Interview conducted by Jieming Zhu.

1. Please give us a little background about your educational and political formation, and how you came to the perspective of “family abolition”? What were the main influences on your thinking as it began to take shape?

I came to family abolition during my years organizing on the revolutionary left, being involved in trans and HIV activism, and engaging communist theory. In my research, I depended a great deal on social reproduction theory, histories of Black freedom struggles, queer and trans studies, and Marxism. I was working on this during my PhD writing about queer social movements in NYC, but my family abolitionist research remained quite distinct from my academic research.

Specifically and most immediately, I came to a family abolition framework through editing a collection of revolutionary feminist theory. I was the lead editor on a reader through the Communist Research Cluster of communist, Marxist, anarchist, and radical feminist writing on gender from the 1880s to the early 1980s. While working on that reader, I found many militant theorists were critiquing the family, but depending on their context what they meant seemed to vary radically. I found that analyzing the changing role of the working class family in capitalist reproduction allowed me to make sense of why the revolutionary critique of the family shifted, as well. Family abolition became a way of conceptually holding together the rich and varied legacy of efforts to radically transform the social relations surrounding gender, sexuality, and care.

2. Your long essay “To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development”, published on Endnotes magazine in 2020, has been widely influential among queer-Marxist-feminists. In this essay you provide a historical overview of working-class family politics and family-abolitionist visions, mostly in US and Europe, from the 1830s to our neoliberal present. Since much of our interview is going to be about this essay, would you mind summarizing some of the main points you made there for our readers? 

“To Abolish the Family” traces the history of struggles to go beyond the family through the changing role of the family in capitalist reproduction. I found this common family abolitionist politics in the last two hundred years of working-class mass movements, but also stark differences in what, exactly, they mean by family. I explain these differences by tracing what was happening in the working-class family at the time, focusing on Europe and North America. 

In the mid-19th-century industrializing Europe, Marx and Engels were writing their critiques of the bourgeois family. Working-class people were dying faster than they were being born, and the intensity of poverty and overwork made forming stable families impossible. Marx and Engels argued that the working-class family had already been destroyed, so instead they focused their critique on overcoming the family as a part of bourgeois society. 

But at the end of the 19th century, working-class parties and movements in Europe and the US began to consolidate in a new way. They distinguished themselves from the poor, claimed respectability and the right to govern, and envisioned a form of socialism as a society run by workers. Communization theory calls this “the workers’ movement” as a distinct phase of capitalist development that lasted until the 1970s. This workers’ movement—which never included the whole working class—adopted the housewife family form of the bourgeoisie as a goal and source of respectable status. Through winning “the family wage” and other reforms, some workers began to live in normative family households. In the meantime, family abolition as Alexandra Kollontai envisioned it and pursued by women in the Russian Revolution was women moving into the workforce, and collectivizing household labor in canteens and crèches. 

In the 1960s, rebellions of Gay Liberationists, Radical Feminists, and Black women radicals all sought again to go beyond the normative family of the workers’ movement. But it was ultimately the long downturn of global capitalism since the 1970s that unraveled the family form of the workers’ movement—along with the workers’ movement itself—while intensifying dependence on the private household and the wage.

Woven throughout is an attention to the racial dynamics of the family in North America. I follow the breaking up of kin relations among enslaved Africans, the non-normative household forms of Black rebellion during Black Reconstruction and in the 1960s, and the imposition of the normative family during Jim Crow. You are correct that my analysis does not extend beyond the North Atlantic world, and this is definitely a fault that requires a lot more research.

The analysis in “To Abolish the Family” forms the core of my historical research about family abolition. I find the thesis of the workers’ movement as developed by communization theory collectives like Théorie Communiste and Endnotes to be very helpful in making sense of why in the socialist imaginary family politics changed so much. In each era, family abolition was the furthest limit of gender and sexual freedom as pursued by proletarian struggle. But what they were fighting against changed as the family’s place in capitalism changed.

3. In “To Abolish the Family”, you have demonstrated a method that combines Marxist feminism with queer Marxism. What are your thoughts on the strengths and limitations of Marxist feminism (especially social reproduction theory), and how can it be enriched through a queer-trans-Marxist, family-abolitionist perspective? Can you speculate about the reasons why this influential statement (“To Abolish the Family”) and your other essays on family abolition have been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese, Greek, Turkish, French, Spanish, and German. To your knowledge, how have these translations been received, especially in Asian and third-world contexts?  How do you see the relation of your works to other young scholars currently working on family abolition (e.g., Sophie Lewis)? 

Social reproduction theory—and the broader Marxist Feminist traditions it is a part of—are immensely helpful in thinking about how the family, the private household, and gender are embedded in the circuits of capitalist society. They help make sense of the changing role of the family over time, which in turn explains changing politics around gender. My research is, in these senses, solidly within a social reproduction framework.

But I found much social reproduction theory had less to offer in making sense of the place of those excluded from the family form, particularly queer people and Black and Indigenous people. Queer Marxism is also a major influence for me, but by looking only at those excluded is less able to make sense of the changing historical role of the family, including in becoming more accessible to queer people. I argue we need much more research linking these two together—both analyzing the family within capitalism, in a dialectical interrelationship with the place of people marginalized from the normative family form altogether. The family is always both: a system of private households, and a regime of exclusion. We need social theory that looks at both sides of that.

Family abolition speaks to an emerging set of global concerns. I would argue that the dynamics of global capitalism have produced common patterns, and shared crises, that cut across very different cultural and national contexts. I don’t explore this fully in the essay, and certainly there is significant regional and national variation. But both the emergence and dominance of the private family, and its current crisis, are widespread and shared. As well, the multi-national, welcome  reception my essay has enjoyed may be partially due to its appearing in a journal of communization theory, and drawing on communization as a framework. Communization is most closely associated with the post-68 French communist theory, but it has always had a strong multi-lingual, international, and internationalist engagement.

I can’t easily speak to how it has been received and debated in other contexts. I had the honor of speaking to a study group centered around the journal Chuang that included Chinese radicals and radical writers oriented to Chinese politics. They saw considerable intersections in their thinking about the history of rebellions, family formation, and proletarianization in China as I laid out, but of course significant differences as well. I gather they found studying the text and discussing it helpful in their own thinking. 

I am honored the text has been taken up as widely as it has. Writing is always a process of putting something out, and not being sure how it will be received. Those who devote the long necessary hours towards translation are providing a profound gift, making that reception possible in new ways.

Sophie Lewis’ excellent book, Abolish the Family! A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso 2022) are in my view overlapping and intersecting projects, and I see our projects as productive compliments. She and I are one of a handful of publishing family abolitionists. They are quite skilled in addressing the affective anxieties family abolition stirs up, in speaking directly to present concerns, and in inspiring readers. My research is a bit more grounded in the history of capitalism, and speculates about  future horizons. Both are very much needed.

4. In “To Abolish the Family”, you devote a chapter to examining family abolition efforts during Chinese and Soviet socialism, especially China’s Great Leap Forward and Alexandra Kollontai’s thinking and practice in the early years of the USSR. Can you elaborate about the historical achievements and failures of family abolition under actually-existing socialisms? 

I can primarily speak to the early Soviet years, and only speculate on the other elements of your question. Alexandra Kollontai, and the experiments in collective living in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, have been a major interest of mine. Her thinking, and the collectivization of household labor she was associated with, are tremendously advanced and compelling as a way of thinking about family abolition, overcoming the private household, and gender equality. The trajectory of the Soviet Union would have been quite different if the Bolshevik government had not abandoned these efforts, and re-imposed the nuclear family and regressive gender and sexual politics in the late 1920s and 1930s. By the time of the infamous Romanian orphanages and such, I don’t think there was much left to defend about the family politics of the Soviet Union.

China’s revolutionary history is complex, as are my feelings about it. I also know far less than many of your readers, so I hesitate in speaking on this. But I’ll make a few speculations about where my studies have led me. I know the Cultural Revolution included mass efforts to move beyond the bourgeois nuclear family. As I understand it, the revolutionary state in China relied more on peasant support than the Soviet government did, so collectivization involved less extreme mass violence. But ultimately collectivizing peasant labor, in both cases, was a brutal process that ultimately served to advance capitalist development and proletarianization in the countryside.

I am much more interested in the little bit I’ve heard about how proletarian queer people today are navigating life and building new forms of solidarity in the corporate barracks and internal migrant worker of China today. China is quite remarkable for having such a huge population that spends much of the year away from their family and household, and this has considerable implications for how people form networks of resistance. State socialism is another way of advancing capitalism. The overcoming of the private household can only happen through the generalization of proletarian rebellion.

5. Throughout “To Abolish the Family”, you put particular focus on historical experiences and liberating potentials of the black working-class family. What about Asian and Latinx working-class families? How might we theorize their experiences in the struggle for family abolition? 

I can’t speak to family politics across Latin America and Asia. But I know a bit about struggles in the history of the US. Before 1965, immigration of both Asian and Latinx people was highly restricted in ways that were designed to undermine or prohibit family formation. Chinese and Mexican migration was often restricted to only men, and male migrants were limited in their ability to marry. Chinese and Mexican migrant workers were integral to building the infrastructure of the American West, and enabling long-term white settlement and capitalist development. Policing their intimacy was a form of labor control. The restrictions on migrant family forms is an important part of the history of policing of the family, and the assault on the kinship relations of racialized people. 

In 1965, the US passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. It dramatically altered US immigration policy. The Act largely did away with race-based preferential quotas that based authorized migration on established European-American populations, and opened the way for large-scale Asian and Latin American migration. As I understand it, three forms of Asian and Latinx migration became possible to a new extent: employer-sponsored highly-educated professionals in technical fields; refugees fleeing military conflict, particularly instigated by political adversaries of the US empire; and family re-unification, as family members of established US residents were able to migrate. These new forms of migration enabled non-European migrant communities in the US to establish family households in the US in ways that were not previously possible. It also meant that for many migrants, their relationship to their spouse, their immediate family member, or their employer was necessary to be able to maintain documented residence in the US. This increases the dependency integral to the nuclear family structure, and the potential coercion that dependency enables. If a migrant has to stay with their spouse to become a Legal Permanent Resident, they are much more likely to continue to endure abuse and coercion in their relationship.

The regime of the family includes both sides of this bind: on the one hand, the state-imposed family policing system that breaks up and attacks certain forms of kinship, and the bolstering of the nuclear family within the private household in ways that enable coercion. Family abolition means overcoming both sides of this violence. 

6. Tell us a bit about your recently published sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of The New York Commune, 2052-2072. How did you experiment with the idea of family abolition in this novel? Why does science fiction and utopian desire matter to the struggle for family abolition? What is the relation between family abolition and other utopian, abolitionist struggles like prison abolition and work abolition? 

I co-wrote this novel with Eman Abadelhadi. Common Notions published it at the beginning of August. The book is a collection of fictional oral histories with people recounting their experiences during a social collapse, followed by a successful global communist revolution. The interviews particularly highlight how social reproduction functioned during the insurrections and in the emerging revolutionary institutions of the new society—how care was collectivized as a survival strategy during rebellions, how children are raised, and how people address mental health needs, food, or healthcare. 

The Marxist critique of utopian socialism was essentially correct—we will not arrive at a just future through planning it out. But utopian visioning can be something other than a program or plan to carry out. It can play another, different role in our movements. Utopian visioning can be a powerful, critical thought experiment integrated into organizing and movement building. Through imagining ways society could be different, people can explore our values, give shape to our critiques of the present. I would love to see a lot more people writing utopian speculative fiction as a part of movement work. 

As far as linking the various concepts of abolition, I draw from two major traditions of abolitionism: the Black freedom struggle in the Americas waged first against slavery, and today against multiple other forms of state-sanctioned social death and anti-Blackness; and the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Drawing from Hegel, Marx understood abolition—Aufhebung—as including both destruction and preservation, lifting up, transforming. It includes both a negative and a positive component. When people talk about abolishing prisons, they probably include a hope to one day burn them all to the ground. But abolishing the family, in contrast, has to be about expanding and generalizing the positive forms of care we associate with the best families. Everyone should have access to the care they need regardless of how they choose to form their immediate kin arrangements. Subtly, you can find this positive element in the struggle to abolish prison, police, and work—what are positive, healing practices and institutions that can assure real safety, that can meet each other’s needs, that can make a society worth living in?

I’m hoping we start seeing deeper dialogue between these different currents of abolition. Together, they can help us envision a world worth living for.

7. Finally, please tell us a bit about your upcoming monograph on family abolition to be published next year by Pluto Press. How will you expand on the arguments already so well articulated in “To Abolish the Family”? What are some of the aspects you will touch upon in the monograph that have been rarely discussed in your previous works?

In June 2023, Pluto will be publishing Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care. It includes much of the history in “To Abolish the Family,” with much more development around the history of the family politics under settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous genocide. It also moves through the multiple crises of the family in the present, and then includes a lengthy theorization of social reproduction during both rebellions and in a free society.  

Here is an excerpt from the opening section:

All the time, people are trying to move beyond the normative nuclear family through creative strategies of survival and care. These are moments that point us to a revolutionary horizon. They draw from and embody qualities that draw us to family life, like long-term and intergenerational relationships of care, interdependency, and solidarity. Yet these efforts also unleash that care into new forms, new practices, and new relationships. The forms of love present in the best families are not destroyed in the struggle to move beyond the family, but broadened, generalized, and made universal. 

Family abolition is this care beyond the family extended through the whole of society, a process made possible through deep revolutionary change. Family abolition is the expansion and generalization of relations of care and consensual interdependency. Family abolition is a commitment that no one should be without support, that everyone should have the freedom to find ways of loving and caring without coercion. The coercion of the family takes many forms, including interpersonal violence and the blackmail of providing necessary care only when certain conditions are met. A free society is one where people are able to form intimate relations without these forms of coercion.