The Insurrectionary Exit: On M.E. O’Brien’s FAMILY ABOLITION
It is an unfortunate if fairly ordinary feature of freelance book reviewing that sometimes your favorite reviews end up orphaned. That’s what happened in this case. Due to a mundane and totally reasonable mix-up, the outlet that initially intended to publish this review had to cancel. (They paid me anyway, though, which was mighty nice of them.) I emailed some editors elsewhere, but by that point several excellent reviews had already appeared — for example in Blind Field, Inquest, and Spectre — and in the end I wasn’t able to find a home for my own.
Which, while completely understandable, was also kind of a bummer. (And since I’d earlier represented myself as a competent freelance book reviewer, on which basis the author and publisher were kind enough to send me an advance review copy, a touch embarrassing, too…)
So I’m self-publishing this one! Here’s my review of M.E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition, a provocative and uncommonly clearheaded book that deserves all the attention it can get. My heartfelt thanks, as always, for reading. ~J.W.
If you’re curious about that slippery species of social organization we clumsily call “the family,” rest assured: the past hundred years or so have seen no shortage of writing on the subject. Go diving in that deep well and here are some things you’ll learn —
The family is preternaturally ancient. And yet it is also incontrovertibly new. The family is primordial. And yet it is also perpetually on the brink of delegitimization and collapse. The family is natural. And yet it also must also be iteratively repaired through compulsory rituals, some of which are codified in law, that reassert the primacy of lifelong coupling and dyadic childrearing to successful adulthood. The family is the only institution insulating us from the savagery of the market and the venality of mass society: “an enclosure on the open battlefields of sex and power,” as the sociologist Göran Therborn once wrote. And yet the family is also the locus of capitalist social reproduction: an engine for replenishing labor markets and therefore also the portal through which each individual is interpolated into class relations. The family is everything; everything is the family. And yet the family is also everything else.
I’m being glib, but my point is that many analysts of the family, mainstreamers and Marxists alike, have long been resigned to circular discussions. They tend to approach their object of study only by way of puzzles and paradoxes. Where one expects to find certainty, one instead almost invariably encounters equivocation.
Family Abolition, a bold new book by the sociologist and psychotherapist M.E. O’Brien, is refreshingly free of equivocation. For one thing, O’Brien is delightfully direct about what she understands the family to be, in both functionalist and historical terms. In class society, she argues, the family is the institution through which care is privatized. The family organizes the energies of its members so as to guarantee the gestation and nourishment of infants; the tending to of youths, elders, and the infirm; and disposal of the deceased. And, at least in the idealistic vision of familist ideologues like Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton, it does all of this alone, unassisted by (and indeed often in defiance of) any collective entity beyond itself.
As O’Brien writes, the family is an impossible institution. Tangled up within it you’ll inevitably find gordian knots of violence and love, atrocity and affection, cruelty and compassion. And yet it is the compulsory character of this impossible institution that is perhaps the most important organizing principle of our social life under capitalist modernity.
With a kind of political clarity that is rare even in books written for radicals, Family Abolition unapologetically condemns the private family as a misguided and indeed intolerable basis on which to organize a free society. What’s more, it dares to anticipate a trajectory through which the private family might be transcended and permanently replaced (abolished, as O’Brien puts it) at the level of mass society.
O’Brien begins her book at the barricades of the 2006 Oaxaca Commune, one of the our century’s most dramatic episodes of mass insurrection. At those barricades, O’Brien writes, insurgent women began the work of “transforming the isolation of domestic life into a means of communal, revolutionary survival.” In the Oaxaca commune, as in other mass insurrectionary experiments, O’Brien sees the germs of a more democratic society, one in which the format of capitalist social reproduction, contained as it is in the private family, is thoroughly transformed. “What had been women’s work in the home became the daily practice of reproducing the insurrection,” O’Brien observes.
The occupied plazas of Oaxaca City may seem an unlikely launching pad for a book about families, but in fact this observation is central to Family Abolition’s major argument. The forms of collective care that have lately been practiced at barricades from Oaxaca to Tahrir to Zuccotti Park can, when given the chance, come to constitute a kind of “insurgent social reproduction,” O’Brien suggests. By formulating ways of attending to vital needs that transcend the private household, the social life of insurgency poses a deep political challenge to the compulsive familism of capitalist modernity. It is through the mundane routines by which insurrection is reproduced that care may be de-privatized, O’Brien argues. And only through such mass and democratic de-privatization of care can the family be overcome.
If you ask me, it is in articulating this vision of an insurrectionary exit from compulsory familism that Family Abolition is at its most provocative and compelling. But before O’Brien can elaborate upon this vision, as she does in the final section of her book, she first assigns herself the somewhat thornier task of historicizing the private family and its place in capitalist society.
Like nearly all critics of the family, O’Brien is careful to differentiate the bourgeois family that emerged in early modern Europe from other forms of household and intimate organization that prevailed during earlier historical moments.
The bourgeois family was characterized above all else by the intergenerational transmission of property through paternity. To an extent, it shared this in common with both the aristocratic and peasant family forms that preceded (and overlapped with) it. But what set the bourgeois family apart was its uncommon attention to libidinal regulation. In the bourgeois family, the hereditary transmission of property was tethered to a uniquely restrictive set of social mores that together established a coercive repertoire through which male household heads proposed to regulate the sexuality of all family members. It was in part through this kind of comprehensive sexual containment, generally exercised within the private household, that the bourgeoisie came not only to recognize itself as a class, but also to assert its interests and establish its collective social dominance.
The bourgeois family, with its parochial fixation on the private regulation of sex, strove to provide patriarchal household heads with an institutional apparatus through which they might rationalize intergenerational patterns of coupling and procreation. The patriarch’s rationalization was self-interested, in that his goal was always to enhance the position of his particular household over others. But to the bourgeois mind such a form of sexual regulation was also utopian. Each household, after all, constituted a quasi-corporate entity in the libidinal economy of market society — and the health of the market required robust competition between well-managed macro-actors, in marriage as well as in commodity-trading. If capitalist social reproduction is located in the private household, then the bourgeois family is that private household’s platonic ideal.
The reconstitution of society under bourgeois hegemony required the generalization of this parochial family form and its attendant sexual mores to classes beyond the demographically outnumbered bourgeoisie. But this project could only ever be partial and fraught with contradiction, not least because the thoroughgoing bourgeois-ization of society also required the annihilation of the procreative and domestic structures that had earlier characterized the feudal mode of production. This process, which Marx famously dubbed primitive accumulation, alienated the members of the incipient working class not only from the means of production possessed by the peasant household, but also from the kinship structures and family-making practices that had durably reproduced that household as a going concern.
To freshly minted proletarians freed from the fetters of farm life, the bourgeoisie’s idealized private family presented itself as one among many possible forms of domestic and intimate organization. But it was also the only form on offer that promised to deliver to working-class households a measure of the respectability and protection afforded the households of the bourgeoisie. For wage laborers seeking to integrate themselves into market society on favorable terms, membership in the private family was something close to compulsory. (The private family became “normal” in the sense proposed by Christopher Chitty, in that it came to function as a kind of “status property” that “accrues material advantages to those who achieve it.”) But at the same time, to successfully form such a family — and preserve it not only for a lifetime but also inter-generationally — was a gargantuan task, one that was indeed impossible for the vast
majority of people.
The private family’s unattainable character is, in a sense, the very thing that best preserves its status as the hegemonic ideal. The perpetual crisis of the working-class family in capitalist society is therefore to be expected. Nevertheless, within the impossible institution, new workers are reared, current workers are restored, and exhausted workers retired — all, of course, to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Having successfully delegated the provision of care (that is, the social reproduction of their workforce) to the private institution of the family, the bourgeois are freed from the responsibility of taking a direct interest in their workers’ vital needs.
In general terms, at least, this account will surely be familiar to many of O’Brien’s readers, consistent as it is with a fairly conventional analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But Family Abolition also goes beyond this commonplace story.
For O’Brien, the durable hegemony of the private family in capitalist society cannot be understood merely as the result of working-class acquiescence to a bourgeois ideal, nor even as an obligatory standard imposed through force by a dominant moneyed class on a servile impoverished one. Instead, as O’Brien emphasizes, the working-class adoption of the private family was deeply conditioned by the exigencies of class struggle, and as a result its particular form and function transformed with the passage of time.
O’Brien argues that, with some notable exceptions, the workers’ movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries generally sought not to abolish the bourgeois family but to appropriate its key elements. This tended to involve joining bourgeois authorities in suppressing the more insurgent forms of sexual and intimate expression that effervesced around the ragged edges of the capitalist social system — notably sex work, which, as O’Brien points out, always seemed to beguile and unsettle Marx and Engels (as well as nearly all their intellectual descendants), despite its being a nearly inescapable feature of proletarian social life.
In O’Brien’s telling, the workers’ movement sought to chasten the actually-existing working class through the invention of the lumpen, a category that tended to describe sexual ungovernability as much as anything else. O’Brien identifies an epochal struggle between the two souls of working-class sexual politics — a repressive (workerist) tendency oriented towards the appropriation of the bourgeois family as an instrument of working-class respectability, and an insurgent (lumpen) tendency invested in exuberant forms of family-making beyond bourgeois projections. Through its contradictory capacity to simultaneously criticize and co-opt bourgeois hegemony, the workers’ movement ended up advancing a particular vision of social progress. And this vision, like its bourgeois counterpart, depended on an idealized private family to function.
As O’Brien sees it, the male breadwinner and female housewife-based family — the unrivaled engine of capitalist social reproduction for most of the twentieth century — is best understood not as a pure reflection of the bourgeois ideal, nor as “the inevitable outcome of capitalist development,” but rather as “a contingent outcome of class struggle.”
The workers’ movement reconstituted the private family as a privileged location from which working-class household heads could demand favorable integration into capitalist society — not as atomized social aliens, but instead as rational and respectable actors, minor patriarchs who in pursuing their own self-interests could be trusted to steward markets both libidinal and laboral. This, for O’Brien, was the grand bargain of the sexually repressive workers’ movement. From their positions as the heads of working-class families, male breadwinners were able to demand a degree of social inclusion for themselves and their relations; in exchange, they assumed responsibility (or rather, coercively imposed responsibility upon their wives) for guaranteeing the durable reproduction of wage workers as a class, to the enduring benefit of the bourgeoisie.
But not everyone was on board with the bargain. One of Family Abolition’s great strengths is that it recovers a subterranean current of anti-family radicalism that extends from the nineteenth-century utopianist Charles Fourier to Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollentai to second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone and beyond. Sometimes articulated from within the workers’ movement, but more often expressed from outside it, this undercurrent represents for O’Brien a parallel tradition to the patriarchal and pro-natalist tendencies that achieved hegemony within the mass working-class politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In excavating this understudied tradition, Family Abolition finds common cause with Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, published last year. Both books identify a common cast of characters as inspirational precursors — O’Brien may tend to emphasize Fourier more than Lewis does; Lewis may tend to emphasize Firestone; but there are precious few fellow travelers influencing one author that fail to inspire the other, as well.
To their credit, both O’Brien and Lewis refuse to romanticize their political predecessors. In fact, they each tend to spell out those predecessors’ failures in nearly as much detail as their triumphs. Firestone, despite her admirable clarity about the need to socialize gestation, was unfortunately seduced by a primordialist view of human development that trafficked in the bankrupt epistemology of racial science. Kollantai may have used her position within the Soviet state to propose a program of collectivized childrearing intended to liberate women by neutralizing the private family — but the institution she envisioned, by enforcing mandatory separation between gestators and infants, would have likely reinscribed much of the alienation and unfreedom it aimed to alleviate. And the world-historical irony of Fourier is that his template for erotic flourishing through communal living was taken up with special fervor by utopians who also embraced the European settler-colonial project, and so ended up contributing to the annihilation of the diverse family forms that characterized indigenous life in America.
O’Brien and Lewis are unflinching about these shortcomings. But they are also insistent that the failures of earlier generations cannot discredit the historic demand for family abolition, which Marx and Engles long ago identified as “the most infamous proposal of the communists.”
Throughout Family Abolition, O’Brien artfully provincializes the private family. One way she accomplishes this is by describing Europeans’ genocidal encounter with the domestic forms characteristic of some indigenous American societies, which tended to accommodate sexual customs and modes of gender expression that overflowed the moral categories of settler-colonial modernity. What’s more, O’Brien also presents an unusual and compelling account of counter-hegemonic family formation among formerly enslaved persons during Black reconstruction.
American chattel slavery operated through the forcible severance of kinship bonds and the unilateral dispersal of intentional households. As a result, people subject to that labor regime were forced by circumstance to create diverse forms of interrelation and intimacy that defied the bourgeois family ideal. Perhaps predictably, then, the abolition of slavery precipitated a brief period of unprecedented sexual and emotional freedom for the formerly enslaved, who, by restoring intimate connections destroyed during enslavement, oftentimes ended up arranging themselves into free households that confounded the dyadic marriage custom and private family form demanded by capitalist modernity. In fact, one purpose of Jim Crow laws, O’Brien suggests, was to suppress this kind of intimate and domestic diversity by rationalizing the Black family according to Eurocentric moral standards.
O’Brien also recovers several twentieth-century episodes of anti-family rebellion in the United States. For example, she compellingly re-interprets both the welfare rights movement led by Black mothers and the Wages for Housework campaign waged by Marxist feminists during the “Red Decade” of the 1960s-70s, identifying in each of them a underlying demand for the de-privatization of care and the disentanglement of social reproduction from the private household.
These aspects of O’Brien’s history are a triumph. Admittedly, though, there are other aspects that may leave inquisitive readers a touch unsatisfied. Reading much of the book’s wide-ranging second section (“A History of Family Abolition”), I found myself distracted by a persistent craving for absented events and details.
For example, O’Brien joins many other Marxist theoreticians in placing the origins of pre-capitalist family forms beyond the frame of her analysis. In O’Brien’s book, as in many others, this maneuver casts a shroud over those forms of intimate and domestic organization directly antecedent to the bourgeois family, such as the peasant household characteristic of European feudalism. This omission has the frustrating effect of fashioning for those antecedents a kind of black box, in the process rendering the historical novelty of the modern bourgeois and working-class families oblique and difficult to grasp. (Readers curious about pre-capitalist family forms, including those characteristic of antiquity and pre-history, should consult Wally Seccombe’s scandalously under-read A Millennium of Family Change, as well as Angela Saini’s informative The Patriarchs, released earlier this year.)
Relatedly, Family Abolition’s account of workerist familism gradually but decisively winning out over the unsettling sexual exuberance of the lumpen sometimes tends to skew towards the mechanistic. Lost in O’Brien’s story of the two souls of working-class sexual politics is a robust sense of capitalist accumulation as a nonlinear process, or of capitalist hegemony as inevitably plural and shifting.
That the cyclical character of capitalist accumulation deeply conditions the social organization of sex, and that standards of sexual normalcy tend to undergo dramatic transformations in periods of capitalist crisis and restoration, are the central insights of Christopher Chitty’s extraordinary Sexual Hegemony. I was disappointed to find that the complex worlds of sex and scandal inhabited by Chitty’s early-modern protagonists are largely absent from Family Abolition. In my reading, at least, O’Brien’s account unfortunately leaves precious little analytical space from which to even consider them.
It must be said, however, that these are all quite minor gripes, especially considering Family Abolition’s uncommonly ambitious scope. (And to be fair, none of O’Brien’s conclusions strike me as necessarily incompatible with the more nuanced accounts of pre- and early-modern family formation I referenced above.) Certainly no quibble of mine can lessen the impact of O’Brien’s political message. As I mentioned, Family Abolition is much more than a history book. Its most important pages have little to do with the past and everything to do with the future.
Which brings us back to the Oaxaca Commune, and to the radical theoretical contribution at the heart of O’Brien’s deceptively plainspoken book.
To sustain the insurgent social life of the barricades, the protagonists of the Oaxaca Commune were forced to develop communal structures for accomplishing tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare. By distributing socially reproductive duties among members of political networks, rather than hereditary ones, they threatened to implode the private family by vacating it of its purpose. To use O’Brien’s terms, an “insurgent social reproduction,” located in the ad hoc institutions of mass struggle, threatened to displace the capitalist social reproduction located in the private family. “Insurgent social reproduction,” O’Brien elaborates, “in pointing us beyond the limits of capitalism and the family, suggests a different mode of organizing domestic life.”
Insurgent social reproduction may provide the tools for eroding the private family’s compulsive character, but it does not, in O’Brien’s formulation, entirely overcome the family. Instead, it represents a transitional stage on the way to a more durable form of “communist social reproduction,” which O’Brien imagines can be achieved through the permanent institutionalization of those social forms and collective methods of task-allocation innovated through insurrection.
“The protest kitchen, the tent encampment, the childcare center, and the medic tent together help replace the family at protest sites, without constituting a new state form separated from the social body,” O’Brien writes. “Taking their essential logic and generalizing it, imagining it encompassing society, may take a new form: collective living arrangements encompassing hundreds of people, constituted directly in the midst of struggle.”
It is through this kind of institutionalization, O’Brien imagines, that contingent and ad hoc insurrectionary institutions might become permanent and well-planned communal ones. “Just as the communal kitchen has arisen in past insurgencies, the commune as the prevalent mode of social reproduction could arise under a wider condition of communism.” If the commune can become “the primary unit of domestic life,” O’Brien anticipates, the family may finally be abolished.
This vision of an insurrectionary exit from compulsory familism is, to my mind, the most noteworthy feature not only of Family Abolition, but also of the wider political milieu in which it sits. In some ways, in fact, this transitional vision constitutes the common basis for the recent resurgence of family abolitionist thinking on the socialist left, a revival to which O’Brien’s efforts as an author and editor have been crucial.
Lewis’s Abolish the Family, for example, derives much of its radical optimism from a 2020 tent encampment in Philadelphia: “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,” Lewis elaborates. Citing an earlier essay by O’Brien, Lewis concedes that to locate in “a localized camp-out” the germs of a post-family future beyond capitalism “might seem a bit vertiginous.” Still “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.”
Earlier generations of radicals may have occasionally diagnosed the problem of the family in compatible terms, but they rarely seemed to agree on what kind of politics might actually be capable of accomplishing the family’s demolition and transcendence. It is striking that family abolitionists in our own time, although hardly numerous, do at least seem to share in common a general idea about what kind of historical trajectory will be necessary for the private family to be undone.
The vision of family abolition provided by K.D. Griffiths and J.J. Gleeson in their famous 2015 essay “Kinderkommunismus,” for example, diverges in important respects from O’Brien’s. (O’Brien’s commune, in fact, is in part a critical response to Griffiths and Gleeson’s “creche,” a hypothetical communist-state institution.) Still, in sketching their prospective transition away from capitalist familism, Griffiths and Gleeson posit their own version of the insurrectionary exit; they speculate that “the normal constraints of gender and family roles” would have to be thoroughly disrupted by mass rebellion prior to the establishment of any alternative institution of social reproduction.
Lest I overstate the case, however, I should add that O’Brien is insistent that her notion of the insurrectionary exit is just that — a notion. It’s not a program. Nor is it even a prediction, not necessarily. It’s an imaginary scenario, a “speculative vision,” as O’Brien writes, “derived from what I identified as communist social reproduction, coupled to analyzing forms of existing mass protest.”
But such speculative visions are, as O’Brien insists, crucial for imagining possibilities beyond inherited social forms, many of which, like the private family, appear incompatible with the full extent of human flourishing. In Family Abolition, O’Brien provides a rare glimpse at a kind of future that is unnerving in its radical dis-familiarity to the world of compulsory private relations we occupy today. But it is also a future that, in O’Brien’s description, feels eminently possible.
And oh what delights, what vistas of freedom and fellowship, might await us on the other side!
