On 4 February 2024, the discourse event “Beyond Equality #2: On Abolishing the Family – and Finding Alternatives” took place at HAU1. With “Abolish the Family”, author Sophie Lewis has recapitulated the history of feminist criticism of the nuclear family. Her vision for the feminist organisation of everyday life is currently being widely discussed: she criticises the idealised concept of the family and advocates collective care work instead. Her lecture at HAU was followed by a discussion with political scientist Eleonora Roldán Mendívil and philosopher Eva von Redecker. This is an abridged version of the discussion.

Eva von Redecker
How would you in define class, Sophie? 

Sophie Lewis
For me the explosive insight of the autonomist Italian feminists is still only half digested on the Left. What happened with “wages against housework” is a rewriting of the classic story where Marx tells you to come and follow him inside the factory, where he'll show you the grisly reality of what's actually happening when capital meets labor – showing us that it's not a free exchange that's all hunky dory. It's really ugly. For me, in the seventies, they're showing us that there's yet another level: there’s a curtain at the back of the factory. And behind that curtain, there's an unwaged housewife making soup. And it’s still today really hard to wrap your head around. I think it is a massively disconcerting, vertiginous insight. Because we really rely for our mental health on the hope that there isn't a circuit of capital accumulation running through our soup. Maybe I’m rambling—I’m sorry, this is quite a difficult question, Eva! A definition of class! Obviously, I am trying to gesture towards a way to center unwaged reproductive labor in the definition of the proletarian. But it’s a tough question. I did my best to have a definition of the family. It took me a very long time. 

Eva von Redecker
I think you’ve got an answer because I came across it once! I saw this amazing article you wrote on abortion. You open it referring to the Mayday. You say it's the day where the makers of human, humanity, or life, or… What did you say? What's your formulation?

Sophie Lewis
I think I say that on May Day we celebrate ourselves as “anthrogenitors: the makers of the world and of one another.” People-making.

Eva von Redecker
Yeah, the people-makers celebrate the people-making activity. That's the workers, right? That's what Marx would say – the animal that produces itself. I really loved that formulation because it centers on the reproductive, on the people-making but makes that into class politics. So do you want to add to that, Eleonora, or would you even say, yes, you are in favor of such a Marxist Feminist extended notion of class?

Eleonora Roldán Mendívil 
I really like Lise Vogel’s definition of who a worker is. In “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” she has this very fine quote, where she says: The working class or the workers is everyone who in the past, present or future have been, will be, or are part of this wage labor, but also general labor structure.
So she includes people who are pensioners, she includes people who are out of work, out of waged work in that moment. She includes everyone who is a child of people who have to go out to get a wage in order for the children to survive.
That the woman worker also continues being a worker when she comes home is something that is an aspect that feminist questions brought into the sphere of Socialism and Marxism. I think this is very, very important.
There is a difference between waged work and non-waged work, and there's a difference when we speak about tactics or strategy depending on who we organise when. I remember about ten years ago there were a couple of strikes by nurses in Germany and everyone was like: They are the new revolutionary subject! And all the feminists were like: This is the economic question! And: We will win now! And I was like: Okay, hang on. This is a little more complicated than that, because if this kind of hospital workers don't bind together with the whole transportation and logistics sector and with all the automotive sector in Germany, we're not speaking about actual workers‘ power. We're speaking about one branch, which we should support in their struggles. I felt some people were like: It's going to be Socialism in two weeks! And I was like: No.
So there’s this glorification of every strike, which is a very social democratic form of politics, which doesn't mean, and I agree, that we should not support workers fighting for the slightest and smallest reforms of course. You know?
Rosa Luxemburg told us reform and revolution go hand-in-hand. So for me, the working class is obviously way more than just the waged earners. It's everyone who is directly or indirectly dependent on a wage.

Eva von Redecker
It is notable that the book and the whole strategy is called “Abolish the Family”. It's not called “Sublate the Family”, as you might expect from a dialectical thinker. But you chose an abolitionist position. You say very beautifully, Sophie, that this is somewhat scandalous at first because for sure a family is not a prison. There's something more terrible about cops and prisons. And yet feminists have drawn that analogy.It made me think of one of my favorite lines from one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels, where the main character says, “Marriage has bastilled me for life.” Here, the family equals the Bastille. So maybe there are some ways in which it is like a prison. And maybe that's a perspective from which it is easier to understand why the question for the alternative is so annoying. Because we wouldn't ask what's the alternative to the police?
It's a world in which we don't need the police. So maybe, even though I will get back to asking about the alternatives, maybe one way to ask the question is: What other structures do we need so that we don't need the family anymore? Like what's the presence? Do you find that a more sensible question?

Sophie Lewis
Yeah, that is the question! (Regarding what the “alternatives” are, I know: it’s annoying when people do this, and avoid an answer. I’m sorry.) Just a brief comment, though, about what “abolition” means here. You’re right: I don't say “positively supersede the family” as my title. But I explain the word “abolish” precisely in those terms later in the book. I do think this is a more complicated terminological problem, as well. In the US, philosophers such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore are talking about abolition in terms of the making-present of everything which forces the object that you're targeting to wither away. So: you don't abolish prisons simply by burning them all down. (That might, of course, happen.) But the bad news, in a sense, is that that's not in and of itself prison abolition at all. (Again: it's not irrelevant to it.) But “abolition” is the building of the things that deliver, as you just said, what prisons purport to deliver – justice. 
Abolitionism is the process of building those infrastructures that actually meet the needs that the thing in question is purporting to meet. So, in the eighties, what Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh said—they were these Marxist-feminists who were holding a little flame aloft, amid the darkness of Thatcherism, for family abolition—in their really elegant book “The Anti-Social Family”—they said that the task of abolition is to build up the things that take the pressure off the family. You create the infrastructures that give people real choice about who, with whom and how to live. And that's how the family is abolished as a logic of privatized care. So, let’s see: shelter is part of that; free food is part of that. Many people find that organizing starts in the streets with some form of provision of food-for-the-people. 
My friend and comrade M. E. O’Brien, who has a much longer book about family abolition out with Pluto Press, she names, as a concrete example of family abolition, the Oaxaca Commune. That was a struggle where people stayed on the barricades for a significant period of time and began to put sufficient pressure on the pre-existing division of productive/re-productive labor in their society, such that stuff began to really get real! 
They figured out embryonic forms of de-commodified and partially communized care provision for one another. 
It's in a situation of militant struggle—for instance, an occupation of the city square—that lasts for many months or years, where you begin to figure out how to meet needs outside of those private channels of consumption and kinship. That’s where we develop these skills. This is also, weirdly, another way of being quite provocative (or maybe disappointing?) because I'm saying: All your leftist campaigns and struggles are actually already family-abolitionist.

Eva von Redecker
I really like this idea of having to start cooking and overcoming some scarcity needs in order for people to give up the privatized provisioning for needs that is often organized abandonment anyway. But I do think there‘s a kind of question, of course: What ideally should be the structure or the level on which that is organized? Because for Kollontai, it was clear it was the state. That was the unit that organized the canteens and the children's raising and all that. I find it very hard to think of the structure that I would trust to create an abundance of care.

Sophie Lewis
Yeah, me too. But it's worth trying. We need to try, right? Because we must depart from the rather unpleasant truth that it's unlikely we make things worse than they already are. The status quo is really, really catastrophic. It’s amazing how much violence we naturalize and accept under the aegis of the family. That said, there are certain things I’ll say in favor of “the family” as a proposition for organizing care, namely: it has some kind of answer to the question of: “What to do with your vile Uncle Stanley?” The answer here is: he's family! So, he has to be invited for Christmas. Which is certainly an answer, right? What I’m saying is: whatever we come up with, it has to have an answer to the question of the arseholes. The people who get left out when we make chosen families. That’s why the logic of “chosen family” is insufficient. We need to come up with something that provides for those not chosen.

Eva von Redecker
I think that's also why “intentional family” or the German “Wahlverwandtschaft” is not a good solution because we are in an area where we actually don't choose.  You said at the end of the talk that it's not against dependency, but about making dependency consensual. But there is also a limit. Some part of dependency is that sometimes you experience it precisely in the state of dissociation, or coma, or baby-ness in which you can't even consent.
So we're dealing with something where the choosing doesn't really grip, as you just said. One nice thing that you can say in German, I think, is the “the foundling”. You just find someone. You didn't choose them, but you have to deal with them. As you say, one has to deal with the one no oe would chose, or make kin with. 
In the “Half-Earth Socialism” utopia by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass they have this dual system set-up.There are dormitories and canteens that are open, everybody can go there, it’s universally free. And then there are smaller hubs where people live in chosen units and you candecide to withdraw to.
And, of course, then there needs to be a constant struggle that the people who withdraw from the collective structure don't then accumulate too much. That they give back. Otherwise, it's a very ableist temptation. I find it really compelling and also intellectually so brave that you say: No, it's not about just the bad family, it‘s about all. Family, as the privatization of care has to be abolished.
And yet I think that there's a certain intimacy that right now the privatization secures which we might want to uphold. Obviously, the real existing families secure it very badly, because, again, you don't choose your family and families are violent. But maybe certain needs are such that you'd rather fulfill them in a more intimate relation or with somebody you've known longer or with somebody whose gender you can choose.
Some people love eating with 20 people and some people actually want to eat with two or something. So there is a demand for withdrawal options that maybe we want to find a different form for even in the care commune. Or do you think if everybody is sufficiently caring we don't need to withdraw anymore?

Sophie Lewis
Who knows? There might be some changes there, maybe. That's certainly what the Gay Liberation Fronts, such as the Front Homosexuel D'action Révolutionnaire, expected: that our need for privacy would diminish. Gay liberationists and women’s liberationists talked constantly about what would happen when we’ve transcended the couple form and the family. They expected a total transformation of individuals’ comfort levels with communalism.
But, like you, I think it's incredibly important to think about those dual structures. I straightforwardly agree with what you're just gesturing towards. And in the town of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy's book “Woman on the Edge of Time,” if I recall correctly, there is a sort of dual structure of parenting expertise. There are people who are “kid-binders,” as they're called—people who are really skilled at the labor of child-care and child-rearing—but there are also three parents per child. And in the phalansteries of Charles Fourier’s imagination, going back to the utopian socialism of the 1810s and 1820s, there were also dual structures. (This guy invented the word feminism. So if you want to piss liberal feminists off, you can say that feminism actually is family-abolitionism in its origin-point. Because, much as Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist, she didn't call it “feminism,” and—by the way—she also was pretty into the institution of patriarchal motherhood for others, just not for herself.) Anyway, phalansteries, for Charles Fourier, were a thing that should importantly provide for people's need for privacy. These communes were his idea for giant living situations with maybe 1600 people, where life unfolds in a way that is scientifically calibrated to cater to every human being’s proclivities and skills and needs. Now, that was a really wacky, hyper-detailed blueprint for the future! 
But I think it's really key to honor a spirit of self-determination about how relationships form; such that they might also withdraw a little bit from the social, at times. Yet, contra Fourier, we have to recognize that family abolition will likely arise in a messy way, via struggle. M. E. O'Brien insists on this all the time, as does Eman Abdelhadi, in their co-authored book “Everything for Everyone”, which tracks how family abolition is going to start happening in the near future in New York City. You should really read this if you want a sense of some of these germinal alternatives made flesh. 
All in all, this isn't a politics about pushing people together, anymore than it is about tearing people apart or confiscating your grandma. It is about allowing people to achieve a form of togetherness that might be historically unprecedented. That’s the dream of “red love.” It's the hope that, under conditions of abundance, the way we meet one another and bind ourselves to one another could be non-violent and free.

Eva von Redecker
So, Eleonora, when you say that what we really need to build is a workers movement, then you would implythat that alone would enable producing the abundance we need in order to get rid of the family, right?
When Kollontai talks about family abolition, she says: The time is ripe for it. Everybody is a worker already, also women, and we could abolish it now. Do you think that's the case now, or have we somehow moved back? Because it sounds more like actually the time is not ripe or maybe it's ripe for the wrong people. Some people can get rid of the family. Actually, capitalism is doing that. But for others it's not the time yet. Or do you not actually endorse that bit of Marxism with this kind of progressive timeline at all?

Eleonora Roldán Mendívil
I think we all have some form of timeline. And, of course, as people who claim to work dialectically, we see always the movement, the constant progress and setbacks. And they are not always small. So going back to the question, I don't think there's like this developmentist humanism where we are constantly going into that freer and better society. I think that's a narrative that we can see. Gaza’s showing us every day on our screens that that is not true. All the kind of values, supposedly “family values“ that conservatives and liberals are telling us we have to sacrifice ourselves for, are being bombarded out of other people, because who is allowed to have a family and who is not allowed to have a family is very striking at the moment.
So for me, I would say the times that we are in right now are not times where we have, like Kollontai in the time where she lived, a massive, self-conscious socialist workers‘ movement. There is movement. People move. People don't like the status quo, be it the ecological destruction, be it the patriarchal society, be it the racist border regime.
So we have all these particular questions that people go on the streets for. We had this massive outpouring of “we want the status quo to be the status quo” of all of the thousands and maybe millions of people in Germany who are like: We don't want the kind of AfD politics, but we want our open society as it is. And I'm like: I don't want this society as it is.
Because this society is deporting right now. This society is destroying right now. We are at war right now. 
There’s this beautiful term in German, “die bürgerliche Mitte”. The center. The rational people, Democrats. Everyone against the actual threats to democracy. And I'm like: Okay, which democracy are we actually defending here right now? There's a lot of problems with the status quo. And they're not small. They're not just two intellectuals having a little bit of a problem with it. It is murderous. It is violent as fuck.
For me, the time is ripe would mean that this kind of consciousness, that our leaders, that all these democratic parties are part of the problem, are part and parcel of this war. We are sitting right now at the heart of empire, right? But somehow we believe we are part of the solution. So who is this “we”? 
Are we all suddenly rallying together behind this German flag and being like: The Germans are going to save the world? I don't think so. 
So what other subjectivities can we envision? What do we have in common with people being bombed in Gaza? What do we have in common with people suffering famine in Darfur? What is our common humanity, and how can we fight for that? For me, this is the question. 
I don't think the time is ripe at this point where we can say: We already have this revolutionary movement. But, of course, and I agree with you a lot, we have to ask these questions. And obviously right now we are not in a revolutionary socialist organization. We're trying to figure out what next steps to do.
But we are the privileged ones who can think about it. Who are not being threatened with death every minute. Who can think about what kind of different society we want. For that, we need an analysis of why this society is so broken that we live in. I am someone who is optimistic. I think this time will come. I believe that, like Kollontai, we have the possibilities for socialism right now, of family abolition right now. Is the time ripe that we can actually switch this button? I don't think so. But we have to, all of us, try in all aspects of life to make this time be more ripe faster.