Introduction to Family Abolition
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists."
Family abolition is one of those things that's so scary that people hardly ever want to talk about it. Our family is the center of our world, after all. It's where we get the care and comfort that no one else can provide. It's the soft and warm alternative to the often cold and regimented world of work. What feels better than coming home after a difficult day to a family that loves you? Why would those wacky communists ever want to take that away?
In reality, family abolition isn't about taking away care - it's about expanding options for care. Today, let's talk about it: what family abolition actually means, why it's so demonized in US-American society, and why it's central to the liberation of young people (and consequently to antiparent).
Table of Contents
What is family abolition?
Let's start with defining the two major concepts of family abolition: family and abolition.
Defining Family
Under capitalism, the family (or household) is the smallest unit of capitalist reproduction. No worker appears out of the air ready to work for a company - someone has to birth them, raise them, feed them, wash their clothes, clean their house, provide emotional support, and perform a ton of other social reproductive labor in order for them to be prepared for work every day. Sometimes people are able to live alone (usually as adults) and either do most of this work themselves or outsource the rest by paying a larger network of other workers to do it. Other times, workers are denied access to the family form entirely - for example, under conditions of slavery or human trafficking. But the vast majority of the working class relies on their family to do some or all of this work for them. For most people, the family is their source of both day-to-day and generational social reproductive labor.
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The family being the main source of generational social reproduction also means that it is the main mechanism for transferring generational wealth (inheritance). This makes preserving the family form especially important for the owning class (bourgeoisie). Without the family, whatever wealth/assets/capital/etc. someone accumulated throughout their lives would just become public property after they died - the owning class wouldn't be able to reproduce itself.
So these are the two main functions of the family under capitalism:
- The primary source of care & social reproductive labor (for everyone: working class and owning class)
- The primary engine of property relations and inheritance (mostly for the owning class)
Defining Abolition
Listen to me: no matter what Fox News says, family abolition does not mean someone is taking your baby/grandma/etc. away from you. Here is the section on family abolition from the Communist Manifesto (emphasis mine):
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
In this section, Marx and Engels are saying that the "ideal" family form is only really available to a small subset of people - the owning class. As we saw before, the family is the main mechanism for transferring wealth from generation to generation, but that only works if you actually have wealth/assets to transfer. The vast majority of working class people do not.
Instead, the family ties of the working class are strained by the whims of the owning class. Financial issues are a major contributing factor to divorce. Parent-child relationships erode when parents have to pressure their children to excel academically so that they have any hope of making a livable wage. And though the Manifesto was first published in 1848, children are still "transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor" every single day. The adoption industry, both domestic and international, continues to traffic children from poor families to rich ones. Children still engage in labor every day, whether it's wage labor (for the benefit of a current employer) or educational labor (for the benefit of a future employer).
In her fantastic book Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, M. E. O'Brien details how translating the phrase to "family abolition" from the original German doesn't capture all the nuances that are important to understand:
For the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the concept of abolition, of Aufhebung, is central to his understanding of transformation. Aufhebung has multiple contradictory meaning: to suspend, to annul, to cancel, but also to preserve, to lift up, to save, and to keep. Hegel seemed to delight in these contradictory meanings and played off them in his thinking. In philosophical writing, Aufhebung is most often translated as to sublate, or as a positive supercession. It here suggests both destroying something and preserving part of that thing in a new, transformed form. In their early writing Marx and Engels used the word Aufhebung extensively. In their work, it is typically translated as to abolish. Marx and Engels called for the abolition of the state, property, and - with some ambivalence explored in the next chapter - the family. The abolition of property was not simply to destroy all possessions but to transform how goods are produced, distributed, and consumed toward the common good. The abolition of the state was not just the destruction of all governing institutions (though perhaps it is that as well) but also the transformation of governance through the radical democratic action of the working class and the dissolving of the state into the social body as a whole. Marx argued this was best embodied in the assemblies of the Paris Commune. In each case, abolition is neither simply destruction nor only transformation. What remains of property or the state takes on a radically different form, unrecognizable from what came before.
Most family abolitionists stand with those working to defend kinship relations against the attacks by capitalism or the racial state, reflecting elements of Aufhebung as a political tradition. Instead of destroying the family, we must abolish it by preserving what is crucial to it - human love, connection, care, community, romance - without binding these qualities to the particular form of the household within capitalism. Abolition means radically transforming these qualities, freeing them from relationships of coercion, abuse, isolation, and property. Abolition is a powerful way to describe moving toward the simultaneous destruction of the basis of coercion, and the unleashing of new forms of care. To abolish the family means to free our capacity to care for each other.
Doesn't that sound nice? So to abolish something (the family, but also prisons or the police) doesn't just mean to destroy it and leave nothing in its place. It means to keep the good parts and to replace it with a system that performs the positive functions more effectively.
To be more specific, here's how family abolition would affect the two main functions of the family under capitalism that we outlined before:
- The primary source of care & social reproductive labor (for everyone: working class and owning class)
- Instead of pretending that social reproductive labor is something women "naturally" love to do for free all the time, family abolition makes the importance of this labor more explicit. It also provides the opportunity to centralize this labor. Think about it - why is cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc. the responsibility of each individual household? It's a massive amount of labor and this is probably the most inefficient possible way to organize it, even though everyone depends on the work getting done. Instead of forcing a significant portion of society do all this work for no pay and no recognition, family abolition lets us emphasize it as a central aspect of life and organize it way more efficiently, helping us gain more free time for the things we actually love to do.
- Family abolition removes the pressure of having only one main option for getting social, emotional, romantic, and sexual needs met. It doesn't remove the option of monogamy or heterosexuality, but it opens up a world of other options. Want to move in with 10 friends and 9 dogs? Want to have 5 partners and raise 8 children together? Want to stay single indefinitely? Family abolition removes the barriers that make these options so inaccessible or impractical under our current system.
- The primary engine of property relations and inheritance (mostly for the owning class)
- Okay, this one is gone. Under family abolition there is no mechanism for transferring all your wealth and assets to your children upon your death.
- On the bright side, you are no longer the one solely or primarily responsible for making sure your children can access food, shelter, and medical care. Your (or your breadwinner's) ability to bring in a paycheck is no longer the main factor determining whether your loved ones survive.
- This also makes it so that your closest relationships can be based on whether you actually like each other instead of whether it's materially advantageous to one or both of you. This is commonly cited as one of the main things that makes even the richest people miserable under the current system.
Why is family abolition so demonized, especially in the US?
I think it's obvious at this point that this is not the view of family abolition that's presented to the public - when it's discussed at all. The destruction of the family is pretty much always represented as an unthinkable horror in popular media, especially right-wing media. This fear manifests in many ways, including panic about:
- Declining rates of marriage
- Declining rates of birth/fertility
- Rising rates of "fatherlessness"
- Crisis of masculinity, especially as it relates to adolescence, dating, or marriage
- Increase of "gender ideology" and its impact on fertility for both adults and children
- Increase of gay marriage
But knowing what we know now - that family abolition is not the destruction of care relations but the expansion of it - why is it still so demonized in the US? Why is it so deeply unpopular, despite the massive amount of people struggling to make things work under the family form?
There are many reasons, but the biggest ones are:
- The family form has existed for a long time (around 10,000 years) and many think of it as natural and biologically/divinely ordained.
- Its existence is crucial to the survival of capitalism.
- People who have access to the family form and hold power within it want to keep it that way.
- Its existence both supports and is supported by other oppressive power dynamics, such as misogyny, youth oppression, ableism, etc. Dismantling the family can't happen without dismantling all of those systems as well.
- The family is most people's primary source of care. The idea of risking that, even to build something better, is terrifying to a lot of people.
Each of these reasons is massively complex and difficult to work past - even more so when factoring in racial and cultural factors. Given the overwhelming dominance of the family form within social, legal, political, and economic spheres, family abolitionists certainly have our work cut out for us.
Importance to Youth Liberation
Youth liberation cannot happen without family abolition. The family form is the biggest threat to young people - it is the structure that denies them their autonomy and enforces their ownership by their parents or guardians. Whatever else we try to do to support young people is working at the margins of the problem at best. Without family abolition, we are doomed to leave the most vulnerable children (abused children, homeless children, trans children) behind.
That's not to say that we shouldn't try other ways to improve child welfare, obviously. But most of our other efforts don't cut to the root of the oppression - just like legalizing gay marriage didn't solve homophobia, popularizing land acknowledgments didn't solve the historical and ongoing violence against indigenous people, and making Juneteenth a federal holiday didn't solve antiblackness. But the difference is that many people acknowledge that the latter examples were ineffective posturing. The vast majority of people don't recognize the same dynamic when it applies to children.
That's what I hope to change with antiparent, to whatever extent that I can. I want to show, step by step, exactly how youth oppression operates. And I want to show why, if we claim to care about children at all, the full abolition of the family form is the only way forward.
Resources
Helen Hester
Rosemarie Ho