Pour en finir avec la famille : Abolir, prendre soin, s'émanciper

by Sophie Lewis, Noémie Grunenwald (translator)

Biologique ou choisie, traditionnelle ou réinventée, nucléaire ou élargie, Sophie Lewis n’épargne aucune famille. En organisant la pénurie et la privatisation du soin, du soutien et de l’attention, la structure familiale entrave la réappropriation collective des moyens de reproduction, seul chemin possible vers une société plus égalitaire. Dès lors, il ne suffit pas de faire famille autrement, mais il faut nous libérer de cette institution. Dans ce manifeste plein d’humour, l’autrice parcourt l’histoire du mouvement pour l’abolition de la famille : du socialisme utopique au féminisme radical en passant par la théorie communiste et les luttes contre l’imposition raciste du modèle familial.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Politics, Philosophy, Queer, Theory, Sociology

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2022

About the author

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Boston Review, n+1, the London Review of Books and Salvage. Sophie studied English, Politics, Environment and Geography at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University, and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give this book four stars because I think Sophie Lewis writes about a fascinating idea here: what if we abolished the family? What if we replaced the nuclear family with more communal and collectivistic forms of care? Lewis references queer activism, Indigenous feminism, and more to build her argument against many of the trappings of the family. This book spoke to a lot of feelings and critiques I have of the nuclear family, such as how a lot of abuse, mistreatment, and even societal loneliness and isolation could be prevented with more collective models of care. Lewis makes some intriguing points, such as how oftentimes people will justify careers that hurt other people by saying things like “well I have to provide for my family” – what if we deconstructed relational networks and reimagined them so that isn’t the case?

I agree with other reviewers’ on Goodreads that sometimes Lewis’s argumentation didn’t quite make sense to me. For me, I felt like sometimes the language felt a bit too academic jargony/theoretical, and I wondered if more practical, direct examples of family abolition would have bolstered the overall strength of this book. Still, as someone who thinks a fair amount about heteronormativity, amatonormativity, and dismantling the nuclear family, I appreciated this book for its overall message.

[Sunny Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why and how is care privatized? What constitutes the oppressive nature of “the family” as an institution? How do we understand the wages for housework movement and cyborg feminism within the context of abolition? I love the integration and analysis of Alexandra Kollontai, and I love how fiercely Lewis defends and articulates utopia. Kinship as the obey metric of who gets care in this world is a terrifying way of organizing society, and the private and even public ‘home’ itself is deeply tied up with that. Fascinating and compelling stuff. Reminds me so much of what Renaissance and I have talked about for forever on The Lavender Menace Podcast and with each other personally. Every person who wants a better world than the one we have now (so of course every feminist and socialist) needs to engage with family abolitionism! This is a tight introduction and exploration of it

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Move over Sam Harris, we have a new ultracrepidarian on the block who wants to make even more unsubstantiated claims per page than you! In all seriousness, I cannot understand how this book got published; even if I put my brain into the most radical-leftist, anti-natalist, anti-human configuration I can imagine, I don't see this book as even remotely convincing on any point other than "Marx probably was anti-family (but apparently was a family man? Maybe cheating on your pregnant wife with the maid makes you anti-family?). The book is comprised of 4 chapters, which can be summarized thus:

1) Abolishing the family? Doesn't that sound crazy? Well every family has problems, so why don't we just destroy the entire system that has existed since the dawn of civilization! Because anything has to be better than my abusive childhood-- I mean wait, I'm not just projecting! No! Definitely not! *insert unfounded and unargued marxist dogmas and godawful neologisms*
2) Lol jk I'm barely convinced in this idea myself. EXCEPT.... *rants for a while about "white" families and "black" families and how even though family is often the only support minorities get, we need to destroy it for the sake of some pipedream. Also, if you didn't shelter in place during COVID you're selfish, but, as we discover in chapter 4, if you sheltered in place, it was all part of a government conspiracy to strengthen the family, so you're actually part of the problem (?).
3) This is the part of the book where I'm gonna ramble about various isolated examples which back up my thesis, including some guy named Charles Fourier and some gal named Alexandra Kollontai. Oh, and I swear the communist manifesto was anti-family! I promise! I'm an orthodox believer like you! Also, gays and trans people exist and are sometimes politically radical, don't you dare forget that.
4) COVID proved family was evil, apparently slavery doesn't exist anymore (p. 70) [even though it definitely has more people in its grips than at any point in all of history], and I don't like the word kinship because it has the word ship in it and I become seasick easily (I'm kidding about the explanation, I didn't bother to read what her non-reasons were).

Now before you say "but Mark, you're being pretty harsh!", I'd like to direct you to a couple of pieces of media I consumed while reading the book which kinda blew me away. The first was a video lecture she gave where she introduced herself with "at the critical moment, this doula fetched a doctor, who saved both our lives—Mum’s, and the life of the fetal pre-version of me." I've never heard a human speak so strangely, but technically she was just being politically precise in order to remain consistent with her infanticidal-- I mean abortive party line. The second piece of media was a podcast she was on where she:

1) was audibly unable to stop laughing at inappropriate times
2) stated doesn't find sacrificial love beautiful
3) claimed "the family exists to produce more workers"
4) unironically used the phrase "literal manufacture of new human animals"
5) was unable to understand why people who had a bad upbringing would want to give their kids the good things they missed out on (instead of just tearing down the entire family system? like a good commie?)

This is more than just an ad-hominem attack on her as a person, this is a concern for her and those who take seriously her deeply pathological writings for political reasons. As far as I can tell, this woman has never had children of her own, and so I doubt very strongly every major assumption she makes about the Family. She makes repeated disparaging claims that families are "at best" *insert vague insult here*. She has a pathetically stupid definition of love: "to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital" (completely leaving out, oh, I don't know, doing the right thing, holding people accountable, sacrificing for people [she's allergic to that, I forgot], etc.). She claims that the family is a "scarcity-based trauma-machine" that exists only to propagate the transfer of property and to guarantee debtors, essentially tying the family with property, and property with capitalism, but she somehow forgets that capitalism isn't as old as family or property. In short, she comes off as an alien who is bitter and jealous of anyone who is doing better than her, and ultimately is confused how humans work. This book, in fact, has to be the least-human thing I've ever read, it comes off so sociopathic. She makes countless conspiratorial and dogmatically marxist claims without ever backing them up with evidence, statistics, or argumentation, and I'm baffled that she thought this was a good argument.

She makes some absolutely baffling arguments, such as "On the other hand, the family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder" (as if abolishing the family would somehow just solve all those!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!??!?!), as well as "The family, right now, is supposed to make everybody happy." This latter claim was so drool-chokingly stupid that I shouldn't need to respond to it, but I will. The family doesn't exist to make people happy. It exists to provide a safe place for children and mothers and to teach people responsibility and goodness. No one has ever claimed that families exist to make everyone happy. I looked in Luther's Small Catechism to see what he thought of family and society, and he pointed out 1 Timothy 2:1-3, which reads: "I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior." Nowhere listed in here is "independence," "hedonistic enjoyment," "liberation," or even just "leisure," but rather "peaceful," "quiet," "godly," and "holy." It's depressing to see how far our civilization has fallen when people think that everything must exist as means to some hedonistic work-free utopia, rather than striving to live with goodness, godliness, and sacrifice as means to a quiet and peaceful existence.

To return to her book's topic, her claim that family is primarily a place of work is reductive and unhelpful. She continually defines things in absurd ways which very conveniently work to her benefit, and only pretends to gesture in an open minded direction (all of these end up being backhanded insults because you're just too stupid to see her brilliance, of course!). Ideally, family is a place of agape love, and usually it's a place of close proximity and learning (whether positive or negative). Because the author is so vociferously partisan in her denunciation of family, it blinds her to all the myriad concessions she repeatedly gives in an attempt to add nuance (which instead actually just undermine her position). She postures as if family is something so traumatic, so self-evidently evil, that she merely has to touch it with her pinky finger and it'll crumble; instead, it's a mountain, and she has done naught but pee at the base of it.

Since she spends half the book giving concessions, I'll admit my own: the only good point she makes is that there is a serious problem in the trend toward social atomization and isolation in general, not just of women; all young people not in active social groups (and even many in those groups) feel extremely lonely. One only has to look at the absurdity of apartment buildings, with their single bedrooms and a separate water heater, AC unit, electric meter, etc., for every single unit. One feels in one's gut that there's gotta be a better way to do this. But these apartments are a symptom of a lack of close family, rather than an excess of it, for if families were such parasitic, unavoidable things, this atomization and lonliness wouldn't exist. So even the one point I agree on undermines her thesis.

Really the main thing I want to talk about is a serendipitous parallel I discovered in the third chapter. In the section discussing Marx and Engels, she mentions that "It was one of three interrelated enemies of Communism the two friends referred to as “the Parties of Order,” namely: Religion, Family, and the State." This utterly blew me away, because I was researching Luther's notion of the "Three Estates" while reading, and that list she gave lines up exactly with how Luther divided up the (in his opinion) three divinely instituted hierarchies present in the world. I'm not sure if Marx was unaware of Luther's notion, or if he was directly attacking/mocking it, but I can be certain that the author of this book was ignorant of them, otherwise she might have actually had something interesting to say on the topic. It's remarkable that Communism positions itself squarely against the three estates and thus is at bottom anti-christian, and even anti-civilization. Really remarkable.

To put some further nails in the author's coffin, I'll add some quotes from a phenomenally prophetic article by Christopher Dawson, who, contrary to our authoress in question, actually had kids and actually had some patience and wisdom when approaching complex socio-historical topics. Here ya go:

The family is not a product of culture; it is, as Malinowski shows, "the starting point of all human organization" and "the cradle of nascent culture."

This synthesis differs from anything that exists in the animal world in that it no longer leaves man free to follow his own sexual instincts; he is forced to conform them to a certain social pattern. The complete freedom from restraint which was formerly supposed to be characteristic of savage life is a romantic myth.

The institution of the family inevitably creates a vital tension which is creative as well as painful. For human culture is not instinctive. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort, which involves the repression of natural instinct and the subordination and sacrifice of the individual impulse to the social purpose. It is the fundamental error of the modern hedonist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and throw off every repression and spiritual discipline and yet preserve all the achievements of culture. It is the lesson of history that the higher the achievement of a culture the greater is the moral effort and the stricter is the social discipline that it demands.

The patriarchal family, on the other hand, makes much greater demands on human nature. It requires chastity and self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and obedience and discipline on the part of the children, while even the father himself has to assume a heavy burden of responsibility and submit his personal feelings to the interests of the family tradition.

even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created

Conditions of life both in the Greek city state and in the Roman Empire favoured the man without a family who could devote his whole energies to the duties and pleasures of public life. Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C.

While the patriarchal family in its original form was an aristocratic institution which was the privilege of a ruling race or a patrician class, the Christian family was common to every class, even to the slaves. Still more important was the fact that the Church insisted for the first time on the mutual and bilateral character of sexual obligations. The husband belonged to the wife as exclusively as the wife to the husband.

But this is no solution. It leads merely to the breaking down of the old structure of society and the loss of the traditional moral standards without creating anything which can take their place. As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members. The home is no longer a centre of social activity; it has become merely a sleeping place for a number of independent wage-earners.

To the modern girl marriage and motherhood appear not as the conditions of a wider life, as they did to her grandmother, but as involving the sacrifice of her independence and the abandonment of her career.

As Dawson points out, the sacrifice and un-natural conditions of the family are actually an amazing feat, separating us from the animals and leading directly to civilization (and all the animal comforts that that entails, of which our authoress takes for granted and makes no provision for in her utopia). So, it would seem that our authoress actually wants to destroy the bedrock of civilization and put nothing in its place but some pie in the sky faith in human nature (i.e. chaos and anarchy, which I'm sure wouldn't just lead to a bunch of authoritarian warlords and exponentially worse situations for all the vulnerable groups she ostensibly cares about!). Ultimately, the author's politics, and all of radical leftist politics at root, are those of a dysfunctional toddler who wasn't ever properly disciplined. She bemoans work and imagines a world where everyone gets what they need whether they work or not (which wouldn't work even if we were on starvation rations, let's be honest), and which no families exist so thus badda bing badda boom, no more domestic violence or child abuse! Get it? Because there's no more "domestic"? So no more abuse! Right? Isn't that how it works?

Really I'm blown away that a publisher that I've actually heard of (Verso) would be so stupid as to publish something politically expedient but utterly braindead like this drivel. Watch paint dry instead of reading this, you'll lose fewer brain cells from the fumes.

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still remember how happy I was when I first found out that blood is thicker than water was actually clipped from a bigger phrase and it's meaning reversed. The original was: the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. In a way, I think I've been a family abolitionist from the beginning, because how else to be as a person whose family has always felt the least safe place to be?

This little book was amazing. Of course, it is kind of preaching to the choir of me, but that has never been enough for me to really love a book. I do this one. It's putting together info and opinions that I've held for a while now, thoughts I've had about family structures, especially the nuclear option of family (when corporations start to brag about being like family, that's when you know it kinda sucks? Like, any of those corporations will not be liable for your student loans, for instance), but it also took me further than that and also has much better phrasing than me! It talks about how family is the privatizing of care and how care should be made public again (and how women perform a lot of caring labor in the home, which we already knew) and it should be shared.

The book also looks at the idea to maybe do reform of the family (and is against it anyway) and analyzes and critiques alternative family structures, including Black families, queer found / chosen families and Indigenous views on family. Lewis says they're not enough, basically, and I'd have to agree.

My conclusion after this is that we need a practice of care for everybody, not just for the ones you're born near or even choose to have near. This would have far-reaching implications and rippling: from the way we behave on social media to the way we are in traffic, to the kind of work we value (caring / care labor of all kinds is extremely devalued in the world we live in, for more see Bullshit Jobs). With a practice of care for everyone and everything, we would no longer have homeless people and no populations (like for instance, Palestinians) would be Othered and dehumanized.

Donna Haraway is quoted with this in the final chapter of the book: and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information— have been bloody enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more and less than kinship. (Though apparently Haraway has softened her stance on kinship and family in the past few years)

That is what I want as well!

Also, there were some really great historical discussions about family and also takes from the past (including Marx & Engels, Aleksandra Kollontai and Shulamith Firestone, but also an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, "All Happy Families"). My favorite thing ever is that the book connected deeply with my favorite scifi era - the 70s, of course. And through the things described here I gained a much deeper understanding of the context in which one of my favorite books, Woman on the Edge of Time, but also many others. Really great, provocative, satisfying read!

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy Lewis' writing, but don't know if it's really suited to manifesto-making - she's clearly not out to make converts (she assumes loads of knowledge on the reader's part - this doesn't bother me given google exists but can imagine a few people finding it irksome); the historical synopses here are fun and am sympathetic to the arguments and her frustration with their lazy dismissal on certain social networks, but it falls between programmatic and freeform; eventually couldn't help wanting something more untrammeled, like her mindboggling essays on 'Mumputz' and octopi.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s not that I didn’t agree with the arguments made in this, it’s that I just don’t think this was that well articulated and all of the arguments I did agree with didn’t come from Lewis, but came from Lewis’s summaries of other writer’s arguments I was already familiar with. I also appreciate the history portion of the book, but can’t help but think it wasn’t used rhetorically very well. I have other critiques but tbh they’re all very “I’m obviously in the middle of a PhD program and critiquing this as such” so I’ll just say that if you’re interested in the idea of family abolition, I would recommend the third chapter of this, that details its history. However, I would not overall recommend this and I really don’t think this was as strong of an intervention that the author maybe thinks it is.

[Columpio]

El libro es, como indica el subtítulo, un manifiesto. Es decir, que no aborda el tema con mucha rigurosidad ni profundidad. En ese sentido, puede servir para explicarle a tu prima a grandes rasgos de qué va el tema, pero no para perfilar la cuestión desde un punto de vista marxista. Es utópico en el sentido marxiano (negativo) del término, especialmente como carente de una estrategia plausible para acercar al presente el mundo que esboza. También tengo dudas sobre hasta qué punto es capaz de lograr el objetivo al que podría aspirar un texto de estas características: ser sugerente y movilizar el deseo, aunque sea en una dirección poco definida. El reto, sin duda, es grande, porque pocas instituciones sociales generan tanta adhesión (inconsciente y consciente) como la familia, y desafiar eso con contundencia y atractivo no es nada sencillo.

Una de las principales debilidades del manifiesto es que no enfrenta seriamente la cuestión de hasta qué punto la familia puede abolirse o no en el actual contexto capitalista. Es decir, no aborda hasta qué punto es necesario un vuelco de poder significativo en favor de la clase trabajadora (o, directamente, una revolución) para establecer las bases materiales que permitan dislocar dicha institución. Y esto, creo, invita a muchas confusiones peligrosas. ¿Acaso es compatible la abolición de la familia con la pervivencia del trabajo asalariado y del acceso mercantil a la vivienda, por ejemplo? Esto es algo que debería ponerse sobre la mesa, para no dedicarnos únicamente a construir castillos en el aire. Por otra parte, creo que el manifiesto corre el riesgo de romantizar otras formas de unión entre seres humanos que, sin ser de parentesco, fácilmente conllevan también relaciones de poder, conflictos, abusos y violencias, o que tienen dificultades para persistir en el tiempo. Me gustó más el texto de Sophie Lewis, de carácter más personal, sobre las momrades.

Más allá de las críticas, he hecho algunos subrayados de cosas interesantes, aprendido algún dato histórico y recogido recomendaciones bibliográficas. También me ha dado un par de cosas para pensar:

1) Hace un tiempo que ando medio obsesionada (para mal) con la contingencia de las relaciones de amistad. Debatiéndome entre si la solución está en aferrarse a aquellas que parecen tener fundamentos más sólidos que lo meramente circunstancial, o si de lo que se trata es de intentar desterrar la angustia que me despierta la contingencia y abrazar esta última. Sophie Lewis parece decantarse por la segunda opción: "Valoro que nuestro deseo casi universal de parentesco genere un deseo de cuidados, ni más, ni menos. No estoy criticando nuestro deseo colectivo de cuidados, critico lo insuficiente del vehículo que tenemos a nuestra disposición para la realización de ese deseo. (...) El parentesco funciona como un llamamiento lingüístico a algo no contingente que puede fundamentar una relación. Y yo pregunto: ¿podemos suspender esta fantasía de algo no contingente?, ¿podemos abandonarla?".

La cuestión, me parece, es que el parentesco no es únicamente un llamamiento lingüístico a una unión metafísica, sino que la praxis de la familia pasa por la durabilidad durante toda una vida de ciertos vínculos de corresponsabilidad (algo que raramente se produce con otro tipo de relaciones o sistemas de apoyo, y que por eso dota a la familia de la fiabilidad y seguridad que la gente busca en ella). Entiendo la voluntad de Sophie Lewis de alejarse de la dimensión forzosa, obligatoria, coactiva y a menudo violenta de las relaciones familiares. No obstante, no hace referencia a la necesidad de rehuir también el polo contrario si queremos plantear alternativas creíbles a la familia: la volatilidad, la ausencia de compromiso, etc. Fenómenos, por cierto, bastante generalizados en las sociedades del capitalismo tardío, y que tienen mucho que ver con la recuperación del imaginario familiar por parte no solo de la derecha, sino también de la izquierda.

Recuerdo a Nuria Alabao hablando de esto en una de las ediciones de la Escuela Feminista de Asturies, en la que dijo que aquellos grupos de convivencia o interdependencia elegidos que perduraban más eran los que habían contraído obligaciones económicas recíprocas de cierta magnitud. O sea, cooperativas o proyectos del estilo donde se han puesto en común propiedades, responsabilidades económicas, posibles pérdidas. Hablaba de cómo estos núcleos son más sólidos cuando no solo se pone el foco en los derechos que una tiene con respecto al grupo, sino también en los deberes u obligaciones respecto a él. Y es ahí cuando se manifiesta de nuevo el perfil no solo enriquecedor sino también demandante (y parcialmente no-elegido) de cualquier vínculo de reproducción social que se tome un poco en serio. Dicho de otra forma, la co-dependencia siempre conlleva una porción de obligación y de no-elección si aspira a ser funcional. Por tanto, las relaciones de apoyo mutuo
(1) si son demasiado laxas y pueden ser abandonadas en cualquier momento, no cumplen su cometido y obligan a la(s) persona(s) cuyas necesidades no son cubiertas a sostenerse en otro lugar. Esto generalmente pasa precisamente por el retorno a la familia nuclear, con sus sombras pero también con sus garantías.
(2) si están ancladas en una mutua dependencia material, no pueden ser abandonada con tanta facilidad, y esto también hace que puedan reproducirse dinámicas abusivas o coactivas, en algún sentido semejantes a las de la familia.

2) Bueno, que me enrollo, solo una última cosa. Frente a quienes plantean que podría existir una compatibilidad entre una familia robusta como sistema de apoyo mutuo y otras constelaciones sociales (que podrían, digamos, reforzarse entre sí), me ha parecido interesante una cita de The Anti-Social Family, que se opone por completo a esa tesis:

"El colectivismo de la familia privatizada tiende a debilitar la fuerza del colectivismo social más amplio (...) Cuanto más fuertes se espera que sean las familias, y cuanto mayor apoyo representan, más débiles se vuelven el resto de instituciones de apoyo que hay fuera de ella" (de McIntosh y Barrett en The Anti-Social Family). En una línea similar, decía Kollontai hace un siglo que "La moralidad burguesa lo exige todo para el ser querido. La moralidad del proletariado lo exige todo para el colectivo".

Por último, en parte al hilo de esa cita pero también de algunos fragmentos del libro, creo que a veces las apuestas por abolir la familia, difundir un amor rojo, o un amor-camaradería defienden la generalización del amor que sentimos por la gente más cercana a la clase en general. Y creo que sencillamente no es posible. El amor-amistad y el amor-solidaridad o amor-compañerismo son cosas distintas, que involucran dinámicas y responsabilidades de distinto tipo, aunque puedan tener cosas en común, y no pasa nada porque así sea. Hay que buscar formas de articular ambos y ampliar el segundo todo lo posible, pero no pretender que son exactamente lo mismo. Y bueno, ya es hora de hacer algo con el día que no sea escribir reseñas en goodreads a las once de la mañana como si no hubiera que levantar el país. Hale.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The family is the reason we are supposed to want to go to work, the reason we have to go to work, and the reason we *can* go to work. It is, at root, the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society. And because it feels synonymous with care, 'family' is every civic-minded individual's raison d'etre par excellence: an ostensibly non-individualist creed and unselfish principle to which one voluntarily signs up without thinking about it. What alternative could there be?" (5).

"...but the family is doing a bad job at care and we all deserve better. The family is getting in the way of alternatives" (5).

"Constant allusions to the hellworld of sheer exhaustion parents inhabit notwithstanding, their condition is sentimentalized to the nth degree: it is downright taboo to regret parenthood. All too seldom is parenthood identified as an absurdly unfair distribution of labor, and a despotic distribution of responsibility for and power over younger people. A distribution that could be changed.

Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition" (7).

"The family--predicated on the privatization of that which should be common, and on proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed--is a state institution, not a popular organism. It's at once a normative aspiration and a last resort: a blackmail passing itself off as fate; a shitty contract pretending to be a biological necessity" (9).

"Kollontai is, however, demanding something magnificent from the 'working women' addressed here. 'The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand,' she declares, 'until it extends to all the children of the great proletarian family.' Kollontai, in sum, envisions a planetary insurgency of *red love*, 'a social love: a love of many in many ways'" (50).

"McIntosh and Barrett's jointly authored book, *The Anti-Social Family*, mounted an enduringly powerful modern argument for the fundamental incompatibility of socialism and familism. 'Privatized family collectivism tends to sap the strength of wider social collectivism,' they explained painstakingly; 'the stronger and more supportive families are expected to be, the weaker the other supportive institutions outside of them become" (59).

"Under capitalism, Wages for Housework perceived, 'love' often serves the interests of the ruling class because it can be leveraged to depress wages (*surely you're not in this for the money*) or even withhold them altogether (*do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life*). The gendered injunction to care 'for love, not money' obscures the grinding, repetitive, invisible, energy-sapping, confining aspects of the work involved in making homes of any kind. The principle that some things 'should not be for sale' becomes a way to disguise the reality that, everywhere, on every street, they are--and to excuse underpaying those doing the selling" (68).

"The proposal, if you recall, is for 'revolutionary creche': an institution of social reproduction that would feed all, abolish deprivation, and undo the people's capitalism-induced mindset of desperation and scarcity" (72).

"Rather than coming about as the implementation of an anal plan for absolute harmony, O'Brien knows, the inevitably chaotic commune 'could arise spontaneously out of insurrection'" (74).

Donna Harraway on p. 83: "I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purpose, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an 'unfamiliar' unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction."

Instead of the extension literally or metaphorically of words and concepts like "kin" or "family" we instead "need concepts with more bite, concepts like 'comradeliness' or 'accomplice.' Or, if we want something intermediary, we could also consider resurrecting the defunct first half of the still-familiar Old English phrase 'kith and kin.' The concept of 'kith' denotes a form of dynamic relation between beings, a bond similar to 'kin,' but one whose ground is knowledge, practice, and place, rather than race, descent, and identity. (In her essay 'Make Kith, Not Kin!' McKenzie Wark speaks of kith's "nebulous senses of the friend, neighbor, local, and the customary.")" (85).

[Magdarine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Die deutsche Übersetzung war leider wirklich unerträglich zu lesen, was bei dem spannenden Thema sehr schade ist.

[Jon Coutts · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's fine to deconstruct and, instead of providing a hasty revision, to call for a collective re-envisioning instead. But unfortunately this book only deals in caricatures, skips massive swaths of history, and all but ignores viable alternatives. It's too bad, because there's something very compelling about imagining the expansive relativisation of "kin" to "kith".

Even Jesus seemed to think so. Seriously. I picked this book up because I'm a Christian studying the question of "estates" (or social orders, i.e., family), which the tradition has long had reason to relativize. However, apart from an unfootnoted allusion, this author appears to know nothing about that (or about many other social visions for that matter).

If a book is for the West, so be it. But even then, it's inexcusable even for a "potted history" of family abolitionism to fast forward from a short Plato citation (neverminding the Greco-Roman invention of Western household codes!) to an 18th century utopian philosopher in the blink of an eye.

I wasn't an unsympathetic reader - I'm actually quite interested in an expansion or relativization of the family to other kinds of "homes" or "care-communities" - but by the end I was repelled by this book's careless iconoclasm. Ironic for a supposed manifesto of "care".

Sadly, when it comes to imagining what would hold care-communities together, this book gives little more than platitudes and protest. Perhaps a common enemy is a good enough place to start: I'm on board with a sweeping critique of capitalism. But even that has to be fair to be useful. Cynicism will not magically transform into care.

Don't get me wrong: There's an important protest here. I ordered this for our library. The future of the category known as family is a fascinating and worthwhile conversation. It's just unfortunate that this book is more of an incendiary device than the manifesto it claims to be. Which is not nothing. But, funnily enough, "nothing" is literally all that it calls for.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

great little titillating primer, loved the use of the Hegelian “Aufhebung” as the root of “Abolition”:

“Aufhebung is sometimes translated as “positive supersession,” and intriguingly, this rather stiff bit of jargon unites the ideas of lifting up, destroying, preserving, and radically transforming, all at once.”

destruction, preservation, transformation, realization 🤟🏻

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off strong, with a riveting opening chapter that very persuasively lays out how the nuclear family is not the “natural” order of humanity but a capitalist construct rife with misery and inequality. Yes, this sounds (and is) radical, but you might be surprised how self-evidently obvious Lewis’s assertions read in this chapter. I was instantly compelled by this section, my mind alight, almost reeling from how much sense Lewis was making.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book falls into a familiar trap of leftist literature: wading so deep into prior theory (much of it based in extremely niche identity and sexual politics) that the work becomes hermetic. While the impulse to establish that the concept of family abolition is not new is a good one, surely there are better, more accessible ways to make that point. (Personally, I always prefer my political diatribes to be based on real-world historical events instead of previous theory; the actualized is more interesting than the abstract.)

Ultimately, I couldn’t shake that age-old question: for whom is this being written and whom is Lewis trying to convince? That first chapter makes a surprisingly strong case - even for the non-leftist, I think. But what follows is going to, at best, utterly alienate most readers who are not, at least to some degree, already on board with radicalism, which makes me question the ultimate goal of this book.

[Sabelka · Rating 1 out of 5]

Utterly disappointing. I was so ready to love this but I didn't. I found Lewis' argumentation quite shallow and even sloppy at times. Even though I agree with most of the ideas in this book, the proliferation of statements without any sort of subsequent analysis was irksome at best.

I mean, I was literally taken aback when I got to the final notes, because I thought I was still reading the introductory part of the text and the actual argumentation was yet to arrive!

[Karolina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Idea ciekawa (i w sporej mierze słuszna - ta nasza kolektywna obsesja do dzielenia społeczeństwa na nuklearne rodziny is fucked up), ale co za przeintelektualizowana i chaotyczna książka. Nie miałam już w pewnym momencie pojęcia, co autorka chciała powiedzieć, zaplątała się w mądrze brzmiących cytatach, random skojarzeniach i fancy słowach.

[Emily Carlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

not deep enough in the world of the ideas in this book to say anything substantive. what i will say is that i feel more open to and curious about family abolition after reading it than i did before. mission accomplished?

one little tidbit from the history section that stood out to me as particularly interesting was her argument that surviving AIDS set back the gay liberation movement / re-routed it to decidedly less radical ends than where it might have gone otherwise (+actually made nuclear family more central for everyone, not just normie gays):

“as Gay Liberation gained momentum, these ideas began to concretize. in 1972, a group of activists drove down from boston to the democratic national convention in miami and leafleted attendees with their ten demands, many of which (abolition of the police, an end to us imperialism, among others) remain familiar today. demand #6, however, is not something democrats nowadays hear very often:

‘rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. any legal rights parents have over ‘their’ children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing.’

….in the eighties, instead of standing up to the reagan era moral majority and anita bryant’s homophobic ‘save our children’ crusade, the bulk of the movement backed away from any connection with children and concentrated on surviving AIDS. the aim of exploding the nuclear family was replaced by a rights-only agenda that eventually gave renewed life to the nuclear family by reinvesting in its symbolic and practical necessity. then, in the wake of the avoidable mass hiv-induced death wreaked among queers by reagan’s plague, a new ‘homonormative’ gay subject emerged on the american scene-erotically continent, creditable, productive, potentially parental. today (exactly as with feminism) other than among the fringes of religious evangelism, the proposition that LGBTQ interests might threaten marriage or have anything to do with challenging the family is unknown. in some metropoles, the type of bourgeois homosexuality (“straight gayness”) identified as an enemy by Gay Libbers early on is now quasi-hegemonic. the gay family-which Gay Power hoped to render an oxymoron-has become a decisive factor in the family’s salvation.”

[Gabriela Oprea · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a family abolitionist myself, this book offered me lots of references of authors that I might want to read in order to see what the academic views are on this topic, since my abolitionism came intuitively to me more than anything else. However, what this book really lacks is an actual argument for family abolition. It does mention reasons at times, but the book should have been primarily about this. Maybe there are other texts about this, maybe even written by the same author, but at least an overview should have been offered. As it is, this books mostly reads as a history of the concept of family abolition in literature (and at times even feels like the author tries to justify her point of view by saying "look, Marx thought the same" and there are way better ways to support it) + some shorter chapters that are not very well structured and gave me the impression of tweet threads, because it felt like the author was rushing through ideas without showing any depth to any of them. These latter sections did indeed echo my own thoughts quite often, but I don't think this would apply to someone who's just being introduced to the concept.

What I got from this book is another list of books to read tho so I'm happy :)

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me parece una buena aproximación al tema, aunque obviamente me falta algo más de teoría o de contexto, para poder entender bien el término de abolir la familia, pero este manifiesto, es un buen inicio. Seguiré investigando.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was meant to be a clarification on her arguments in Full Surrogacy Now and criticisms she received, and in my view it utterly failed. It's badly organized, most of it is a historical review (itself presented too briefly to be useful), and if there are any actual arguments I failed to identify them. She contradicts herself and has so carefully preserved her ignorance on critical points of science and history that it can only be construed as willful blindness.

Lewis and I come from, so far as I can tell, very similar families. I understand why her background predisposes her to be critical of our definitions and models of family and kinship; mine does as well. But in pushing the argument to the point of wanting to abolish the very notions of family and kinship altogether and hand over all human care to the state -- any state? only a post-revolutionary communist state? this is unclear -- it is human exceptionalism in its worst form, completely anti-science, and not only doomed to fail but if it were to succeed it would be devastating. In fact it would recreate on a global scale the very family experiences that so traumatized the both of us: you get all of your material needs met, mostly, sort of, but only the material needs, with no love or bonding or close ties.

We have tried this, of course. Founding homes and orphanages throughout the past several centuries have run on these principles to devastating effect. The children die en masse, and those that survive are permanently disabled by their experiences. She does not mention these experiences even once. Is she aware of them, and leaving them out because she can't or won't confront the lessons of them, or has she remained willfully unaware? It is not clear.

She also writes as if humans are able to reinvent themselves at will, untethered to our biological and evolutionary history. Human families have been enormously various, and kinship has been defined in a multitude of ways, but all societies have had families and kin. And we are animals. We can't just jettison inconvenient bits of grey matter because they don't suit the needs of communist revolution. (Which also has never worked out well -- why is it we're meant to keep ignoring the lessons of history?)

Moreover, all animal species and as it turns out now plants as well have preferential behaviour towards kin and family. It doesn't look like ours, no. It is nearly infinite. But I've seen toad fathers saving their tadpole offspring, stuck in a shrinking puddle; read of crow parents caring for disabled offspring well past the normal fledging time; of course most pack and herd animals are based on biological relatedness; and even plants refrain from competing with their close relatives for root space underground and grow their leaves so as to avoid shading them above.

Lewis raises a number of excellent points about the harms of the family in 21st century capitalism. I share them. It is grindingly unfair to mothers and caregivers. It does give property rights over children, who can be pretty well damaged and abused at will, even with our child protection infrastructures. It does replicate class inequalities between generations, and can be a factory for turning human infants into productive employees in a dehumanizing machine. All of this is true and all of these problems need solving.

But she puts the problem exactly backwards: capitalism didn't invent family and kinship in order to create these systems to serve itself. It exploited a very deep, billions of years' deep, need and compulsion to serve itself, much like it exploits our need for food and shelter. We need to disentangle those things, desperately. But we can no more make humans not need kin or family than we can make them not need food or shelter. And if we tried, it would only be worse.

Not temporarily worse. Not worse-for-the-transition-period. Worse-forever worse.

Should the material needs of children be met by society, so that the burden on parents is more humane and children don't suffer or prosper based on their parents' class status? Yes, absolutely. Is the way to achieve this by removing children from their families and placing them in the care of the state? Dear god, no. We have tried this, Sophie. It led to a generation of deeply traumatized and cognitively disabled children every time.

Should children be able to leave a bad family where they are being abused? Should the tethers of family be slackened to allow this, and to provide for better options? Yes, absolutely. Should this be done by unilaterally destroying all family bonds for everyone everywhere forever?

What are you thinking? Don't you see that this just replicates your own traumatic childhood on a global scale -- that all children will then go through what you went through?

There are decades of psychological research showing very clearly that children NEED to be loved by people for who they are. They need to be seen as special. They need to be valued and cherished. What Kollantai (sp?) sees as a "joy" that parents can indulge in if they choose once the State takes over childrearing is a critical ingredient for human development and flourishing. It is not a frill!

Too many children don't receive it, and that needs to be fixed; but the fix isn't to make sure that NO ONE receives it.

Anyway.

I wanted to be engaged by good arguments and a more nuanced exploration of what family abolition is or might mean for those who have been on the pointy end of the worst parts of mandatory nuclear families. This was not it.

[eve massacre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am forever a fangirl for Sophie Lewis' political fervor and bite but for a manifesto it could do with a little less sounding like a bibliography and historical fundament-tracing. It is more a (strong!) defense and underpinning of what she has written about family abolition before than an actual manifesto. Sophie Lewis conjures up the countless ghosts of theories and activism on whose shoulders hers stands. It is a good primer for family abolition through the years with lots of sources to read on with a fiery note of inspiration/ass-kick to think about how to build a future with something better replacing family and capitalism.

[Cass Boe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was hoping the author would say more than they did about what the alternative looks like, but ultimately I guess it makes sense that something so removed from our current way of life is not even fully knowable! Amazing little book, extremely convincing and thought-provoking.

[Calderón · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una buena y sencilla entrada al tema: la abolición de la familia. Un texto muy breve y sencillo que sirve para ubicar de qué se habla cuando se aboga por abolir la familia y que aporta algunas respuestas iniciales y someras. Puede ser un libro muy útil para personas y militantes poco familiarizadas con la idea (yo). Además, el grueso del texto es un repaso por los autores y movimientos que han contenido esta propuesta en su actividad, lo que también resulta de gran utilidad para la formación política. A pesar de ello, tengo algunos problemas con el libro.

Aunque se presente como un texto marxista, estoy bastante dispuesto a defender que no lo es, al menos no en términos ortodoxos. No sé si se debe a las inclinaciones ideológicas y políticas de la autora o a la exigencia que impone escribir sobre un tema de esta complejidad en las pocas páginas que lo hace (139 concretamente), pero las conclusiones de la exposición parecen emerger – simplemente aparecen –, no emanan del análisis marxista. A pesar de su intención manifiesta de evitar “romantizar” identidades disidentes para elaborar su posición, la autora acaba cayendo en premisas morales o, al menos, injustificadas. Cuando argumenta por qué ninguna forma de familia (las queer o las racializadas) debe ser “salvadas”de la abolición, plantea las diferencias que caracterizan a las familias negras constituidas tras la esclavitud. En este punto es en el que más extraño la falta de análisis materialista, parecería que las características “positivas” que se describen serían fruto de buenas voluntades y no de la supresión de las división sexual del trabajo bajo la esclavitud a fuerza de explotar hasta la extenuación de igual forma a “hombres” y “mujeres” negros y de destruir planificádamente cualquier forma de hogar u organización de la reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo. También se aprecia esta carencia – en este caso de análisis económico – en el balance del movimiento del Salario para el Trabajo Doméstico. En ambos casos encuentro más acertadas las conclusiones de Angela Davis.
Por último en esta línea, creo que concebirse como feminista marxista – indistintamente de cuál sirva de sustantivo y cuál de adjetivo – más que una cuestión puramente terminológica es una cuestión de principios; me da la sensación de que la autora no concibe el comunismo como una cosmovisión omniabarcante sino como una posibilidad teórica más. Así, entre otras cosas, creo que en su repaso histórico erra las críticas a las posiciones comunistas.

Otra cuestión que rechazo – y a pesar de que podría parecer únicamenteformal, creo que va bastante más allá – es que sea un texto esencialmente académico; si de por si el libro es corto, eliminando las citas a las tropecientas académicas (marxistas) feministas se quedaría en un panfleto. No es esta una crítica “antiteoricista”, sino una “anti-academicista”. Creo que la presencia de la mayoría de estas referencias se deben a la tradición estilística de los círculos académicos más que a una voluntad de desarrollo teórico políticamente útil.
Cada vez estoy más convencido de que el acceso a una formación política potente se ve obstaculizada por el desarrollo académico de la doctrina marxista. Las re-elaboraciones que la academia lanza sobre la teoría marxista creo que – salvo contadas excepciones – sirven principalmente a hacer más farragoso el campo de estudio. Para más señas basta mencionar el marxismo occidental. La necesidad estratégica y organizativa de conocimiento impone unos cauces que distan mucho de las vías cíclicas e infructuosas del avance académico del conocimiento. En el libro se ve que la vía que ha seguido la autora para llegar a sus conclusiones es la segunda.

En definitiva, mi principal punto de desencuentro político con el libro es estratégico; ¿abolición de la familia? Por supuesto, como objetivo integrado en un programa comunista por la revolución; cualquier objetivo que deba ser acometido por la revolución y se considere sin tener a ésta como horizonte está condenado a la irrelevancia histórica; y nuestra clase no merece tal fracaso.

“haciéndose pasar por una elección, creación y deseo de los individuos, la familia es un método para organizar, por poco dinero, la reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo de la nación”
“Y aun así, a pesar de que la familia como forma de gobierno es un hecho económico brutal, la familia como experiencia vivida, en cierta medida, sigue siendo algo ficticio”.

[mims ₊ ⊹]

this was a book for my philosophy class 🙌 the concept is quite interesting and i found myself constantly applying it to our growing and changing world :) 🌟

[Sophie Aber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas about how capitalism and patriarchy benefit from the nuclear family structure but not sure about it all

Kind of acts as a review of other people’s thoughts about motherhood/family/labor and assumes that u know those ideas already which was hard

Some things I wanna remember:

“ 20th century welfare officers’ “man in the house rule” which denied benefits to any mother caught “living”, even just for a couple of hours, with a member of the opposite sex. If you, a Black woman, had a “man in the house of any kind,” the law declared, then that man, not the state, ought to be the one paying your child support”

“The stronger and more supportive families are expected to be, the weaker the other supportive institutions outside of them become”

“Free universal 24/7 community run child care was a middle of the road feminist demand.” (in the 60s ?)

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adding the reading I did for my final seminar paper 😤😤 cos it was good!!!

[anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

was nodding my head at the premise and the argument (and the quotes were all great additions!) but a lot of this book's points fell flat in a lot of places, some contradictions/weird logic and overly libshart language.. don't know that i would recommend but glad i read it

[νίκη κωνσταντίνου-σγουρού]

μετάφραση: φανή αραμπατζίδου, κική τσαπακίδου / ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες

*άφθονο, αναγκαίο και συνηθισμένο - όσο το να πίνεις ένα ποτήρι νερό: από την κολοντάι στη haraway, σε κάτι περισσότερο ή λιγότερο από τη συγγένεια

[Annie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book with a very open mindset, as this is a subject I had only a superficial knowledge of and wanted to learn more about. I was actually prepared to be convinced by the author's thesis.

I was surprisingly met with a text that felt hostile and that treated me not like an equal, but rather like a child who doesn't know any better. Lewis is condescending, self-important and haughty—or maybe she isn't (I don't actually know her), but that's how she writes. You may think it unfair to call out the author directly in this review, but Lewis herself has no such scruple in her work. The book is filled with phrases like "I feel," "I've done" or "you probably think"; the text is practically framed as an argument between the author and the reader.

I went into this book open-minded, and in turn, I expected to be engaged with in good faith. I was quickly disillusioned, however. No later than on page 15, I encountered this sentence:

"It matters that admitting how disappointing family life is—how irksome, unjust and exhausting at best, and crushingly traumatic at worst ..."

"At best," really? "At best?" It's one thing to argue that the familial social structure is deeply flawed and doesn't work for many—it's another thing entirely to pretend that it works for no one at all and that it's a source of disappointment for every single individual who walks this Earth. So as early as chapter 1, it became hard to take this book seriously. And I really wanted to, in the beginning. But I do not trust blindly.

I once tweeted "English speakers use French the same way French speakers use Latin." It's especially true with this book. It's filled with French words and expressions, most of which in possession of a perfectly serviceable English equivalent.

"At present, it is standard among practically all communities to fête the family as a bastion of relative safety ..."

What exactly is the word "fête" accomplishing here that could not be achieved with "celebrate"? You may view this as a small issue, or even a non-issue, but I'm a language professional. Words and languages matter to me, a lot. The relationship between English and French is at the very core of my career. So to me, this is important. Using a word from another language can have several meanings, depending on the word itself, the text, and the very nature and social standing of the borrowed language. Here, it can only mean one thing: pretentiousness.

Abolish the Family contains many statements, but also a curious lack of explanations or reasoning. I can't count how many times I read a statement by the author that was interesting and that piqued my curiosity, only for her to change the subject in the very next sentence. There are so many topics in this book that deserve—and need—to be expanded upon and to be justified, not only with sources in the Notes section, but with a real analysis by the author in the actual text. This book seems to say so much: it's filled with quotes, references, names and suggestions for further reading. But in reality, it says very little.

This "manifesto" utterly failed to convince me of its thesis, and like I said, I started reading it all ready to be convinced. So in my eyes, it amounts to a complete failure.

[Mitchel Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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!

[AJ Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting exploration of the issues with the family structure, especially for parenting. I like Becky Chambers imagining of the Aeulons professional child rearing and trained fathers in the Wayfarer series even more for how it used fiction to imagine what more is possible, but this is an important and interesting book and I look forward to tomorrow’s book club discussion.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant little book. It’s a shame so many reviewers seem to misunderstand the concept of a “manifesto” and/or the ideas in this book. I am excited to read some of the works discussed in this book.