Parking Lot Construction: As part of our ongoing work to maintain and improve Central Library, the parking lot will be closed for construction from Tuesday, July 28, to Saturday, August 1. Visit the Central Library page for more details. 

CLOSURE: Central Library will be closed Tuesday, July 21, through Saturday, July 25, while emergency repairs are made to the building’s cooling system. We expect to reopen Monday, July 27.

Notice of Public Meeting: Kalamazoo Public Library Board of Trustees | July 27 | 5:30 pm | Central Library/Van Deusen Room. The packet of information for the meeting can be found on the library’s website. 

Book

Family abolition : capitalism and the communizing of care

Call Number

  • 306.85 O136 (CEN)

Browse similar titles by call number

Publication Information

Las Vegas, NV: Pluto Press, 2023.

Physical Description

x, 290 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"For some of us, the family is a source of love and support. But for many others, the family is a place of private horror, coercion and personal domination. In capitalist society, the private family carries the impossible demands of interpersonal care and social reproductive labor. Can we imagine a different future? In Family abolition, author M.E. O'Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. O'Brien traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and in the slave plantations and settler frontier of North America, explaining the rise and fall of the housewife-based family form. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds revolutionaries 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"--

Contents

  • Introduction : The Oaxaca Commune
  • Part I: The impossible family. Private households ; Family terrors ; Lines of flight
  • Part II: a history of family abolition. Industrialization and the bourgeois family ; The family politics of slavery and genocide ; Sexual transgression and capitalist development ; The family form of the workers' movement ; Rebellions of the red decade ; Crisis of the family
  • Part III: Toward the commune. New alliances, new kinship ; Communist social reproduction ; Around the people's kitchen ; Communes to come
  • Conclusion : toward beloved community.

Subjects