You can't choose your family. But despite this, most of us wouldn’t choose to be without them either. For the lucky, families are a place of love, care and safety. But for many, the family creates everlasting trauma in a life. Even in so-called ‘happy familles’, the unpaid labour and childcare are exhausting. Leading feminist critic, Sophie Lewis, argues the family should be abolished.

The social scientific consensus that the overdeveloped world is in the grip of a ‘care crisis’ is at least fifteen years old: life expectancies are going down, we all work ourselves sick, no one can comfortably afford adequate housing, and our governments have decimated social services such as shelters, eldercare, disability care, psychotherapy, and support for queer youth. By cloistering huge numbers of people within the domestic sphere, the COVID-19 pandemic shone a light on the longstanding strain affecting local webs of mutual aid (and unpaid kin-based care) as well as fragile global chains of commodified care. While Covid exacerbated them, the so-called ‘shadow pandemics’ of elder abuse, domestic battery, isolation, community depletion, familial sexual violence, mental ill-health, and a phenomenon UNICEF calls child ‘regression,’ were clearly preexisting. Op-eds came thick and fast wondering if ‘the nuclear family was a mistake.’

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Pundits seemingly agree that the market has leaned too heavily lately on the (still gendered) services of the private household. Yet the solutions typically proposed—get a bigger dinner table, let grandma and grandpa move in—are too timid, unwilling to demand state funding for free universal crèches and care homes, let alone contemplate a more thoroughgoing deprivatization of care. I mean, I get it: it’s terrifying to imagine a post-family world! To speak of ‘expanding’ the family, rather than ‘abolishing’ it, certainly sounds more congenial to most of us. But it makes no sense to try to expand what is essentially a system of organised scarcity that we administer via marriage- and genetics-based norms of custody, habitation and inheritance. Meals, clean clothes and children could all be manufactured differently. The overwork we experience in the private home is naturalized, yes, but it isn’t natural.

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For a couple of centuries, the family has functioned as a source of almost infinite free labour for bosses and states.

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For a growing number of people young and old—including some participants in the mass anti-productivity trend known as the Great Resignation or Big Quit—revisiting the ancient revolutionary demand of ‘family abolition’ with an open mind in 2022 is an intuitive move. Wasn’t it precisely the economic ideology of ‘family’ that, perversely, drove waged workers to threaten their loved ones’ lives by going out to work for their sakes during the pandemic? Indeed, family values, as the Australian political scientist Melinda Cooper demonstrates, are capitalist economics writ small. For a couple of centuries, the family has functioned as a source of almost infinite free labour for bosses and states. Why should we continue to house and reproduce ourselves in this atomized way that is designed to blackmail us into working shitty jobs (for love of ‘our’ kids) until we’re dead?