The Importance of the Family on the Left

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