
What’s left of the bourgeois family? On family abolition
Alex Stoffel •The call to abolish the family is back, sparking fierce debate on the left. As capitalism reshapes how we live and relate, Alex Stoffel asks if breaking free from the family’s grip can open the door to true liberation.
Family abolition is back. The demand — central to radical feminist, queer, and other counter-cultural formations of the late 60s and early 70s — was excised from virtually all left agendas after the defeat of the New Left. It has made a striking comeback in recent years, drawing inspiration from recent anti-carceral abolitionist struggles against police, prisons, and borders, as well as from a revival in Marxist and Marxist feminist thought.
Family abolition has predictably become a flashpoint on the left. It’s not for nothing that family abolition has been referred to as the most infamous proposal of both feminism and communism. A key defense of family abolition against the hand-wringing of certain contingents on the left has involved the retort that Marx and Engels themselves had called for the abolition of the family in The Communist Manifesto. The manifesto states:
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Although the impulse behind this ‘gotcha’ is understandable as an attempt to legitimise the program of family abolition, it’s actually not very helpful. Aside from the fact that today’s family abolitionists are not particularly indebted to Marx and Engels’ analysis of the family, I want to argue that abolitionist perspectives that place a premium on the traditional bourgeois family form — defined by a male breadwinner, an unwaged housewife, homeownership, normative gender and sexuality, monogamy, legitimate procreation, and nuclearity — are especially inadequate to the present.
It is striking that the demand for family abolition is spreading at the same time that the bourgeois family is so rapidly contracting. While the decades leading up to the 1960s witnessed the dramatic extension of bourgeois family norms beyond the upper classes, the past half century has seen its dissolution among the lower and middle classes of capitalist society. To be sure, even at its peak in the postwar period, only a minority of civil society could access and afford bourgeois nuclear family life. Today, however, only a very privileged few are able to conform to this ‘traditional’ family model. Proletarians are actually more likely to live in reproductive units that resemble the fragmented and extended family relations of the 19th century than they are to reproduce themselves through the bourgeois domesticity of the 1960s.
If the bourgeois family is indeed in decline, why has family abolition gathered steam now? Psychoanalysis teaches us that things often become present only as a perceived loss. This may be one explanation for the widespread obsession with representations of the ‘traditional’ family (think anything from TikTok tradwives to reality romance shows to the ‘what it means to be human’ montage scene in Barbie). Certainly it has become an occasion for a renewed reckoning with the structural role of the bourgeois family in times of capitalist crisis. But first, let’s briefly look back at the history of radical struggles against the family.
When the bourgeois family became an object of critique in the 1970s, its critics were placed in a direct antagonism with the socialist struggles, trade union efforts, and social democratic reform campaigns of the preceding decades. As M.E. O’Brien has so thoroughly detailed in her Endnotes essay ‘To Abolish the Family’, the workers’ movement from the 1880s onwards fought for a family wage that would secure for workers access to the bourgeois family model. The extension and naturalisation of this family ideal over the course of the century, which was won in part through these campaigns, achieved a new regime of respectability for working classes and led to a monumental improvement in their standard of living, moral legitimacy, and political integration within the state. It also consolidated an affirmative white working-class identity that cohered around respectable family life and distinguished itself from the lumpenproletarian, gender deviants, and racialised proletarians whom the normative prescriptions of the bourgeois family excluded.
The family abolitionists of this era (most notably, radicals from the gay and women’s liberation movements) based their critique of the family on the insights of Marxist feminism. That is, they sought to expose the family as a site where countless activities that were necessary for the functioning of capitalism were performed by women and children in the home without pay. This critique recasts the family from a natural site of love, leisure, and respectability into an ideological institution marked by violence and exploitation. It demystified the family by showing that many unwaged household activities (often referred to as ‘reproductive labour’), such as caring, cleaning, and childrearing, were central to the daily and intergenerational reproduction of the capitalist workforce. And because these unwaged activities were not mediated by the impersonal forces of the market (meaning, essentially, that housewives were not formally employed by their husbands), women and children within the home remained directly dependent on a male wage labourer. The subordination of women and children to the personal domination of a male breadwinner made the home a site of systematic gendered and sexual violence and abuse.
The purpose of rooting a critique of the family in the exploitation of women’s unpaid reproductive labour was to shift focus from private property and inheritance (which had been the linchpin of Engels’ critique of the bourgeois family) to exploitation and the gendered division of labour. This shift from property to labour was better able to account for the persistence of male supremacy within proletarian families, where there is often no inheritance to transmit. In practice, however, these Marxist feminists continued to take aim at those white, bourgeois families that could afford to keep an unwaged woman in the home to perform reproductive duties. Many manifestos, such as Third World Gay Revolution’s ‘Sixteen Point Program’, explicitly called for the abolition of the bourgeois family. After all, it was the consolidation of this family model’s dominance in the 20th century that made its abolition appear most pressing.
The Black feminist movement of the following decade radicalised the critique of the bourgeois family. The Black feminists of the seventies understood that the bourgeois family had historically been used as a barometer to pathologise both colonised populations abroad and indigenous, immigrant, enslaved, and other racialised proletarians at home. The foundations of the bourgeois family they revealed lay in the history of white supremacy and empire building. Proletarians had long been denied property, rights, citizenship, and status on the basis of their estrangement from bourgeois domesticity. And as the bourgeois family model was gradually extended to subordinated groups in the 20th century, it also enforced new regimes of respectability that disciplined and excluded non-heteronormative and racialised proletarians. For Black feminists, then, it was the bourgeois family that represented a key instrument of racist pathologisation and repression.
This brief history reveals the revolutionary potential of family abolition. The frame of family abolition has the potential to unify diverse struggles because it bypasses unhelpful debates about class reductionism versus identity politics. For the feminist movement, family abolition clarifies that it is private property and the gendered division of labour (not, say, sexual objectification) that lies at the heart of women’s domination. For the queer and trans movement, family abolition correctly identifies the private home as the primary site for heteronormative socialisation and discipline. For anti-racists and anti-imperialists, family abolition dismantles racist ideologies of biological difference by diagnosing the naturalising function of the family whereby racial subjects appear as naturally born into families rather than produced through racist and colonial social systems. And for communists, family abolition promises to overcome the perhaps most damaging blind spot in Marx’s critique of political economy: the failure to examine the role of women’s unwaged activities in the reproduction of capitalism as a whole.
These traditions emerged when the bourgeois model of the family was at its peak. But much has changed since the 1970s. The bourgeois family ideal today looks more like a dual-wage earner household that employs an immigrant domestic worker to alleviate family members from onerous household tasks. Marxist feminist critiques of a white, bourgeois family grounded in an analytical distinction between productive labour (carried out by the breadwinner in a factory for a wage) and reproductive labour (carried out by the housewife in the home without a wage) are no longer very helpful. They no longer even make much sense conceptually. First, in today’s post-industrial service economies, most so-called reproductive labour is indistinguishable from productive labour. Cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, elderly care, and so on — all of these needs are increasingly met through the market. We buy these services on the market, just like any other commodity, and the low-waged workers who produce them generate surplus value for the private enterprises that sell those services. Second, much ‘reproductive’ labour does not occur in the home. While some upper-class families may employ a private chef, people are more and more likely to order a takeaway to save time from cooking at home. Third, the ‘reproductive’ labour that does occur in the home is increasingly waged, and, as Black feminists have been pointing out for decades, paying for housework has hardly been emancipatory for its mostly feminised and racialised operatives. The economic freedom to gain employment in casualised, low-wage service work is experienced by many women today as exactly the type of freedom that it is: the freedom to be exploited by capital.
If the demand to abolish the family once meant to abolish the private site of unpaid reproductive labour, it is no longer as relevant as it once was. With the commodification of many household tasks, the bourgeois family has become a site of much paid productive labour while many members of proletarian families now perform so-called reproductive labour in the public sphere, cleaning office buildings, cooking at take-out restaurants, working in private nurseries, etc. In this context, the categorical distinction between a strike of productive workers and reproductive workers (the latter often referred to as a ‘women’s strike’) is increasingly unclear. The withdrawal of labour power in the form of a formal workers’ strike would directly disrupt families, the site of much productive labour. That is, capital is not only vulnerable to strikes that happen in the public sphere, since capital has penetrated into the private sphere of the family through the commodification of so-called reproductive labour.
Does this mean that capitalism is already abolishing the family? No. Does it mean that capitalism is abolishing the bourgeois family? Also no. The bourgeois family still exists, although it has contracted with the more general contraction of the middle classes in post-industrial states around the world. And proletarians of course still live in families as well. All proletarians have to organise their survival and reproduction outside the wage relation. And although we have seen a dramatic increase in carceral institutions, like prisons and detention centers, to organise the reproduction of growing surplus populations, the most common reproductive unit for proletarians continues to be the family.
The decline of the bourgeois family in recent decades has opened up possibilities for the emergence of new proletarian family and kinship relations that allow for greater forms of gender freedom and sexual fluidity within civil society. But at the same time that the heteronorms of the bourgeois family have lost their hegemonic status across the popular classes of capitalist society, these developments have also accelerated the subjection of everyone to the domination of capital; what we often call neoliberal precarity. Christopher Chitty captured this trend in Sexual Hegemony when he wrote: ‘Although this ongoing crisis of modern sexual categories may initially have produced a utopian sense that societies were moving beyond rigid binary systems, such celebrations of intransitivity have missed the ways in which gender and sexual flexibility have also been forced upon subjects as a consequence of precarity.’
Families are less and less likely to look like the ‘traditional’ heteronormative bourgeois family of the post-war period. Instead, we should think of the family more capaciously as a set of interpersonal relationships of dependency, naturalised through biogenetic ties, that are characterised by a mixture of consent and coercion. The family is where most proletarians find the relationships required to survive. It is where they find love, sex, and the many forms of care we depend upon — arguably the activities that are most valuable for human life yet do not count as ‘valuable’ for capital because they are difficult to objectify as ‘wealth’ in the terms of capitalist value generation. The bourgeois family is only one way of organising the life-sustaining activities that — despite being successfully commodified to some degree under neoliberalism — are still repeatedly excluded from the immediate circuits of capital.
This analysis points us towards the necessity for a program of family abolition where ‘the family’ is understood not as a literal home marked by the highly particular characteristics of the white, bourgeois nuclear household of postwar industrial societies but rather as the result of a set of undesirable social relations. That is, family abolition must be understood as the demand to abolish the forces that drive proletarians into interpersonal relations of dependency in order to secure their survival. It is to ensure that our access to all the things needed to pursue the full possibilities of human life is never threatened simply because we might choose to leave the immediate interpersonal relationships we are born into.
To abolish the family, in this sense, is to abolish the capitalist present. The movements of capital continuously expel life-sustaining activities from the socialised labour that is the substance of capitalist wealth. Capital knows that it will always be able to find a pool of available workers to exploit, given that surplus populations ‘set free’ from the means of production and subsistence all seek the ‘privilege’ of finding a capitalist to consume their labour power. Capital therefore does not have to involve itself directly in their reproduction. It is also indifferent to the forms that the reproduction of the workforce takes. Those reproductive activities that take place outside its immediate circuits do not produce surplus value and are therefore, from the standpoint of capital, ‘valueless.’ It is precisely this tendency to exclude non-value-producing yet essential activities from its formal circuits that forces people into relationships of dependency to guarantee their survival. Capital’s generation of surplus populations in our period of ever-deepening crisis has therefore taken the form of a generalised crisis of social reproduction. One solution to this crisis has been the states’ expansion of prison systems to absorb surplus populations. Another has been increasingly strained family structures.
The demand for family abolition is therefore necessarily anti-capitalist. It is also part of a broader program of anti-carceral politics. Understanding the family not as a literal bricks-and-mortar suburban home but rather as the product of specific social relations allows us to draw continuities between various carceral sites of social reproduction. Whilst it may appear distasteful to compare a family to a prison, considering that families are often the only place where proletarians are able to find support, love, and care, it nonetheless remains true that families and prisons are two of the most dangerous institutions in society. While not every family is a site of violence and abuse, the fact that proletarians are forced into families in order to secure the necessities of life or any durable sense of well-being means that the institution of the family systematically permits and facilitates violence on an overwhelming scale. Indeed, one of the most important lessons from family abolition is that care and love are themselves powerful instruments of coercion and exploitation.
Comfort and control, love and violence, intimacy and coercion: all carceral institutions are marked by the co-existence of life-supporting and life-denying forces. Whether you are an immigrant who is made dependent on relatives for residency and the right to work through family reunification laws, or an elderly person experiencing abuse in a nursing home, or an incarcerated person, the reproduction of your life is dictated by the deep entanglements of care and confinement that define carceral reproductive structures. Abolitionism is therefore not about the enumeration of individual institutions to be destroyed, but about the revolutionary overhaul of the capitalist social relations of which these are expressions. It directs itself against the carceral structures that emerge as a solution to the crisis of social reproduction when capital is unable to absorb growing surplus populations into socialised labour. Abolitionism names, in other words, revolutionary socialism in times of capitalist crisis.
1 comment
Sigh…I’ve been through this before. As a young anarchist, ‘smash patriarchy, abolish the family!’ had a great ring to it. Fine by me. But five years later, when my partner and I had two daughters, aged 1 and three, was I the patriarch to be overthrown? My partner and I were quite happy with our heterosexuality. And also fine with the homosexuality or bisexuality of others. But we were dirt poor, working at less than minimum wage for the ‘left and underground press’, defending the Panthers and organizing GIs against the war. How could we manage and stay left? We made a few projects–a babysitting coop among 100 families like us. We used tickets, each worth 30 minutes, and a phone list. It worked fairly well. We got together with a church and 20 families and organized a day-care coop, where we each had to put in half a day a week. I did most of it, since my partner had other burdens I couldn’t deal with. But we were still crushed by being too poor and too left (no cushy NGO jobs). Our marriage failed for an odd reason. I was supposedly famous on the left, and she said she was sick of being introduced as ‘So-and-so’s wife. I tried to tell people not to do it, but to no avail. I’m sure I committed other sins, all of the ‘vnial’ variety that we might have worked out in better circumstances. We both went on to attempting other ‘proletarian families’without much long-term luck. Decades later, the one that finally worked was because all the children had grown up and had gone off to form successful families oftheir own, amazingly. They had better incomes, which helped. And now the older ‘we’ both had ‘families’ as two elderly couples living alone. My bottom line? We can fight for reforms to make family life more democratic–our babysitting coop and child care coop as small examples–but abolish the family? Forget it. Drop it. All you will do is alienate and piss off 90% of the working class that will think, at best, that you’re from another planet. They usually like their families, and struggle daily to see them survive and thrive.