Political Utopias for the Communization of Care

The Project of Abolishing the Family

Abstract

This article traces the historical genealogy of family abolition as a radical emancipatory project, inscribing it within the strategic horizon of the communization of care. Abolition, understood as Aufhebung (positive supersession), does not seek to annihilate affective bonds but to dismantle the capitalist nuclear family: a specific historical institution that privatizes and feminizes reproductive labor, guarantees the inheritance of private property, and reproduces the labor force. Through an examination spanning from Plato to contemporary abolitionism, passing through Fourier, Marx and Engels, the Soviet and Chinese experiences, Firestone's radical feminism, and current transmarxism (Gleeson, Griffiths, O'Brien, Lewis), it is demonstrated that this critique responds to material transformations in social organization. The article analyzes how the neoliberal care crisis has pushed progressive sectors toward "domestic realism," paradoxically reinforcing the very institution that should be questioned. Finally, it examines the central strategic debate within contemporary abolitionism: the tension between conceiving revolution as generalized insurrection (O'Brien) or as prefiguration (Lewis, anarchism). A synthesis is proposed that understands both perspectives as a division of strategic labor necessary for building communism without State or families.