monetary, labour family, e.g. male-breadwinners model bougeois ideals. There's also nothing natural about humans, so scrap the idea for parental ownership or partner ownership. Sexual freedom is completely allowed if both consent, even incestuous. Social education would be provided instead of familial education and it might take indoctrination to do so which to some is a coercive but necessary step for change and others a collective, counter-cultural wish to change.
Kollantai (Bolshevik) - Freedom is attained through labour, not love. Work is the focus and socialising and offering care are secondary side-effects. People may derive the joys of parenthood still but it cannot be offered soley to one but all. Affection must go beyond just for the child or just for the singlular partner (as wanted by the bourgeois) but the whole proletariat. As for sex, it should be so abudant and necessary it is viewed as unremarkable, like water. Even accepting identity like feninist is performative and bourgeois to enacting actual proletariat feminist change, like proposing no-fault divorce and state-provided alimony. Her party didn't support her and Lenin said she must wait, she eventually followed Stalin's oppressive regime
Firestone (USA) - Inspired by but uncrediting Kollanti, the Russian revolution failed because it didn't dismantle the family. And kibbutzniks are just as sociallu oppressive as traditional family structures. Women are liberated when capitalism and patrairchy are overthrown through controlling technology, abolishing labour through automation (including reproductive, ectogenesis), allowing all loves including incest, and dividing child-caring among society and irrespective of genders. We'd all live in democratic, non-familial households but a middle-road goal is free, universl, 24/7, community-run childcare. The capitalist state crushed the dreams of family abolition but that doesn't mean the ideas were bad and we should pursue them again. So long as the family exist, we cannot extend care beyond it and will only oppress once more. Even if it is equated with care or love, then how we understand care and love must be abolished too for a higher level of love. And this imevtiably leads to us being deemed and acting as haters if we are to see change.
Gays and lesbian (USA) - Many women and queers left family for safety and queer people created non-familial systems to support them. But Gay Liberation, Women Liberation, and Black Power focused on their own agendas rather than working together. Some queer people worked with the Mafia to provide gay ghettos whilst others worked with children to promote rights such as by providing free school meals and afterschool clubs. Whilst family may protect, it constrains and we must change how we think about all things if we are to remove these constraints. Children have the right to multiple parents and parents don't own the right to their children for birthing them, and it is a communal responsibility to raise children. Gay liberation failed as a family abolition movement as they responded to the preventable HIV crisis and have since been subsumed into the capitalist ideal of family and, like feminism, today makes little progressive change but rather provides family as another means to continue onwards.
Wages for Housework (Italy & National Welfare for Rights Organisation (USA) - WGH demand all women be paid (including retroactively) for the unpaid household labour they provide under the guise of love. Whilst it may be labour done out of love, it eventually becomes labour out of work, and the excuse of love or uncoditional labour means women are underpaid or unapid for their labour. Freedom begins by naming themselves as workers, demanding freedom from exploitation even if incentivised through wages, and eventually knowing a love beyond the family. NWRO focused on poor, and often Black, women and families who would need to be seen as a family for welfare support to survive but rejected the scientific objectification of them as families. Welfare, whilst necessary for then, is still an oppressive tool. Women couldn't have men out of work in their family and you couldn't have sex if on welfare. Poor women's relationship to welfare in one-way and conditional. Family couldn't free women, nor could waged work, from state oppression: only uncoditional, livable income provided by the state ($5,500 in 1970 or $44,500 in 2024 per year per individual) so we have the right to not work. Women who perform waged work are no better than housebound unwaged women who also work and we should move beyond the false dichotomy of staying at home or waged work
Lewis and Trans-Marxists (globally) - COVID-19 highlighted to the majority population the failures of the nuclear family and the need for unconditional state welfare. Family abolitionism has been quiet between 1985 and 2015 but grown with Lewis' 2015 manifesto calling for food availability to all, abolishing deprivation, and undoing a capitalism-induced scarcity-mindset in the move toward childcare responsibility falling on the community rather than the family. Various proponets in various means have also called for family abolition and one group in London called for communes of 200 people compared to Fourier's 1,600 people. Family abolishment may come about via meticulous planning or spontaneously in response to insurrection
Chapter 4: Comrades Against Kinship
There is no alternative needed to the family. The state doesn't want an alternative to the family evidenced by COVID-19, even in the harms forcibly living with family caused. Those who didn't live with family (e.g. homeless) were despised by the state, disadvantaged groups moreso. However non-familial living even in COVID-19 was possible, even if this history goes erased and unspoken by media. The family, and privitised care, may've once protected us with a house but never a home.
According to O'Brien, family abolishment begins with the protest kitchen:
• Shared sleeping areas for safety
• Cooperative childcare support
• Syringe exchanges and harm reduction practices for drug use
In 2022, we're in a similar era of pro-abolition everything, e.g. The Great Resignation, since the 1800s. Abolition itself is "absence of things" but a more complex take is "presence of no thing" or positive suppression, originally inspired from aufhebung. Positive suppression comprises:
• Lifting up (a new idea)
• Destroying (the old system)
• Persevering (i.e., sustainability of the idea)
• Radical transformation (of the old into the new; and oppressors into allies)
We (mostly) did it once with slavery replaced by humanism, despite slavery once being seen as good and naturally aligned with our values. We can do it again with family. Others consider abolition the presence of everything changing.
We might begin abolishing family by either or a mix of:
• Changing everything such that the family couldn't stay even if we wanted it to
• Identifying what we desire about family, scrapping the family, and finding these desires elsewhere.
The desires of family appear to be:
• Reciprocal care
• Interdependence
• Belonging
Hidden amongst the family's constraints of:
• Exclusivity
• Chauvinism
• Race
• Property
• Heredity
• Identity
• Competition
We desire family because we desire care but the family is a poor means of satisfying this desire
Family as an ideal has been hollowed out by corporations and they would not go out of their way to legally be your family despite pretending to be. Family is itself not natural but a strong idea that even shadows of it, like kinship terms of brother, should go too as it perpetuates an idea of naturalness and unconditional or non-contingent labour. If needed, even the current way we understand "love" must be abolished.
Models of solidarity and human unity, in absence of family based on identity and reproduction, should be rooted in:
• Friendship
• Work (but not labour)
• Shared purpose
• Shared pain
• Shared inescapability of mortality
• Persistent hope
We must abandon the links between kinship and love and safety, for we can have love and safety without kinship. Under capitalism, it can be scary to let go of our supports (like family) but we are so scarce about are care we pretend it must be offered unconditionally to some but not all people despite this being untrue. If we truly extended the family, we should not need to differentiate between chosen vs. legally approved or biologically linked family. Instead, we could be comrades or accomplices rather than kin.
A halfway point could be kith, linked to connection but not by familial relation rather nebulous connection and practicing our love outward beyond the family to our kith and without priviledge to the family and kin.
Caring, sharing, and loving should not be solely responsibilties to the individual (evidenced by the harms of family) nor solely to the state on large-scales. Small scale community may be an answer but we can keep searching and must for the wellbeing of children currently owned by parents. Forcible family separation can cause harm but so can forcible family reuinfication: the state must loosen its control of letting families cross borders together but also allow children to separate from family if they need to.
Nothing replacing the family is the ideal but, even if something replaces the family, it is surely better to abolish the currently broken system than allow it to maintain its many ways of harm against us all.
Notes:
• [Shulamith Firestone] expressed her unwillingness to unmake her selfhood [in spite of her family abolitionist views]: “I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure.” (Firestone, 1970)
• “...the neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of ‘care for one’s own’..." (Chatzidakis, Hakim, Littler, Rottenberg, and Segal, 2020)
• "Their bias is toward keeping families together…. The default is that children should depend for almost all their material resources, love and care, on whatever can be provided by at most two parents based on their own family experiences, education and remuneration from the labour market. Those are the rules. That’s how class is transmitted. And it’s a far from optimal situation for child safety." (Seymour, 2021)
• “This family form [i.e. male-breadwinner or ‘housewife-based’] was a tremendous victory in improving the standard of living and survival of millions of working-class people, and creating a basis for stable neighbourhood organization, sustained socialist struggle and major political victories. It was also the means by which the workers’ movement would distinguish itself from the lumpenproletariat, black workers, and queers.” (O'Brien, 2020)
• “Clearly, this thinker has never lived in a group house, or been obliged to sit on a committee, for he [Fourier] believed that a rather relentless public existence would, by its own account, bring us, without exception, a profound and unshakable happiness.” (Pettman, 2019)
• “On the one hand, [marriage] certainly offered some legal and economic protections. On the other hand, it was administered by the Freedmen’s Bureau as a means both to constitute the nuclear family as the principal labour force of family farming that enabled the transition from the plantation system to sharecropping, and to free the government of further responsibilities toward formerly enslaved people. It represented another mode of bondage within a relationship founded in property rights" (Weeks, 2021 (citing Hunter, 2017))
• I teach an online course on The Dialectic, open to all, at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research: thebrooklyninstitute.com. (Lewis, 2022)
• ""desexualization "is how adults control children”" (Millet, 1984)
• "[Firestone] explored the materiality behind the ostensibly psychological cliché “that women live for love and men for work”—the twenty-first century twist on this being, as Kathi Weeks notes, that we must all now love our work and even be in love with work (Lewis, 2022)
• explored the materiality behind the ostensibly psychological cliché “that women live for love and men for work”—the twenty-first century twist on this being, as Kathi Weeks notes, that we must all now love our work and even be in love with work.
• "On some of the revolutionary (anti-)love and anti-work traditions in feminism see: Nash (2011) and Weeks' (2017) respective works “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality" and “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work"" (Lewis, 2022)
• "For more on the family abolitionism of FHAR [in 1981], I recommend F.H.A.R., a short documentary directed by Carole Roussopoulos (1971) 26min. mubi. com." (Lewis, 2022)
Emotionally charged, reasonable arguments made, and offers alternatives (sort of). Engaging but linguistically off-putting.
"Conceptually interesting but such a mash of just so many leftist (dare I say dog whistle) words. This is just one page (and in larger font too). The amount of times I've read "racist, patriarchal, heteronoramtive capitalist...held by the majority White, cishet, bourgeoise descendents of colonisers..." in just 34 pages is nuts."
Uses a lot of inaccesible turn-off, dog-whistle leftist words. You have to be pretty far left to just even engage with this I feel
Very, "as proposed by [name] and akin to what [name2] wrote and expanded upon by [name3]" Just feel it could be more clearly referenced.
Time-specific coding. Re: Palestine
Lol, only actually realised it was a (communist) manifesto when Jonty mentioned as such (at 46%). Obviously, I got it was communist-focused early on.
Reading this helped me to guess why I brain-rot a lot. This was so linguistically and idealogically dense to read through, it feels like a lecture but more intense information.
Summary Notes Below
The idea of abolishing the family invokes fear and a protective reaponse from many who value family. But if we truly love others and want change at one level, we must undergo change at all levels. Family abolishment is fundamentaly an anti-capitalist issue influencing all stretches of life: it exacerabtes societal discriminates, places unfair labour expectations on individuals (pribvitises care responsibilities) that should be provided by society, and models and indoctrinates capitalist values such as hierarchy and competition at a smaller level. Families statistically cause harm to individuals more than strangers (abuse, rape, robbery etc.) and is weaponised for labour rather than given by choice. Family isn't in decline, or rather, the family has always been in decline and to say so is a requisite to reinforce the idea of family. Why should we force people to stay in unfulfilling relationships just because of luck of birth when we know other types of cohabitation and communal living work? Simply, we shouldn't.
Chapter 2: Abolish Which Family?
Whilst the family system does seem to protect from other oppressive structures, it is inherently aligned with them and so must go too if we are to truly be free. This is even the case for queer alternative or Black families where family roles like motherhood is pedestaled which places its own excessive stressors and may reinforce other forms of oppression for the sake of the family. There comes a point queer or Black identities become subsumed into the capitalist wheel of property and we should not turn to them for alternative structures, historically there was a point they could've been a different structure but they have instead tried to follow the White, heteronormative, capitalist, nuclear structure of family. We can acknowledge the family's benefits whilst still proposing to abolish them, because it is not just the family that offers these same benefits.
Ultinately, we cannot choose a medium position between family or none, either some family must go or all family must go. If some families stay, it may romanticise or place unseen, additional burdens on those families whilst excluding a majority people's needs. Therefore, all families must go.
The family once helped us survive but now causes us more harm and little use than good and utility. We can now survive, we should let go of the family.
The family is historically rooted in ownership ideals akin to slaver / master and parent-child dynamics are oppresively equivalent as the men-women dynamics of patriarchal oppresion.
Family abolition historically occurred in two patterns: dismantling family and its oppressions from within by changing and and providing alternatives to family outside of it.
Chapter 3: A Potted History of Family Abolitionism
Fourier (France) - Invented word "feminism", proposed "kitchenless" cities (open common kitchens and free canteens), he hated work so hated "civilisation", "Harmonian" happiness. Among other leftist propositions, proposed adults and children share labour and labour is allocated according to what people enjoy. Every instance of Fourierism failed due to implosion or state-interfernce, or didn't fail but rather never got a chance to truly ucceed
Indigineous, Marooned, and Queer (Americas) - Native Americans women had political power. Tribes were open to non-monogamy, non-binaryism, sexual freedom, collective child-raising, and collective property ownership before being forced to change to Christian marriage and private property. They started by killing them, then forcing them to change culture by legally holding children hostage. Queers appropriated this culture but it's one worth modelling. Slaves also practiced non-mogamy and open marriage, and created a sense of family with strangers as they were taken away (marooned) from theirs such as raising others' children and sharing wives resulting "kinning" and "polymaternalism". Though this shouldn't be romanticised as it gave about reproductive rights and relational-commitments changed because of forced separations. Freed people comfortable with marooned life continued open marriage and non-monogamous child-rearing until the state cracked on down on this "failure" of marital indecency of divided labour with policies like forcing any men who spent to much time with Black women to be forced to pay childcare fees instead of the state [Is this where the belief men and women can't be friends came from]. Criminalised women also practiced family anobolition by being unwed mothers, female breadwinners, siblings and aunts child-raising, and but it is the shared identity of the poor banding together, not found-family that resulted in this being possible.
Communists (Russia) - Capitalistic order is maintnained by State, Family, and Religion. All three must go for communisism and families undermime proletariat bonds. Marx's family thinking was inspired by Fourier by not slavery's impacts and concluded that capitalism had hollowed out sentimental family for monetary, labour family, e.g. male-breadwinners model bougeois ideals. There's also nothing natural about humans, so scrap the idea for parental ownership or partner ownership. Sexual freedom is completely allowed if both consent, even incestuous. Social education would be provided instead of familial education and it might take indoctrination to do so which to some is a coercive but necessary step for change and others a collective, counter-cultural wish to change.
Kollantai (Bolshevik) - Freedom is attained through labour, not love. Work is the focus and socialising and offering care are secondary side-effects. People may derive the joys of parenthood still but it cannot be offered soley to one but all. Affection must go beyond just for the child or just for the singlular partner (as wanted by the bourgeois) but the whole proletariat. As for sex, it should be so abudant and necessary it is viewed as unremarkable, like water. Even accepting identity like feninist is performative and bourgeois to enacting actual proletariat feminist change, like proposing no-fault divorce and state-provided alimony. Her party didn't support her and Lenin said she must wait, she eventually followed Stalin's oppressive regime
Firestone (USA) - Inspired by but uncrediting Kollanti, the Russian revolution failed because it didn't dismantle the family. And kibbutzniks are just as sociallu oppressive as traditional family structures. Women are liberated when capitalism and patrairchy are overthrown through controlling technology, abolishing labour through automation (including reproductive, ectogenesis), allowing all loves including incest, and dividing child-caring among society and irrespective of genders. We'd all live in democratic, non-familial households but a middle-road goal is free, universl, 24/7, community-run childcare. The capitalist state crushed the dreams of family abolition but that doesn't mean the ideas were bad and we should pursue them again. So long as the family exist, we cannot extend care beyond it and will only oppress once more. Even if it is equated with care or love, then how we understand care and love must be abolished too for a higher level of love. And this imevtiably leads to us being deemed and acting as haters if we are to see change.
Gays and lesbian (USA) - Many women and queers left family for safety and queer people created non-familial systems to support them. But Gay Liberation, Women Liberation, and Black Power focused on their own agendas rather than working together. Some queer people worked with the Mafia to provide gay ghettos whilst others worked with children to promote rights such as by providing free school meals and afterschool clubs. Whilst family may protect, it constrains and we must change how we think about all things if we are to remove these constraints. Children have the right to multiple parents and parents don't own the right to their children for birthing them, and it is a communal responsibility to raise children. Gay liberation failed as a family abolition movement as they responded to the preventable HIV crisis and have since been subsumed into the capitalist ideal of family and, like feminism, today makes little progressive change but rather provides family as another means to continue onwards.
Wages for Housework (Italy & National Welfare for Rights Organisation (USA) - WGH demand all women be paid (including retroactively) for the unpaid household labour they provide under the guise of love. Whilst it may be labour done out of love, it eventually becomes labour out of work, and the excuse of love or uncoditional labour means women are underpaid or unapid for their labour. Freedom begins by naming themselves as workers, demanding freedom from exploitation even if incentivised through wages, and eventually knowing a love beyond the family. NWRO focused on poor, and often Black, women and families who would need to be seen as a family for welfare support to survive but rejected the scientific objectification of them as families. Welfare, whilst necessary for then, is still an oppressive tool. Women couldn't have men out of work in their family and you couldn't have sex if on welfare. Poor women's relationship to welfare in one-way and conditional. Family couldn't free women, nor could waged work, from state oppression: only uncoditional, livable income provided by the state ($5,500 in 1970 or $44,500 in 2024 per year per individual) so we have the right to not work. Women who perform waged work are no better than housebound unwaged women who also work and we should move beyond the false dichotomy of staying at home or waged work
Lewis and Trans-Marxists (globally) - COVID-19 highlighted to the majority population the failures of the nuclear family and the need for unconditional state welfare. Family abolitionism has been quiet between 1985 and 2015 but grown with Lewis' 2015 manifesto calling for food availability to all, abolishing deprivation, and undoing a capitalism-induced scarcity-mindset in the move toward childcare responsibility falling on the community rather than the family. Various proponets in various means have also called for family abolition and one group in London called for communes of 200 people compared to Fourier's 1,600 people. Family abolishment may come about via meticulous planning or spontaneously in response to insurrection
Chapter 4: Comrades Against Kinship
There is no alternative needed to the family. The state doesn't want an alternative to the family evidenced by COVID-19, even in the harms forcibly living with family caused. Those who didn't live with family (e.g. homeless) were despised by the state, disadvantaged groups moreso. However non-familial living even in COVID-19 was possible, even if this history goes erased and unspoken by media. The family, and privitised care, may've once protected us with a house but never a home.
According to O'Brien, family abolishment begins with the protest kitchen:
• Shared sleeping areas for safety
• Cooperative childcare support
• Syringe exchanges and harm reduction practices for drug use
In 2022, we're in a similar era of pro-abolition everything, e.g. The Great Resignation, since the 1800s. Abolition itself is "absence of things" but a more complex take is "presence of no thing" or positive suppression, originally inspired from aufhebung. Positive suppression comprises:
• Lifting up (a new idea)
• Destroying (the old system)
• Persevering (i.e., sustainability of the idea)
• Radical transformation (of the old into the new; and oppressors into allies)
We (mostly) did it once with slavery replaced by humanism, despite slavery once being seen as good and naturally aligned with our values. We can do it again with family. Others consider abolition the presence of everything changing.
We might begin abolishing family by either or a mix of:
• Changing everything such that the family couldn't stay even if we wanted it to
• Identifying what we desire about family, scrapping the family, and finding these desires elsewhere.
The desires of family appear to be:
• Reciprocal care
• Interdependence
• Belonging
Hidden amongst the family's constraints of:
• Exclusivity
• Chauvinism
• Race
• Property
• Heredity
• Identity
• Competition
We desire family because we desire care but the family is a poor means of satisfying this desire
Family as an ideal has been hollowed out by corporations and they would not go out of their way to legally be your family despite pretending to be. Family is itself not natural but a strong idea that even shadows of it, like kinship terms of brother, should go too as it perpetuates an idea of naturalness and unconditional or non-contingent labour. If needed, even the current way we understand "love" must be abolished.
Models of solidarity and human unity, in absence of family based on identity and reproduction, should be rooted in:
• Friendship
• Work (but not labour)
• Shared purpose
• Shared pain
• Shared inescapability of mortality
• Persistent hope
We must abandon the links between kinship and love and safety, for we can have love and safety without kinship. Under capitalism, it can be scary to let go of our supports (like family) but we are so scarce about are care we pretend it must be offered unconditionally to some but not all people despite this being untrue. If we truly extended the family, we should not need to differentiate between chosen vs. legally approved or biologically linked family. Instead, we could be comrades or accomplices rather than kin.
A halfway point could be kith, linked to connection but not by familial relation rather nebulous connection and practicing our love outward beyond the family to our kith and without priviledge to the family and kin.
Caring, sharing, and loving should not be solely responsibilties to the individual (evidenced by the harms of family) nor solely to the state on large-scales. Small scale community may be an answer but we can keep searching and must for the wellbeing of children currently owned by parents. Forcible family separation can cause harm but so can forcible family reuinfication: the state must loosen its control of letting families cross borders together but also allow children to separate from family if they need to.
Nothing replacing the family is the ideal but, even if something replaces the family, it is surely better to abolish the currently broken system than allow it to maintain its many ways of harm against us all.
Notes:
• [Shulamith Firestone] expressed her unwillingness to unmake her selfhood [in spite of her family abolitionist views]: “I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure.” (Firestone, 1970)
• “...the neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of ‘care for one’s own’..." (Chatzidakis, Hakim, Littler, Rottenberg, and Segal, 2020)
• "Their bias is toward keeping families together…. The default is that children should depend for almost all their material resources, love and care, on whatever can be provided by at most two parents based on their own family experiences, education and remuneration from the labour market. Those are the rules. That’s how class is transmitted. And it’s a far from optimal situation for child safety." (Seymour, 2021)
• “This family form [i.e. male-breadwinner or ‘housewife-based’] was a tremendous victory in improving the standard of living and survival of millions of working-class people, and creating a basis for stable neighbourhood organization, sustained socialist struggle and major political victories. It was also the means by which the workers’ movement would distinguish itself from the lumpenproletariat, black workers, and queers.” (O'Brien, 2020)
• “Clearly, this thinker has never lived in a group house, or been obliged to sit on a committee, for he [Fourier] believed that a rather relentless public existence would, by its own account, bring us, without exception, a profound and unshakable happiness.” (Pettman, 2019)
• “On the one hand, [marriage] certainly offered some legal and economic protections. On the other hand, it was administered by the Freedmen’s Bureau as a means both to constitute the nuclear family as the principal labour force of family farming that enabled the transition from the plantation system to sharecropping, and to free the government of further responsibilities toward formerly enslaved people. It represented another mode of bondage within a relationship founded in property rights" (Weeks, 2021 (citing Hunter, 2017))
• I teach an online course on The Dialectic, open to all, at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research: thebrooklyninstitute.com. (Lewis, 2022)
• ""desexualization "is how adults control children”" (Millet, 1984)
• "[Firestone] explored the materiality behind the ostensibly psychological cliché “that women live for love and men for work”—the twenty-first century twist on this being, as Kathi Weeks notes, that we must all now love our work and even be in love with work (Lewis, 2022)
• explored the materiality behind the ostensibly psychological cliché “that women live for love and men for work”—the twenty-first century twist on this being, as Kathi Weeks notes, that we must all now love our work and even be in love with work.
• "On some of the revolutionary (anti-)love and anti-work traditions in feminism see: Nash (2011) and Weeks' (2017) respective works “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality" and “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work"" (Lewis, 2022)
• "For more on the family abolitionism of FHAR [in 1981], I recommend F.H.A.R., a short documentary directed by Carole Roussopoulos (1971) 26min. mubi. com." (Lewis, 2022)
visa_be_readin's review against another edition
5.0
This book’s got balls, and frankly, it’s about time someone told the truth about how western family politics makes fools of us all.
Abolish The Family invites us to take part in critical thought experiments about why society clings so hard to (traditional) family privilege, and has us fighting amongst ourselves for the meager scraps of care which are coveted by the greedy few, and systemically withheld from everyone else.
This incredibly well-researched and painfully humane work feels nourishing for anyone who has ever struggled to belong to other people, has ever been made to feel undeserving of care and love. It MATTERS to have these experiences validated rather than be continually gaslit by abusers of privilege in all forms.
I really like how Lewis offers her own personal experience alongside historical context, and calls on the wisdom of so many queer and BIPOC ancestors, while acknowledging her own privilege in speaking to and for abolitionist movements. It affirms her position as an informed, self-aware, and reliable ally and scholar.
I’m grateful to this book for giving me language to articulate things that we all experience, language that we are purposefully robbed of in common public discourse, in order to squash any revolution before it starts. This book is essential reading for anyone engaged in 21st century freedom fighting.
Abolish The Family invites us to take part in critical thought experiments about why society clings so hard to (traditional) family privilege, and has us fighting amongst ourselves for the meager scraps of care which are coveted by the greedy few, and systemically withheld from everyone else.
This incredibly well-researched and painfully humane work feels nourishing for anyone who has ever struggled to belong to other people, has ever been made to feel undeserving of care and love. It MATTERS to have these experiences validated rather than be continually gaslit by abusers of privilege in all forms.
I really like how Lewis offers her own personal experience alongside historical context, and calls on the wisdom of so many queer and BIPOC ancestors, while acknowledging her own privilege in speaking to and for abolitionist movements. It affirms her position as an informed, self-aware, and reliable ally and scholar.
I’m grateful to this book for giving me language to articulate things that we all experience, language that we are purposefully robbed of in common public discourse, in order to squash any revolution before it starts. This book is essential reading for anyone engaged in 21st century freedom fighting.
roweky's review against another edition
4.0
"Violent and scary movie-making is, more often than not, a popular vehicle for mass anti-family desire ... The monster is coming from inside the house."
Once more, radical Feminist literature is bringing me so much joy, and Sophie Lewis does such an amazing job at opening up this realm of ideology. The family is an ideological construct which, until now, I'd never questioned all too much in its ties to capitalism, colonialism, and queerness.
The book charts an effective history, spanning from Plato to the current moment, showing that family abolitionism has existed for a long time and isn't nearly as scary as everyone might think. Lewis effectively argues how and why the family structure is upholding capitalist and colonial structures, and does so in a readable way!
While she's not the first, Lewis revitalises the family abolition movement for the current moment, and stresses how (now more than ever) we need to move past the family. I'm convinced of many of her arguments, but, as she describes, it's difficult to change my views as my subjectivity has been so fundamentally formed through the familial structure.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and it has opened up so many avenues to care politics that I can't wait to explore. Definitely give it a read!
Once more, radical Feminist literature is bringing me so much joy, and Sophie Lewis does such an amazing job at opening up this realm of ideology. The family is an ideological construct which, until now, I'd never questioned all too much in its ties to capitalism, colonialism, and queerness.
The book charts an effective history, spanning from Plato to the current moment, showing that family abolitionism has existed for a long time and isn't nearly as scary as everyone might think. Lewis effectively argues how and why the family structure is upholding capitalist and colonial structures, and does so in a readable way!
While she's not the first, Lewis revitalises the family abolition movement for the current moment, and stresses how (now more than ever) we need to move past the family. I'm convinced of many of her arguments, but, as she describes, it's difficult to change my views as my subjectivity has been so fundamentally formed through the familial structure.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and it has opened up so many avenues to care politics that I can't wait to explore. Definitely give it a read!
themitchelrowe's review against another edition
4.0
"Violent and scary movie-making is, more often than not, a popular vehicle for mass anti-family desire ... The monster is coming from inside the house."
Once more, radical Feminist literature is bringing me so much joy, and Sophie Lewis does such an amazing job at opening up this realm of ideology. The family is an ideological construct which, until now, I'd never questioned all too much in its ties to capitalism, colonialism, and queerness.
The book charts an effective history, spanning from Plato to the current moment, showing that family abolitionism has existed for a long time and isn't nearly as scary as everyone might think. Lewis effectively argues how and why the family structure is upholding capitalist and colonial structures, and does so in a readable way!
While she's not the first, Lewis revitalises the family abolition movement for the current moment, and stresses how (now more than ever) we need to move past the family. I'm convinced of many of her arguments, but, as she describes, it's difficult to change my views as my subjectivity has been so fundamentally formed through the familial structure.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and it has opened up so many avenues to care politics that I can't wait to explore. Definitely give it a read!
Once more, radical Feminist literature is bringing me so much joy, and Sophie Lewis does such an amazing job at opening up this realm of ideology. The family is an ideological construct which, until now, I'd never questioned all too much in its ties to capitalism, colonialism, and queerness.
The book charts an effective history, spanning from Plato to the current moment, showing that family abolitionism has existed for a long time and isn't nearly as scary as everyone might think. Lewis effectively argues how and why the family structure is upholding capitalist and colonial structures, and does so in a readable way!
While she's not the first, Lewis revitalises the family abolition movement for the current moment, and stresses how (now more than ever) we need to move past the family. I'm convinced of many of her arguments, but, as she describes, it's difficult to change my views as my subjectivity has been so fundamentally formed through the familial structure.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, and it has opened up so many avenues to care politics that I can't wait to explore. Definitely give it a read!
cowboylikestoread43's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
5.0