Abolish the family? Why?

In defence of an institution we actually quite like

Maybe I’m getting old and, therefore, more conservative. Or maybe Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, written by Sophie Lewis, visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, confirms the radical left has taken a nasty, nihilistic turn.

This breathless, not to say incoherent, pamphlet - described by one reviewer as an ‘exhilarating’ read - left me cold. Far from wanting to abolish the family (a ‘scarcity-based trauma-machine’ apparently), I rather felt an urge to head to the barricades in its defence.

Not only is it wrong-headed to want to destroy an institution which many of us hold in great affection, and rather depend upon. It is also curious timing. The family is failing badly at what we older radicals used to accuse it of. There is no ideology of the family, anymore. No one is excluded from it. While it has withstood the shifting roles of the sexes and even which sexes constitute it, the undermining of the very idea of the sexes is hardly conducive to the flourishing of family values.

The Marxist critique of the family as reproducer of capitalist relations barely holds anymore. Not because it got the family all wrong but because 19th Century radicals could hardly imagine the peculiar (and I mean peculiar) challenges of today. If Matt Walsh can’t get a straight answer to his question ‘what is a woman?’ and academics are forced out of the academy for defending sex-based rights, the very notion of the family is surely thrown into confusion too? How can it reproduce any relations (never mind capitalist ones) if we have abolished the distinction between the sexes?

The family is doing a bad job of reproducing the workers that capitalist society needs. That was it’s role in the system, it’s reason for being. And yet now there are over a million job vacancies and as many as 15% of employers report shortages in the UK. Increasingly it is failing to reproduce people at all, as ‘depopulation’ becomes a real prospect for the not too distant future and anti-natalist sentiment grows amongst the opinion-forming classes.

And yet, despite these formidable challenges, the family is still the birthplace of our our values - confused as they are. It is, as Christopher Lasch once put it, a ‘Haven in a Heartless World’. That is worth defending. But if the family is to survive, we will also need to borrow from the left’s more radical past to sustain it. It never used to be just about pulling things down. It was also about building an alternative, whether that be a new society or experiments in living.

The family has long outsourced certain functions. We already socialise the care of the young, the elderly and disabled, and delegate it to paid carers. But these care systems are in crisis. In this 75th anniversary year of the National Assistance Act that created adult social care as we know it, we should be thinking seriously about how we organise care around the family.

Instead, the reaction to Danny Kruger’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference suggests a lack of commitment to the family goes beyond the radical circles inhabited by Lewis. When Kruger spoke up for the importance of couples ‘sticking together for the sake of the children’, there was outrage amongst the liberal commentariat. They are no more interested in coming up with ways to help families manage the demands placed upon them than the abolitionists.

There is a hostility to the way people live their lives, and to the institutions they invest themselves in. As Yoram Hazony, founder of the National Conservatism movement, puts it, there is an ‘aggressive critique of every inherited idea’. There is nothing progressive about wanting to destroy foundational societal norms and institutions; anymore than there is anything necessarily conservative about our attachment to each other, our children and families.

Don’t abolish the family!