About the Books:
Family Abolition:
How do we take care of each other? Who raises us as children, is with us when we are ill, provides a place to sleep when we need one? We often rely on family for the care we all need. Yet even at their best families cannot carry the impossible demands placed on them, and for many the family is a place of private horror, of coercion and personal domination.
M. E. O'Brien uncovers the long history of struggles to go beyond the private family. She traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and the slavery plantations and settler frontier of North America, through the rise and fall of the housewife family. From Marx to Black and queer insurrection to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds revolutionary movements 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 organised in a free society.

Abolish the Family:
What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted? What if we could do better than the family?
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

About the Speakers:
M. E. O'Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, June 2023), and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She works as a therapist, and is pursuing training as a psychoanalyst.

Sophie Lewis is a writer and para-academic living in Philadelphia and a teaching faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She has an unpaid visiting affiliation with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of many essays as well as two books so far: Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022).

Sterling Johnson is a housing lawyer and organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action.