Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care is a timely and accessible analysis of family abolition through the Marxist tradition. It also provides an overview of contemporary practices and theories of family abolition drawing from Indigenous theory and praxis, the Black radical tradition, and queer and trans liberatory traditions. Drawing on the abolitionist tradition within radical Black feminist scholarship, this book builds on the organizing of the rebellions of 2020 by connecting our contemporary struggles to a much longer history of revolt against enslavement and racial capitalism.
In our present moment of reaction against mass revolt, it is important not to cede ground to far-right analysis and political demands. The right has mobilized the family as something to be preserved in the face of mass impoverishment by targeting both women—and more specifically, their right to self-determination— and LGBTQ people, by positing them as being responsible for our worsening conditions of life.
This text is right on time. Given the continued rise of fascism globally—and the attacks on queer, trans, and gender-variant people particularly—we need to be thinking within the terms of family abolition and the communization of care. As O’Brien writes, “communization is the global generalizing of communist measures, of the immediate appropriation of the means of production for collective human need.”1M.E O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 215.
Care on the barricades is “the future in the present” on which O’Brien builds the possibility of her vision. The book opens with a description of the 2006 Oaxaca Commune organized after massive police repression of a teachers’ strike. Only collective labor makes rebellions possible, and to sustain long term strikes and barricades requires an overcoming of the individualism of the family, as well as the reactionary uses of the family to put down collective struggle, such as husbands demanding wives return to housework and the state demanding a return to order to end the “disorder” of communal care. Later in the book, O’Brien details many more examples of insurgent social reproduction in order to develop the commune as the speculative horizon of family abolition.
The imposition of the nuclear family as a primary economic unit is tied to the history of colonization, imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. While sometimes the left may brand the family as progressive under the demand of the so-called “family wage,” or as a reprieve to alienation under neoliberalism, the right mobilizes the concept of the family as the linchpin of civilization. Against all of these readings of the family, O’Brien sees the family as a “limit to human emancipation” and a “limit to our imagination.”2O’Brien, Family Abolition, 4. There are no guarantees to care or love in the family. Families continue to be a primary site of child abuse, sexual abuse, and violence.
Further, the individualism and social isolation fostered by the family is opposed to social revolution. As O’Brien put it, “so long as the private household is maintained, no revolutionary process can overcome class society.”3O’Brien, Family Abolition, 5. Social contradictions that are many times relegated to the family like child care, dealing with sexual violence, and the gendered division of labor have consistently ended revolutionary organizations and movements. Instead, “family abolition is the recognition that no human being should even own or entirely dominate another person, even children.”4O’Brien, Family Abolition, 7. O’Brien persuasively argues that the end of class society requires the abolition of the family because “family abolition is the destruction of private households as systems of accumulating power and property at the cost of other’s well-being.”5O’Brien, Family Abolition, 7.
The book is broken up into three major sections:
Part I: The Impossible Family
Chapter 1 analyzes the family as a “private household, a unit of privatized care.”6O’Brien, Family Abolition, 21. Chapter 2 reveals the family as a site of violence and coercion. The family is linked to fascism, white nationalism, the carceral system, sexism, sexual violence, and the abuse of children, elders, and disabled people. Chapter 3 focuses on the meaning of abolishing the family within the Hegelian-Marxist concept of Aufhebung. Aufhebung is a term that refers to a process by which something transforms into something else through developments that both eliminate and preserve elements of its former state of being.
Drawing on Black feminist theorists analyzing the 2020 uprisings and the family life of George Floyd, O’Brien reveals what is to be preserved and what is to be overcome in our current understanding of the family. She writes, “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.”7O’Brien, Family Abolition, 56.
While colloquial understandings of the verb “to abolish” tend to reduce it to a solely destructive process of absolute elimination, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical meaning of Aufhebung is more in line with what contemporary abolitionists mean when they talk about that term: abolition. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has famously explained it: “Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack.” When O’Brien talks about abolishing the family, what she is really talking about is the struggle to build life-affirming institutions to meet the real human needs that contemporary families imperfectly and unevenly aspire to address.
Part II: A History of Family Abolition
Chapter 4 looks at the history of industrialization and the development of the bourgeois family. Marx and Engels were family abolitionists, but O’Brien challenges their visions of what comes after the bourgeois family. It should not be universal heterosexual monogamy. While Marx and Engels understood capitalism to be rendering the bourgeois family obsolete, they failed to see the much more diverse and life-affirming possibilities of nonalienated social relations which are not reducible to heterosexual monogamy. Following O’Brien, what becomes possible with communism is true gender self-determination and the formation of free relationships of care and love that will reach beyond the confines of a relationship dyad or nuclear family form.
Chapter 5 focuses on the development of bourgeois family ideology within the context of settler colonialism and chattel slavery in North America: “the history of the family is also the history of white supremacy and genocide.”8O’Brien, Family Abolition, 91. The chapter ends with a vision of indigenous queer communism, quoting Lou Cornum: “We work to form kinships, not in the bio-bind of blood lines and percent nor in the institutional pacts of marriage and property inheritance.”9O’Brien, Family Abolition, 93 Chapter 6 looks at the role of sex and sexuality during industrialization and urbanization through an analysis of the Paris Commune, Reconstruction-era U.S., Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism, and the writings of Friedrich Engels. Chapter 7 analyzes the history of socialist theory and praxis on the family, including socialists such as Bebel, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Zetkin, and Kollontai, continuing to the rise of trade unionism and the formulation of the “family wage” as a contingent outcome of class struggle.
This brings us to O’Brien’s engagement with communization theory and her critique of the worker’s movement as it became organized around a particular “worker identity” that tended to reduce its concept of liberation to universalized waged labor under state authority.
In part as a response, chapter 8 outlines the “Red Decade” and the radical theorizations of sex and gender emerging from theorists and organizations including Mario Mieli, Guy Hocquenghem, David Fernbach, Third World Gay Revolution, S.T.A.R., Shulamith Firestone, Frances Beale, Kay Lindsay, and the Wages for Housework campaign. Chapter 9 goes deeper into communization theory’s analysis of the worker’s movement and the consequences for a communist analysis of the family.