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/342/ Maybe Don't Abolish the Family? w/ Amber A'Lee Frost (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-23 06:01:00
Imported:
2026-06
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On family abolition.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Amber A'Lee Frost joins us to talk through recent radical proposals to do away with the family as an institution. Author Sophie Lewis claims that "ever since the capitalist victory over the long Sixties, the shout for abolition of the family has been buried beneath a strange kind of shame”, but that now it’s back. Why?What problems does family abolition address? And how do contemporary accounts sit in relation to earlier radical proposals by the Old and New Lefts?

If "the family is doing a bad job at care" and "getting in the way of alternatives", what actually is the alternative? Wouldn't destroying the family merely make life worse for most, without putting anything better in its place?

Readings: 

Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis, Verso

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso

Profile of Sophie Lewis in VICE

Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch

Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star

The Lockdown Left: socialists against society, Philip Cunliffe, spiked

Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage

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Comments

Nina Power

Thank you all for covering this so thoughtfully, and good to hear Amber on this. Family "abolition" is just the left-branded defence of capitalist processes of enclosure, exploitation and commodification already far advanced.

Davka Smolah Collective

Sounds like the book can be summarized as an incoherent long-form "argument" for "do good things but don't do bad things" with very little attempt to rationally delineate the two beyond what the author and her friends happen to like or dislike. Very Chapo, only a little snark at Amber intended. In that it really is quite symptomatic of today's "radical" Left thought. There are likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, and of course critiques of the critiques of everything... but not a lot of actual projects or principles to be affirmed.

Mathieu Dube

There's an expression in French: "fuite en avant" meaning running away to the future. I find that all these "Abolish xyz" are just that. Where are the kids going to go if we abolish the family? Do we want the bourgeois state to grab the babies from their mother's at birth and put them in sort of permanent boarding schools? There's no social structures that could handle an abolition of family ethically. The left constantly sloganeers about abolishing this or that instead of doing the thankless job of building working class organizations that could eventually challenge the bourgeois regime and take over these tasks. Same applies to abolish prisons. How would the actually existing society deal with an influx of hardened criminals?

Kenneth Smith

Amber is the best person you could have on to talk about this. It’s a much more nuanced discussion than it would’ve been otherwise. Good call

Richard R

Excellent episode, though vulnerable to the criticism that Sophie Lewis makes for a handy straw man, instead of Engels or Firestone as more robust targets. It seems like a missing piece from your criticism is also that no one (Lewis included) is even really going out of their way to define family. Is it just commitment like in the Fast and Furious franchise (one barbecue away from being Vin Diesel's family)? Just blood? The vague principle of a coalition of people raising children? Freud for example could be easily read as a radical anti-patriarchy figure because the nuclear family was a genuine break from the norm of an extended, patriarchal family. But as I imagine Frost would shoot back, that was a norm, not a reality for most people in the 19th century. "Anti-social socialism" seems like an excellent problematic for working through all this. We want to offer people, I would think, freedom from certain kinds of stupid, meaningless commitments in order to have the freedom to commit to what they actually value. The problem of the wage relationship is that it becomes the principal commitment against which all others are measured, and which has been used to sever all others.

NigelBOpinion

Great episode. Wonderful to hear from Amber again. I hadn't realized how much I missed her wit and insight.

William Bell

If anyone had actually explained the fucking argment the author puts forward rather than all of you simply snarking against it for an hour this might have been a decent listen. But you didn't and it wasn't.

Eamon

Loved this. I do think the political economy of getting non fiction books published is a major factor in the cognitive dissonance throughout Lewis’ work here. Most abolitionists when really pinned down don’t really believe in, for instance, abolishing prisons, but in basically liberal reforms to make prisons more rehabilitative. Ditto the family, where most actually just want better health, elderly, and child care access. But no one’s going to publish a nuanced thoughtful book on that, when they can instead publish long form click bait. I don’t think this requires conscious cynicism on Lewis’ part, as you allude to (and avoid ascribing to her). It just requires coercive laws of competition that compel any academic trying to ‘make it’ within such a saturated market to write any old bollocks! As Amber says, she and her work are a morbid symptom.

aarinsanity

I feel like Sophie Lewis must be a very sad person internally

Andrea

The mafia was not the way Italian peasants protected themselves from the state. The mafia developed from a specific social arrangement in certain extreme south latifundia. They were mostly thugs paid by latifundists to keep peasants in check/repress them violently. They then developed by the control of state distribution of resources and by occupying public offices in those areas. Notably thanks to the US after WWII, it then developed further as a crucial way to guarantee votes to the dominant Christian Democratic Party in the South through violent social control. It then furthered it's grip on the State's flows of money in southern regions in the different phases of infrastructuration and attempted industrialization of the South from the 60s to the 80s with complacency (and even request) of state apparatuses. The mafia was not a way to protect the insiders from the outside world and especially from the state. Not the Italian state at least. Also, interestingly, pre-capitalist family types in Italy varied a lot depending on the region and the productive structure. In Sicily it was mostly a nuclear patrilocal type if I remember correctly, not the stereotypical extended multigenerational cohabiting family type often used as a symbol for either the Italian, Southern European, or even generally pre-modern traditional family. That depiction of the mafia family speaks more to Anglos stereotypes about Italy than anything else.

Chris Clark

Just watched an old interview. She used the phrase “Xenofam”. How will language like this help? In terms of recruiting people to her cause. Hello person in Morrisons struggling to pay your heating bills. Have you ever considered starting a Xenofam. Erm.