Excerpt: /342/ Maybe Don’t Abolish the Family? w/ Amber A’Lee Frost

On family abolition.

[Patreon Exclusive]
Amber A'Lee Frost joins us to talk through recent radical proposals to do away with the family as an institution. Author Sophie Lewis claims that "ever since the capitalist victory over the long Sixties, the shout for abolition of the family has been buried beneath a strange kind of shame”, but that now it’s back. Why?
What problems does family abolition address? And how do contemporary accounts sit in relation to earlier radical proposals by the Old and New Lefts?
If "the family is doing a bad job at care" and "getting in the way of alternatives", what actually is the alternative? Wouldn't destroying the family merely make life worse for most, without putting anything better in its place?
 
Readings:

Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis, Verso


Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso


Profile of Sophie Lewis in VICE


Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch


Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star


The Lockdown Left: socialists against society, Philip Cunliffe, spiked


Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage