Text me when you're done: Abolish the Family

In 1920, Soviet thinker and writer Alexandra Kollontai published a pamphlet titled Communism and the Family. In the pamphlet, she puts forth a utopian vision of a world in which childcare is a collective responsibility. Addressing “working women,” she argues that love and care must not be limited to the home or the family, but instead must be “a social love: a love of many in many ways.”

Kollontai's proposals for sexual liberation, her demands for a society where housing, food, and parenting are abundant and shared, are among those featured in Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation by Sophie Lewis. The book, published in 2022,  traces the histories of queers, parents, welfare recipients, houseless people, feminist organizers, and visionaries of all kinds who have practiced forms of social support and care outside the framework of the nuclear family. Family abolitionists have long recognized that the work of making and sustaining life requires communal structures. Drawing on this rich tradition, Lewis explains what so many of us know intuitively: that society’s emphasis on the family as the sole source of love and resources is alienating, exhausting, and, frankly, unnecessary. Mainstream media coverage about the rising popularity of non-monogamy and co-living spaces would have you believe that collectively-oriented living is a new revelation. Lewis and the many voices that fill Abolish the Family remind us that, if anything, individualizing our care is the recent invention, created for the benefit of the boss. 

Earlier this year, there was a copy of Abolish the Family that lived on my boyfriend’s nightstand. Recently, at a state forest campground, one of my best friends took out a copy of Abolish the Family and started reading it at our picnic table. Of course, I feel extremely pleased when people I love read the books I recommend. Beyond that, though, I see this collective reading embodying a joint commitment to caring for one another in more rigorous and enduring ways. This shared reading is also a study of movement history, a curiosity about lineages which might guide us away from the false promises of capitalist kinship. I also have loved ones who don’t read books regularly, or who haven’t yet read Abolish the Family. I consider myself in communal study of family abolition with them, too—a learning that takes place in the kitchen; over Facetime; while lingering at the front door; in the beds we share or the beds we call each other from when we’re too depressed or sick to leave the house; at meetings; at the grocery store; in the park; in the street; in yearslong text message threads; while tending grief; while complaining about our jobs; while confronting shame; while paying bills. My enthusiasm for Abolish the Family isn’t about reifying the book as an object, or suggesting that Lewis’s work is the only place to engage with these concepts. The book is one deeply-researched vehicle for questions that preoccupy me and my loved ones constantly: What are the fighting techniques honed by those who came before us? What would it take to accurately value and compensate the domestic labors performed by us and the many others whose work makes our lives possible? In a time of economic precarity, how can we create households and relational agreements that facilitate our collective thriving?

Abolish the Family features many movements across history, but one that particularly interested me for its breadth and precision was the organizing done in the 1960s and ’70s by welfare recipients in the U.S. Through the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), these activists, many of them Black women, fought for more accessible food stamp programs and an expansion of social support programs more generally. 

The federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program had stringent guidelines about who qualified for welfare, with rules designed to police poor Black women’s everyday lives and relations. The program also sought to preserve an underpaid labor force; in some states, benefits were cut off during farming seasons in order to force Black parents to work agricultural jobs. A welfare applicant could be deemed ineligible if she had sex outside of marriage, if there was an unemployed “able-bodied” man in her household, or if her home was otherwise determined unsuitable for children.

In a 1972 op-ed for Ms. magazine, the organizer Johnnie Tillmon wrote about her experiences navigating the welfare system and explained the urgent need for change. Describing herself as a “middle-aged, poor, fat, Black woman on welfare,” Tillmon made connections between the oppressive nature of the welfare system and the oppression of heterosexual marriage. Both systems denied women bodily autonomy, an issue that was even more urgent for poor Black women who relied on government assistance. Describing the expectations imposed on welfare recipients, Tillmon wrote, “You give up your own body. It’s a condition of aid.” 

Like Kollontai, the NWRO activists fought for a world where people of all ages could have their basic needs met, even if they didn’t live in a heterosexual household with two working adults. It’s a simple objective, but one which shakes the very foundations of capitalist logic. As Lewis writes, “The family is an ideology of work.” The structure of the storybook nuclear family—with a male breadwinner, a domestic-laboring mother, and two children—is an efficient economic unit for reproducing wage workers. People whose lives fall outside this structure, who nurture and care for each other in other formations, are deemed wayward and undeserving. 

However, even the “wayward” are still forced to power the state’s economies of exploitation. While the AFDC was originally formed to support single mothers in staying home with their kids, the program increasingly focused on finding employment for such mothers. Beginning in the 1960s, there was a spate of welfare-to-work programs which incentivized welfare recipients to accept jobs, even if those jobs did not pay enough for them to support their children.

Lewis writes that in 1970, members of the NWRO occupied the federal office for Health, Education, and Welfare. Sitting in a politician’s chair, NWRO leader Beulah Sanders demanded a Universal Basic Income and an end to U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia. It is this moment which illustrates for me the power and meaning of family abolition, a politics that insists on making clear the connections between the ideology of the nuclear family and the practices of extraction and militarism that power the global economy. Speaking from a (literal) seat of the federal government, Sanders didn’t simply reference her organization’s calls for a stronger welfare system. She appealed to a broader internationalist movement against U.S. imperialism. She demanded that everyone in the country should have the resources they needed to survive. She embodied the practice of a social love across individual households and borders.

I see people like Sanders and Tillmon as models for the kinds of relations I hope to build in my own life. Central to the work of the NWRO and related movements is an intergenerational ethic that insists on the inherent worthiness  of children, elders, parents, disabled people, and all those who are devalued under capitalism and seen as a drain on government resources. Guided by the family abolitionists Lewis writes about, and the many others who have instructed me throughout time and space, I believe we deserve more than a love that is privatized, willfully set apart from the injustices that shape us. I want a love where we practice how to live, not only in a partnership but also in responsibility to a neighborhood, a city, an ecology, a movement, a history.

Growing up, I dreamed of a romance that would deliver me from abuse and self-hatred. I collected vintage photos of lesbian couples, close-read relationship advice columns on Autostraddle.com, and fantasized about having smoldering love affairs like the queer artists and writers of Jazz Age Paris. As I grew older, I realized that while nothing can single handedly deliver me from trauma, relationships could provide some paths forward—just not in the ways I once thought. I realized that the reason I’m alive and able to love is because of the relational work and care of multitudes: the friends who have checked in on me when I was in crisis, the janitorial and sanitation workers who maintain the buildings and cities I have lived in, the agricultural laborers who harvest the food that makes its way to my table, the underpaid teachers and counselors who have given freely of their personal time, the roommates who have cooked for me when I couldn’t. Some of this work is forced by economic circumstance and some of it is shared willingly and abundantly, but all of it has sustained me, and I am indebted to these labors. My Venus is in Scorpio, which means I crush hard, love deeply and devotedly, and have a difficult time letting go. I doubt this will change anytime soon, but I am no longer interested solely in whether the people who make my heart beat faster will profess their love for me. I want to know whether, in being together, we might cultivate a love that brings us into deeper relation with the world.