In recent years, there’s been growing interest on the Left in analyzing the role of the family and reproductive labor under capitalism. Much of this work has been carried out under the banner of social reproduction theory, which, drawing on feminist Marxism from the 1970s, emphasizes what Susan Ferguson calls “the wider social reproduction of the system” — that is, the daily and generational labor performed in households (but also in schools, hospitals, prisons, and beyond). This approach examines not only how the family survives under capitalism but also how it helps perpetuate it. While social reproduction theory critiques the role of the family under capitalism, it rarely questions the family’s continued existence as such. That more radical perspective, however, has been revived by a growing circle of feminist thinkers — including Alva Gotby, Sophie Lewis, Helen Hester, M. E. O’Brien, Melinda Cooper, and Kathi Weeks — who advocate for what is now known as feminist family abolitionism. These thinkers don’t seek to reform the family; they want to do away with it altogether.

The case for family abolition rests on two central claims. First, the family functions as a key site of capitalist social reproduction, maintaining labor power while relegating care to the private sphere. Second, it operates as a locus of hierarchy, discipline, and coercion — structured by gender, race, and — often — violence. In its place, abolitionist theorists imagine a world where care is decoupled from kinship, organized collectively, and liberated from patriarchal and capitalist imperatives. It’s surely an ambitious vision. But does it hold?

In the following — and more fully in my forthcoming book (La Fabrique, 2026) — I argue that it does not. Family abolitionism offers a valuable critique of some of the political valorization of the nuclear family and the burdens of care placed upon it and rightly calls for a more collective and liberatory approach to care. But it also overstates the family’s functional necessity to capitalism and the role it plays as a mediator of capitalist power. Moreover, the ambivalent character of familial life is largely absent from the abolitionist’s account. Let’s take these points in turn.