Endnotes - To Abolish the Family

Violence and mutual love are interwoven throughout family forms. All people rely for their survival on relationships of care, love, affection, sex and material sharing of resources. Class society forces these relationships into a variety of specific historical forms. Capitalism’s logic of market dependency and generalized proletarianization forces these loving relationships into a particular structure of semi-coerced, semi-chosen interpersonal dependency. Workers subject to insecure employment depend on their family members and kin ties to get through periodic unemployment; similarly children and those no longer able to work are often reliant on their personal connection to a wage worker. Further, free wage workers often access work through kin-based social networks that provide information and support to locate and secure available employment. These relationships can be sources of genuine care, but the necessary ties of dependency leave them constantly open to violence, abuse and domination. For all forms of gendered violence, the threat may be implicit in the structure of a social institution that facilitates the exercise of violence. Families need not be actually or frequently violent for the family as a widespread institution to systematically enable and permit violence and abuse. The combination of care and violent domination is the dual character of any family structure in class society.