Feminist calls for “abolishing the family” are having a moment. The idea raises some sharp questions about how capitalism organizes care and reproductive labor, but it also carries some big blind spots. Too often, its advocates lean on a kind of functionalism — reducing the family to an ideological machine for producing compliant workers and citizens — while overlooking the messier realities of living with others: love, dependency, generosity.
It also downplays something more basic: how family life requires people to be in contact with those outside their comfort zones, across generations, and beyond ideological “safe spaces.” Absent abuse or other noxious pathologies, that heterogeneity — however uncomfortable — looks a lot more like the real world than the “chosen families” celebrated by abolitionists, and is often more instructive and healthier. Abolitionists will say such encounters only enforce harmful social norms, disregarding the fact that this is also how people learn to live with difference.
From there, the critique often drifts into utopianism. Abolishing the family is imagined to overturn not only social hierarchies, but to sweep away life’s ordinary struggles — offering a hopeful vision, reminiscent of Charles Fourier, the nineteenth-century utopian socialist who thought that reorganizing society would guarantee true love and even turn the oceans into lemonade.
Still, family abolitionists don’t just target the role of the nuclear family in reproducing capitalism — they also highlight the sheer arbitrariness of being born into one household rather than another. Life under capitalism is a lottery: some draw parents who are able and willing to care for them, while others get neglect, abuse, or crushing…
Auteur: Evelina Johansson Wilén
