The idea of family abolition may invoke visions of violent interventions into the loving and caring homes that some of us are lucky enough to have. Where its proponents are really coming from, however, is to argue for a society where mutual nurturance and support are not dependent on a genetic lottery. This is not merely about pointing out that a disconcerting number of homes are not actually safe places but hold acute threats of violence particularly to the women who live there. Instead, if we can learn anything from the experiences that Covid-19 has unleashed, it is that the linked ideologies of the home, the nuclear family and neoliberal individual responsibility are ill-equipped to provide the care that we are all dependent on.

In Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner and Nancy Holmstrom put this point concisely. We all want kinship, love, and good things to eat. Its just that the family as we currently know it is not necessarily the best way to satisfy those desires. More importantly, the family assumes central responsibility to provide for these needs in a society that fails to do so. Specifically, various authors such as Agnes Heller have argued that capitalism explicitly produces needs it cannot satisfy. Rather than disparaging the things that people who defend the family in its current form want to preserve, Brenner and Holmstrom want to build political momentum to extend the values now located exclusively in family life solidarity, respect, and commitment to others development across a society [which] requires the elimination of the family in its meaning as a special place for those values.

The nuclear family does not just hold the promise of fulfilling needs of love and kinship, but as an institution it is built on intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia. As Melinda Cooper points out, for example, welfare restructuring in the United States explicitly enforced a particular model of the married nuclear family that would exclude African-American single mothers from receiving benefits. Defending the monogamous, heterosexual, many-children family is therefore not a neutral act of defending the right to a safe and cozy home but is more often than not tied up in other conservative political goals. Thinking about organizing intimacy and care beyond the family is less about taking away safety and coziness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love.

If the family is supposed to be a haven in a heartless world, what kind of world would be so heartless as to require it? It is here that we need to start thinking about the family in the context of the individualism and precarity that neoliberalism is exacerbating. In their manifesto, Feminism for the 99%, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Battacharya, and Nancy Fraser point towards the imperative of individual responsibility on the back of which many states have carried out neoliberal privatization and deregulation of welfare and care services. In some cases, they argue, it has marketized public services, turning them into direct profit streams: in others, it has shunted them back to individual families, forcing them and especially the women within them to bear the entire burden of care.

Societies which rely on the fact that the family has to be the only site of loving and caring relationships are inherently unequal and undermine solidarity. The family then becomes oppressive because leaving it is made harder and harder which undermines the formal equalities that Western democracies pride themselves on. At the same time, precariously employed migrant workers bear the brunt of the material and cultural devaluing of caring labor beyond the family.

Thinking about family abolition in the time of a global health crisis puts its finger in exactly this wound carved out by our need for care and neoliberal precarity. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch prime minister has called on his citizens to act like responsible grown-ups as we all participate in what he has dubbed an intelligent lockdown. This rhetoric references a particular kind of citizen who is able-bodied and invulnerable. This is the person who in normal times would show up to work even if they have a cold, because to be responsible in this context is really to be unable to afford staying home from work when sick because bills keep piling up and children need to be fed. Now when showing up to work is not possible at all, this potentially challenges business as usual. However, this is disavowed, for example when all the government does is to suggest compensating loss of income through the closing of the service sector merely by taking out more loans, which has been the official recommendation has been for students.

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Family abolition isn't about ending love and care. It's about extending it to everyone - Open Democracy