The Limits of Family Abolition
Family abolitionists see the family as the beating heart of capitalist social reproduction. But this view of the family misunderstands both the structure of capitalist reproduction and the complexity of how people survive within it.
A family of five watches a television program featuring a trained elephant while sitting together in their living room, circa 1948. (Harold M. Lambert / Getty Images)
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.
Capitalism Doesn’t Require the Family
For feminist family abolitionists, the family is required as a key site in the reproduction of labor power. Without the unpaid domestic labor, care work, and emotional support carried out in households, the daily and generational renewal of workers would not be possible. But this raises a crucial question: Does capitalism require that these activities be carried out within the nuclear family? The answer, I argue, is no.
As social reproduction theory has shown, social reproduction extends well beyond the household. Schools, neighborhoods, community organizations, and even state institutions participate in sustaining and replenishing labor power. The nuclear family is just one node in a broader reproductive infrastructure — and it is neither universal nor indispensable to capitalism’s functioning. In fact, contemporary capitalism is marked, in many ways, by a destabilization of the nuclear family as the default unit of care. In Love and Gold, Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the formation of global care chains, in which migrant women from the Global South provide domestic labor in wealthier households — often leaving their own children behind. This phenomenon reflects the structural contradictions produced by capitalist labor markets: as more women in the Global North enter waged work, the demand for care work is offloaded onto poorer women, often racialized and transnational.
What this reveals is not that capitalism defends the family, but that it exploits care wherever it can find it. Reproductive labor remains essential to the system, but its form is increasingly flexible. Capitalism does not need the nuclear family; it needs reproduction. The danger, then, in centering the family too narrowly in our critiques is that we risk mistaking the form for the function. Reproduction is the deeper category — one that takes multiple institutional shapes and can be reorganized without challenging its fundamental role in sustaining capitalist relations. While collective forms of care may indeed ease the burdens of privatized domestic labor and open space for more liberatory social arrangements, they are not inherently emancipatory. Communal care, too, can be appropriated and instrumentalized by capital. What we need is hence a broader confrontation with how capitalism organizes and exploits life-making itself, rather than fixating on one of the institutions in which this reproduction takes place.
Big Brother Isn’t Your Dad
Contemporary family abolitionists contend that capitalism reproduces itself not only materially, but ideologically — through the family. It is within the family, they argue, that subjects are formed who internalize capitalist norms: individualistic, property-minded psyches that fragment class solidarity and inhibit collective resistance. On this view, capitalism endures not merely through economic structures, but because it shapes subjects who desire in ways that sustain it. Transforming the world, then, requires both institutional abolition and a reconfiguration of the subjects who sustain those institutions.
Importantly, this is not a simple call for individual ethical reform. Family abolitionists insist that different desires can only emerge through structural transformation. Drawing on Shulamith Firestone, Kathi Weeks rejects the notion that self-improvement alone can reorient desire. For her, desiring otherwise must pass through collective, material change. This emphasis on transforming desire raises a question about the terrain of struggle itself: Should political transformation aim to change institutions, subjects, or both? Leon Trotsky’s transitional demands, for instance, involved pushing for reforms that appeared realistic within capitalism but, if pursued seriously, would expose the system’s inability to meet them — thereby revealing its limits and radicalizing political consciousness.
Weeks, by contrast, seems less concerned with revealing capitalism’s outer boundaries than with pushing the boundaries of our own desires and psychosexual capacities. Sophie Lewis articulates this provocatively in Abolish the Family: “Being together as people and ending the separation of people — this is a future that can be imagined, even if it cannot be fully desired yet. . . . I don’t know how to desire it fully, but I can’t wait to see what comes after the family.” Here abolitionism becomes a claim not just about institutions, but about our colonized capacities to love, care, and imagine otherwise. The family, Lewis argues, produces privatized, petit bourgeois subjects isolated from solidarity and structurally unprepared for collective life beyond kinship. As she writes in Surrogacy Now: the book is “animated by hatred for capitalism’s incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family and its purposive starvation of queerer, more comradely modes.”
A better starting point is to question the assumption that the family, by default, produces possessive, individualistic subjects. As Dustin Guastella has noted, one could just as easily view the ideal family as an “organic social relationship built on selflessness, uncalculated caregiving, and fraternity.” And if we look around, there are plenty of examples of people being capable of loving each other not as properties but as a concrete other. This counterview is worth taking seriously. But more pressing, I think, is the broader problem of overemphasizing capitalist subjectivity as the primary site of critique.
Despite their differences, both Søren Mau and Vivek Chibber highlight the coercive and impersonal power of capital as key to understanding why capitalism thrives. Both point out that people might very well be critical of capitalism but still need to adhere to it. The problem, in other words, is not that people are capitalist subjects — it’s that they live in capitalism. Overreliance on ideological explanations risks missing the more material basis of compliance. Most people conform to capitalist norms, not because they are ideologically duped, but because survival under capitalism leaves little alternative. This materialist lens shifts our attention away from ideology and toward the structural constraints imposed by capital. It recasts institutions — including the family — not as monolithic agents of domination producing capitalist subjects, but as contradictory spaces shaped by capitalist imperatives, precapitalist residues, and counterhegemonic potential.
The Family Isn’t Just a Capitalist Institution
Beyond relying on a functionalist understanding of the family’s role within capitalism, family abolitionism tends to simplify the complex relationship between social reproduction and capitalist accumulation. Nancy Fraser’s work on capitalism as an institutionalized social order offers a richer framework — one that helps us to understand the nuclear family as neither pro- nor anti-capitalist as such. Capitalism is, as Fraser argues, not just an economic system; it is built on fundamental divisions between economic production and social reproduction, between economy and polity, between human labor and natural resources, and between exploitation and expropriation. Crucially, capitalism depends on a set of noncapitalist “background conditions”: reproductive labor, political institutions, natural resources, and racialized expropriation.
Capitalism has an ambivalent relationship to these noneconomic spheres. Reproductive labor — the work that sustains and reproduces the workforce — is, as Fraser demonstrates, “simultaneously indispensable and an obstacle to accumulation.” Capitalism pushes their limits, constantly extracting from these spheres without replenishing them fully. The family exists in this ambivalent space. Fraser describes it as a “reservoir of non-economic normativity”: a sphere of values, care, and relations that capitalism exploits but cannot fully incorporate. While the family is deeply intertwined with capitalism and often reproduces oppressive social hierarchies, it also contains pivotal elements of counternormativity and care that resist capitalist logic.
This means the end of capitalism is not achieved by abandoning the family. If we understand the family as distinct from yet intertwined with capitalism, we can see anti-capitalist potential within it — as we can in other social relations that matter beyond mere economic survival. Ferguson’s work on the tension between capitalist clock-time and social reproductive time helps illuminate this tension. Social reproduction within the family follows rhythms and tempos that are both shaped by and resist to the mechanized pace of capitalism. As Eli Zaretsky puts it: “The family, attuned to the ‘natural’ rhythms of eating, sleeping, and childcare, can never be wholly synchronized with the mechanized tempo of industrial capitalism.” This temporal dissonance opens a space for resistance — where care and social reproduction within the family might nurture alternatives to capitalist exploitation rather than simply reproduce it.
You Are Just Like Your Family!
While discussing this project with a friend, he half-jokingly asked, “Isn’t it just that people who want to abolish the family come from bad ones, and those in favor of it come from good ones?” Annoying as it was, the question lingered. It’s easy to dismiss family abolitionism as trauma politics — or to write off its opponents as merely afraid of losing something dear to them. But that would be unfair. Still, I think the personal stakes of these debates deserve more reflection. We don’t experience the family in the abstract. Our views are shaped by complicated memories, affective attachments, and inherited stories.
My own position comes from this tangle of personal and political experience. I’ve seen families harm and heal. I’ve seen them reproduce inequality but also resist it. I’ve seen them fail, and I’ve seen them survive. These experiences — and the stark inequalities revealed in how differently families are positioned to thrive and offer care — point toward a distinct politics.
Family abolitionism wants to make care more collective, more just, freer. That’s a goal I share. But that project begins not with the end of the family, but with a sober assessment of what families are — and what they are not — under capitalism. Let’s fight for better ways to live and care together. But let’s not assume that abolishing the family will help us reach that goal.