Family Planning

Family Planning

How should we live together and divide our labor?

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care
by M.E. O’Brien
Pluto Press, 2023, 304 pp.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Bold Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Simon & Schuster, 2023, 352 pp.

Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
by Sophie Lewis
Verso, 2022, 128 pp.

They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life
by Alva Gotby
Verso, 2023, 192 pp.

Radical Intimacy
by Sophie K Rosa
Pluto Press, 2023, 208 pp.

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek
Verso, 2023, 288 pp.

At the end of last year, a friend and I sat down to watch the 2002 Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy. Grant’s character is kind of a loser, one who does nothing all day but live off the royalties of a hit song his father once wrote. While dating a single mother, he realizes two things: one, that single moms have lots of responsibilities and don’t expect too much from him, and two, that he actually likes kids. He goes in search of more single mothers, and stumbles into a friendship with a tween boy (Nicholas Hoult, who is now all grown up and starring in films like The Favourite). He’s romantically uninterested in the kid’s mother (Toni Collette), but the kid won’t let him bail, and while he’s trying to impress another woman (Rachel Weisz), ultimately his emotional growth comes through his decision to accept the role that the kid has given him as a sort of surrogate dad or uncle or something that we don’t have the language for. The film ends with a Christmas party with the raucous extended non-family the kid has assembled around him: bio-mom and dad, Hugh Grant and his girlfriend and girlfriend’s son, and some other miscellaneous, multigenerational, multigender friends. I turned to my friend and said, “I actually endorse this.”

Children, it often seems to me, deserve more than two parents. And we adults deserve space for more complicated, sprawling relationships than the world we currently live in finds legible. We are living through an epidemic of loneliness, which the World Health Organization has declared a public health threat with long-term effects perhaps as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The truth is that the family, expected to meet all of the needs and desires that we are otherwise denied in the capitalist world, has been breaking down for as long as it has existed. It is not a surprise that, in our time of plural apocalypses, the family has come in for renewed and ruthless criticism.

What is the family? For the purposes of this piece, I mean a private household made up of a couple and their children. The old assumption is that the couple would be a man and a woman and the children biologically theirs. This form of the family, often called the nuclear family, is perhaps as old as ancient Rome, but its particular role in the structure of the economy only became hegemonic in the heyday of industrial capitalism.

The family is materially real but an impossible ideal; it is freely chosen and the site of coercion and sometimes violence; it is the opposite of “work” but the location of lots of labor nonetheless. It is the place where love is produced, and also where deeply unequal social relations are reified. It is presumed natural, and yet for millennia people have lived outside of and without it. The family is the place where so many of us get at least some of our needs met, and yet it is more and more often falling short.

As I write this, I can imagine readers stiffening: how dare I criticize this pillar of our society, the institution that is the backbone of our lives? But it’s not just me. A crop of recent books delves into the problems with the family form and the pillars on which it stands—housework, emotion work, patriarchy, private property, and even binary gender—pulling apart its flaws and exploring the different ways we have lived and might live in the future. Some wish to abolish the family entirely; others use softer language but are no less critical of the ways that the family has let us down. M.E. O’Brien, Kristen R. Ghodsee, Sophie Lewis, Alva Gotby, Sophie K Rosa, and Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek are, variously, academics, journalists, and political organizers asking the old question: how should we live together and divide our labor? They take up the work and love done within and outside of the family, and offer ideas of what a world beyond it might look like.

The private household, rooted in private property, with a man off to work and his wife at home, is a fairly recent invention, though one built on the biological needs for creating children. The institution of the factory changed the lives of working people: work was now done outside of the home, on a clock kept by the boss. As this way of life stabilized, workers and bourgeois reformers fought for free time and to regulate who should have to suffer the brutality of factory work: children and women staying home was seen as a sign of progress, but it also created what Hester and Srnicek call “an intrafamilial reserve army of labour,” able to take up waged work in moments of desperation. We saw this again during COVID-19 lockdowns, as teenage children’s part-time delivery or fast food work suddenly made them the family breadwinner when other workplaces shuttered. One’s power within the family, O’Brien argues, is connected to one’s power in the working world. Without outside resources—a job or other source of income—it can be nearly impossible to leave a bad relationship, and this is doubly hard for children trying to escape an abusive home.

The “traditional family” the authors focus on only became dominant a century or so ago, in the aftermath of the First World War and even more so after the Second World War. During the latter, women worked in factories in large numbers while the men went to the front, and governments briefly invested in social reproduction, funding public nurseries for children and feeding people. As with expanded unemployment, furlough programs, and the child tax credit early in the COVID-19 pandemic, those investments were yanked back after the war ended, reprivatizing the burden of care. Following the war and up through the 1970s, many workers made a “family wage,” enough to support a wife and kids, to buy a suburban home and drive the car they made (Hester and Srnicek call this “peak family”). But this period of respectable life for the working class, O’Brien notes, had its limits, excluding many black and queer workers.

Since the 1970s, the reorganization of capitalism that we call neoliberalism has simultaneously undermined and attempted to revalorize the family: stripping bare social safety nets so that the family once again takes up more of the burden of care, while also crushing unions and ending the family wage, forcing women into the workplace whether they want to be there or not. Women in particular have carried the double shift of housework and waged work, but we’re all suffering the consequences. In these circumstances, an emotional attachment to the family serves, as Sophie Lewis notes, as “a shield that human beings have taken up, quite rightly, to survive a war.”

Over the decades, the family has been pressed into shape by various, often contradictory legal codes and powers that are strong and yet irreconcilable. Marriage is incentivized with tax breaks; earlier laws dictated that married women obey their husbands and fork over all property. Today, welfare benefits are still structured to incentivize a “proper” family and punish those outside of it; abortion is legalized or criminalized; numbers of children have been restricted and women sterilized; children have been taken away from those deemed unsuccessful parents (often simply due to poverty, as Dorothy Roberts has documented extensively in her multiple works on family policing). Children are taken away from their parents at the border, and families are splintered by incarceration.

As Angela Davis pointed out back in 1977, the family meets real human needs for love and care, nursing during illness and support during stress, for basic survival and reproduction in all its forms. Yet more and more people are simply going without. The only thing worse than having a family these days, as Lewis writes, is not having one. We are in a kind of interregnum, where many experiments may be happening but no new model has become hegemonic and, to steal Antonio Gramsci’s famous line (turned by Nancy Fraser toward the care crisis), a great variety of morbid symptoms appear: loneliness, increased pressure on fewer social connections, rising right-wing violence and a spate of laws aimed at banning abortion, the efforts to roll back trans healthcare and suppress discussions of queerness, even dating apps and reality shows promising love in ever less likely circumstances. We are desperately trying to patch holes in the social safety net with our personal lives.

If the family is failing to meet our needs, what can we do about it? The authors of these books offer a variety of solutions to the problems of housework, gender roles, and the private home, but they occasionally struggle, like we all do, to see beyond the personal.

For housework, it’s possible to imagine technological fixes in the form of labor-saving gadgets, but we’re not getting the tech we deserve. Partly that’s because it’s still being designed by tech companies that are not looking to improve the lives of houseworkers unless they see serious profits in it. We’ve gotten a world where the more enjoyable aspects of child care, Hester and Srnicek note, can be automated—in the form of a tablet or TV—while the work of folding laundry or changing diapers remains done by hand. So often tech developers mistake convenience for freedom. And “convenience” itself is often just a marketing ploy. The “smart home,” as Hester and Srnicek point out, is full of gadgets that save little labor—automated light switches, for those of us for whom a finger flick is too much work—while producing data for platform companies.

If making the home “smart” isn’t solving our problems, might imagining a different home entirely help? Ghodsee’s Everyday Utopia is packed full of examples of humans choosing life in community beyond or away from the nuclear family. Utopian socialists collide with Buddhist monasteries, Indigenous communities, settler kibbutzniks, and modern yuppies in her pages, underscoring in their ideological diversity the limits of the family. Her examples range from Neolithic Çatalhöyük to thirteenth-century Christian heretics to current-day ecovillages in Colombia; thinkers from Plato to Thomas More to Alexandra Kollontai. Some share property, raise children in common, or practice free love, while others are celibate, patriarchal, or live on subsistence farming. Some resisted settler colonialism; others enact it. In reading each example generously but critically, she paints a picture of a deep human desire for community beyond the nuclear family. In noting how often these radical experiments were crushed—by the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, colonial occupation, Stalin—she reminds us that living otherwise is often seen as a threat.

The other authors also offer real-world and imagined alternatives to what Hester and Srnicek call “domestic realism.”  Fourierist phalansteries—utopian communities built on the principle of free love—and early Soviet kommunalki, or communal homes, come in for examination, with apartment blocks built around shared kitchens and domestic machinery to create economies of scale in housework, and communal play-spaces for children and entertainment centers for adults. Even in the capitalist city, Hester and Srnicek found plenty of cohousing experiments, often created by women seeking an escape from family life. Architecture and design, they note, are political: the shape of the home itself can make living easier or harder, particularly when combined with publicly funded services outside of it. The socialist city, rather than a collection of isolated molecules, could be designed at every step to facilitate connection, shared work, and shared governance.

Where do our relationships fit into visions of communal life? Many of these authors try to imagine romance as something other than a step on the way to marriage. After all, the idea that marriage and family creation would be done out of love is a relatively recent shift; for most of its history, marriage was an economic arrangement rather than a romantic one. Sophie K Rosa asks if love is a “scarcity economy.” Lewis proffers a definition that answers in the negative: “to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital.” Alva Gotby adds that love can be work and is always a skill; it is, furthermore, necessary to our existence. She suggests we speak of “emotional reproduction” and recognize that love is not intrinsic. In these formulations, it is something active, something that is produced, and in conditions of inequality.

Assumptions about gendered skills are at the heart of the thing we think of as heterosexuality. Women’s skills, Gotby notes, are considered innate, while emotional skill is something men are presumed to lack. Yet women in particular are pressured by the whole of society to find romantic love and pour ourselves into it, to make up for this lack with our own abundance, and to move forward into family life selflessly producing love for all. The self-help industry, dating apps, and reality TV continue to reap massive profits from this set of rules; in fact, the world has become more open to the possibility of queer romance, as long as it fits a particular structure (see, for example, The Ultimatum: Queer Love). In this model, Rosa writes, “romantic relationships are supposed to be our all-encompassing source of meaning and fulfilment: partners should spend most of their time together and meet all each other’s needs; attraction to other people should cease (sexual exclusivity is essential, jealousy indicates love); self-worth is to be found in one’s worth to the other; and love should conquer all incompatibilities.” That love is always expected to lead to marriage.

As relationship therapist Esther Perel has noted, today we seek in romantic love and the workplace the kinds of meaning humans used to get from religion and community. The modern romance thus arose alongside the modern work ethic. Indeed, as Gotby writes, heterosexuality itself is a kind of work ethic: the reward for good work is the love of the other.

The world we live in has shaped the family and heterosexuality, and they in turn have shaped us. The practices of love, its pleasures and its pains, make us who we are. They make and affirm our genders, too. In this way, the family preservationists are right to fear when the subject of modifying the family is broached. We can find ourselves stuck, though, at this point in the conversation. And several of these books struggle with—or neatly sidestep—the question of how we might love each other differently.

First, there is the unhelpful suggestion I tend to shorthand as “have you tried not being straight?” It is undoubtedly true that queer and trans movements have led in both publicly challenging compulsory heterosexuality and binary gender and in creating alternative structures of care. And yet it does not follow that, as the advocates of political lesbianism argued, we can solve the problems of the family by choosing to date differently. For one thing, actual human desire, socially constructed though it is, is an unwieldy thing to try to turn into a political act. As Amia Srinivasan has noted, “Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal.” I can recognize that my desire for men is shaped by a world that tells me this is easy and right, and still find a recent lover indescribably beautiful, and it is in this tension that to some degree we all live. So when Gotby writes, “Some sexual practices can therefore be understood as a form of resistance to the privatisation of reproduction,” I blanch. Yes, she notes, this is only possible as part of a wider struggle, but I want more particulars here. We need struggles that, to be frank, don’t rely on who or how we fuck.

Another trap is the one I think of as “everything is work.” The Wages for Housework movement, on which many of these writers draw, aimed to, as Silvia Federici wrote, “call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love and create our sexuality, which we have never known.” At the time, this demand shook up even the left; these days, it’s been metabolized into the much-memed request to “Venmo me for my emotional labor.” Is there a limit to the value of understanding everything as work? Do we unintentionally find ourselves affirming the very neoliberal idea (see the aforementioned dating apps) that every human interaction should come with a price tag? In writing about grief recently, I found myself turning away from work as a lens, reaching for an argument that there are some states of human existence that are not calculable on a ledger of fairness and compensation.

Both Gotby and Rosa gesture toward friendship as a model of intimacy that is not so easily commodified. Yet this formulation too frustrates me. It is precisely the lack of coherent rules and obligations that make friendships both glorious and slippery; as Gotby writes at another point, women’s friendships can serve to “uphold male dominance by naturalising men’s lack of emotional reciprocity.” A wider understanding of love that does not parcel it into “romantic” or “familial” and then “otherwise” might help, as Rosa suggests, but what are we to do when the non-romantic friend we counted on suddenly falls in love and becomes scarce? We need more than vagaries to build our lives upon. The “lifeworld of intimate strangers” that Gotby writes of sounds both beautiful and nebulous; if we are intimate with everyone, we are intimate, actually, with no one.

So what is to be done? I have found this question more frustrating when it comes to the politics of the family than almost anything else. If it is impossible to expect any one book to lay out an entire program, it’s reasonable to want some ideas for how to organize. Not that I’m suggesting a Leninist anti-family vanguard party; rather, I would like the left to take seriously the question that I started this piece with: how should we live together and divide our labor? With Ghodsee, I want to return to utopian dreaming, but I also want at least the beginnings of a game plan.

Wages for Housework gave us the outlines of one, as did queer and trans liberation struggles and ACT UP. So did Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai, who as commissar of social welfare in the period immediately following the Russian Revolution sought to supersede the family through the building of collective social institutions like community kitchens, laundries, and child care. We will need to tear down the structures that privilege, even force us into, one way of cohabiting, while building out the spaces that offer the ability to live otherwise. We need wild visions, yes, but also practical experiments in meeting human needs. We hold on, in other words, to what is good about the family, while building something bigger and more abundant and flexible.

Examples of the latter are all around, though they are rarely defined as such. M.E. O’Brien finds a model of caring relations in the streets of the George Floyd rebellion—where protesters came with masks, hand sanitizer, bottled water, and free food for any who needed it—and in the protest kitchens at Occupy and the Standing Rock encampment. (More recently, in the student encampments for Palestine, a kind of communism—in the sense of “to each according to need”—reigned.) Gotby points to Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the group founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, which served as both a home and an activist collective for the queer and trans people of color abandoned by the family and the state; taking care of one another, Gotby notes, was for them a revolutionary practice, and they often accomplished it by criminalized means. Rosa looks to their predecessors: the “molly houses” of eighteenth-century London, where queer people, sex workers, and working-class misfits of all types gathered to care for one another.

The STAR collective and the molly houses were examples not just of holding on to what is good about the family, but also of “survival pending revolution,” to borrow a phrase from the Black Panthers. Indeed, the Panthers have much to teach us about building structures of care: they organized free breakfast, free clothing, ambulance services, and self-defense—as praxis, as enticement to political education, as exuberant declaration that Black lives mattered. It has become almost a cliché to note that J. Edgar Hoover considered the Panthers’ breakfast program a bigger threat than their guns.

The welfare rights movement points the way to a struggle for both concrete, immediate policy changes and a more radical horizon. The National Welfare Rights Organization and its subsidiaries, led by Black single mothers, for a time succeeded in opening up access to cash benefits, challenging surveillance, and asserting the right to subsistence, the right to pleasure, and, as Wilson Sherwin has noted, the right not to do wage labor, and came within a hair’s breadth of pushing the Nixon administration into supporting a guaranteed minimum income for all. From a position outside of the family, outside of respectability, they insisted on being seen and valued and paid as they were. The NWRO’s disillusionment with the world of waged work points to a key part of the struggle, as Hester and Srnicek write: the fight for free time. This does not mean shaking off all obligations of care, but taking seriously the process of minimizing, collectivizing, or automating the burdensome work of social reproduction—of lessening its miseries while opening up its pleasurable aspects.

Hester and Srnicek point to three principles to guide us: “communal care, public luxury, and temporal sovereignty.” Through those principles we can consider potential non-reformist reforms like universal basic income, universal child care, social housing, or healthcare. Think of the Chicago Teachers Union, and the other teachers’ organizations following in its wake, demanding not just better schools but protection for immigrant students, housing, healthy food, and cops out of the schools, as a way of saying that all children are our responsibility. Think of the Minneapolis tenant union Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia (IX) winning ownership of several buildings away from their corporate landlord and forming a housing cooperative, covering the walls of their buildings with colorful murals celebrating their values.

Think also of Lewis’s definition of love: “to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care.” The seemingly contradictory demands for freedom and care are what we have to balance. It helps if we realize that abundance is a relationship based on the principle that meeting our needs should not depend on whether we are in that moment loved. That we should be able to exit bad relationships or indeed any relationship without wondering if we will have a place to sleep or be able to see a doctor. But also that we should have the freedom to pursue love in all of its personal, gorgeous specificity, and even to mourn its loss.

Sarah Jaffe is the author, most recently, of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, and an editorial board member at Dissent.