by M.E. O'Brian
Pluto Press
6/10/2023, paperback
SKU: 9780745343822
For some of us, the family is a source of love and support. But for many others, the family is a place of private horror, coercion, and personal domination. In a capitalist society, the private family carries the impossible demands of interpersonal care and social reproductive labor. Can we imagine a different future?
In Family Abolition, author M.E. O'Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. O'Brien traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and in the slave plantations and settler frontier of North America, explaining the rise and fall of the housewife-based family form. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds revolutionaries seeking better ways of loving, caring, and living. Family Abolition takes us through the past and present of family politics into a speculative future of the commune, imagining how care could be organized in a free society.
Reviews:
"An accessibly written distillation of two centuries worth of reproductive class struggle; a revived vision of revolutionary 'beloved community' for an age of climate catastrophe. Spread this book around, and start communizing care!" -- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
"An immensely useful book that will help us not just understand the violence of gender and family relations, but also take action to establish new methods of caring for one another and building survivable social relations... A tool for transformation, skillfully drawing on insurgent histories and contemporary struggles to increase our capacity to build new ways of being together." -- Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
"A vision for the future that draws on insights from both the history of the workers' and black liberation movements, and contemporary struggles worldwide. Both meticulous in its historical account of insurrectionary moments (that unsettled our assumptions about how to care for one another). And daring in providing a strategy for replacing private households with "beloved community", founded around Red Love. Highly recommended to anyone committed to both care and revolt, or bored of household chores." -- Jules Gleeson, writer, comedian, historian, co-editor of Transgender Marxism
About the Author:
M.E. O'Brien writes on gender and communist theory. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She co-authors the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.