Pre-Reading Guide

Here are some questions and background information to consider before you start reading. If you have a reading journal, try noting down your answers to the following questions so that you can review them again when you finish reading the book. 3-5 bullet points should be enough to capture your perspective. Engaging in this extra step of the process will help you understand how reading this book has shifted how you think about these concepts.

If you don’t know the answer to a question, try to give it your best guess anyway. (It’ll be interesting when you look back!)

Establishing Understanding¶

1. What is a family?

2. What do families do? (What is their role on an individual level?)

3. Does “family” mean the same thing for everyone?

4. What is the relationship between families and the economy?

5. What is the relationship between families and the government?

6. What is family abolition?

Establishing Personal Perspective¶

1. How do you feel about your family?

2. What are some positive things about families?

3. What are some negative things about families?

4. Do you think the current relationship between families and the economy is good? How do you think it should be, ideally?

5. Do you think the current relationship between families and the government is good? How do you think it should be, ideally?

6. How does the term “family abolition” make you feel?

Establishing Context¶

This book was published in June 2023.

The author, M.E. O’Brien is a writer, teacher, therapist, and activist. Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care is her second book; her first one was Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, co-authored with Eman Abdelhadi. She co-edits the magazines Pinko, on gay communism, and Parapraxis, on psychoanalytic theory and politics. She has a PhD in Sociology from New York University.

O’Brien’s contemporaries include:

• Sophie Lewis, a writer and independent scholar who wrote the books Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (2025)

• Eman Abdelhadi, an activist, writer, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago whose work explores gender, sexuality, religion, and politics

• Alva Gotby

• Helen Hester

• Melinda Cooper

• Kathi Weeks

O’Brien and Abdelhadi also co-edit Project 2052, an art and short fiction series based on their speculative work Everything for Everyone.

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care was published by Pluto Press at a point where the concept of family abolition has been gaining some steam again within revolutionary feminist circles. While the concept has been around for a long time (Marx and Engels even mentioned it in the Communist Manifesto), it’s never been a popular position, even among leftists. Even now, in the mid-2020s, the concept faces heavy criticism from the left and the right alike.

Family Abolition (the book) draws heavily on social reproduction theory, which was explored heavily by Marxist feminists in the 1970s and is starting to gain popularity again in the 2010s and 2020s, thanks to the work of writers like Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson.