Common critiques

Me too! Calm down. I'll talk you through it.

It's less "get rid of all families; families are bad" and more "get rid of the conditions that make you need families; care for who you want to care for, in families or other ways of relating." Family abolition does not seek to separate loved ones, or remove one's means of support, or anything of the like.

Family abolitionists take care to explain that they're using the definition of abolish that doesn't just mean "destroy" but also "recreate, retrieve, preserve, transform, and reinvent." The love, support, affection that the luckiest among us experience in families is the very thing that family abolition seeks to break out of the family and weave into the social fabric of communal life.

Sophie Lewis actually names the first chapter of their book "But I Love My Family!" and remarks: "Loving the people in your family, mind you, is not at odds with a commitment to family abolition. Quite the reverse. I will hazard a 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."
Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, page 2

Families fulfill a crucial role in everyday survival under capitalism, so family abolitionists are careful to explain how the family and capitalism are co-constituted -- you can only dismantle capitalism simultaneous with the unmaking/remaking of the family. Family abolition is understood to be a revolutionary project.

M.E. O'Brien theorizes that one path to family abolition is that in anti-capitalist, anti-imperial insurrection, the communal life of the protest kitchens and occupations and this practice of insurgent social reproduction (reproducing the protest from day to day), is the basis for universalized care and new social relations outside the nuclear family.

Sophie Lewis is careful to warn that abolishing the family without abolishing capitalism would result in "nightmares."

Do you actually like capitalism? If so, maybe consider all the harms it causes and go read some David Graeber or Grapes of Wrath or something. This is really embarrassing for you.

No? Okay. You're thinking of socialist dictatorships maybe? Family abolition tends to reject state solutions and the state altogether, so this isn't closely related to Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology, though they both count Marx as an origin.

Can you imagine what life is like under state-less communism? Left communism isn't as well known and well understood but tends to incorporate Marxism with anarchist theory. Author M.E. O'Brien favors a tendency called "communization theory" which is developed by the collective producing the Endnotes journal and others.

Do you actually prefer authoritarians? Good grief. How embarrassing. Go read The Jakarta Method or watch V for Vendetta or something about it.

No? Okay. You're worried maybe about hoodlums / antifa supersoldiers / militant protest / black bloc / outside agitators / riot-starting anarchists? This is a gross misperception of anarchists fueled by a media serving capital's interests in a narrative of property destruction and violence when in reality violence in protests is due to cops rioting.

Maybe you've only seen "anarchy" described by libertarians? They have a selfish, self-interested ideology based on egoism, primitive accumulation, and the exploitation of human beings. They are free-market capitalists and cannot be trusted.

The anarchy of: mutual-aid networks, child liberation, protest camps, and alternative living experiments is the anarchy that family abolition embraces.

Kathi Weeks (see panel discussion) identifies one misunderstanding of family abolition in the trend of feminist theory to focus on subjects, or specific experiences of being in families. This framing would see family abolition as a personal mandate to embody the virtues of the theory and live family abolition. This is not, overall, a subjective theory. Family abolition is an analysis of systems and relationships; a structural critique and revolutionary horizon. The dismantling, retrieval, and recreation of social relations from capitalist to communist social reproduction is a massive, communal undertaking and not a personal crusade or obligation.

Fair.

Just kidding! Ha ha!

The history of change within the family is the history of struggling workers. What could be more important to workers than the prosperity of their own families? Families are why we go to work and endure the drudgery of labor.

Yes, it's a structual critique!