In an article titled Romantic Love and Family Are Not the Enemy, which involved a discussion between Jacobin editor Meagan Day and Swedish gender studies academic Evalina Johansson Wilen, Jacobin completely mischaracterise the ‘family abolitionist’ position. I would like to set the record straight. Of course, I can only speak for myself in this letter, though I hope other ‘family abolitionists’, as we are described in the article, will agree with what I have to say.

In this interview, Wilen argues that ‘family abolitionism’ – I shall call it abolitionism from now on – is a position arising relatively recently due to increased demands on familial reproduction alongside decreasing capacity to meet those demands. However, abolition of the family was advocated more than one hundred years ago by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. The socialisation of reproductive labour (which is, as Wilen acknowledges, the substance of abolishing the family) was an important part of the programs of the social democratic parties of Europe, despite what the right wing of those parties thought about it.

Wilen also claims that abolitionists do not recognise that the family exists outside of market relations, and that this exterior existence is not only how capital makes use of it for its own interests, but also how it can serve as a basis of resistance. Wilen must not have done very much research into the abolitionist position to have come up with this perspective. It has been the exact perspective of socialist feminists for nearly one hundred years, from de Beauvoir to Wittig to Mitchell to Federici and Fortunati, that the family’s apparent separation from capitalist market relations is what allows these relations to subjugate it according to capitalist interests. Wilen’s claim that the family is completely external to the market is quite odd, as it is the gender pay gap which forces men and women proletarians together into families to function as stable economic actors. This separation is, in fact, illusory. It exists to ensure the stable supply of labour power according to the economic and political interests of the ruling classes of the various nation-states of our global society.

The authors of this article make the point that familial relations can, and have, served as the basis for class struggle. This is true, without a doubt. Workers' immediate experience of their exploitation, and their interest in fighting against it, often emerges from their loving relationships with their partners, children, or other relatives who are suffering. But this alone tells us little that is interesting. It is certainly no reason to be soft on the family or romantic love. Workers also experience their exploitation in the workplace alongside their colleagues, or through their friends out in the ‘social factory’ of their towns and cities. Do we, then, go soft on wage labour?

It is only because the patriarchal and nuclear family structure favoured by capitalism is a part of capitalism that it can function as a site of resistance in the way that Day and Wilen argue. It is not truly external. It is not a novel argument that it is only with the tools provided to us by capitalism that we will be able to abolish it. This is exactly what Marx said when he wrote, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

Wilen’s argument that capitalism is, at the most abstract level, ‘gender blind’ is patently false. While only that half of the species whom are labelled ‘women’ are capable of reproducing the human species through birth, it is they who will be the absolute focus of capital’s need to reproduce the class which it exploits.

‘Heteropessimism’, an antagonistic view of the relationships between men and women, is not created by dating apps. First, there has always been a moral panic about ‘the war of the sexes’; it is nothing new. Secondly, if this ‘war’ has intensified, it is primarily a result of women’s entrance into the workforce and thus our increased capacity to decide our sexual partners for ourselves, and the anxious effect this has had on the consciousness of young men raised in an ideology that they deserve women’s sexual labour simply by existing.

And anyway, romantic love is not the true counterpart to the sort of dating culture created by dating apps, and we certainly shouldn’t be soft on it. Bourgeois romantic love, in all its tantalisations about finding ‘the one’, of men and women as different puzzle pieces fitting together, and of love everlasting has a complementarist – and thus sexist – view of love by design.

The response to this which is truly in line with working class interests is not to fetishise romantic love, or to go soft on the family for fear of alienating the proletariat, which is so enmeshed in it as an institution, but to propose our own alternative. Comradely love is the negation of romantic love and of the family. It proposes that the proletarian-human of a future communist society will be free to love whomever and however many they wish in whatever manner they see fit and for however long they want. Not in an exploitative manner, but in a way that is respectful to the wishes of all parties involved (for as long as they are compatible) and is responsible to the community. The aim is a form of love which is truly free from economic considerations and not tied up automatically in oppressive amounts of reproductive labour. This kind of culture needs to be consciously built by a united, democratic, international communist party of the working class. I say, let a thousand blossoms bloom!

In solidarity,

Mila Volkova

Communist Unity, Australia