With family abolition a controversial topic in the current-day leftist discourse, Alyson Escalante argues for a more nuanced and sensitive approach to the topic by looking at the works of Karl Marx and Alexandra Kollontai while exploring the relation of colonialism to the family. Reading: Sam Wiles.

It might seem strange that in a time when internal debates within Marxism are largely centered around revolutionary versus electoral strategy that a whole other long-downplayed component of Marxism has begun to enter the mainstream discussion: the abolition of the family. In 1848, Marx himself noted that the proposition of family abolition was particularly scandalous, remarking that “even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Perhaps because of the scandalous nature of the topic, Marxists have largely downplayed this aspect of the communist project, with criticism of the family mostly being taken up within the field of feminist theory. 

And yet, in 2019, the question of family abolition re-emerged, with both the left and the right taking up a condemnation of this part of the communist program. In many ways, this re-emergence is due to Sophie Lewis’s 2019 book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. This text managed to earn partial condemnation from the left social democrats at Jacobin as well as an intense amount of right-wing ire due to Tucker Carlson’s decision to discuss the piece on his show. Suddenly, the idea of abolishing the family is being taken up in mainstream publications such as Vice, The Atlantic, and Fox News. A debate that communists have long pushed to the sideline is now unfolding outside the scope of our own publications and organizations, and the question we are faced with is how we as communists will respond to and intervene in this debate. 

My primary interest here is to intervene by reframing the debate within the history of Marxism and to attempt to shift the debate from one regarding the normative desirability of family abolition to a debate around the strategic response to capitalism and colonialism’s own destruction of the family. This requires us to return to Marx and Kollontai’s work regarding family abolition to understand the historical conditions in which Marx raises the concept and to examine how those conditions might function to inform this emerging debate today. Furthermore, I suggest that we must also consider the relationship between colonialism and the family in order to develop a proper orientation towards family abolition. I hope to demonstrate that the desirability of family abolition is not a useful framing for the debate, as capitalism and colonialism have already begun to enact historical processes which make this abolition inevitable. The question facing communists today, I propose, is how we respond to this inevitability. 

Marxism and The Family

In order to better understand the debate at hand, I think that it is worth historicizing the relationship between communism and family abolition. In order to do this, I hope to turn to communist theorists of family abolition to uncover a historical understanding of the term that might shed light on its development. 

Perhaps the most famous invocation of family abolition is found in the second chapter of The Communist Manifesto. In this chapter, Marx sheds light on the historical contingency of bourgeois culture, by demonstrating the relatively recent emergence and historically novelty of bourgeois cultural norms, and by insisting that such norms are not extended to the vast majority of people, i.e the workers. When the communists discuss the abolition of class culture, they do not mean an anarchistic destruction of all culture, but of a very distinct and historically contingent form of culture. And yet, for the bourgeoisie, this culture is treated as eternal, grounded in nature itself, such that its abolition is seen as an abolition of culture as such. Marx notes that for the bourgeoisie, “the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture…” because the bourgeoisie has transformed “the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property” into “eternal laws of nature and of reason.” The bourgeoisie has naturalized their culture as the sole legitimate expression of culture. 

In response to the ideological naturalization of bourgeois culture, Marx asserted that this culture has not always existed, emerging as the result of “historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production.” According to Marx, this view repeats the mistaken belief of all prior ruling classes, namely the idea that the social conditions resulting from a given mode of production are eternal, natural, and impossible to undo. This belief is grounded in obvious hypocrisy because the ruling capitalist class must acknowledge that the feudal culture which accompanied the feudal mode of production was not eternal, and was in fact overthrown through the bourgeois revolutions. Given this reality, the bourgeoisie should understand that their own culture is a historically contingent result of a given mode of production that can be transcended and surpassed, just as the feudal and ancient modes of production were transcended and surpassed. 

Furthermore, Marx astutely pointed out that the bourgeois culture which the capitalists seek to defend is one that is exclusive to a relatively small class. For the majority of people living in a capitalist society, the cultural fixtures of bourgeois society are simply inaccessible decadence. The same social formation that the bourgeoisie accredits with the development of great art, music, and cultural expression is a social formation which condemns the majority of the population to squalor and exploitation. Marx insists that culture, the “loss of which [the capitalist] laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” From this insight, we can see that not only is bourgeois culture historically contingent, but also that it is far from universal within the given historical epoch in which it emerges. 

It is from these premises that Marx shifts abruptly to the discussion of family abolition, beginning by exclaiming (as previously quoted), “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Marx unpacks this infamous proposal by pointing again to the hypocrisy of the capitalists’ claim to be protecting the family from communists who would seek its abolition. He points out this hypocrisy, stating: 

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

Here Marx again points to the apparent lack of universality of the family form, noting that the family form is more or less reserved for the bourgeoisie themselves and that in the daily lives of the proletariat, the family as a meaningful social unit is absent. The capitalists point to the communist call for abolition of the family with horror, while simultaneously developing a socioeconomic system which has already destroyed the very basis of the family for the workers. Marx continues:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family… becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

Once again, we must note that Marx does not actively defend the abolition of the family as a program here so much as point out that for the proletariat, the family has already been torn apart by the exploitation which is endemic to capitalism. 

Given the historical context of the Communist Manifesto, we must take note of the rhetorical and propagandistic function of Marx’s argument. He does not come out of the gate proposing the abolition of the family as a positive program, but rather begins in an almost defensive manner. Marx is aware that communists have been accused of endorsing abolition of the family, and so begins by dismissing misconceptions and pointing to bourgeois hypocrisy instead of brashly defending a programmatic demand which itself would be potentially alienating to potential comrades who might read the manifesto. The effect of Marx’s own form of argumentation is clever, in that it gestures towards an already-existent family abolition which takes place at the hands of the capitalists. For Marx, the abolition of the family is a process already being undertaken, as the bourgeois family form was never truly extended to the workers. Thus those workers who might be appalled at the idea that the communists want to abolish the family might have their fears assuaged by the claim that the family is already being abolished by the capitalists, while the communists merely recognize this reality and seek to formulate a response to it. In this sense, Marx transforms the primary question from “should the family be abolished” to “given that the family is already being abolished for the workers, how ought we to respond and what forms of care and kinship might we replace this dying family structure with?” This transformation of the question is one that has perhaps been lost in contemporary debates regarding the abolition of the family.

Marx is purposefully somewhat vague in his manifesto. While this may have propagandistic utility, it does make it hard to unpack some of the details regarding the family as a historically contingent and non-universal cultural phenomenon, as well as the details of what abolition of the family might look like in a communist context. Given this ambiguity in Marx’s work, I suggest that we turn to Alexandra Kollontai’s 1920 text Communism and the Family. At the point in her life that this text was published, Kollontai was involved in the founding and administration of the Zhenotdel, a department within the Communist Party focused on addressing the needs of women in the Soviet Union. This positioned her as an authority on questions regarding women’s place within communist society and lends the text a level of credibility in terms of its ability to stand in for the view of organized communists in a given revolutionary era. 

Kollontai opens her text by posing two simple questions, “Will the family continue to exist under communism” and  “Will the family remain in the same form?” Following in Marx’s own footsteps, Kollontai recognizes that these questions are asked by many workers as a result of generalized anxiety regarding what sort of changes communism might usher in. She acknowledges that the concept of doing away with the family is not immediately appealing to the workers, and that it cannot be brashly asserted as a progressive demand absent careful consideration of specific historical trends. She notes that increased ease of divorce within the Soviet Union has added to concerns, and recognizes that many women who see their husbands as “breadwinners” are expressing understandable concerns regarding precarity and economic abandonment. It is important to note that Kollontai does not dismiss these concerns out of hand, recklessly treating them as obvious reactionary sentiments. 

In order to respond to these fears, Kollontai echos Marx by pointing out that capitalism itself has already begun to erode the family. She writes:

There is no point in not facing up to the truth: the old family in which the man was everything and the woman nothing, the typical family where the woman had no will of her own, no time of her own and no money of her own, is changing before our very eyes.

While acknowledging that this change can be scary, she also points out that change is a constant of history, and that social forms are always prone to change, that “we have only to read how people lived in the past to see that everything is subject to change and that no customs, political organizations or moral principles are fixed and inviolable.” She thus calls attention to the historical contingency of the family. The family is not an eternal transhistorical constant, but is a social phenomena which has changed over time based on factors of production and geography. For example, Kollontai points out that remnants of the broader feudal family relations still survived into early capitalism among aspects of the peasants. Furthermore, she notes that within her own time, notions of the family are variable along cultural and national lines, with totally different and polygamous forms of the family existing in some cultures. Given these realities, it would not make much sense to be worried about the fact that the form of the family is changing. Instead of worrying, Kollontai suggests that our task is to: 

decide which aspects of our family system are outdated and to determine what relations, between the men and women… which rights and duties would best harmonise with the conditions of life in the new workers’ Russia.

In this quote, we see a rhetorical move which is quite similar to Marx’s transformation of the core question regarding family abolition. The family is changing, according to Kollontai; that is an inevitable fact of history which results from the contingency of social formation on ever-changing modes of production. Given this inevitability, it is the task of the communists to guide this change away from something destructive and towards something harmonious. 

Again, we must pay attention to the rhetorical function of this text, noting that the term “abolition” does not appear a single time. Instead, an inevitable change is discussed, and an active project of guiding this change is proposed. In this sense, the communist abolition of the family is transformed from an externally imposed top-down process into a process guided by the working class as it determines what new kinship forms might provide for the well-being of all people. There is evident compassion in Kollontai’s writing, which takes the concerns of working women seriously, and Kollontai clearly adapts her rhetoric in response to the seriousness of these concerns. 

Having adequately explained the historical contingency of the family, and more importantly, having demonstrated the active role of working women in building a new better form of familial relations, Kollontai then turns to discuss the non-universal nature of the bourgeois view of the family. She notes that this older understanding of the family fulfilled necessary social functions, writing,

“There was a time when the isolated, firmly-knit family, based on a church wedding, was equally necessary to all its members. If there had been no family, who would have fed, clothed and brought up the children?”

According to Kollontai, one needs to look no further than the horrid state of orphans to see how central the family was to fulfilling real and pressing social demands for care. The family, through an admittedly violent privatization of women’s labor in the household, had met the real needs of society. Despite the fact that this family relation was inherently exploitative towards the domestic labor of women, it did serve a social function. And yet, Kollontai points out that even this exploitative form of the family is no longer guaranteed by capitalism. In fact, it is being undone by it. She writes,

“But over the last hundred years this customary family structure has been falling apart in all the countries where capitalism is dominant and where the number of factories… which employ hired labour is increasing.”

Following Marx, Kollontai points to capitalism’s own destruction of the family among the workers. The incorporation of women into the proletarianized workforce as wage laborers has itself had begun to erode the role of women as housekeepers and caretakers. The economic hardship of capitalism had made the wages of a single proletarian worker per household insufficient and have forced women to enter the market and sell their labor. While Americans tend to think of the phenomena of female proletarianization as relatively progressive and historically recent (often being traced to the Second World War), Kollontai calls attention to how early this process began for many workers around the world, and the destructive impacts it had. She points out that as early as 1914, tens of millions of women were already being forced to enter the workforce. Rather than seeing this as a move towards gender equity, she instead recognizes the destructive aspects of this process, writing: 

What kind of “family life” can there be if the wife and mother is out at work for at least eight hours and, counting the travelling, is away from home for ten hours a day? Her home is neglected; the children grow up without any maternal care, spending most of the time out on the streets, exposed to all the dangers of this environment. The woman who is wife, mother and worker has to expend every ounce of energy to fulfil these roles.

For Kollontai, it is quite clear that capitalism is responsible for the destruction of the family. In this sense, she echoes Marx’s own critique of bourgeois hypocrisy. Furthermore, she acknowledges that capitalism has not offered any real alternative to the family form which it is actively destroying, which leaves us with anarchistic absence of structure in its place. Given this lack of alternative, is it any wonder that workers express fear at the idea of family abolition?

In response to this horrific disintegration of family life, Kollontai does not propose a reactionary return to earlier forms of familial relation. After all, the idyllic vision of the nuclear family as a source of stability and safety amid a chaotic world is one which has always been particular to the ruling class; it has always been denied to the masses for whom the economic precarity of wage labor and the anarchy of the market ensure that such stability is always out of reach. Kollontai rejects the romantic bourgeois view of the family, acknowledging that under capitalism, the family is nothing more than “the primary economic unit of society and the supporter and educator of young children.” The bourgeois reactionaries who clamor for a revival of the family ignore the way that capitalism itself makes their vision of the family impossible. As a materialist and a Marxist, Kollontai cannot embrace this nostalgia and instead must ask what the materialist insight into the economic function of the family means for the future of the family. 

Capitalism has, according to Kollontai, not only eroded the conditions in which the traditional nuclear family could function by forcing women to labor outside of the house; it has also destroyed the economic necessity of women’s labor within the household. She points out that at one point women not only performed the labor of household maintenance and childcare but also played a productive role in their domestic labor. As part of this productive labor, she would be required to “[spin] wool and linen, [weave] cloth and garments, [knit] stockings, [make] lace, [prepare] – as far as her resources permitted – all sorts of pickles, jams and other preserves for winter, and manufacture, her own candles.” Many of these products would actually make their way into local markets, meaning that women would play a broader economic role even while being confined to domestic labor. This productive function has also been destroyed by capitalism, however, as women no longer have the time to produce alongside engaging in wage labor and performing domestic maintenance. This has necessitated a transition from the family as a productive unit to the family as a consumptive unit which simply consumes commodities made available by non-familial modes of production. Women are even being forced to have less and less time to engage in cleaning and child-rearing, as the demand to engage in wage labor increases. Capitalism itself has created a primitive socialization of much of women’s duties, evidenced by the existence of restaurants as a way of feeding one’s family. This primitive socialization, is of course, not particularly liberatory as families are forced to spend their meager wages in order to engage in it. 

Thus, once again, it is not the communists who are destroying the role of the family, it is capitalism. Furthermore, capitalism in the instance of primitive socialization of domestic labor provides a terrible alternative predicated on the exchange of service for money in a market context. It offers no real alternative to the family, only transactional forms of care in place of familial care. Does this liberate women from their domestic burdens? In sense it does, but it also replaces that burden with new capitalist burdens. Given this ambiguity, the question is not whether or not the abolition of the family is a good thing. The abolition of the family, according to both Marx and Kollontai, is an inevitability that has already been taking place for decades at the time of both their writing. Both reject the possibility of going back to some romantic alternative, as this alternative has already been made impossible. The question is then, given this inevitability and the impossibility of a reactionary alternative, what sort of kinship formation ought communists to endorse? 

Kollontai suggests that communism can offer a truly socialized alternative, not based on economic transactions, but based on expanded relations of solidarity and care. If women are already becoming too busy to perform domestic maintenance based labor, communism can socialize that labor in a truly progressive manner. She writes that while “under capitalism only people with well-lined purses can afford to take their meals in restaurants… under communism everyone will be able to eat in the communal kitchens and dining-rooms.” The work of laundry, house cleaning, and other domestic duties can simply be fulfilled by “men and women whose job it is to go round in the morning cleaning rooms.” Furthermore, the education of children (the other remaining task of women) can also be socialized. She notes that even capitalism had created state-run systems of socialized education. Capitalism has prevented this full socialization because “the capitalists are well aware that the old type of family… constitutes the best weapon in the struggle to stifle the desire of the working class for freedom.” Capitalism cannot fully socialize these educational functions but it destroys the ability for the family to meet them at the same time. Communism, on the other hand, can create this full socialization. 

And so Kollontai concludes that the family is going away whether we like it or not. The capitalist mode of production has destroyed its economic function and has offered no real alternative. She writes: 

In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them independent and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family… Marriage will be a union of two persons who love and trust each other… Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it. 

This vision is perhaps not what most think of when they imagine the communist abolition of the family. Love, mutual care, and the union of people in a kinship unit still exists but is transformed through the socialization of domestic labor. This change does do away with the idea that one’s responsibility is only to one’s own children, of course, because the care of children becomes a collective responsibility. All children are in a sense part of a new and larger family, what Kollontai refers to as “the great proletarian family” and the “great family of workers.” It is a powerful vision that Kollontai offers here: it is capitalism that would abolish the family and replace it with mere transaction, but it is communism that transforms the family into a truly socialized reality. 

Now, finally having outlined Kollontai’s approach to the question of family abolition, we must ask what is at stake in her rhetorical framing of the question. In response to the workers’ fears regarding family abolition, she recognizes the horrors of capitalism’s erosion of the family. In fact, she diverges from Marx in as much as she refuses to name the communist project as a project of “abolishing” the family. In the face of the capitalist destruction of the role of the family, she simultaneously argues that attempts to hold on to the old family are both doomed and also naturalize women’s subordination, while simultaneously insisting that a new type of family is possible. She does not tell concerned workers that they must suck it up, that their fears are reactionary and that they must embrace a world without the family. Rather, she preserves the language of the family but reinterprets it into a collectivist, that is to say, a communist, version of the family. The old family is dead, capitalism has killed it, and so we have been invited to build and define a new family.

It would be possible to suggest that the language used by Kollontai is merely a semantic matter, but while this may be true on some level, it misses the strategic function of this semantic shift. Kollontai’s choice to preserve the language of the family, while inviting us to radically redefine this family through communist revolution and socialization, is able to assuage the fears of workers for whom the concept of abolishing the family carries understandably concerning connotations. There is a real strategic decision being made here that we ought to learn from today. 

Colonialism and The Family

While Marx and Kollontai demonstrate that the abolition of the family is an inevitable project that has been enacted by capitalism, it is worth expanding the scope of their analysis by examining the relationship between colonialism and the family. An analysis of this relationship is extremely important in our current moment, particularly for communists inside of the United States. A common reply to those who call for the abolition of the family is a sort of indignant frustration with the insensitivity of this suggestion in the face of the contemporary and historical treatment of racialized and colonized families. Many in my organizing circles have responded to this revived debate by asking “how can we possibly call for the abolition of the family in a time when ICE is forcibly tearing families apart?” This question is quite understandable, and it expresses real anxiety grounded in contemporary colonial capitalism’s destruction of the family in particular among colonized communities. 

This question ought to lead us to augment Marx and Kollontai’s analysis with a careful analysis of the colonial project of abolishing the families of colonized people. Marx and Kollontai show how the abolition of the family is a process already being undertaken by capitalism, and we can turn to theorists of colonialism to show how this process is likewise being undertaken by colonial societies. Absent this historicization, we risk advocating a form of Marxist feminism that risks falling into liberal color-blindness which ignores the historical processes which cause colonized people to respond to the proposition of family abolition with scorn and frustration. 

One context in which we must consider the relationship between colonization and the family is within the context of blackness in America. America’s own history of slavery and anti-blackness necessarily require us to consider the way in which black people (and black women in particular) have an experience of the family which diverges from the experiences of the Russian and European proletariat. One author who is particularly useful for considering this experience is Dorothy Roberts, whose text Killing The Black Body provides insight into the way that slavery and its ongoing legacy of anti-blackness has controlled black women’s reproduction and foreclosed access to certain familial relations. 

Roberts begins by asserting that black women’s own status as mothers has been consistently under attack as a result of the exclusion of black women from the category of womanhood. She writes, “from the moment they set foot in this country as slaves, Black women have fallen outside the American ideal of womanhood.” While European ideologies of gender treated women as the fairer sex, understanding women as morally superior (if physically and politically inferior) to men, black women were painted as portrayed as immoral Jezebels. While European women were encouraged to become mothers and raise the next generation of workers and capitalists alike, black women were seen as hypersexual and were condemned for having too many children. The image of a neglectful black mother who has more children than she could care for emerged from slave-era narratives and has been preserved today in the frequently evoked myth of the welfare queen. Not only were black women shamed and attacked for having children of their own, but racist ideology also praised the Mammy figure, “the black female house servant who carried her master’s children.” Thus from the very beginnings of slavery, black women’s relation to the family had been disrupted by slavery. Furthermore, these forms of racial oppression demonstrate the way that the maintenance of the white settler family relied on the labor of black women who were denied a right to their own families. In this sense, the analysis that Roberts puts forward can help us to understand the non-universality of the nuclear family within the context of American colonization and slavery. 

The horrific story of slavery does not end with a prohibition on black women’s reproduction. Roberts notes that “the ban on importing slaves after 1808 and the steady inflation in their price made enslaved women’s childbearing even more valuable. Female slaves provided their masters with a ready future supply of chattel.” As slavery developed, black women’s reproduction was transformed into a productive process in which a black woman’s children were commodities that could be traded and sold. Given this reality, we can see that even when black women were encouraged to reproduce, such reproduction did not lead to the formation of black families or the establishment of black motherhood, but rather led to the severing of kinship and care relations based on the dictates of the slave market and slave masters. In fact, the babies of slaves were considered to be their master’s property “before the child even took its first breath!” These children were very frequently sold off, separating mother from child. 

Throughout this process, black women engaged in resistance and sought to fight back against this destruction of black kinship. Roberts writes that “they escaped from plantations, feigned illness, endured severe punishment, and fought back rather than submit to slave master’s sexual domination.” Black women had to fight for access to the family in a way that European proletarians could never have understood. Is it any wonder that in light of this struggle, black women might be concerned with communists (especially white communists) promoting a program of family abolition?

Furthermore, the abolition of slavery did not end the colonial destruction of black kinship and the attempts to preclude the existence of black families. Roberts also traces the early movement for birth control’s complicity in the eugenics movement, paying special attention to Margeret Sanger’s concept of family planning as an instance of racist eugenics. Early eugenics projects emerged alongside a theory of race science that emphasized the supposedly dysgenic effects of black reproduction. Robert’s points out that early eugenic experiments in forced sterilization began with the forced “castration of black men as a punishment for crime.”  In the twentieth century, eugenicists began to raise fears about high black birth rates and the possibility of intermarriage between people of different races. These eugenicists proposed and endorsed policies to engage in the forced sterilization of black people. Sanger’s family planning clinics were in fact supported by eugenicists because they believed that increased access to birth control would reduce black fertility rates. Again, we see that even after the formal abolition of slavery, a concerted effort was made to decrease black reproduction and to preclude the existence of black families. 

Roberts also analyzes more recent instances of white supremacist regulation of black reproduction. Roberts examines the case of Darlene Johnson, a black mother who faced trial on child abuse charges for “whipping her six and four-year-old daughters with a belt for smoking cigarettes and poking a hanger in an electrical socket.” Johnson was facing the potential of serious prison time, raising the stakes of the trial. In response to this circumstance, the judge “gave Johnson a choice between a seven-year prison sentence or only one year in prison and three years probation with the condition that she be implanted with Norplant [a hormonal birth control].” This example is part of a broader trend of the courts being used to prevent or punish black motherhood, ultimately culminating in a host of discriminatory policies. Again and again, we see white supremacist society doing all it can to destroy black families. These developments are in many ways concurrent with the development of capitalism, and indicate that the processes by which capitalist development have eroded the family extend beyond the role of wage labor analyzed in Marx and Kollontai’s work. 

The ways in which colonial violence has precluded access to the family form for many people extends beyond the experience of blackness; Native Americans are also subjected to a whole host of acts of violence designed to destroy native kinship relations.  Mary Annette Pember, an Ojibwe woman whose mother was forced to attend a boarding school recounts the way in which “Native families were coerced by the federal government and Catholic Church officials into sending their children to live and attend classes at boarding schools.” Not only did these state-sanctioned boarding schools geographically separate children from their families, but they also undermined kinship relations by pushing cultural assimilation into European norms, and trying to destroy cultural customs and languages which were central to familial bonds. Pember notes that “Students were physically punished for speaking their Native languages. Contact with family and community members was discouraged or forbidden altogether.” 

Writing in American Indian Quarterly, Jane Lawrence’s article “The Indian Health Service and The Sterilization of Native American Women” explores more contemporary acts of violence against native women in order to preclude native motherhood. Lawrence documents a history of forced sterilization of native women, noting that “Native Americans accused the Indian Health Service of sterilizing at least 25% of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970s.” This estimate, it turns out, is actually quite conservative, Erin Blakemore noting that the percentage may be as high as 50% of native women. 

These forced sterilizations and the history of boarding schools make up part of a broader move by the settler-colonial society in the US to try to destroy and erode native families. In 2011, NPR reported that “Nearly 700 Native American children in South Dakota are being removed from their homes every year.” Although a 1978 law called The Indian Child Welfare Act requires native children to be placed in the care of relatives or tribal members, NPR found that “32 states are failing to abide by the act in one way or another.” In South Dakota, NPR found that the majority of native children were being placed in non-native homes or group settings. This much more recent example demonstrates the extent to which the genocidal prerogatives of settler-colonialism prioritize the dissolution of native families. 

Another instance that touches on the relationship between colonialism and the family is immigration policy in the United States. In 2019, the practice of family separation came to the forefront of public discourse. Under President Donald Trump, a policy had developed of splitting up families in the deportation process, often deporting the undocumented parents but leaving children behind. This created a large public outcry in the United States. As a result of this practice, a new legal precedent was established for American foster parents to adopt and gain legal guardianship for the children left behind after deportations. Several cases of these adoptions have taken place in the United States, and they have been upheld by various courts. The practice of family separation stands out as a very alarming example of the destruction of families by colonial policies. 

Of course, immigration raises larger questions regarding the dissolution of the family. The desperate conditions in South and Central America which prompt many immigrants to move to the US often separate families, as one member may move for work in order to send money back to family. Additionally,  the historical imposition of the current border between the US and Mexico also separated families who now suddenly found themselves living on opposite signs of an arbitrary line of division.  

All of these examples demonstrate the extent to which colonial and racialized systems of oppression and exploitation have worked to not only destroy families among marginalized communities but to preclude the very possibility of such families existing at all. Within the United States, the story of the eroding of the family extends far beyond the story of the proletarianization of women. There is, quite frankly, more to the story of family abolition than Marx and Kollontai are able to account for. Given this reality, we must ask how these experiences of colonization affect the communist stance regarding family abolition. 

I believe that we should acknowledge that these experiences make it difficult to forward the language of family abolition when explaining communist demands for expanded kinship systems. Given these histories, it is easy to understand why so many have objected to the concept of family abolition on its face. The history of colonialism in America is the history of violently and horrifically destroying the families of the colonized. It is, quite frankly, both insensitive and unstrategic for communists to discuss the abolition of the family in light of these histories. Although that term might have a more technical meaning within communist circles, it does a terrible job of conveying communist goals to those who have experienced particularly horrific violence as a result of colonial policies aimed at dissolving families. Communism is a mass movement that seeks the liberation of the oppressed and exploited. As such, our language must not be isolating or alienating to the most marginalized. Although certain academics might insist on maintaining the use of the term “family abolition” due to its historical legacy, we ought to instead follow in the footsteps of Kollontai by discussing a transformation of the family and the development of a new collective proletarian understanding of the family. This language emphasizes the fact that communists have a positive vision for an alternative to the nuclear family, and seek to build a type of expanded family unit actually worthy of its name. 

While I argue that it is important for us to modify our language, these experiences of colonization cannot lead us to accidentally fall into a defense of the nuclear family. After all, the exclusion of colonized people from participation in the nuclear family is indicative of the historical emergence of the nuclear family as a colonial concept. That is to say that the nuclear family was not only denied to colonized people but was defined in terms of their exclusion and in opposition to alternative non-European forms of kinship. This means that we cannot resolve these ongoing legacies of colonialism through an attempt to expand the European nuclear family to include marginalized people. Such an expansion would not only arguably be impossible given the extent to which exclusion of colonized people is constitutive of the nuclear family, but would not resolve the violence of the capitalist destruction of the family. The family under capitalism is still based on the exploitation of women, still slowly being eroded and replaced with transactional atomized alternatives, and still unsuitable for human harmony and thriving. To simply expand the nuclear family to include colonized people would simply be to assimilate these communities into another violent and exploitative framework. As such, these histories of exclusion do not in fact act as a defense of the necessity of the nuclear family, but instead, act as a profound example of why we need an alternative. Communists can offer such an alternative, and I again argue that we should frame this alternative not as “abolishing the family” but as a positive project of building something better in the face of hundreds of years of capitalism and colonialism doing all they can to abolish the family themselves. 

There are, of course, those elements of the communist left, who might be tempted to incorporate the analysis presented here into a reactionary defense of the family. The “trad-left” podcasters Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker have argued on Twitter that the family ought to be defended because “familial love and loyalty are worth more than money.” They forward a position common among the chauvinist traditional left, which argues that because capitalism has been the main force attacking the family, it is the duty of the left to defend the family from capitalism. As a result of this analysis, they argue that “feminism is a disciplinary technology of the bourgeoisie” which hopes to assist capitalism in the abolition of supposedly natural family relations so that kinship relations might be commoditized. I address this perspective explicitly because I think it is important to make sure that my arguments which seek to complicate discourses of family abolition do not get taken up in defense of such a reactionary position. As Marxists, we understand that we are not required to defend all of the social phenomena which capitalism seeks to dissolve. This is, in fact, a fairly fundamental Marxist insight. For example, capitalism sought to dissolve the conditions of feudal agricultural production in favor of proletarianized urban labor. In response to this, Marxists did not defend the “natural” relations of feudalism “which are worth more than money.” Instead, the Marxist position was to point out that feudalism had to be allowed to fade away, while also pointing out that the abolition of serfdom had not in fact made laborers free, instead replacing one form of subjugation with a new form of wage exploitation and precarity. The logic forwarded by Terese and Studebaker represents a common reactionary impulse among more right-leaning critics of capitalism, an impulse to advocate for a return to pre-capitalist forms of life. Such a position is untenable for Marxists both as an assessment of feudal relations and of the family. Our task is first to point out that the capitalist destruction of the family has done massive damage to many working and colonized people, just as the foreclosure of the commons in the transition away from feudalism created massive suffering among peasants. Our second task is to point out that the solution to this destruction is to create broader forms of solidarity and kinship that are superior to the family order which preceded capitalism. 

The family, despite often offering a real respite for those alienated by capitalism and subjected by colonialism still plays a fundamentally reactionary role. A family system based on blood relations has led to many young LGBT people finding themselves abandoned outside this system. The family has created privatized and uncompensated domestic labor largely pushed onto women. The family has become a symbolic core of reactionary politics in the United States. No defense of the nuclear family can avoid taking on the baggage of the family’s own patriarchal and compulsory heterosexual function. The nuclear family, even when not being destroyed by capitalists, is still a failure for too many people to be worth defending. 

So if we cannot defend the nuclear family, what options are available to us? I argue that if we actually historicize the debate surrounding the abolition of the family within the context of the early communist movement as well as the context of American colonialism and white supremacy, it becomes very clear that communists have a strong case to make that something better than the nuclear family must be developed. We must follow Marx and Kollontai’s framing of the abolition of the family as an inevitable process that has been initiated not by communists, but by the capitalists themselves. We must also go beyond the scope of Marx and Kollontai’s work in order to demonstrate the way that the processes of colonialism have initiated the abolition of family relations among colonized communities in the US and beyond. If we begin our appeal to the people by emphasizing these ongoing processes, we shift the debate from a debate about whether or not we communists ought to abolish the family to a debate about what alternative there is to the decaying and violent colonial nuclear family. The family is dying, and it has been dying for centuries now. In its place capitalism offers no real alternatives. Our job as communists then is not to glibly celebrate the abolition of the family in a way that alienates those suffering most from this abolition. Rather, our job is to offer hope that we can build something better. 

It is worth insisting once again quite explicitly that a shift in language away from an endorsement of abolishing the family must not be accompanied by a shift towards softening our critique of the nuclear family. Kollontai and Marx remain correct that the nuclear family remains a patriarchal institution built to ensure the exploitation of women’s labor and women’s legal subordination to men. The nuclear family has also proven to be an absolute nightmare for those whose families have failed to care for them. I know countless LGBT people who can attest to the violence of the nuclear family after being kicked out of or abused by their families. In his article Faith, Family, and Folk: Against The Trad Left, Donald Parkinson summarizes this well, writing “Not everyone lives in a world where their family is their friend; in many cases, one’s family can be their worst enemy. We can do better than valorizing one form of alienation in response to another.” Parkinson is completely correct that even in our critiques of the sometimes reckless and insensitive language of abolishing the family, we must still avoid slipping into reaction. 

In the end, it is a fine line that we have to walk. On the one hand, we must frame our critiques of the family in a way that the people we hope to organize will find understandable; we must avoid alienating language used either for the sake of academic credibility or an impulse to scandalize. This is a task that those communists who support family abolition have largely failed at. On the other hand, we as communists must remain ruthless critics of all that exists, including the nuclear family. The balancing act demanded of us is not one that is easy to perform. Thankfully, we have the example of those revolutionaries who came before us to provide some guidance. When I read Kollontai, I don’t see someone celebrating the abolition of the family, I see someone advocating for an expanded and new sense of the family in the face of the dying nuclear family. At the very least I see this as a vision for a better society; a society whereas Donald Parkinson puts it, “someone without a family can thrive as well as someone with family intact.” Kollontai’s expanded notion of the great proletarian family provides an example of what such a society would look like. It’s an example in which the dying nuclear family is allowed to pass on and a new form of communist family that extends beyond blood relations can finally, at last, take its place. A transfer of power from an old and corrupt form of kinship to a new and harmonious one can occur.

The family is dead. Long live the family. 

Works Cited

Blakemore, Erin. “The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of …” JSTOR Daily, 2016, daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the-forced-sterilization-of-native-american-women/.

Kollontai, Alexandra. “Communism and The Family” Komunistka, 1920

Lawrence, Jane. “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women.” The American Indian Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3, 2000, pp. 400–419., doi:10.1353/aiq.2000.0008.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.

Parkinson, Donald. “Faith, Family and Folk: Against the Trad Left.” Cosmonaut, 28 Dec. 2019, cosmonaut.blog/2019/12/28/faith-family-and-folk-against-the-trad-left/.

Pember, Mary Annette. “Death by Civilization.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 Mar. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/traumatic-legacy-indian-boarding-schools/584293/.

Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Vintage Books, 2017.

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