How come people have started talking about “family abolition” again in the 21st century?

That’s a great question, because only ten years ago, nobody was really doing it. “The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” wrote D. K. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” It was Juliana and Danyal Kade’s timely intervention—presented as “a feminist analysis of the 21st-century family and a communist proposal for its abolition”—that slowly but surely inaugurated a resurgence of interest in family abolition among anticapitalist movements in the West.

Have activists in abolitionist circles been receptive?

Yes and no! Of course, for those to whom the concept is totally new and alien, the phrase “family abolition” seems ridiculous at best—and terrifying at worst! What on earth, we want to know, could “abolition” mean in the context of care and the family? The task has therefore been to unpack and spread some political education around the interconnectedness of all abolitionisms. It is surprisingly easy to have really rich conversations with abolitionists by drilling down into what the uniqueness of this word “abolish” actually is. What makes it distinct from “end” or “outlaw” or “eliminate”? What I say to this is that the idea of abolition was imagined, from the beginning, as a multi-stranded and open-ended continuous revolutionary process. It’s really quite a strange and beautiful bit of grassroots militant philosophy, one that comes from the thought and praxis of self-liberating enslaved people and then inspired the work of communist theorists all over the world.

OK, then, what does “abolish” mean?

For Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth century, abolition (or, in German, “Aufhebung”) referred to humanity’s unfolding journey of “return” to itself. Intriguingly, it combined elements of

destruction, transformation, and even actualization (that last part is what startles us). Yes, actualization! What Marx suggested was that to abolish the present class-bound state of things

meant: to destroy it, yes, but to destroy it by transforming it in such a way as to—paradoxically—realize its buried, secret promise. For example: The process of abolition of the police is the project of delivering true justice. The process of abolishing slavery is the earth-wide project of inventing something worthy of the name “human” together. And by the same token, for family abolitionists, the task is to make the private nuclear household unnecessary—obsolete—by universalizing care.

To abolish something means … making good on its hidden promise?

Yes, I know: it seems counterintuitive to say that family abolitionism entails realizing for the first time the family’s otherwise impossible promise, that everyone shall be mothered and held. But this is how abolitionism thinks about history—about how historical change occurs. You might think it is a heady abstract matter, but it’s mostly not, and momentum in this imaginative

revival of abolitionist dreaming has been gathering ever since Griffiths and Gleeson broached the topic in 2015. In the years that followed, a plethora of new voices joined the chorus, including

Lola Olufemi, Katie Gibson, Lily Sánchez, Gina Kim, and Devon Price.

Let’s go back to the story of how the revival happened.

In 2018, Tiffany Lethabo King looked at some mostly-forgotten archives of revolutionary Black womanist calls to “overthrow” the family circa 1970, while simultaneously reflecting on her

profound love for her “own extended Black diasporic family” as a source of commitment to the project of “addressing [the family’s] limitations—even its elimination” in the future. M. E. O’Brien published her landmark abolitionist text on the history of the capitalist family, “To Abolish the Family,” the following year. Also in 2019, I published Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, my book thinking about pregnancy (“gestational labor”) as a jumping-off point for the abolition of capitalist parenthood.

All these writings helped raise family abolition’s public profile in the past decade. But perhaps most of all, it was the lockdowns of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic that underlined the urgency of a politics of care-deprivatization. Pandemic life gave people plenty of new opportunities to relate to the expansive, care-communizational love-politics at the heart of the terrifying (to many) slogan “abolish the family.” So, in 2022, a slim, crimson-covered volume I playfully refer to as my “little red book”—Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation—further tried to reduce the terror involved, destigmatizing “abolitionism” in the context of kinship relationships. Remembering the forgotten half of the old phrase “kith and kin” (where “kith” refers to the people who we think of as part of “us” because of a shared hometown, cause, or project), Abolish the Family vindicates the reproductive principles of “kith” and “comradeliness” in the world, over and above what we still all too often nationalistically imagine as the priority of marriage and of “blood.”

A whole a new wave of family abolitionist thinkers!

Yes. “Family abolition is back,” declared the political economist Alexander Stoffel recently. It’s important to note, I think, that the emphasis on abolitionism’s world-making—not just world-unmaking—character was insistent from the outset. “Rather than orienting toward this question of abolition in negational terms—withdrawing, undoing, subtracting,” the West Coast feminist theorist Madeline Lane-McKinley asked, “how might alternatives to The Family be made imaginable and practicable as a political project of dismantling capitalism’s care crisis?” Similarly, over in the UK, the radical tenant activist Alva Gotby theorized abolition of the family in terms of “positive abolition” starting six or seven years ago. In American magazines such as Commune and Pinko, a number of non-academic contributions by M. E. O’Brien have sketched out what the beginnings of the abolition of the family might look like. O’Brien’s major book is Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, published in 2023, which I passionately recommend everyone read. My Abolish the Family book, published shortly beforehand, aims to introduce the topic to a wider audience, presenting a “potted history” of the demand, and asking what it would mean to entertain the possibility of replacing the family with “nothing”—in other words, with the abundance of truly universal nurturance, in a care commune.

The amazing thing is that O’Brien also works in fiction form. Together with the Palestinian feminist Eman Abdelhadi, she has co-authored a novel that takes place in a post-capitalist version of our world—it’s called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 and includes interviews with people who have participated in the defeat

of adult supremacy, the reinvention of reproductive practices, the reparation of ecological systems, the war against various fascist counterrevolutionary forces, and the liberation of Palestine, among other things. I’m nervous and excited because I don’t usually write fiction, but I have a fiction contribution of my own coming out in one of the anthologies that Eman and M.E.

are editing as follow-ups to Everything for Everyone. These speculative fiction collaborations are happening in large part by popular demand, because the project was so wildly loved by readers.

People got in touch from everywhere in the world wanting to know more about what happens when people start abolishing the state, the market, empire, and the family.

Do you think there’s anything about the current moment that has made family abolitionism appealing to people, besides COVID-19?

The timing and circumstances of family abolitionism’s comeback are interesting. Western households today are less and less likely to resemble the idealized Fordist male-breadwinner model of the postwar period. (The core capitalist family now is certainly a dual-wage

household.) This means that a much greater proportion of reproductive labor than ever before takes waged and commodified forms such as food delivery or cleaning services. Also, many

nations have engineered a dramatic increase in nonfamilial modes of lifemaking among their populations for the management of so-called surplus populations in prisons and detention

centers. We’re living in increasingly dystopian times! Yet, again, what Griffiths and Gleeson provocatively named was that the left has simply accepted the tactical limits of this grim

situation—imagining that the protection or reform or improvement or even restoration of the family system is the best that we could hope for. Leftists have not only assumed that the family

is a fact of nature—especially ever since the global neoliberal counterrevolution of the late 1970s—but have even actively championed it, not least via the movement for gay marriage rights. Family values during this period have more often been imagined as a bulwark against the White-supremacist cisgender state rather than an extension of it.

What family abolitionists say is that the case for family abolition is strengthened, not weakened, by the possibility that the family is “in crisis.” Capitalism’s protracted crises—since the 1970s—have dramatically shrunk and undermined the functions of the bourgeois private household. But does that mean that we shouldn’t kick our opponent when they are already on the floor? Of course not! After all, the family remains the site of most proletarians’ self-reproduction, despite everything. It persists for the majority of people as the simultaneously aspirational, impossible, and austere container for life’s most important activites—namely, the love, care, and sex we depend upon (and live for) yet do not count as “value” for capital. Plausibly, if humanity ever stood a chance of “positively superseding” (i.e., abolishing) it, the time is now—in this moment when the family system’s organized scarcity is most visible.

Capitalism has shrunk middle- and working-class family time and parceled up, for monetization, what was previously a lump of unwaged labor called wifehood. But, to borrow Stoffel’s two-pronged retort to an often-voiced objection to family-critical endeavors: “Does this mean that capitalism is already abolishing the family? No. Does it mean that capitalism is abolishing the

bourgeois family? Also no.” On the contrary, capitalism is quite capable of undermining those very features of society on which it most depends. Our task, lest we forget, is not the business of undermining, but the abundance-oriented project of abolition.

Say more about that.

Capitalism cannot “abolish” anything on its own because abolitional transformation is, by definition, the work of struggles militating in and against the capitalist present while looking

beyond it. I’ve already alluded to the fact that the word “abolition” is the subject of a confounding amount of semiconscious disagreement. Colloquially, it is sometimes deployed as a synonym of something akin to elimination by legal fiat or even just erosion, when nothing could be further from the meaning of the abolitionist tradition, whose revolutionary theory of historic change posits that something is truly abolished when—and only when—the world has changed such that the thing has been rendered socially impossible. The goal, according to the abolition philosopher-militant Ruth Wilson Gilmore, was never merely a lack of slavery, but a new society. This commitment demands, counterintuitively, that abolitionists begin the analysis by taking seriously the positive ideals that are supposedly being met by the institution we wish to

positively supersede. To positively supersede the family requires us to think about the buried kernel of utopian desire that familial reproductive practices contain, for only then might refugees from the family launch the revolution in reproduction that could make the family obsolete.

You are not proposing “family abolition” as a policy platform, but as a movement horizon.

Right. My argument here is that expressions of utopian desire for family “abolition,” specifically, are still valuable as contributions to the wider abolition of the present state of things, despite this not being a “strategic” policy proposal, and despite many comrades’ “realist” objections to—and repudiations of—their recklessness and lack of specificity. Because what the (unreasonable) abolitionist critique insists, correctly, is that to vest our collective wish for uncoerced togetherness in the family form is no less quixotic than vesting our wish for safety in the armedwing of the state.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean that the wishes, in themselves, are somehow invalid; quite the contrary. Rather, it is to dare imagine that a care-communizing process of abolition, alone, could satisfactorily address the fact that families—and indeed cops, in some places—are the only thing that many of us have by way of nurture and safety. By no means does abolitionism paint people as fools for cleaving to these institutions in the hopes that they will shield us. The hope in play, precisely, is our concern.

You’re saying that abolition, not the family, takes people’s needs seriously.

Right. In the same way the prison industrial complex promises humanity justice, the family promises us care and love. Now, it is counterproductive to pretend that either institution delivers

nothing of those promises. While “it may appear distasteful to compare a family to a prison,” Stoffel writes, “one of the most important lessons from family abolition is that care and love are

themselves powerful instruments of coercion and exploitation . . . all carceral institutions are marked by the co-existence of life-supporting and life-denying forces.” The point is to connect

the dots: Abolitionisms—against prisons, the police, and the family—are all substantially meaningless when divorced from anticapitalism—or divorced from one another. Hence Gilmore famously sums up the supersession of the present state of things (at the hands of a transformed,

insurgent, communist world we can glimpse here and there in the cracks of things) in the following way: we must “change one thing—everything.” But sometimes I think the best way to

explain “changing everything” is actually a different metaphor: turning things inside out. Because that’s how the buried core of things, the real human need that capitalist systems bank

on, gets flipped on its head.

For example?

In Family Abolition, theorizing the communization of human life, O’Brien searches for the “positive potential” in each of capitalism’s social institutions, which would be “preserved,” even

as the institution’s “present form is destroyed”:

O’Brien rightly implies that a form of direct consensus-based democracy must replace the adult-supremacy of the intergenerational household, thereby giving substance to the ideal of non-domination that is latent in most positive invocations of “care.” We can unpack further the family’s “positive potential” with reference to the claims that are often made in defense of the

family, about the imagined characteristics of familial relationality: “organic,” “selfless,” “uncalculated,” and so on. The grain of truth at the heart of this dangerously sentimental assessment is what renders it so counterrevolutionary: Relative to the wage and the state, the economic compulsions of the familial sphere can, after all, often feel muted and more palatable to many people. Nonetheless, leftists with a passing acquaintance with anarchism, queer liberationism, Marxism, socialism, or feminism are usually able to understand the fantasy of family life qua haven or sanctuary away from market logics to be just that—a fantasy.

The family is not outside of capitalism, sure. Is it nonetheless still better to be economical coerced by “one’s own flesh and blood” than by a boss or by city hall, though? Is the family still “a haven in a heartless world,” in relative terms?

For some people, in a limited and relative sense, yes, absolutely. But things do not have to be this way. We forget, in fact, that they weren’t always this way. There was nothing organic or purely

voluntary, for example, about the historic process of housewifization that gave rise to the private nuclear domestic model that is so widely mistaken for “natural” today. The question of real freedom—real organicity in human relating—is the abolitionist question. Rather than settle for the partial, nonuniversal, unguaranteed, relative, and foreshortened “selflessness” of the family, a care-communizational approach takes the human need and desire for unconditional or noneconomic love seriously enough to interrogate the material roots of human unfreedom. It is the refusal to sugarcoat the realization, articulated by Engels and Marx, that the absence of private property would make far freer relationships possible.

Let’s end with a vision of how relationships between humans could be more free.

I’ll give you two. First, the utopianist anthropologist Judy Thorne has speculated about a society in which everyone is nurtured by a city-wide universal care cooperative (UCC), “whose purview is as comprehensive as people’s needs.” What I find so interesting about her vision is that she is imagining the abolition of the family as the realization—paradoxically—of the family’s promise. For instance, the role of “mother” has been decoupled from gender, and de-individualized, allowing its power to brilliantly shine forth. Thorne writes in the second person, in a direct address to you, placing you within this future, as though she is reminding you that you feel comfortable living there:

Isn’t that compelling? Thorne, I feel, brings necessary elements of any truly universal communization of care together, including disability-related priorities from crip feminism and

anti-ageist queer of color critique. She envisions a system of “mother agreement” whereby several individuals (“more than three, usually fewer than eight, at least in early years”) are

assigned to the same child. And whereas the capitalist family had promised us that we would all be profoundly known and cherished without recourse to the value-form, in Thorne’s future society it is the universal care collective that demonstrates what attempting to deliver on that promise could actually look like.

Dr Sophie Lewis (she/they) is an ex-academic writer based in Philadelphia, working on a book for Penguin: The Liberation of Children (forthcoming 2027) as well as an essay collection for Haymarket: Femmephilia (2026). She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019), Abolish the Family (Verso, 2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket, 2025). Lewis teaches short courses online for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and publishes essays everywhere from the LRB to n+1.