On Robyn Marasco’s Anti-Abolitionism and the Abolition of Care

This is a response to ‘The Anti-Politics of Family Abolition’ by Robyn Marasco, from Salvage #16: The Construction Site of Hell.

‘Abolition,’ writes A. J. Bohrer in Capitalism and Confinement, ‘names a refusal to accept any arrangement that purchases some people’s freedom with others’ domination.’ From an abolitionist perspective then, ‘what makes the problem of the home, the family, and care so intractable’ is that ‘our survival is mobilised in favor of’ exactly such an arrangement: our lifemaking labours are part-captive, such that ‘even despite ourselves, our home work is conscripted into a project that exists specifically over and against us.’ The dense, bleeding intertwinement of love and work, of work with love, under capital, is a diabolical double bind. The word we tend to use for this double bind is ‘care.’

No less terrified by care than anyone else, but determined not to be cowed into silence, abolitionists ask: What if the uncoerced-and-uncoercive, non-economic nurturance the family is supposed to provide was, one day, provided in fact—what would it be like to get what we wish for; to receive what we all too often pretend we already have? What if infants’ basic entitlement to consistent, personal, and reliable provision is a precious life-long birthright best guaranteed, not in private, but in the common domain? Which elements (if any) of the family-form would remain after kinmaking has been stripped of individualism and property logics? How might we all live, futurely, in our abolished families?

Last year, I published a long-form response to the last decade of family abolition-related discussion, emulating Bohrer’s salutary insistence on clarifying what abolitionism isn’t, is, and might yet become for revolutionaries. I set out there to reiterate and reinforce my view that ‘the cultivation of abolitionist negativity and supersessionist utopianism vis-à-vis the family serves as a reminder to the left: Everything can and must change.’ I attempted to give an overview of recent family abolitionist writings (by M.E. O’Brien, Kathi Weeks, Tiffany Lethabo King, Alva Gotby, Alex Stoffel, and others), an account of the intertwinement of family abolition with the ‘other’ abolitionisms, and a brief typology of the various contemporary critics of family abolition—from fascists at Compact magazine to comradely sceptics at Contemporary Political Theory. I framed all of this with a couple of brief remarks about capitalism’s ongoing undermining of families and simultaneous familialisation of the world:

A much greater proportion of reproductive labor than ever before takes waged and commodified forms such as food delivery or cleaning services. Many nations have engineered a dramatic increase in nonfamilial modes of lifemaking among their populations for the management of so-called surplus populations in prisons and detention centers. … Ownership, to be blunt, is the main thing [i.e., not necessarily labour], and may well represent the last bastion of the twenty-first-century family form.

I gave the aforementioned piece the title ‘Destroy the Family to Actualise Its Promise: Family Abolition as Care Communisation.’

It appears necessary, due to the ‘normie shitstorm’ that dogs the topic of family abolitionism, to spell out all over again that ‘abolition does not entail outlawing family relations, parental authority and marriage by legislative fiat,’ as Richard Seymour explained in these pages in 2022. Apart from anything else (Seymour continued):

Families are currently formed through acts of choice by partners, a fact that can’t be explained away as ideology or false consciousness. To remove that choice would be both despotic and a severe social impoverishment. Moreover, as [Michèle] Barrett and [Mary] McIntosh put it [in The Anti-Social Family, 1982], with the wider world unchanged, the resulting households would ‘probably be little different from the household patterns and ideology that we know as “the family” at present.’ The aim [of family abolition] is not to reduce but to expand the available forms of care, and the choices for household and communal living.

Clearly, something about the very terminology of abolition sets some socialists off. There are those who guffaw, after all, at the very idea of ‘abolishing’ prisons, police, and the private nuclear household, even though they ‘aren’t revolted by the idea of abolishing capitalism’ (to quote Seymour again).

Why persist, then, in using a word that so many people sincerely experience as misleading?

Well, because, following Bohrer, abolitionism is our ‘most developed grammar of anti-confinement politics.’ Central to the aims and methods of a book like M.E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (2023), for example, is the fact that the word ‘abolition’ carries a very specific freight of commingled actualisation and destruction. O’Brien, in that book, defends ‘Aufhebung as a political tradition’ predicated on explosively transforming something ‘by preserving what is crucial to it.’ Gotby, similarly, emphasises that abolition is about building, superseding, and making-obsolete: the destruction that abolition entails is ‘positive,’ as we are reminded in They Call it Love (2023). Abolition, annoyingly, is just the best concept we have, and we don’t want to give it up. Its dialectical structure seems like the best corrective available to the fantasy that persists both on the left and the right, whereby family life is somehow inherently un- or anti-capitalist.

Robyn Marasco’s recent essay against ‘abolition’—via the example of family abolitionism—at least does not fall into the common trap of mistaking the family’s fundamental anti-sociality for resistance to, or a refuge from, states and markets. Nonetheless, Marasco throws everything-and-the-kitchen-sink at the project of abolishing the family. She does so in a more or less ad hoc manner and says several genuinely interesting things in the process before, surprisingly, proposing by way of conclusion ‘the eventual withering away of the family,’ which is, you know, exactly what family abolition means. Even though we ultimately agree, and despite the flattery it extends to me personally, it is a bewildering and, at times, condescending essay.

On the bright side, there is satisfaction for me (even though delivered in the form of an assault on the utopianism I preach) in the swipes Marasco deals out to the anti-family-abolition Jacobin columns lately penned to the effect that capitalism doesn’t require familism and is even threatened by it. I’m sure it came to Marasco’s attention already a couple of years ago—as it did to mine—that an attempted left revival of the arch-familist philosopher Kit Lasch is part and parcel of this antifeminist tendency. In the view of Atlantic pundits like Tyler Austin Harper, for instance, any and all revolutionary critiques of the family-form will only ever be fronts for bourgeois polyamory and neoliberal commitmentphobia; i.e., a free-market fantasy of frictionless, laissez-faire eros predicated on the consumeristic fungibility of intimates, or an unforgivable abandonment of kids by selfish, self-actualisation seeking mothers. Thus for Jacobin’s Evelina Johansson Wilén, family-critical politics obviously stem from an aversion to ‘love, dependency, generosity’ (or, at best, a naïve faith that everything could be for everyone.)

Gratifyingly, Marasco makes short work of the neo-Laschian phenomenon. Per Wilén, as she notices, care communisation is an idealistic and reductive response to the nuance, complexity and ambivalence of family life; a childish symptom of what other anti-woke social democrats like to deride as trauma feminism. But actually, family abolitionism ‘is not “trauma politics” – it’s just politics,’ Marasco counters with panache. As she goes on to point out, Wilén seriously underestimates capitalism’s reliance on the personal and intimate realms of private life.

However, family abolition is being misunderstood, here, too. In Salvage #16, the positive supersession of capitalist care becomes an object synonymous with ‘social reproduction theory,’ anarchism, and utopianism as a whole but also an antonym, for some reason, of nuance and maturity. The embrace of ‘abolition,’ or so Marasco thinks, bespeaks an allergy to growing up; to ‘wrestling with complexity’; to absorbing Lenin’s lessons about getting one’s hands dirty. Even the tired pseudo-gotcha so often leveled at me by Tom Whyman—you say you’re against motherhood, yet you promote mothering??—gets an airing. Marasco avers that I ‘can’t quite quit the family’ insofar as ‘a profound and pervasive familialism lies at the heart of [my] project.’ As I’ve said on many an occasion before: if I have ever advocated ‘quitting’ the family, or required that we strike its vocabulary from our tongues, I will readily address this hypocrisy.

What is more striking is Marasco’s claim that whatever this compound object ‘family abolitionism’ is, it isn’t political. Hence the title of the essay: ‘The Anti-Politics of Family Abolition.’ Family abolition simply isn’t politics, for Marasco; rather, it is imaginative, moral, aesthetic, rhetorical, ethical, and, worst of all, economistic. (The distinction between economics and politics is evidently not one she views as itself a product of capitalist history.) But before I try to parse what ‘politics’ means for Marasco—and why she thinks the communisation of care isn’t it—it seems worth stating upfront that she omits to tell us at any point about her targets’ own definitions of key terms (e.g., ‘family’ and ‘abolition’). This is a pity. The result is that the essay never comes into focus, so stringently does it avoid engaging, you know, the reasons family abolitionists have given for their choice of these signifiers. In a different vein, one might wonder if, for a self-described ‘comradely’ critique, such an approach makes any sense.

Marasco has decided that abolition is pure destructivity. But to reiterate: ‘abolition is neither simply destruction nor only transformation’ (this is O’Brien). The idea behind taking up ‘family abolition’ as a synonym of care communisation is that what will remain after the process in question is ‘a radically different form,’ a form sublated via the struggle-mediated procedure that can only be adequately captured in that weird Hegelian word that means, all at once, ‘to suspend, to annul, to cancel, but also to preserve, to lift up, to save, and to keep’ (to quote O’Brien again). By the same token, in Abolish the Family (2022), I characterised the fruit of the historic abolitionism of the self-stealing enslaved as ‘humanism: negated, remade, born, buried, prolonged.’ I recalled how, for the early Marx, the positive supersession of private property is the way to ‘“return” people “out of religion, family, state, etc.”—returning us to our proper, “human, i.e., social existence”’—by destroying the violent compulsions presently structuring human relationships.

For almost five years, in other words, we have done quite a bit of public explaining. Our feeling—by which I mean family abolitionists’—is that the world is not to be annihilated so much as turned inside out. Our hope? That once we are no longer compelled and coerced into kinships, a truer basis for love, for family-ing beyond the family, may flower: a ‘red love’-based (anti-proprietary) mode of lifemaking that might, ironically, come closer to actualising the grandest ambitions and implicit justification for the family ideal in the first place—that is, the notion of ‘one big human family,’ which has long been familism’s buried utopian kernel. No one understands the positive dimensions of familiality and familism better, I think, than a family abolitionist. So why does Marasco write that ‘abolitionism keeps us locked in a moral debate about the family, whether it is good or bad’? Abolitionism is the only framework I know that enables us to transcend such good/bad moral gridlocks.

In the end, what fascinates me the most about ‘The Anti-Politics of Family Abolition,’ since it seems so squarely beneath Marasco as a thinker, is the fact that it even rehearses that dusty old clapback: isn’t capitalism itself abolishing the family..?! 

This one has been repeatedly rebutted over the years—including in an entire chapter in Abolish the Family, and several in Family Abolition. Marasco speaks absurdly of ‘abolitionist tendencies’ inherent to white supremacy and capitalism. Are we really still doing this? Evidently she knows, when she writes that ‘capitalism “abolishes” the family,’ or that ‘the United States also aimed at the “abolition” of enslaved families,’ that the scare-quotes she has carefully inserted are required. Marasco has inserted scare-quotes around these instances of the word because she knows that the meaning in each case is actually to undermine, erode, starve, squeeze, colonise, and destroy; not to abolish, at all. Abolitionism seeks to render the family-form non-compulsory and superfluous to need, proliferating relations and infrastructures of life-giving provision. Capitalism seeks, suicidally, to strain and stretch the family-form past its breaking-point.

Was it not an option to conduct this disagreement sans recourse to straw-anarchists and patronizing pseudo-psychology? Marasco’s essay announces—despite, ahem, eight lines later, calling abolitionism ‘feeble and inadequate’—that it intends ‘not to oppose abolition, per se but to understand something about its appeal.’ What is it about this phenomenon, Marasco asks, that affectively appeals to people? She comes close to implying we might all merely be a little mad at our dads. Perhaps, she suggests, the kick one must surely get out of being a family abolitionist comes from indulging the ‘delightful’ fantasy of ‘burn[ing] it all down.’ Indeed, she offers, triggering anxiety and anger might be ‘mainly the point.’ Family abolitionism ends up, in her portrayal, as a callow insurrectionism that ‘operates on a rhetorical level, primarily’ and ‘aims, above all, to elicit an emotional response.’ Generously, for that reason, the author questions then ‘whether family abolition is really what Lewis intends.’ It seems much more plausible to her that, whatever I think my intentions are, they amount to gratuitously raising people’s hackles.

I wish I could honestly say she hadn’t raised mine. Halfway through her eclectic stroll, Marasco dedicates a section to the ‘ambiguities’ embedded in various projects that have laid claim to the name ‘abolitionist’ over the years. Fetus-fetishism—i.e., the contemporary hard-line anti-abortion movement—calls itself ‘abolitionist,’ as she points out.

Okay? And? Surely abortion prohibitionism is all too easily understood as an analogue of those other false abolitionisms of our day: antiprostitution and antitrafficking humanitarianism. Quite simply, those projects are proscriptionist: they have no dialectical conceptual shape. We could say that they are not true abolitionisms, in that sense. Or we could say, à la enemy feminisms, that they are enemy abolitions. I think I probably tend toward the former strategy here, but am aware that—for their part—Bohrer is perfectly willing to speak of strands of ‘capitalist abolition’ active in the nineteenth century, provided we include the following caveat:

A capitalist abolition could only ever have been partial at best; in order to make good on the abolitionist dream, we must abolish the capitalist system that created so grotesque a regime of confinement.

Have some movements claimed the name ‘abolition’ and sucked, in other words? Of course! Marasco correctly mentions the cross-class character and counterrevolutionary tenor of much of the anti-slavery movement. Much of early self-described ‘abolitionism’  was reformist and did not rise to the level of Moten and Harney’s much-cited definition—not so much the abolition of slavery as the abolition of a society that could have slavery—nor did it rise to the level of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s rightly celebrated line, ‘change one thing: everything.’ Again I ask: and..?

I am intrigued that the off-putting element for Marasco is precisely what makes the name abolition enduringly appealing to many of us: namely, the fact that the black freedom struggle is unfinished, its dream ‘not yet realised.’ It is precisely that unfinishedness, to my mind, that is abolition’s hallmark. The famous ‘dream deferred‘ inspires, at the same time, hope and wistfulness. It reminds us that everything hangs together with the past; that the work of liberatory politics is likely—alas—to never end. (Think of Diane di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letter #2’: ‘get up. put on your shoes, get / started, someone will finish.’) Some of us find a kind of courage in this. Maybe Marasco does not; maybe there is nothing inspiring, for her, about the unfinished business of her political ancestors. Unfinishedness may be ‘no reason to abandon abolitionism,’ she grants, ‘but it might give us pause in adopting its language for every emancipatory struggle that follows.’

Why might it give us pause? I find myself baffled by the logic here. No doubt Seymour remains right when he writes in his ‘Notes on a Normie Shitstorm’ that the brouhaha over abolitionism bespeaks ‘a clash, not of ideas, but of dispositions.’ After all, it isn’t that Marasco has a stated preference for any other word or phrase: revolutionism; revolutionary feminism; anti-patriarchy; communism; care communisation; mothering against motherhood (in fact, she strongly dislikes the latter). She doesn’t like alternative vocabularies and appears particularly non-plussed by the concept of ‘kith’—from the Old English cyðð—which refers to relations grounded in shared praxis and shared place rather than, as is the case with ‘kin,’ in the idea of shared blood. (It’s true: I formulate a call for a future populated by comrades and kith, more so than by kin. But no one, least of all me, has suggested that names by themselves will transform the world.) Marasco glosses ‘kith’ with obvious scepticism as ‘friends and acquaintances’: how silly, she seems to suggest, to imagine that building ‘kith’ could be political. No doubt we should somehow attempt to pursue socialism without abolishing anything.

Marasco doesn’t like the term ‘abolition.’ She thinks it designates an approach that boils down to ‘economics’ and ‘ethics.’  She thinks that there is something about ‘power’ missing in the left’s current discourse about the family. And she strongly doubts ‘that family abolition is what Marx and Engels intended.’ Little does she realise that she is a family abolitionist—and a more advanced one, at that, than many who call themselves by that name. Here’s the thing. Marasco’s main worry is that the left underestimates the powers of sexed domination that continue to swirl in the bosom of the family even in this neoliberalised, highly market-mediated era in Western social reproduction. ‘Capitalism does depend on the family,’ she affirms, refuting Jacobin. But far too many of us feminists now overemphasise the labor-related dimensions of the private household, and miss that it is a ‘“complex unity” based in power.’ So, rather than understand the family predominantly in terms of the social factory or the hiddener abode of production, we need to talk a lot more, she feels, about how the family incubates violence, ‘male power,’ and authoritarian domination. In the end, her beef with us family abolitionists seems to be that we don’t understand enough how urgent it is that the family be destroyed.

While I reject the premise that to talk about wageless labor (i.e., economics, for Marasco) and love (i.e., ethics) is somehow to preclude talking about power (i.e., politics), I perceive far more overlap and compatibility between the abolitionist literature on care’s privatisation and Marasco’s desired left ‘politics’ of the family than she does. In ‘Destroy the Family to Realise Its Promise,’ I advance what I believe is a Marasco-compatible point: that relations of property, more so than labor, are currently the family’s most salient function in our conjuncture.

The most useful way to grasp familism now—strategically speaking—may be via the lens of private property… . … The case for family abolition is strengthened, not weakened, by the possibility that the family is a mere bit player in today’s social factory in labor terms.

I agree with Marasco that we should always have been on the offensive. We ought never to have abandoned the revolutionary critique of marriage, of adult parental domination. We should always, in my view, have followed the radical wing of the welfare rights movement in declaring war on the parental state and, at the same time, on the counterrevolutionary buyoff of ‘parental rights.’ Marasco is right: the fascists today are not shying away from naming ‘power’ in the family; they are actively celebrating interpersonal domestic hierarchy and patriarchal supremacy. What is our response?

No doubt my contribution has been insufficient. Yet ever since Full Surrogacy Now (2019), I have sought to pit, against the capitalist institution of familial domesticity, the anti-property, anti-work, care-communisational and child-liberationist forces of ‘mother-ers’ of all genders and none. Is this the project that Marasco is prepared to call ‘bourgeois liberalism’ (or is it ‘anarchist’?—in any case, something merely ethical). ‘Contra Lewis,’ Marasco writes, ‘I do not think that mothering can be separated from the institution of motherhood.’ I take this to mean that she would deny that the bearing and tending of children can be ungendered; that the labor of care-provisioning can be separated from the patriarchal property relation imagined (biogenetically and legally) as parentage.* My question to Marasco, then, is this: what are we fighting for as revolutionary feminists, if that is what you believe?

Marasco’s antipathy for ethics, on its face, arouses considerable sympathy in me, not least because it is a peeve shared by our generation’s foremost feminist philosopher and family abolitionist comrade Kathi Weeks. Yet, curiously, it seems to me that Marasco and Weeks hold diametrically opposed concepts of the relation between the ethical and the political. On the one hand, for Marasco, the politics of the family is whatever psychosexual remnant or residue gets left behind after economic coercion has been removed because care-infrastructures have been communised (‘we should not imagine that building this infrastructure will abolish the family,’ she declares). On the other, for Weeks—as her paper on ‘The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal’ makes clear in a passage criticising Kathi’s otherwise-favourite thinker Shulamith Firestone for making Marasco’s same mistake—the properly political is precisely the effort to deprivatise the whole business of caretaking, whereas the ethical is, ironically, Marasco’s political: ‘the matter of individuals choosing to change not only their lives, but what may be their deepest desires.’

But perhaps—whether we call it ‘politics’ or ‘ethics,’ ‘abolition’ or ‘feminist struggle’—the thing that we should be doing is building the historic force that Aleksandra Kollontai termed ‘red love.’ Marasco concludes that our task is to develop a ‘better understanding of how profoundly our politics (and our psyches) are shaped by the family’ and then (presumably) to do something about it. But what? Facing up to our historic task, she writes, means ‘recognising that the family is the primary instrument of initiation into collective life and the most powerful machinery of social reproduction available to the state. It means wrestling with the complexities of what is to be done with such a powerful machinery and what can be done in its context.’ I mean, sure! Amen. But while we wrestle with complexities, we can simultaneously see what happens to our selfhood when we spring food, medicine, childcare, and eldercare responsibilities free from the familial matrix. When it comes to returning ourselves to our human, i.e., social, existence, what do we have to lose by faking it just in case we end up making it? Why don’t we heed the invitation in ‘Revolutionary Letter #4,’ to ‘share blankets, dope and children,’ fixing our eyes on an as-yet-invisible horizon beyond which ‘our babes toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe’?

___

Sophie Lewis is a frequent Salvage contributor and the author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, Enemy Feminisms, and Femmephilia. She lives in Philadelphia.

* Perhaps my forthcoming book The Liberation of Children, which deepens the analysis of forced cissexualisation, propertisation, and adult supremacy that I began a decade ago, will get at some of this ‘power’ that my critic craves to see talked about.