How do we take care of each other?
Who raises us as children, is with us when we are ill, provides a
place to sleep when we need one? We often rely on family for the care
we all need. Yet even at their best families cannot carry the
impossible demands placed on them, and for many the family is a place
of private horror, of coercion and personal domination.
M.
E. O'Brien uncovers the long history of struggles to go beyond the
private family. She traces the changing family politics of racial
capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and the slavery
plantations and settler frontier of North America, through the rise
and fall of the housewife family. From Marx to Black and queer
insurrection to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds
revolutionary movements seeking better ways of loving, caring, and
living. Family Abolition
takes us through the past and present of family politics into a
speculative future of the commune, imagining how care could be
organised in a free society.