Do revolutionaries call for the abolition of the family?

Alexandra Kollontai defended ‘the joys of parenthood’ (Pic: Wikimedia Commons)

Calls to abolish the family are having a moment. Books by Sophie Lewis, M E O’Brien, Alva Gotby and Kathi Weeks have raised the demand.

Revolutionaries share many ideas with family abolitionists. Family abolition is not about breaking up individual families.

It is about a radical transformation of our lives.

We agree that there is nothing natural about the nuclear family.

And that the family is the material basis of women’s oppression.

But the family is deeply contradictory. It is not just oppressive.

It is also a place where people seek, and some find, loving and fulfilling relationships.

For many people, it is family that makes life worth living.

So calls to abolish the family start from the wrong place.

Marxists have long understood the drudgery of domestic labour—but they haven’t simply demanded family abolition.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels mocked the “radicals” who “flared up” at the idea of abolishing the family.

But their argument was that the middle class family was already based on private gain rather than love.

And the working class family had been destroyed by industrialisation with “children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour”.

Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai is often claimed as a family abolitionist. But her argument was nuanced.

After the Russian revolution of 1917, she developed new ways for the workers’ state to take over the duties of parenthood—nurseries, creches, canteens and launderettes.

But she also argued that, “the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those capable of appreciating them”.

She envisaged parental love expanding to incorporate all children and possessive love developing into a “social love—a love of many in many ways”.

But this could only happen after workers had overthrown the whole system.

There are two key theoretical elements to the demand for family abolition.

The family is very important for capitalism—but it is the reproduction of the labour force which is fundamental to the system’s existence, not the family itself.

The central dynamic is the accumulation of profits through exploitation. This shapes and reshapes the family.

Capitalism has always denied the right to a family to enslaved and colonised people, women working long hours and migrant workers.

Activities previously carried out within the home are now outsourced to the market.

The nuclear family does not cause capitalism—it is a product of capitalism.

Secondly, the family abolitionists emphasise the ideological role of the family as the place where children are socialised into conformity.

The family, Lewis argues, produces privatised, petit bourgeois subjects incapable of imagining collective forms of living not based on kinship.

But people are not simply duped into conformity.

Capitalism requires us to submit to what Marx called, “The dull compulsion of economic relations which completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist.”

Abolishing the family will not transform this subjection.

O’Brien writes that the family must be abolished to “free and unleash what is good about it and to generalise that into the social body as a whole”.

This would require the forced redistribution of wealth from private corporations to democratic control. And that means class struggle.

Working class people have always had to fight for a family life. Many people become socialists to fight for the people they love.

In that fight, the question of collective provision of child care rises organically as women join demonstrations, picket lines and political organisations.

Rather than abolishing the family, we need to demand more resources for welfare.

And we need a vision of how to transcend the family with socialised, universal forms of care.