Family Destruction and Its Socialist Cheerleaders
If anyone believes that it is reactionary hysteria to claim the radical Left wishes to destroy the traditional family, then let Sophie Lewis’s 2022 book, Abolish the Family, allay such concerns. This “Manifesto for Care and Liberation” sets forth the why and the how of the erasure of traditional households.
As to the why, it won’t come as a surprise that the goal is to destroy the productivity and wealth that capitalism creates. Lewis cites others, like Pat Parker, who state definitively that the family must go, as it is “the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move to revolution it has to be destroyed.” Lewis further notes that the reason for abolishing marriage is deeply intertwined with abolishing private property, which would put an end to voluntary exchange.
It’s the “how” of family nihilism that Lewis presents that provides bizarre yet shockingly effective challenges to traditional family life. She recounts the various—and completely failed—attempts at socialist utopias. She hails Joseph Fourier’s phalanstery buildings (vast dormitories housing precisely sixteen hundred people assigned to live there), where “regular carefully curated sex parties are presided over by special ‘fairies.’” She continues, “The original feminism, then, is inseparable from family abolition, queer sex, and socialist utopianism. Good to know, right? Vive le phalanstère!”
Lewis doubles down on this statement in a section entitled “The Queer Indigenous and Maroon Nineteenth Century.” She claims that Native Americans exhibited superior ways of being and practiced “no forms of patriarchy; raising children collectively, honoring more than two genders, placing only loose social strictures on sexual pleasure, counting nonhuman relatives among their k
Article from Mises Wire
