Does the call to ‘abolish the family’, then, mean[ ] tearing the heart out of a heartless world, destroying one of the last remaining shelters, only to leave us more precarious, atomised and exposed to the malice of the world? No. Abolition does not entail outlawing family relations, parental authority and marriage by legislative fiat. Apart from anything else, families are currently formed through acts of choice by partners, a fact that can’t be explained away as ideology or false consciousness. To remove that choice would be both despotic and a severe social impoverishment. Moreover, as Barrett & Mcintosh put it, with the wider world unchanged, the resulting households would ‘probably be little different from the household patterns and ideology that we know as “the family” at present’. The aim is not to reduce but to expand the available forms of care, and the choices for household and communal living.

Insofar as ‘the family’ is an ideological mystification which sanctions conservative social goals, the idea is to de-naturalise it. Insofar as ‘the family’ is an anti-social project of the state, and of capital’s organic intellectuals, to both encourage market dependency and render people docile and accountable to the state in various ways, the goal is to reverse it. Insofar as ‘the family’ is a kinship-based household unit which has been made to bear responsibility for care and reproductive labour that could be socialised, the goal is to expand the realm of choice and loosen the coercive incentives that foster familial dependency. In this way, through experiments in living, people will find more emotionally satisfying and sustainable alternatives to ‘the family’.