The Anti-Politics of Family Abolition

In loving memory of Asad Haider

‘And just as God has been pronounced dead quite often but has this sneaky way of resurrecting himself, so everyone debunks marriage, yet ends up married.’
– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Why has ‘abolition’ emerged as a rallying cry on the Left, first in anti-prison and anti-policing activism and, more recently, in socialist-feminist and anarchist-feminist writings on the family? Why has the Left held on to this term while letting go of many others? What does ‘abolition’ do for us? How does it orient (and disorient) us to problems of politics?

These are the questions that motivate my comradely critique of abolitionism. My scope is limited: I will set aside the debates surrounding police and prison abolition. My primary concerns are with the promiscuity of the term and, especially, its prominence in recent feminist writings on the family. In its feminist iteration, the project of abolition is meant to address a crisis of care in the family, and contemporary capitalism more broadly. The language of abolition also establishes links between feminist and anti-racist struggle. For family abolitionists like Sophie Lewis, M.E. O’Brien, Alva Gotby, and Helen Hester, the claim is not that the family is a kind of slavery or that its powers are the same as those that undergird the modern prison or policing. (Indeed, family abolitionists generally devote little attention to the patriarchal foundations of modern policing or the historical links between the family apparatus and the prison system.) Rather, the borrowed language of abolition is supposed to signal the radicalism of the project and its debts to other emancipatory traditions.

Fair enough. My intention is not to oppose abolition, per se, but to understand something about its appeal. At this historical juncture, oppositional energy is better spent on a surging Right, not internecine debates on the Left. We face real and grave threats, from the reconsolidation of white male supremacy in public life to the assault on women’s reproductive privacy and freedom. What the Right promises is the restoration of patriarchy and its perverse value-system. The institution of the family is integral to this project. Family abolitionists recognise the threats. The problem, as I see it, is that abolition remains a feeble and inadequate response to them; radical in rhetoric, but limited in how it theorises the family and its significance in a social order. Like many on the Left today, family abolitionists treat the family as an economic unit or as an ethical relation – or, more accurately, as economics and ethics, as labour and care, two sides of the same coin. Thus, it has become practically obligatory in academic and activist circles, even beyond abolitionist writing and organising, to speak of ‘care labour’ in the family, as if this were its main or most important function.

What is missing from abolitionist discourse is a political theory of the family. Family abolition rests on a limited understanding of what the family is and what it does, focusing especially on care relations and their distortions. Family abolitionists tend to neglect the family’s primary role in the psychic and social construction of authority and domination. They disregard altogether the relationship between the family and the state – not just white heteropatriarchal families and the bourgeois state (liberal, neoliberal, now ‘postliberal’), but any state that intends to survive from one day to the next and establish its monopoly on the use of force as somehow legitimate. From this perspective, the new abolitionism reflects an anti-political impulse that runs through the anarchist and socialist traditions – the mistaken and misguided belief that politics can be overcome by ethics and economics, by mutual aid and the socialisation of care.

We can all agree: high-quality daycare and elder care, universal public healthcare, schooling, housing, transportation, laundromats, kitchens, and cafeterias, as well as open and accessible public spaces, playgrounds, libraries, and museums are the basic infrastructure of a free and flourishing society. We should fight for each of these things and for a future that includes all of them. But we should not imagine that building this infrastructure will abolish the family. It will transform it, as the family is always and endlessly transformed by changes in material conditions.

It is helpful to recall Juliet Mitchell’s classic account of the family as ‘a complex unity of systems of practice’ – a unity that is forged politically, through the use of force and fraud, not found in nature or derived from necessity. Labour is only one among many elements in this complex unity. For Mitchell, writing for the New Left Review in 1966, the task of a socialist-feminism was to distill the different elements of this complex unity, to determine which was strongest and weakest at any historical moment, and to exploit them in pursuit of a revolutionary project.

What if we treated the family today not primarily as a relation of care labour, but as a ‘complex unity’ based in power? We might then see that mutual aid and socialised care do not necessarily undermine family, and could conceivably strengthen it. Relieved of responsibility for the provision of care, the family may well turn to other functions, from the inscription of group identity to the administration of discipline and punishment. When we see the family as a complex unity, defined not by any one practice (labour, care, sexuality, property, and so on) but by the integration of multiple practices at different levels of a social formation (including the unconscious), we can better appreciate how it innovates and adapts to new conditions. These are qualities that have made the family absolutely indispensable to capitalism, itself innovative and adaptive to new imperatives. Michel Foucault, underappreciated on the socialist Left in recent years, shows how the family defined as a relation of care is itself a historical innovation and adaptation. The concept of ‘care labour’ is not a socialist discovery, but the invention of the European bourgeoisie itself, as it redefined the family in pursuit of a disciplined and able-bodied workforce.

Sophie Lewis is probably the most prominent family abolitionist, with two books (Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family) and a slate of articles in the Nation, the Boston Review, and other popular venues. Lewis concedes that family abolition feels impossible. As the crisis in capitalism comes into focus, with economies and ecologies ravaged by profit, the family can feel like our only protection against chaos and suffering, not one of its principal sources. In this context, family abolition seems like the nightmare scenario of a world without humanity, a world of wolves (Hobbes) and machines (Huxley), where each is left to fend for themself amidst economic and ecological ruin. The sad truth is that capitalism’s real tendencies transform every utopian project, including family abolition, into the dystopian horror that capitalism itself has wrought. To Fredric Jameson’s quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Lewis responds that it is ‘perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family’.

Reading Lewis, though, suggests something else. Not at all impossible, family abolition turns out to be pretty easy to imagine. And Lewis is so compelling a writer that we cannot help but imagine it with her. Her work is demonstration of the powers of the imagination to abolish the family – with words, at least. We might recall that family abolition has been imagined at least since the birth of the philosophy itself, most famously in Plato’s Republic, and then in every piece of utopian writing inspired by it. From this perspective, family abolition is arguably the first act of a political imagination, fanning utopian dreams and fueling dystopian nightmares. The problem is not that we cannot imagine abolishing the family, but that the activity operates on that level primarily, if not exclusively. Moving from political imagination to political reality remains the challenge. And political reality, when it comes to the family, is not merely external; it is our inner experience, our deepest desires, and our unconscious patterns.

Family abolitionists claim that the project is constructive, not destructive. Abolition aims to build alternatives to the privatised nuclear family. Abolition is creative, the slogan says. So why this term? What rhetorical purpose does it serve? Put differently, is it a rhetoric in place of a politics, less a creative act of the imagination, than a rhetorical displacement of politics? As rhetoric, abolitionism rests on moral outrage and an aesthetic sensibility. It asks, how can we leave the provision of care to an institution that so consistently fails to furnish it? And wouldn’t it be delightful to burn it all down, and put in its place something truly beautiful? These are good questions. But they deflect the more difficult question of whether the family succeeds in reproducing the social order – and what sort of state, if any, can do without the family. They avoid, in the name of abolition, the unavoidable challenge that family poses to the project of human emancipation.

This term, emancipation, has fallen out of circulation on the Left. Recall that emancipation in Roman Law presumed the paterfamilias that it also challenged. To be emancipated, for the Romans, was to be free of the authority (and obligations) of the male head of household. Every act of emancipation took place in the context of the contested reign of the family over its individual members and collective life. Emancipation did not abolish the family as such, nor was that its aim necessarily, but it did abrogate its power and jurisdiction. Emancipation, for the Romans, was linked to a practice of autonomy – another term that has fallen out of use on the Left, but is invaluable to a socialist-feminist politics of care.

The Ambiguities of Abolition
Abolitionism has a proud but complicated history in the United States. The movement to abolish slavery gained momentum in the early nineteenth century, in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and anti-slavery activism in Europe and the Americas. While revolutionary in its aims, the American abolitionist movement included many moderates in its ranks: industrialists and entrepreneurs, driven primarily by profits; white workers, opposed to the devaluation of their labour; yeoman farmers, squeezed by the plantation economy; and white Christians, some more concerned with salvation of their souls than the liberation of the enslaved. Radicals like Frederick Douglass and John Brown, now legendary in the abolitionist struggle, were marginalised in their own time by more moderate figures in their movement. Competing elements within the antislavery struggle in the United States shaped the politics of emancipation in profound ways. The limitations and failures of Reconstruction are part of this embattled history. The Jim Crow era reflects the durability of white supremacy and the persistence of a Southern slaveocracy that survived formal emancipation. That the abolitionist struggle against slavery continues, in the ‘New Jim Crow’ era of mass incarceration and racist policing, suggests that we have not yet realised the dream of black freedom. This is no reason to abandon abolitionism, but it might give us pause in adopting its language for every emancipatory struggle that follows.

Some of the most vocal and militant activists in the anti-abortion movement today also call themselves abolitionists. Abortion abolitionists believe that embryos and fetuses have full rights of personhood and deserve equal protection under the law. They oppose the incrementalism of the mainstream anti-abortion movements and support the criminalisation of women who have abortions, as well as healthcare providers who offer abortion services and fertility treatments. For these activists and organisations, the language of abolition sets their position and politics apart from the broader ‘pro-life’ movement, which they see as morally compromised and complicit with mass murder. For those who believe that the moral wrong of abortion is comparable to the most heinous crimes in modern history, the abolition of all abortion is the only acceptable response. Chattel slavery and the Holocaust are constant reference points within the abortion-abolition movement. Abolitionist rhetoric provides this wing of the anti-abortion movement with a sense of valour and righteousness. Its valour is stolen. Its righteousness is false. But the rhetorical force is real. After Dobbs, abortion abolitionism is becoming more prominent in the larger anti-abortion movement.

Abolitionist rhetoric sounds different in a feminist, socialist, or anarchist voice, but its circulation across very different political projects, from Left to Right, from anti-prison and anti-policing organising to anti-abortion activism, illustrates the indeterminacy and pliability of the words we use in political struggle. Adding to the ambiguity of language, ‘abolition’ is also a strategy of the ruling class and a feature of the dominant order. The hetero-patriarchal family lies at the foundations of white supremacy, but chattel slavery in the United States also aimed at the ‘abolition’ of enslaved families. For this reason, Angela Davis, herself a leading voice in prison abolitionism, has been mostly defensive of the black family, which she sees as a refuge from racism and a model of solidarity, and highly critical of the ‘family abolitionism’ of white supremacy. ‘Within the confines of their family and community life,’ Davis writes in her 1981 classic, Women, Race, and Class, ‘Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.’ For Davis, the black family is the monument to this magnificence. Family abolition, from this perspective, reflects the myopia of white feminism, bourgeois feminism – a feminism that does not need the family to survive.

My own worries about family abolition are different, though I take the point that capitalism and white supremacy have abolitionist tendencies of their own. I recognise that the family can be a lifeline for the oppressed and that those who are most oppressed in our society are often denied the social privileges that come with being part of ‘acceptable’ family systems. Nonetheless, all families are shaped by a white hetero-patriarchal norm, even those marked as deviant or pathological. Authority is at issue in every family, though mediated in different ways by class, race, and other categories. And all individuals are shaped by the normative family and its powers, regardless of whether they are part of families of their own. Most importantly, the oppressed often find immediate outlet for their pain and suffering among those also oppressed and closest at hand. The family, as so many of us know, is the source of lasting historical wounds and profound intergenerational trauma. Oppressed families, especially those with the least power within them, bear the brunt of this suffering. The problem is that abolitionism keeps us locked in a moral debate about the family, whether it is good or bad, whether one is for or against the family, and which families, at the expense of an account of how both the normative family and actually existing families function to reproduce the state and its vast arsenal of powers.

The history of family abolition long predates the antislavery movement in the Americas and reaches all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Plato’s Republic features an account of family abolition among the guardian class of the kallipolis, or the ‘beautiful city’ that Socrates constructs in speech, in dialogue with his students. Plato did not imagine the abolition of the family for all citizens. To the contrary, family abolition was reserved for the ruling class. It reflected the class structure of the kallipolis and the ideology that placed a few at the top and many at the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy. Family abolition was a mark of class distinction, separating those fit to rule from those they ruled, those presumed to be led by their particular interests and the everyday affairs of the oikos. The kallipolis served as a kind of surrogate family for a defamilialised class of philosopher-kings. Moreover, in Plato, the family serves as a metaphor for the city-state and its cycle of regimes. As Rob Goodman has shown, Plato relays the cycles of regimes in the Republic as a ‘multigenerational family saga’ – a story of political and moral decline over five ‘generations’ of fathers and sons. Goodman reads this family saga as Plato’s rhetorical appeal to affect. I see it, furthermore, as confirmation that family abolition is often (always?) shadowed by a more profound and pervasive familialism. Plato’s proposal to abolish the family for the guardian class is a sophisticated rhetorical strategy, which reinforces class hierarchy, establishes the supremacy of philosophy over the polis and the oikos, assigns the oikos its proper place within the structure of the polis, and constructs the polis as a familial inheritance.

Utopian socialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries advocated the abolition of the bourgeois family form, but they also envisioned new families flourishing under new conditions. Russian revolutionaries put many of the principles of family abolition into practice, but also confronted the difficult but inevitable question of the role of the state in family abolition – a question that the new abolitionists mostly avert. I suspect that this is because the new abolitionism operates on a rhetorical level, primarily, and in this respect owes more to Plato than to Saint-Simon or Lenin. Lewis observes that ‘the idea of family abolition triggers enormous onto-epistemological anxiety and, hence, often unleashes violent anger’, but does not consider whether this is mainly the point, whether the idea aims, above all, to elicit an emotional response. That response may be anger, it may be enthusiasm, but abolitionism taps into the intensity of feelings about the family, especially one’s own. It draws from this reservoir of passion built up in and around the family. It does not ask what kind of politics we can have, given that we are all shaped in profound ways by the family, but it does speak to that part in all of us that wants to burn it all down – a part that Freud shows as forming and flourishing in the family, an inevitable resistance against its tremendous power.

Lewis does consider the possibility that family abolition actually wants ‘more family, not less’ – more mothering, more care labour, more evenly distributed, and more highly valued. ‘However, when I am feeling more courageous’, Lewis writes, ‘I stick to my guns and insist that abolition of the family is, as Marx and Engels put it, precisely what we intend’. It is not clear that family abolition is what Marx and Engels intended, if they are included in the ‘we’ or simply cited on its behalf. Marx and Engels conceived of the family in a myriad of ways: a sexual division of labour; a system of wealth accumulation and transmission; an instrument of political domination; a form of working-class solidarity. To abolish one aspect was not necessarily to abolish the family as such. Thus, the communist party could plausibly claim to defend working-class familialism against the abolitionist tendencies of capitalism itself. After all, no class practiced family abolition as effortlessly as the bourgeoisie, with its crass commercialism and monetisation of all values. The Communist Manifesto, embracing the ‘infamous proposal’ to abolish the family, also thematises the ambiguities of abolitionism, which are reflections of the ambiguities of capitalism itself. Capitalism ‘abolishes’ the family by its own real movements, but it also and simultaneously shores up the family and draws from its powers. Their embrace of family abolition is partly ironic. Irony, in this instance, is a method of dialectical criticism.

The ambiguities of abolition led Lenin to reject this rhetoric in State and Revolution. Abolition is the anarchist agenda. No matter how militant and insurrectionary, anarchism, according to Lenin, was a glass cannon forged from the fires of nostalgia. Anarchism could very well make a revolution, but Lenin believed it was doomed to fail in protecting a revolution against its class enemies. Anarchism had no theory or practice of politics beyond the spontaneity of revolt. Against abolitionism and opportunism, anarchism and social democracy, Lenin doubled down on ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the ‘withering away of the state’ as, in fact, precisely what Marx and Engels had intended.

I think it is worth pressing on whether family abolition is really what Lewis intends, or whether a more profound and pervasive familialism lies at the heart of her project. Lewis herself reflects on this in the second chapter of Abolish the Family: ‘Abolish Which Family?’ She considers arguments from Hazel Carby and others that the black family has been a site of resistance to and protection against white supremacy. Lewis cites black abolitionists like Tiffany Lethabo King, whose position springs from deep love of and commitment to the black diaspora. Lewis borrows from King’s notion of a sociality beyond the family, relationality beyond kinship. Elsewhere, Lewis is even more receptive to ‘mothering against motherhood’ and even a ‘matricentic feminism’ that takes its cues from black mothering, a practice Lewis portrays as if beyond the institution of the family. Lewis concedes that ‘Black mothering is surely not always and automatically transgressive,’ with the odd implication that our abolitionist future will revolve around what kind of mothers we want to be and what kind of mothering we want to do. Contra Lewis, I do not think that mothering can be separated from the institution of motherhood, nor do I accept that ‘revolutionary mothering’ – ambivalent or not – is what radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone meant by feminist revolution.

Lewis is absolutely right that kinship is no answer. ‘Kinship, at least right now, is always a reference to something that is imagined to be inerasable, to “nature”,’ she writes, and ‘functions as a linguistic appeal to something non-contingent that can ground a relation’. Lewis implores us to give up the fantasy of non-contingency, to embrace what is contingent and creative in our bonds with others. Other terms, like comrade and especially kith, to designate friends and acquaintances, provide Lewis with the utopian language of abolition, the image of a sociality beyond family and kinship. Is this a sociality without authority and domination? Can we create this sociality without them?

Family abolitionism invites us to think, feel, love, and live differently. It is invaluable in this respect. Yet, like so many of us, abolitionists can’t quite quit the family, dreaming of its abolition, searching for its surrogates, sometimes conceding that these are weak substitutes for an institution and ideology that burrows so deep in our psyches and extends so far across the social field that we don’t know how to think, feel, love, and live without it. This is a paradox that Firestone recognised as a real political challenge. The Dialectic of Sex is as much an account of the extraordinary durability of the family in human history, the seeming inescapability of the family as a psycho-sexual and socio-economic structure, as a call for feminist revolution. Abolition is not really Firestone’s preferred term, either: ‘If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution,’ she writes, ‘we would use it.’

This extraordinary durability may be in question today, as marriage and birth rates fall precipitously in many parts of the world. Just over half of American adults today are married. More of them are living alone. It appears that the withering away of some form of family life is on the horizon, which helps to explain the revanchist familialism ascendant in the United States. But this is only part of the story. While a growing share of adults are unmarried, and a smaller but growing share of them unpartnered, rates of cohabitation among unmarried couples are on the rise. And still a significant majority of children, over 70 per cent, are raised in two-parent households. Birthrates are falling, but levelling out and, in some places, creeping up. It is uncertain how the escalating attack on women’s reproductive autonomy and freedom, to say nothing of the surging costs of housing, healthcare, childcare, and education, will impact these trends. The family is changing, as always, but reports of its imminent obsolescence are vastly overstated. With this in mind, we might wonder whether Firestone herself did not intend something closer to what Lenin spelled out, a dictatorship of the oppressed classes (women and children) over the means of reproduction and the eventual withering away of the family.

Feminism Returns to the Family
Lewis can be credited with putting the family back on the feminist agenda, reviving radical feminism for a new generation, and putting children’s liberation at the forefront of the feminist project. Her work also illustrates some of the basic premises of socialist-feminism today, as distinct from the radical feminism of a previous era and other versions of socialist-feminism. In contemporary socialist-feminism, the family is a labour relation, the ‘hidden abode’ of capitalism. Social reproduction theory is the fullest articulation of this position. It treats the family as a labour relation, a gendered division and gendered exploitation of labour. The family, on this account, is a machinery for the reproduction of the worker and his ‘replacement’ in the form of children. The family produces value for the capitalist class and for the capitalist system as a whole, not in the form of commodities, but of workers themselves. Social reproduction theory – and, by extension, family abolitionism – is Marxist in this sense.

One predictable response to this is the revalorisation of the labour side of this relation. Thus, social reproduction theorists can end up in a strangely conservative defense of the family against bourgeois feminism (Fraser), or of ‘women’s work’ in the home (Federici), or even of the patriarchal family wage (Vogel). Lewis herself mostly avoids this trap, though she does tend to see every social relation as a labour relation first and foremost. This is clearest in her first book, where surrogates are renamed ‘gestational labourers’ and all who reproduce are invited to see themselves as surrogates, or as labourers of one sort of another. The call for ‘mothering against motherhood’ – a slogan premised on the separation of agency and structure, doing and being, identities and institutions, practices and systems – sets a different trap. But it, too, reflects the difficulties with a labour theory of the family.

A different theory of social reproduction might look beyond the gendered labour that reproduces workers and the working class to the various practices that reproduce a complex social totality, including but not limited to its class structure. Social reproduction theory of this sort would attend to the role of the family in the reproduction of subjects – not just workers who produce surplus values, but individuals who relate in a particular way to authority, domination, and violence. The family produces subjects of the state, not just by way of birth certificates and social security numbers, but by the initiation into power. Contra Evelina Johansson Wilén, this is not ‘trauma politics’ – it’s just politics.

An abolitionism that admitted its destructive impulses might be better positioned to reflect on the complex of passions that define and delimit sociality, the contradictory forces that shape human experience, and the ambivalence of our attachments to others. M.E. O’Brien, another prominent family abolitionist, deals more directly with these issues. From a queer-psychoanalytic perspective, O’Brien attends to the imbrication of care and coercion, dependency and domination, vulnerability and violence in the family. O’Brien takes more seriously the way that the family is used politically, as a ‘tool of counter-insurgency’ to discipline a discontented population. And O’Brien notes the problem with ‘chosen families’ as a model of true freedom and equality. Also critical of the concept of kinship, O’Brien invokes the ‘beloved community’ as the affirmative image of abolition. This is the community without hierarchy or exclusion, the community of mutual aid and superabundance, the community that has long figured as the positive image of utopia. While more attentive to the family’s powers and its political functions, O’Brien nonetheless presumes that communism will abolish the family through the collectivisation of care and the practice of mutual aid. Communism thus appears as the positive image of the universal family, as well as the fulfillment of the family’s unkept promise, in which we care according to our abilities and receive according to our needs. Again, it is a beautiful image. The Left needs images like these to sustain energy and excitement, especially as political conditions appear more and more hopeless. But it is an image in which politics – the exercise of rule, the practice of authority, the use of violence, the possibility of domination – plays no part.

What would an alternative account of the family look like and what might it offer the Left? Marxism and radical feminism, traditions to which the new abolitionists are also indebted, provide some answers. Marxism, of course, has contributed significantly to a labour theory of the family. But Marx himself says many different things about the family. From his early writings on Hegel and the Jewish Question to his late and unfinished project, the so-called Ethnological Notebooks, Marx had a lifelong interest in the family as a political institution. For Marx, the family is political in the sense that its relations are power relations, which create and consolidate classes and class conflicts. The family is also political in the sense that it retains a special significance for and relationship with the state. Marx rejects the conceit of the ‘German ideology’ that the ‘concept’ of the family could be considered apart from its real history. But he accepts the insight that this history is not a natural history, but a political history, a history made by human beings using force and fraud.

Radical feminists of the second wave also saw the family as a political institution. While the first wave brought universal suffrage and a measure of formal political equality to women, it was later seen to have left male dominance in the family untouched and women’s oppression in and through the family largely unexamined. The feminism that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s put focus on the politics of everyday life and the institutions that define women’s lives. Like more militant figures of the first wave, feminists in this period fought for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, access to birth control, abortion, and reproductive planning, the expansion of public education, daycare, anti-poverty assistance, and health services for women. Radical feminists also developed a theory of patriarchy, which posited that an entire political order – a white supremacist, colonialist, militarist, and capitalist system – was born in the male-dominated bourgeois family. Patriarchy, for radical feminists, named a set of powers within the family, as well as a set of powers modeled on the family that extended across the whole society. Many of them saw feminism as the political struggle to dismantle the patriarchy by taking aim at its elementary form in the family.

Sheila Rowbotham’s 1973 classic, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World helps to make sense of the prominence of the family in theory and politics in the postwar period. As Rowbotham notes, the women’s liberation movement was born on college campuses, many of them newly accessible to women, where a rebellion against the authority of the family, the university, and the state was already brewing among students. Leaders in the radical feminist movement, including Firestone herself, were shaped by the more militant wing of the civil-rights movement and believed it was the task of radical women to fight in what was presumed to be their primary domain of experience. The women’s liberation movement also took inspiration from socialist parties and politics, arguing that women of all classes were oppressed by the bourgeois family. Feminists theorised patriarchy as a system as powerful as capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism and militarism, and saw feminism as a method for mapping these systems in their complex interdependence. Many of the white women in the movement saw the family as a citadel of conformity and control. Many of the black women, poor women, and immigrant women in the movement understood that the family was a sphere of survival, as well as domination, and that this was the double-bind that needed to be undone. Feminists of all stripes converged on a critique of the family, because they shared the belief that male power – and not merely gendered labour – was produced and reproduced there.

Even in its heyday, many feminists criticised the concept of patriarchy as abstract and unhistorical. Some had wondered if feminists had been too centered on the family and had paid too little attention to sexuality, language, and media in shaping women’s lives. Others, like Catharine MacKinnon, ultimately dispensed with the concept of patriarchy, arguing that it obscured the powers that men possess as men – not as fathers or brothers, not as positions in an imagined familial order, but as men in relation to women. By the 1980s, the theory of patriarchy seemed too radical, too restrictive, and too reductive for feminist theory and politics. Reductive, because it treated all historical, geographical, and social particularities under the sign of an abstract and ahistorical concept. Restrictive, because the theory assumed and extended a white, bourgeois, heterosexual, reproductive family model across an entire social field. Too radical, because the second wave aimed to abolish the patriarchy – and one discomfiting result of those years was the Reagan revolution and a new discourse of ‘family values’ that spread across the political spectrum. Feminists, feeling the backlash, were turning away from the family just as neoliberals and neoconservatives were finding common ground on a family-focused agenda. Some feminists were even beginning to romanticise the family, or at least some of its relationships, especially the mother-child bond. Still others were shifting attention to the public sphere and fostering counterpublics, reinforcing the (patriarchal) idea that ‘the political’ is that which pertains to public life. A different kind of pushback came from both black feminists and lesbian feminists, who recognised that the family was an ambiguous construction, that it promised a kind of belonging and protection, thus could be an object of longing and attachment, even if also an instrument of exclusion and inequality.

By the 1980s, feminism was beginning to turn away from the family and toward sexuality, in search of a more expansive account of power and a more complex theory of gender. This position was shared by those we now see as adversaries and opponents in feminism’s so-called ‘sex wars’ – feminists like Gail Rubin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Judith Butler were all part of this generational reorientation. Seen from this perspective, the ‘sex wars’ were fought on a terrain that had seen battle before, in a fight over the family and its place in feminist theory and politics. Rubin and MacKinnon agreedthat heterosexuality was the issue, not fathers or brothers or some ill-defined notion of patriarchy. The integration of queer theory into feminism further displaced the family and the feminist critique of patriarchy, which had presumed the heteronormative family structure as its oppositional object.

Why should feminism limit itself to the family anyway? Was this not precisely the limitation that had been imposed on women for centuries? What does it mean for feminism to focus its political and theoretical attention on the institution to which women have been historically confined? And, anyway, the family appeared to be changing so dramatically, first, by changes in the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, the simultaneous rise of both single-parent and two-income households, and by reforms in marriage and adoption law, which liberalised the idea of the family to include gay and lesbian couples. The frameworks that feminists had developed to theorise the family seemed outmoded and, more importantly, oblivious to the deep diversity of actual families, the profound malleability of the normative ideal, and the observable benefits of happy and healthy families for individuals and society. After Obergefell, which legalised same-sex marriage across the United States, feminism had all but given up the fight against the family.

That was in 2015. Once again, the times are changing. The family is back on the feminist agenda, thanks in part to efforts of abolitionists. Even the language of ‘patriarchy’ has come back into fashion, though hollowed out, the political theory of the family that was once its core left to the archives of feminist history. Instead, feminists talk about the family in ethical or economic terms, as a relation of care or an organisation of labour, or both. They don’t think about it, or relate to it, as a political thing. I should note that the Right makes no such mistake. Various camps on the Right today – the National Conservatives, Catholic Integralists, neo-Monarchists, Tech-Futurists, and ‘Race Realists’– converge on a political theory of the family. They gleefully embrace patriarchy. Our task is to understand how it endures and how it can be fought.

Family abolitionists are right to insist that the family is the primary and most effective instrument for the reproduction of capitalism, but they do not provide an adequate explanation for why. It has less to do with how labour is organised than with how power is organised across a social field and reproduced in different systems of practice. Here I disagree with Evelina Johansson Wilén’s claim that capitalism exploits the family, but does not depend upon it, only the ‘impersonal’ dimensions of capitalist coercion. ‘Capitalism needs reproduction’, Wilén argues, against the abolitionists, but it does not need the family to reproduce. In my view, capitalism does depend on the family, precisely because what the family reproduces is not merely workers, but the foundations of authority, domination, and violence upon which capitalism rests. These powers are not impersonal. They are not mute. Capitalism relies on personal power, too.

Still, abolitionists have difficulty dealing with the family in these terms, too. They acknowledge that abuse is endemic to the family, but their theoretical frameworks cannot account for why – why mothers in the United States are responsible for the majority of non-sexual violence against children (according to the Child Maltreatment Report, filed annually by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), why husbands beat and kill their wives and annihilate their families, or why anyone would perform non-reproductive labour for the elderly and the infirmed. To answer these questions, I think we need politics.

In my view, the family will not be abolished so long as authority, domination, and violence remain part of the human condition. Abolition does not confront this challenge as much as it wishes it away. To borrow from Adorno on transcendent critique, ‘in wishing to wipe away the whole as with a sponge, [abolition] develops an affinity to barbarism.’ It represents a retreat from the enduring problems of political life, those left unresolved by anarchist ethics and socialist economics. Abolitionism is an anti-politics, not for its negativity or its destructive impulses, but in the belief that politics can be reduced to ethical considerations and economic calculations – a belief that it ultimately shares with bourgeois liberalism.

For the Left to take the family seriously does not mean defending the family against neoliberalism, capitalism, or white supremacism. Nor does it mean that we must develop alternative and affirmative models of family life. Instead, it demands that we gain a better understanding of how profoundly our politics (and our psyches) are shaped by the family and why the Right today mobilises so effectively in explicit defense of patriarchy. It 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. In short, we must treat the family as a perennial impediment to genuine freedom and real equality. And we must reckon with the family as the historical horizon from which a new world will be born. Political thinking starts there.

Robyn Marasco is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at The New School for Social Research.

This essay appears in Salvage #16: The Construction Site of Hell (Autumn/Winter 2025).