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corvidcall · 8 months

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So, I didn't like the book "Abolish the Family" by Sophie Lewis very much

(Or, "wow, Corv, how did you manage to write over 5k words about a book that's got less than 100 pages?")

I read Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation by Sophie Lewis and I.... well, to be gentle, I did not much care for it. And to be less gentle, I thought it was hot nonsense, and I kind of wanted to just put my thoughts down about it somewhere.

I picked up the book because I was curious about family abolition. I actually heard Sophie Lewis on a podcast ages ago, and I've seen some posts on Tumblr from people talking about family abolition, but I hadn't really heard it argued in full. I had some immediate concerns when I heard about! I mean, I agree that it's pretty fucked up to offload all the responsibility of caring for people who cannot care for themselves onto their families, which both enables abuse and also leaves people who don't have families shit out of luck. But what's the alternative? I assume it's not advocating for just letting all children run loose in the streets, but I don't know what it IS advocating for. If all children are to be raised collectively by the community, how will unique cultures and heritages be passed down? The way I see it, either we have diverse communities, and nobody gets to pass down history and culture and religious practices that are applicable to them but not to everyone (so either the white children in this community have as much claim to participating in the practices of, say, Native American tribes as any Native child, OR these practices are just dissolved entirely), or all these communities must be racially segregated. And isn't "abolishing families" what colonizing governments did to their native populations, when they forced their children to attend state-run residential schools? Are you just advocating that but for all children?

But these are concerns raised by someone who has only heard the name, really, and it's silly to get very mad trying to argue against what you imagine something to be without ever investigating what it actually is. That's not the kind of person I want to be! And surely someone who spends a lot of time thinking about and writing about this concept would have been able to anticipate my incredibly obvious and uninformed complaints about it. (In the same way that anyone advocating for police abolition MUST have an answer for the obvious "but then who will stop all the murderers?" question that people immediately respond with). I picked up this book in particular because, hey, it's a MANIFESTO! That must be the most distilled version of the idea, so surely it will answer my questions and tell me what I wanted to know!

I, uh. I was wrong.

Before I get started with a lot of my thoughts about the actual book, I do want to say that this is not really a refutation of the idea of family abolition, so much as a complaint that this one book is incredibly poorly argued. I have heard compelling arguments for family abolition, and I am, at the very least, sympathetic to the idea. I was honestly coming into this hoping to be convinced by it, so I think it's kind of shocking how unconvincing this book was!

OKAY with all my scenes set and my disclaimers made, let's get into the good stuff.

Abolish the Family is a very short book (122 pages, the last 30 pages of which are footnotes), and is broken up into 4 chapters. I'm just going to go chapter by chapter chronologically, although I could probably go in any order, as I don't feel like they really build on each other well.

1. But I Love My Family!

Lewis opens the book by arguing why families are bad: they are the means by which society privatizes care (as I said earlier!), they perpetuate capitalist hegemony, they foster environments under which abuse can flourish. I don't really have any refutations to these points, but I feel like me trying to summarize them here makes them come across as better argued than they are. Lewis makes a lot of assumptions about the readers immediate willingness to agree with her, in my opinion. She imagines we will try to argue that we love our families, which is, admittedly, one of my first arguments. "But loving one's family in spite of a 'hard childhood' is pretty typical of the would-be family abolitionist," Lewis insists, "She may, for instance, sense in her gut that she and her family members aren't good for each other, while also loving them."

I suppose that is true, but when I object to the idea by saying that I love my family, I mean that I enjoy being around them and I think my life is frequently better for them being in it. My mom is one of my best friends, and one of the only adults in my life who cared about and tried to accommodate my disabilities. It's weird to me that the only real response to this objection is for Lewis to go “sure, you love your family, but you can admit they're bad people!” I could admit that, but I don't think it's true! And if I did think that was true, you wouldn't really have to be arguing to convince me, would you? I would already be agreeing with you.

Personally, I always struggle a little with the idea that you can “love” someone but not “like” them, or that you can “like” being around someone but not really “love” them. A lot of that, of course, is that there is no consistent definition of what love means, and I'm autistic, so these things that seem very instinctual to others are occasionally a little inscrutable to me. Lewis attempts to define loving another person as ”[struggling] for their autonomy as well as their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.“ Using this definition, she suggests that a mother who REALLY loved their children would not seek to have any particularly special relationship with their child on the basis of being their ”real“ mother, and that you, as a child (”assuming you grew up in a nuclear household“, which is a parenthetical that's doing a LOT of heavy lifting, if you ask me), surely noticed how lonely and isolated your mother was, being confined to the home, so you should all understand that family abolition is truly the more ”loving“ option, as opposed to perpetuating the family structure.

My problem with this argument is that... well, none of these things were true about my mom? She did not ”restrict the number of mothers (of any gender) to which [I] had access.“ When my father got remarried, she was delighted there would be more people in my life to love and care for me. And I most certainly did not sense her loneliness and isolation, because she was neither lonely nor isolated. And I very much did not grow up in a nuclear family, as my parents divorced when I was still in preschool. All of the things Lewis is suggesting as reasons for abolishing the family are things that were achieved for me within the family, and without any special effort on the part of anyone. So why should I support abolition, as opposed to, say, better social safety nets or something? If you were arguing that we need to eliminate mosquitoes to stop the spread of malaria, the fact that you can get vaccinated against malaria WITHOUT eliminating all mosquitoes kind of undercuts your argument, doesn't it? Even if I agree the problems you've pointed out are bad, you haven't convinced me that yours is the best solution.

I also found that the way that Lewis brings up the issue of abuse comes across as kind of... callous, I guess? It's brought up as more of a gotcha towards people who think that families aren't inherently evil, as opposed to a real concern that she actually has compassion towards and is seeking to solve. Lewis writes, "The family is where most of the rape happens on this earth, and most of the murder. No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family. Logically, announcing an intention to “treat you like family” ... ought to register as a horrible threat." And that's about all she has to say on the subject of abuse, beyond one name drop of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, an English 6-year-old who was murdered by his parents during the COVID lockdowns (which, frankly, I found both a little inappropriate to mention, and not even a good example of the thing Lewis is complaining about. The abuse this child was experiencing at the hands of his father and his father's girlfriend was reported by both his grandmother and his uncle, but social services chose not to investigate. While he was abused and subsequently killed by his family, his family also attempted to save him. So it's a little weird to use this as an argument for family abolition and for having some sort of government/non-family body be in charge of the safety and well-being of children, if you ask me.) It just strikes me as weirdly uncaring, to bring up the subject of abuse only in response to a common piece of advertising copy. "Oh, Olive Garden says 'when you're here, you're family'? Well, sometimes families rape each other. Betcha didn't think about that!" Like, yeah, Sophie, I guess I didn't. You owned me, with facts and logic. Congrats.

2. Abolish Which Family?

I'm gonna be honest, it's very possible that this chapter went a little over my head. I like to think I'm decently smart and whatnot, but I really couldn't parse some of the points of this chapter.

Lewis states that her purpose in this chapter is to argue why families must be ABOLISHED, and not reformed or expanded, and why THE FAMILY needs to be abolished, and not just "the white family" or "the bourgeois family". She starts off by bringing up what she imagines some of the criticisms to family abolition might be: do you really want to talk about families the same way we talk about things like prisons or police? How can we talk about "abolishing the family" for colonized people, like Palestine, when the occupying genocidal power has already pre-abolished the indigenous family? Isn't this just asking queer people to surrender their hard-won family rights to hospital visitation? "As you can see, I’m semi-fluent—almost impassioned— when it comes to reeling out points against becoming a partisan of “family abolition.”" Lewis writes, "They are compelling, these counterarguments, even to me."

But she doesn't really refute any of these points? At least, not directly, which seems odd, given that she introduced the chapter by bringing them up. Most of this chapter is a lot of Lewis quoting other writers, who were writing about how Black motherhood is "as radical and revolutionary, as spiritual and transformative" (Jennifer Nash), and "Black mothering is queer" (Alexis Pauline Gumbs). I have no problems with Black writers exploring the ways in which the Black family is fundamentally different from the White family, or in finding power and beauty in that. But I do think it's a little odd for Lewis, a White woman writing about how families ought to be abolished, to spend so much of this book talking about how Black mothers are so important and wonderful? I thought families were bad? I think the point she's trying to make, both with this section and her later transition back into talking about how families should not be, is that Black families are already inherently aligned with family abolition, as they exist outside of the societal ideal of "the family", which is White. But it still strikes me as odd, to take a long diversion to deify the figure of a Black matriarch before going back to talking about how it's bad that women feel like they must be mothers. Do we want them to be mothers or don't we?

Anyway, if anyone else has read this book and can come up with a more coherent thesis for this chapter in particular, let me know. It's definitely the one I struggled with the most.

3. A Potted History of Family Abolitionism

In this chapter, Lewis lists every prominent writer that has written in support of family abolition (by her own metrics, as some of them did not identify themselves or their political pursuits to be attempting to abolish the family). This was honestly my favorite chapter of the book! A lot of the people she listed sounded very cool, and I will be reading more from some of them. I'm not going to talk about everyone Lewis mentions in this chapter, but I will go through a few of the ones I had the most to say about:

Charles Fourier

A French philosopher from the late 18th/early 19th century, he is the man who coined the word "feminism" and wrote about utopias (including insisting that, in his imagined utopia, the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade. So I'm gonna put his ideas of utopias in the "maybe" pile). He imagined a world in which people lived in "phalanxes" of 1600 people, with universal basic income, covered walkways to protect from bad whether, a guaranteed sexual pleasure minimum, and communal kitchens, where all cooking and eating would be done by everyone. Lewis refers to some of these ideas as "unquestionable sensible" (particularly the removal of private kitchens in favor of communal cooking), and I, personally, DO question how sensible the idea is, actually! This is an incredibly common talking point amongst my fellow radical leftists of all stripes, to which I always want to respond with: have you ever known anyone with a severe allergy, or dietary restrictions, or an eating disorder, or or or or? I have ARFID, and there are very few things I can eat. Are we going to require the entire community change their diets to match mine, or, under this utopian society where I am not allowed access to a kitchen for only my food, am I simply not allowed to eat? Given how hostile people are to those with peanut allergies, even when it does not impact them in the slightest, I find it hard to believe that everyone would be happy never using peanuts in their cooking ever again when someone with an allergy joins the community. Maybe it makes me an unforgivable lib or something, but I don't believe capitalism is the sole reason behind man's unkindness to man, and I don't believe it will disappear after we build communism.

I also have some concerns about this supposed "guaranteed sexual pleasure minimum", but it doesn't seem like Lewis is going out of her way to defend that part, so I suppose I will have to let it slide in service of brevity. Which I know is funny to say, considering how long the rest of this post is. But, well, you decided to read it, so this is at least partially on you.

The Queer Indigenous and Maroon Nineteenth Century

This part's good! Lewis talks a lot about how, pre-colonization, Indigenous tribes did not organize property along the lines of the biological family, and the idea of "the family" was something that was imposed upon them by colonization. Taking property ownership out of the hands of the collective and putting it under the control of the heads of households - which is to say, men in general and husbands/fathers in specific - was a way for colonizing governments to dissolve the tribal identity. In this way, family abolition is actually a protection AGAINST colonialism, because it would be allowing people to return to ways of structuring communities that were not imposed by the colonizers.

Lewis goes on to talk about the similar experience of the people newly emancipated from chattel slavery in the U.S. Given the circumstances under which slaves were forced to live, the structure that we recognize as "the family" was not available to them, and once slavery was abolished, former slaves did not immediately organize themselves along family lines, and retained “diversity of relationship and family structures greater than their white contemporaries on farms or in factories" (Lewis quoting M.E. O'Brien). Lewis adds, "But the American state’s policing of the post-Reconstruction Black marital bed laid the basis for twentieth-century welfare officers’ “man-in-the-house” rule, which denied benefits to any mother caught “living” (even just for a couple of hours) with a member of the opposite sex. If you, a Black woman, had a “man in the house” of any kind, the law declared, then that man, not the state, ought to be the one paying your child support."

Overall, I thought this section was great! Very informative. Wish the whole book was like this.

Wages for Housework and the National Welfare Rights Organization

This is my favorite section in the whole book. While I don't think that Lewis herself adds much to the discussion, I do think that everything mentioned and quoted in this section is incredibly good and compelling. She first discusses the Wages for Housework movement in Italy which was, as the name would suggest, demanding financial compensation for the household labor traditionally expected of women. “They say it is love,“ Wages for Housework said, ”We say it is unwaged work.“ To quote Lewis:

”Pointedly, they did not deny that unwaged childcare, eldercare, housekeeping, sex, emotional labor, wifehood, might be a manifestation of love. Rather, the militants argued that “nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.” Put differently: the fact that caring for a private home under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem. That the “they” of the dictum—bosses, husbands, dads—are not wrong about this illustrates the insidiousness of the violence care-workers encounter (and mete out) in the family-form. It’s the reason paid and unpaid domestics, and paid and unpaid mothers, still have to fight just to be seen as workers."

Meanwhile, in America, and frequently in collaboration with Wages for Housework, the late 1960's saw the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which at its peak represented as many as one hundred thousand people, the majority of which were Black women, agitating for reforming America's welfare infrastructure. One of its founding members was Johnnie Tillmon, a self-described "middle-aged, poor, fat, Black woman on welfare," who said, in an article for Ms. magazine in 1972:

"For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival. ... [Welfare] is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate…. A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) says if there is an “able-bodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go. Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you. The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On AFDC, you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare."

At a time when most feminists were focusing on getting more women into the workplace, Tillmon and her comrades were demanding the freedom to NOT work, “the aspiration that women’s lives would no longer be dictated by husbands, employers, government bureaucrats, and clerks,” in the words of Wilson Sherwin and Frances Fox Piven.

Lewis argues that the work of the NWRO and Wages for Housework were works of family abolition "on the basis of their simultaneously (or combined) non-maternal and non-workerist accounts of what it is that a poor single mom needs and wants." I'm not really sure I agree, or I think that, were I to agree, then I once again have no idea what does and does not constitute "family abolition." If acknowledging that some single mothers would rather not work is an implicit endorsement of family abolition, that isn't all leftism inherently family abolitionist? I imagine that Lewis would argue that, yes, true leftism IS inextricable from family abolition, but she sure spends a good amount of this book talking about how many leftists DON'T support family abolition. If wanting universal basic income, for example, is wanting family abolition even if I don't say I'm advocating for family abolition, then how can you lament that I don't support family abolition? Am I overthinking this? Probably.

As I said, there were other sections in this chapter that I skipped over, because they were less interesting to me, or I had less to say about them: some arguments that Marx and Engels supported family abolition, some writings from a Soviet family abolitionist (who later, it seems, sacrificed a lot of her own ideals to support Stalin), dismay that Gay Liberation movements had been advocating for family abolition and the expanded rights of children but backed away from it to focus on surviving AIDS, and discussion of second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, whose utopian vision in her magnum opus, The Dialectic of Sex, involved mechanical uteruses in which all human fetuses would be gestated, resulting in no one even knowing who they were biologically related to any longer (and, by Lewis's own admission, segments of this book were pretty racist, and featured absolutely no mention of queerness. Ain't that just the way).

4. Comrades Against Kinship

We're almost done! In this chapter, Lewis finally answers the question I've had since I first heard the words "family abolition": but what does that look like? As you can imagine from my frustrations overall with this book, she does not have a coherent response. I would say she gives three answers to this question:

First, quoting Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, she says, "Any critique of the family is usually greeted with, ‘but what would you put in its place?’ We hope that by now it will be clear that we would put nothing in the place of the family." Which is frustratingly dismissive, in my opinion. Obviously, there would be SOMETHING to replace the family. We're not very well going to just let all infants roam free in the streets!

Her second answer is, she doesn't know.

“It is very, very difficult,” wrote Linda Gordon, “to conceive of a society in which children do not belong to someone or ones. To make children the property of the state would be no improvement. Mass, state-run day care centers are not the answer.” Do we have answers? Do we know yet which kinds of relation are outside capitalist accumulation? Lou Cornum: “If the answer today is none, let us devise some by tomorrow.”

And her final, most concrete answer is: Camp Maroon, the months-long 2020 tent encampment in Philadelphia. Just copying from the book directly once again:

What was Camp Maroon? An occupation, complete with a kitchen, distribution center, medical tent, substance use supply store, and even a jerry-rigged standing shower—a militant village led by unhoused Philadelphians and working-class rebels like the indomitable, one-in-a-million Jennifer Bennetch (rest in power). The encampment was composed of hundreds of people willing to live together side by side, in tents, to struggle for free housing, migrant freedoms, the right to the city, and more. Even I, standing on the periphery, felt transformed. It was that summer that taught me this: all beings exploited by capital and by empire are basically homeless. All of us have been driven from the commons. Everywhere, humans have woven enclaves and cradles of possibility, relief, and reciprocity in the desert. But the thing that would make our houses home —in a new, true, common sense of the word—is a practice of planetary revolution.

It might seem a bit vertiginous to draw such huge conclusions from a localized camp-out in the middle of Pennsylvania’s capital city. But if you have experienced, even just for a few days, the alternate social world that brews in the utopian squatting of a city boulevard, you probably know. It’s trippy: people acquire a tiny taste of collective self-governance, of mutual protection and care, and suddenly, the list of demands, objectives, targets and desires becomes much longer and more ambitious than simply “affordable housing.” That’s why M. E. O’Brien thinks “the best starting point to abolish the family” is the protest kitchen: “Form self-organized, shared sleeping areas for safety. Set up cooperative childcare to support the full involvement of parents. Establish syringe exchanges and other harm reduction practices to welcome active drug users.” Expand from there, and never stop expanding.

There's also a lot of waffle about Aufhebung, a concept popularized by Hegal (which Lewis refers to as "the word abolition’s weighty original German form", even though the word "abolition" did not at all originate from Aufhebung, but instead from the Latin abolitionem. But now I'm nitpicking, I suppose), and a strange implication that actually, unhoused people in 2020 were better off than people who had to move back with their families, which I'm not sure really holds up to scrutiny overall. The final paragraphs of this alleged manifesto bring up a heretofore unmentioned point about how family abolition does NOT support the policy of separating families of "illegal aliens" at the border; family separation is actually another way of enforcing the importance of the family unit, as it uses the removal of family as a punishment and the (alleged) respect for the integrity of the family as a reward. Personally, I was always taught that the conclusion of a book or paper isn't really the right time to bring up new points, but I guess I'm just not as smart as Sophie Lewis.

Conclusion:

Let's see how many of my initial questions and concerns were addressed in this book!

If all children are to be raised collectively by the community, how will unique cultures and heritages be passed down? - Kind of answered, but not really. In the first chapter of the book, Lewis states "Like a microcosm of the nation-state, the family incubates chauvinism and competition. Like a factory with a billion branches, it manufacturers "individuals" with a cultural, ethnic, and binary gender identity; a class; and a racial consciousness. Like an infinitely renewable energy source, it performs free labor for the market. ... For all these reasons, the family functions as capitalism's base unit." (Emphasis mine) So, I guess, unique cultures and heritages won't be passed down, and she thinks that's good? She doesn't address this specifically, but I don't think you can put "imbues people with a cultural and ethnic identity" on a list between "incubating chauvinism" and "performing free labor for the market" and say that you weren't trying to imply that it's bad and the world will be better without it.

And isn't "abolishing families" what colonizing governments did to their native populations, when they forced their children to attend state-run residential schools? - Answered, genuinely! No, it's different, because it would be abolishing the idea of what a family is/ought to be that was imposed upon native populations, and would allow them to go back to doing whatever they want.

What's the alternative? - Answered, but the answer was "nothing. why would we abolish families if were were just gonna do families again?" so. Not really answered, if you ask me. And by reading this, you are implicitly asking me. There is no clear answer to what the world would look like if Lewis got her way, beyond, I guess, something like the tent city she visited in 2020. But that doesn't really answer my question of: in Lewis's ideal world, what happens to a baby after it's born? If I give birth to a baby, do I get to keep it? If I want to have children, do I get to have them at all, or is this work entirely offloaded to mechanical wombs (that I guess will have been invented by then)? Is it someone's entire job in this society to just gestate and birth children? Do I get to fuck freely and then give birth, but my baby is raised in some sort of state-run nursery or community-owned crèche? I don't know. I didn't know before I started this book, and, if anything, I somehow know even less now.

I looked at the GoodReads reviews for this book, and saw several people saying that they were generally fans of Lewis' work, but that this one was unusually bad, so I might try checking out her other book. If any family abolitionists read this post and have any recommendations, please let me know. I assume this can't possibly be the best articulation of the idea, because it is honestly borderline inept. For her self-described manifesto, Lewis sure doesn't ever make clear what she's hoping to manifest!

If this IS the best articulation of family abolition, then I think it's probably poorly thought out, at the very least. I don't want to veer into any naturalistic fallacies here, but it seems like this entire perspective hinges on the idea that humans are somehow not animals. That pregnancy and child-rearing are labor, and only labor, interchangeable with my data entry job. If a person gets pregnant, gives birth, and then feels a special bond with the child they birthed that they would like to maintain, it is a result of societal brainwashing at best and active selfishness at worst. A true leftist would surrender their baby to the nearest community government official, so it can be cared for by someone more capable, and then said leftist should get back to their life, same as it was before. Now, I've never had any children, but neither has Lewis, so we're both just talking about what we reckon and what we've heard. And from everything I've heard from friends and loved ones of mine who have borne children, this perspective is entirely out of touch with reality, or, at the very least, is an experience of pregnancy that is very much not universal. And, personally, I find it kind of disgusting.

So, uh, no. I guess this book didn't convince me to embrace family abolition. Which, again, is notable, because I went into it with the explicit purpose of being convinced to embrace family abolition. Ah, well. They can't all be winners.

#my writing #effortposting #family abolition #Sophie Lewis #ok now i have to throw this book away from me so i can stop saying more #if theres any point i make here that isnt clear please let me know i would be happy to clarify or rephrase #sometimes i fear that my leaps in logic dont always make sense to the outside #anyway. uh. ive been threatening this post for a while. so here it is.

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