How do we take care of each other? Who raises us as children, is with us when we are ill, provides a place to sleep when work is tight? We often rely on family for the care we all need. Yet even at their best families cannot carry the impossible demands placed on them, and for many the family is a place of private horror of coercion and personal domination.

M. E. O’Brien uncovers the long history of struggles to go beyond the private family. She traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and the slavery plantations and settler frontier of North America, through the rise and fall of the housewife family. From Marx to Black and queer insurrection to today’s mass protest movements, O’Brien finds revolutionary movements 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.