What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.
If the private household is where so much unpaid and gendered work is trapped, what would it mean to free it? The traditions here answer differently, and on purpose. Some want to communalize the household’s work while keeping its bonds. Some want to socialize care through public provision. Some want to abolish the family as a unit of privatized care altogether, and some want to end the gendered and biological family as such. Gay and trans liberation currents ask what selves and relationships become possible when the old forms loosen.
Anchor questions
- What would it mean to abolish the family? Abolish what, exactly, and build what instead?
- Can the household be transformed, or must it be undone?
- What have revolutions actually tried, in collective childcare, communal kitchens, new forms of love?
- Wages for housework or the end of gendered work: which points toward freedom?
- What would a world look like where care was everyone’s work and no one’s cage?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.
Communizing and socializing the household
- Alexandra Kollontai (1872 to 1952), Communism and the Family (1920). A direct vision of dissolving the household’s economic functions into communal kitchens, laundries, and collective childcare, turning marriage into a free union of affection rather than an economic unit. Written from inside a revolution that tried it. Free: marxists.org
- Alexandra Kollontai, Make Way for Winged Eros (1923). Kollontai’s argument that love itself is a social and historical force, proposing “love-comradeship” as a proletarian alternative to possessive, property-based romance. Free: marxists.org
- Angela Y. Davis (b. 1944), The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework (1981). Davis’s influential dissent from Wages for Housework, arguing that paying for housework entrenches it, and that liberation lies in industrializing and socializing domestic labor. Read directly against the Wages for Housework texts in the theoretical lens. Free: marxists.org
Gay and trans liberation
- Carl Wittman (1943 to 1986), Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto (1970). An early gay liberation manifesto linking sexual freedom to the critique of gender roles, the family, and capitalism, and calling for coalition across liberation movements. Free: historyisaweapon.com
- Gay Liberation Front, Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (London, 1971). A collective statement rooting gay oppression in the patriarchal nuclear family and rigid gender roles, and imagining new communal ways of living beyond them. Free: sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu
Family abolition
- Shulamith Firestone (1945 to 2012), The Dialectic of Sex (1970). The radical feminist classic that locates women’s oppression in biological reproduction itself and calls for its technological transformation and the abolition of the biological family. Bold, contested, and generative. Free to borrow: archive.org
- M.E. O’Brien, To Abolish the Family (2019). A historical and strategic account of the family abolition tradition from Marx and Engels to the present, arguing that the family privatizes care and that its abolition means universalizing care, not ending relationships. The clearest free entry to the debate. Free: endnotes.org.uk
- Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022). A hundred and twenty-eight pages tracing the demand from Fourier and the Manifesto through Kollontai, Firestone, and gay liberation to now, and refusing the obvious objection: abolishing the family means universalizing care, not taking anyone’s mother away. It synthesizes most of the texts above, which is why the lens felt unfinished without it. Paywalled: versobooks.com
- Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019). Reads commercial surrogacy as gestational labor under racial capitalism, refusing both the prohibitionist panic and the industry’s defense, and ending at holding all babies in common. This is where the theme’s question about reproduction stops meaning housework and starts meaning gestation. Paywalled: versobooks.com
- Sophie Lewis with Daniel Denvir, Abolish the Family (The Dig, 2019). The free way in for both books: a long interview published with a complete transcript, on surrogacy as labor, the natural family as ideology, and communist kinship. It dates from 2019 despite its title, so it tracks Full Surrogacy Now. Free: thedigradio.com
Debates and disagreements
The school holds the disagreements open. This lens stages one of the sharpest arguments in socialist feminism.
- Dalla Costa, James, and Federici (in the theoretical lens) argue for wages for housework as a way to make reproductive labor visible and refusable. Angela Davis argues the opposite, that wages entrench housework and the answer is to socialize it. Kollontai wants to communalize the household’s work while keeping love and bonds. Firestone, O’Brien, and Lewis want to abolish the family form itself. Put these side by side: they agree the private gendered household must go, and disagree completely about what replaces it.
Video
- “Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story” (Philosophy Tube, 2021). Roughly 38 minutes, about 3.4 million views. A personal and philosophical account of gender and selfhood that works as a liberatory opener on trans experience. youtube.com/watch?v=AITRzvm0Xtg
- “Angela Davis on feminism, communism and being a Black Panther” (Channel 4 News, 2018). Roughly 32 minutes, about 251,000 views. A wide-ranging interview linking socialist and anti-racist feminism. A living voice to pair with Davis’s essay. youtube.com/watch?v=x3q_qV5mHg0
- “Family abolition” (Sophie Lewis, Verso Books, 2019). Roughly 2 minutes, about 24,000 views, a niche pick. A punchy statement of why capitalism relies on the family as a unit of discipline. A fast prompt to open the family-abolition debate. youtube.com/watch?v=4LooLW4sTXk
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of communal-living and collective-care experiments underway now, and intersex and nonbinary voices, which are still thinner here than trans women’s. Note that Transgender Marxism is not open access despite what several sites suggest; the copies circulating are unauthorized, and Gleeson’s free essay is the honest route in.