Abolish the Family

We can talk about extending kinship to the whole world all we want. If kinship were truly something we valued as made, not given, we wouldn’t have to specify the word “chosen” (as in: “chosen kinship” or “chosen family”) when we are talking about kinship that isn’t imaginable as governmentally ratified (marriage or guardianship based), genetic, or bloodborne.

We do not have to reject the language of kinship outright. Collectively, rather, we can begin to torque it. It’s time to practice being kith or, better, comrades— including toward members of our “biofam”—building structures of dependency, need, and provision with no kinship dimension.

Before the twenty-first century, Donna Haraway—the philosopher to whom I owe my feminism—was not advocating “kinmaking.” Quite the contrary, in fact. “I am sick to death,” she said in 1997, “of bonding through kinship and ‘the family’”:
and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information— have been bloody enough already. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more and less than kinship.

Bullshit. Imagine what would have to happen in order for the staff at restaurants and airlines to be welcome to input your name as a guarantor for their student debt. Consider what would make the fashion retailer Kinship™ (whose website currently celebrates “the bond we share,” and states that “we are all kin”) turn up to an eviction defense on your behalf. Ask yourself what needs to change before Maria the cleaner is able to add her name to the children’s birth certificates if she wants to. Then ask yourself whether birth certificates are really necessary. If these thought experiments seem silly, we have to consider the possibility that kinship, as a value, isn’t worth all that much. Let me be more direct: I don’t particularly like what kinship affords us, ethically or politically. I don’t think it is doing a lot of good. What is worse, I think it is getting in the way of better possibilities.

Slavery was overturned in law and eventually more or less done away with in practice. What we must understand, however, is that our very capacity to understand these events was generated by them. In the “before” times, the ideals that governed slave-trading societies really were human rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The world manifested those ideas as they existed then, until, at the end of an enslaved person’s rifle, the self-styled inventors of “freedom” in these societies learned at last what real freedom (a more real freedom, for the time being) looked like. Humanism: negated, remade, born, buried, prolonged. By winning the struggle against slavers, abolition gave the lie to those societies, and supplied those brave ideals with their first-ever shot at becoming more than words.

That’s why M. E. O’Brien thinks “the best starting point to abolish the family” is the protest kitchen: “Form self-organized, shared sleeping areas for safety. Set up cooperative childcare to support the full involvement of parents. Establish syringe exchanges and other harm reduction practices to welcome active drug users.”7 Expand from there, and never stop expanding.

all beings exploited by capital and by empire are basically homeless

the art world can be where insurgencies go to die

Put differently: the fact that caring for a private home under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem. That the “they” of the dictum—bosses, husbands, dads—are not wrong about this illustrates the insidiousness of the violence care-workers encounter (and mete out) in the family-form. It’s the reason paid and unpaid domestics, and paid and unpaid mothers, still have to fight just to be seen as workers. And why being recognized as workers remains only a precursor to—one day—ending their exploitation and, by extension, beginning to know a new and different form of love, just as Kollontai envisioned it: a love beyond the family.

Demand #6, however, is not something Democrats nowadays hear very often:
Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over “their” children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing.