“Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care”
M. E. O’Brien in conversation with Madeline Lane McKinley

Saturday, July 15
2-4 PM
Tsunami Books
2585 Willamette St
Eugene, OR, 97405

Website event description:
“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 a 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.”