[“For Marx and Engels, the call to abolish the family stems from their rejection of the bourgeois family form, which is bound up with private property and men’s claim to ownership over their wives. Families are more than carriers of normative values. Families are work relations, and in particular a central site of emotional reproduction. The family is a privatised arrangement of work, care, and economic distribution, shored up by ideological and legal means. Furthermore, families function to structure kinship and lines of inheritance, or lack thereof – forms of (dis)possession that are tied to the reproduction of classed and racial difference. Sophie Lewis writes that ‘ “family” refers to “blood” ideology and organized care scarcity: a kind of anti-queerness machine for shoring up race/class and producing binary-gendered workers’. The family is tied up with the production of gender, the exclusion of queerness, and the continued reproduction of overlapping racial and classed dynamics. Family abolition is a necessary part of the abolition of private property.
In a similar vein, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Kade Doyle Griffiths argue that since the family is an economic unit, critiquing the patriarchal or heteronormative values of family relationships is insufficient. They write that ‘not many will accept their children losing social advantages which they possess. The absence of alternative institutions of obligation ensures that this is felt as a binding burden: beyond the family, there are merely individuals.’ The challenge of the abolitionist project is to think of how the work that families do can be transformed and diffused rather than just abandoned, and how we can create other forms of bonds so that we can be more than ‘merely individuals’. We cannot replace family units with detached individuals, as individuals, both adults and children, cannot meet many of their own needs. In Gleeson and Griffiths’s words, ‘A purely negative effort to destroy the family would simply result in starving infants’, and, I would add, many lonely and sick adults.
Contrary to some articulations of family abolition, I argue that it cannot just mean the expansion of existing kinship models. Because the family is a fundamentally exclusionary social form, and one based on a zero-sum model of emotional bonds, we cannot just expect to abolish the family by including more people in our intimate sphere while leaving existing family relationships intact. Family abolition does not mean inviting more people over for family dinner. Because current and dominant models of kinship are based on scarcity and property, family abolition means that how we relate to our biological kin would change fundamentally, to the point where these relations would no longer be recognisable to us. They would become less emotionally charged and fraught.
The demand for family abolition must be articulated according to the specific form the family has taken in different historical phases. Whereas for Marx and Engels, ‘the family’ meant the emerging hegemony of bourgeois family values, the feminist writings of the sixties and seventies target the twentieth-century male-breadwinner model of a working-class family. As M. E. O’Brien shows, this family model was won through extensive working-class struggle, and therefore family abolitionists had to position themselves against the grain of the mainstream workers’ movement. Shifting models of (re) production have further unravelled the already limited access to the kinds of protection and emotional security that the mid-century white nuclear family model offered.
Today, a heightened dependence on commodified reproductive services indicates that the family has become increasingly precarious – something that parts of the left consider a worrying sign of neoliberalism’s impact on communities and human relationality. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s later writings, for example, articulate a socialist position that defends an expanded notion of the family, which now includes single parents and homosexual couples raising children. This new and inclusive notion of family, the argument goes, must be protected against the neoliberal commodification of human relationships. According to this logic, the family is under threat, and we need to find solutions that would protect family life. But as Sarah Brouillette points out, ‘The family has not been destroyed enough.’ A socialist politics that seeks to defend the family against the onslaught of neoliberal individualism has missed the fact that family values and familial labour are in fact essential conditions for the existence of such individualism.
What can account for the persistence of nuclear family models after the end of the family wage and the breadwinner model? One reason the family remains a hegemonic form, even as it has become more precarious and flexible than it was in the post-war period, is that we have failed to construct viable alternatives. The nuclear family appears increasingly unstable, as indicated by higher divorce rates and seemingly more inclusive norms surrounding family arrangements. This has led to a discourse of the family being in crisis. But no new model has taken its place, and access to care and resources often remains tied to membership in a family. People keep imagining familial relations as the source of the good life, despite how inadequate they are in terms of meeting the emotional and physical needs of most people.
In undoing the privatisation of family, we must also abolish the privatisation of feeling. The family under capitalism functions as a nexus of privatised emotional bonds. Emotional labour has to be refused for a feminist movement to be able to mobilise emotion in an emancipatory way. This refusal means doing emotion differently. I am not arguing against emotional care for other people. Rather, I want to articulate a politics in which we struggle against emotional reproduction as we know it – that is, tied up with forms of sociality and ideology that continually recreate and privilege privatised social bonds and hierarchically constituted subjectivities. Abolishing the family and gender involves the ungendering of emotion. It also involves moving away from niceness as the dominant good feeling, and accepting or even cultivating bad feeling. As a dominant family value of the bourgeoisie, niceness has a tendency to obscure social hierarchy, exploitation, and antagonisms. Niceness has a propensity to travel upwards in the social hierarchy, accumulating at the top and associating those at the bottom with bad feeling and emotional stigma. In order to abolish emotional labour and bourgeois family values, niceness has to be deprivileged as a socially desirable feeling. This might mean that we all have to live with some emotional discomfort, rather than allowing comfort to adhere to the most privileged. It would mean refusing the good life as we know it – a life of good jobs, home ownership, and proprietarian family relationships.”]
alva gotby, from they call it love: the politics of emotional life, 2023
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