"For some of us, the family is a source of love and support. But for many others, the family is a place of private horror, coercion and personal domination. In capitalist society, the private family carries the impossible demands of interpersonal care and social reproductive labor. Can we imagine a different future?

In Family Abolition, author M.E. O'Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. O'Brien traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and in the slave plantations and settler frontier of North America, explaining the rise and fall of the housewife-based family form. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds revolutionaries 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 organized in a free society." Pluto Press

Selection

Pop-culture is a dominating practice in our lives and as a teenager to my young adult years (go ahead argue I am still a young adult because I am 26), I aimed to avoid popular ideals and subjects. I wanted to be everything that was my niche and concentrated on the struggles and interests of my own community rather than other communities. After adolescence I made major progress on learning and experiencing more pop-culture icons and traditions that affect the people around me, because community care is necessary. There is still a lot to learn about the deeper issues that plague our current communities, some of which as an adult I became closer to.

A few of my selections are straight manifestos or manifesto-like writings that come from the heart of communities I became closer to in my adult years through a change in my identity, the queer community, and through the nature of my work, the indigenous community. While others are reconciling with the communities I grew up in; the fat community, the working class American community. The way these communities are often described in pop-culture is sometimes faithful and sometimes unfaithful. Many of the selections I chose aim to break that apart and offer different narratives we can start practicing in our own daily lives.

– Bernadette Schoeman