Family Abolition: How we Survive the Disasters to Come

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On July 8th, 2024, Hurricane Beryl touched down in southeast Texas. I was back home in Houston after graduating from college the month before. I woke up that morning to find my mom sitting in the living room watching wind whip the windows as tree limbs collected on the ground. One big branch had snapped and was perched on top of our power line.

I lived through Hurricane Ike in 2008, when I was six years old, and Mom made it seem like a fun game to sleep in a nest of blankets in her closet. I witnessed Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a Category 4 storm that flooded more than 200,000 homes and displaced 30,000 people. And still I had never seen anything like Beryl, which wreaked havoc via wind, not water. Entire trees littered the neighborhood, power lines hung in the middle of the street, and billboards had blown clean off.

This was also the first time I experienced losing power during the summer for more than a few hours. While we lost power for a few days during the freeze of February 2021, it was different to experience it in the 100 degree heat.

Our lives ground to a halt without electricity. We lost all the food in our fridge and freezer within a couple days. We couldn’t cook. Even our kitchen faucet stopped working because it has electrical components. In the blink of an eye, it became profoundly difficult to sustain our lives as we knew them. Our house went still and stagnant, the temperature inside creeping up one degree at a time.

A few weeks before Hurricane Beryl, I started working for Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center, an Atlanta-based organization that supports Black queer families. At the time, I didn’t know that my role with Kuluntu would inform much of my understanding of the storm’s devastation. My co-writer and I were hired to write a literature review about non-normative families, and in the process we stumbled across the concept of “family abolition.” Soon I was reading everything about family abolition I could get my hands on. Scholar M.E. O’Brien defines family abolition as

“…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 destruction of private households as systems of accumulating power and property at the cost of others’ well-being.”^[1]

As scary as it sounds, family abolition is not about ripping children away from their parents – see our current administration detaining immigrants in the thousands for that – it’s about creating a world where everyone’s needs are met, regardless of what circumstances they are born into. That’s it. It’s that simple.

The implications of family abolition really started to sink in the day after Beryl hit. I was sitting at my mom’s friend’s house, which miraculously had power, reading Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis. This line hit me like a gut punch: the family is “the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society.”^[2] Lewis was exactly right, I thought. “The family” is just another way to say that no one else is going to give you a hot meal or a place to sleep.

What Lewis argues is that the means of social reproduction, the resources and labor that we use to sustain our lives, are contained to the home. In units of two or three or four people, often bound by marital or biological ties, we’re supposed to do all our cooking, cleaning, bathing, and emotional caring. After the storm, I felt the ridiculousness of this, that as soon as our individual house lost power we lost the ability to care for ourselves.

Family abolition imagines a world where social reproduction is a collective effort, not one confined to the family and the home. What if there were communal kitchens, large-scale public housing, and accessible community centers in every neighborhood? If social reproduction were done collectively, we wouldn’t be so vulnerable when disasters struck.

In my family’s case after Beryl, we were lucky to have someone who took us in, but I knew many people didn’t have friends with power. And what about people without friends period? What about socially isolated people with limited mobility? Or unpleasant people without strong social connections? Everyone deserves care, regardless of their monetary OR social capital. Receiving care from our friend was not the same as being caught by a social safety net because it was conditional on us being enjoyable company. This is the limitation of a privatized care system: that your personality or your proximity to wealth could be life or death.

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Sitting on that friend’s couch after Beryl, I felt something beneath my frustration at our privatized care system; I felt like a child who had put their faith into a parent who had abandoned them. There were countless opportunities for the state to intervene before Beryl hit. Legislators could have taken aggressive action to stop climate change decades ago. Instead, “100-year storms” like Hurricane Harvey are now estimated to happen every 25 years. The state could have ordered more upgrades to Texas’ power grid after the deadly freeze of 2021 – instead, after making the minimal required changes, experts “remain skeptical that the grid is any better off.”

It has taken storm after storm with disastrous consequences, including the death of fellow Houstonians, for it to really hit me that the state, and the billionaires who run it, do not care if we live or die.

That should have been obvious to me considering that the state has treated BIPOC, migrant, and poor people as disposable since its founding. Any glance at American history shows BIPOC, migrant, and poor people being exploited, incarcerated, deported, and murdered for the sake of white, male property owners’ profit. Despite understanding this, I had been sold the story that as a white middle class person, my wellbeing and future would be protected. So, when I was standing in my eerily quiet house after the storm, sweat rolling down my leg, I was aghast to experience the system momentarily not working in my favor.

Finally I put words to it: this was my first taste of state neglect, which marginalized people have felt for centuries. This is the sinister nature of white privilege, that I thought I would be exempt from the destruction wrought by racial capitalism. I finally viscerally understood that in a system built on the disposability of Black and Brown people, we can all become disposable. In fact, the only way capitalists make more profit is if more of us become collateral.

What is one way the state gets away with this public neglect? By championing the family. It’s no coincidence that the conservative regimes that have slashed spending on social services (or propose to) also espouse pro-traditional nuclear family rhetoric.^[3] In stripping back welfare, the state offloads care onto individuals, which burdens women most.^[4] And who benefits from this? The top 1%.

Family abolition recognizes that the U.S. government functions to protect and grow the profits of its wealthiest citizens, and for that reason, the state will never serve the people. A just government would exist to meet people’s needs, and that kind of organization is not coming from above. We have to create our own communities’ structures of care.

While immediately meeting all of our communities’ needs by ourselves is unrealistic, we can start relying more on each other and less on the market. I’ve seen glimpses of this in people’s responses to disasters, which are the best examples of family abolition I’ve witnessed. I didn’t grow up knowing my neighbors, but I remember everyone on my block standing in their yards after Hurricane Harvey, surveying the damages, and finally, finally, talking to each other. It was the first time I had even laid eyes on some of them.

In the aftermath of Harvey, we helped salvage some items from a neighbor’s flooded house, washing their baby’s clothes with lemon-scented Lysol to get out the stink of flood water. Another friend was coordinating a supply drive, and we dropped off what we had. Disasters like Harvey became glimpses of an alternate reality, one where we acted like we knew how much we needed each other. It was powerful to see people come together in those moments, and it broke my heart when everything was cleaned up and we went back to our insular units, to living in parallel.

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After almost a week without power, our electricity came back on and we went home. Slowly, evidence of the storm started to disappear around the city, and we returned to our regular rhythms.

Even as I felt the status quo creep back in, I knew that Beryl had changed me: I was committed to family abolition, which became the heart of the final “Redefining Family” literature review. Family abolition is the reason I decided to move into a communal house where both resources and chores are shared. It has been one of the best decisions of my life, and has shown me that we can all create community care in small, concrete ways, like getting to know our neighbors and plugging in to mutual aid networks. But fighting for family abolition does not just mean engaging in collective care in our own lives – it also means calling for the end of racial capitalism and the state’s collusion in it. Let’s not wait for the next disaster to bring us together; let’s live for and with each other now.

Notes

1. M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023), 6-7. ↑
2. Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Books, 2022), 11. ↑
3. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000), 215. ↑
4. Jessica Calarco, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net (Penguin Random House, 2024). ↑

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Featured image caption: Houses damaged by severe weather. (Courtesy Kelly on Pexels)