“Abolish the family” – On the unfairness of kinship practices

I’ve been meaning to read “Abolish the family” by Sophie Lewis for quite a while now, and finally, the situation presented itself when I proposed we should do it together with my best friend*, C., who has been working as a nanny for years in the US. It all started with her distress at how the nuclear family makes little sense, producing babies you then pay other people to care for, people who end up spending more time with “your” kids than you do. I told her, hey, do you know there’s a book that calls for its abolition? And she was just delighted at its title, imagining angry Republicans losing their minds over it. So off we went into this short but incisive manifesto, whose strength, I believe, is energizing you to think about what it might actually mean to abolish the family. 

The book contains four chapters, the first being an introduction to the idea in a snarky I-know-what-you’re-gonna-disagree tone; the second an exposition of “which family” (and conclusion that yes, all families, not just the white hetero nuclear one); the third, a history of different people or movements who touched on the idea in various ways and lastly, a sort of conclusion or opening towards something that might be… but, we are not sure yet what it is going to be? I mean, I am one of those people who agrees that we cannot know how things might look like otherwise, but I am also one of those people who like to believe that imagining it might help to bring us there. And this book, while it puts you on a promising path of what abolishing the family might mean, doesn’t leave you with a lot of answers. Sure, that can be an advantage, but it is less so when even the working definition of “family” fluctuates widely and is rarely pin-pointed to something particular, as if it functions across time and space with no specificity, as if it means the same as kinship, and as if it holds all the bad things one could imagine, being a “disciplinary, scarcity-based trauma-machine” (p. 4). But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, why are we abolishing the family? 

The critique of the family as been made in the past in a socialist feminist tradition, showing how the privatized household benefits capitalist production, reproducing the labour force both in terms of doing unpaid domestic labour, and of creating labourers (to be noted that Lewis’ first book, which I am yet to read, is called Full Surrogacy Now, and explores this and other related matters). The family, as Lewis puts it, is a form of “privatization of that which should be common” (p. 9), a state institution that not only privatizes care, but also constructs kinship-as-property relationships, having children belong to their parents in a “lottery” sort of system and constructing parenthood “as an absurdly unfair distribution of labor, and a despotic distribution of responsibility for and power over younger people” (p. 6, italics mine, to mark what I believe she means to be the core features of the family to be abolished).

Lewis goes to great lengths to make the family seem strange and unnatural by narrating it from an anthropologically alien perspective – and in part, I believe she succeeds: 

…you, too, can imagine something better than the lottery that drops a neonate arbitrarily among one or two or three or four individuals (of a particular class) and keeps her there for the best part of two decades without her consent, making her wholly beholden to them for her physical survival, legal existence, and economic identity, and forcing her to be the reason they give away their lives in work. (p. 18).

As a child, who has not wondered why they were given certain parents, and not others? And maybe, our parents have wondered the same about us. As someone interested in child liberation, I see the point Lewis makes here. The problem, as it has come up in discussion with people I consider family, is that children are born to specific people, and shouldn’t be torn away from them. And of course, that is NOT what Lewis is proposing at all, but the claim that blood must not matter at all should come with accounting for children’s desires, especially adopted children. People who have undergone such separations, whether they have “won the lottery” (a recurring discourse for children adopted to richer parents) or not, might have different opinions about what abolishing the family might mean, while also agreeing with parts of it – especially adoption abolitionists (“the world I fight for is one where adoption isn’t necessary. As an abolitionist, the world I envision is one where our communities and the state provide the resources that all families need not just to survive, but to thrive” writes Nicole Eigbrett in Prismreports, 2022). 

Coming from an Eastern European country, it is easy to argue that children (and parents) might gain a lot from more-than-parental care. In Romania, many of the families I know are non-nuclear, and many of the people from my generation have spent enormous amounts of time in the care of their grandparents, aunts or uncles. But for Lewis, it is not the nuclear family that needs dismantling, but all families, not a specific form of kinship, but, it seems, all forms of kinship. I find that hard to grasp, as families are always-already in the making, not just “given”, and they become so very often when people share intimacy, care, and yes, even households. Would a collective housing situation, as proposed by some of the family abolitionists, not lead to a sort of “big family” feel? Maybe, if it is of the dimensions Charles Fourier dreams of: buildings named “phalansteries” numbering 1,600 people. But certainly, 1.600 people will not be caring for one child. It will, most likely, be a group of specific, recurring people – whether we are imagining an anarchist commune or a socialist organization, children benefit from knowing the adults in their lives, and vice-versa. This is where I think Lewis’ project becomes too slippery to stand on its own: by opening up the definition of family and claiming to abolish all of it, it becomes unclear what is abolished, and what remains afterwards.

Other traditions and thinkers Lewis draws on for her point on family abolition are queer indigenous perspectives of collective children-raising and Black non-nuclear kinning and “polymaternalism”; the communist manifesto with its proposal for a revolutionary crèche and social education (rather than familial); Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas on how the communist society should take care of every child (and willing parents should not be prevented to help); Shulamith Firestone’s advocation of childbearing and childrearing to be done by society, women and men both; gay and lesbian and children’s liberationists who see the weakness of the couple form and call for collective living; the Wages for Housework or Wages against Housework (as Silvia Federici puts it) movement and finally twenty-first-century Trans Marxism. Each gives a glimpse of what life under other forms of care might look like, dreaming about what kind of infrastructure (such as kitchenless houses) might better allow us to forge comradely relationships, and responsibilities, to each other. 

What I find, unfortunately, touched upon too little, is the humanist dimension of the family, which is mentioned in the second chapter, but never adequately explored. Lewis draws on the early, cyborg, Donna Haraway, criticizing her later theorizing (which includes her multispecies work and her “make kin, not babies” slogan), all the while maintaining that only by abolishing the family will “our species (…) truly prosper”. I think it’s a missed opportunity to explore more-than-human ways of relating, to mount a (possibly) even stronger argument against the family, and to criticize the prevailing forces of anthroparchy. But here the question returns, which family? A family that is not properly defined cannot be properly dismantled. 

I would have loved for this book to be a little longer – as a close friend of mine mentioned, for example, there is almost no mention of queer-anarchist & polyamorous modern-day practices which are, as we speak, actively troubling the traditional family. But such is the point of manifestos, I suppose – to poke at you and get an idea in your head, not give you everything on a three course silver platter. What Lewis proposes instead, “comradeliness” or “accomplice”, are useful concepts for political revolution, upheaval and solidarity, but less so for our daily, mundane lives, in which we put up with each other, care and clean after each other, and have to survive capitalism, together. But I’m ready to be convinced otherwise… I mean, that’s the whole point – why claim we can rely on “the family” and “kin” to survive, when only some of us have it, and others don’t? It’s precisely that what we must abolish, the unfairness of it all. And yet, are our relationships at fault, or the socio-economic systems that strain them? 

The imagination of family abolition, with its criticism of the unfairness nested within parenthood and its unequal distribution of resources, both within the household and within society, is tantalizing. Maybe not entirely convincing, but the questions it opens should be further explored.

References:

Lewis, Sophie. Abolish the family: A manifesto for care and liberation. London; New York: Verso, 2022.

Eigbrett, Nicole.  “Adoption abolition envisions a world without ‘organized abandonment’”, Prismreports, 2022 https://prismreports.org/2022/12/01/adoption-abolition-organized-abandonment/. 

* While I do not believe in categorizing friends hierarchically, as the title ”best friend” seems to suggest, I understand it in my life as a particular, unique category for this one relationship – a name we agreed upon when we were teenagers, and which still stands.