# Progressive Summary # Rough Notes # Structured Notes # Quotes > The family is a limit to human emancipation. The family’s horrors are vast, its abuses widespread, its logic coercive. The family is a joy for some, a necessity for most, and a nightmare for too many. Behind its closed doors, the household is a gamble. Children born into abusive households have no recourse from harmful parents. Those trapped in abusive couple relationships may see their means of escape gradually cut off by manipulative and controlling partners. Those working-class adults who wish to be a part of a child’s life are forced into degrees of economic precarity to keep their children fed and cared for, trapping parents further within awful jobs. The family policing system targets poor, Black, Indigenous, and migrant families with new forms of state violence in the name of protecting children, leaving the violence of the white, propertied family form untouched. > > The family is also a limit to our imagination. Many of us grow up in private households and struggle to envision anything else. We can barely conceive of real alternatives to the family. Shared households are often a necessary survival strategy for proletarians, yet most working-class families come under frequent pressure from changing labor market conditions, state policies, or state violence. These pressures make it hard to form and hold together families, but even harder to maintain chosen, nonnormative living arrangements. Many imagine and pursue a household that is entirely chosen and a radical alternative to the normative family, but attempts at holding such arrangements together often fall apart over decades of the stresses of trying to find and maintain work, to pay rent, to deal with medical emergencies, or to face aging. Others flee shared households altogether, often to find isolation and loneliness. Beyond some variation on the private household, what could possibly provide the care that we all so desperately need? > > The family is also a limit for many mass social movements and revolutionary struggles. Social revolutions that left untouched the tyranny of the home prevented a deeper social and cultural change that could extend into everyone’s lives. So long as the private household is maintained, no revolutionary process can overcome class society. Many reform protest movements run into major internal crisis when they are forced to grapple with conflicts and contradictions often relegated to the family. Countless organizations and parties have been destroyed because they were unable to adequately address sexual assault, intimate partner violence, the unequal gendered division of labor, or the demands of childrearing. The family is a limit, and the real movement for collective liberation must abolish it. > Family abolition is a commitment to making the care necessary for human flourishing freely available throughout society. Rather than relying solely on one’s immediate personal relationships, access to care could be built into the social fabric of our collective lives. Family abolition is the vision that the basis of thriving should not depend on who your parents happen to be, who you love, or who you choose to live with. Family abolition is a horizon of sexual and gender freedom beyond the bigotry imposed by those on whom we depend. Family abolition is the expansion of care as a universal, unconditional social good. Family abolition is not just the positive assertion of care but also a refusal of the harmful relationships of domination that the family form enables. Family abolition is a belief that no child should be trapped by cruel parents; no woman should be afraid of poverty or isolation in leaving her violent husband; no aging, disabled, or sick person should be afraid of having to depend on an indifferent and uncaring family member. Family abolition is the recognition that no human being should ever own or entirely dominate another person, even children. No individual should have the means to coerce intimacy or labor from another, as current property relations enable. Family abolition is the destruction of private households as systems of accumulating power and property at the cost of others’ well-being.