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The reduction of individuals to impotent, isolated units—who interact primarily with state agents—is the ultimate outcome of the Left’s efforts, regardless of what its stated goals may be. Instead of independent family groups, bonded by biology and ancient, natural modes of human affection and loyalty, we are instead to have, as the “norm,” state-regulated sex workers and state-apportioned children, conceived by IVF and grown in surrogate wombs. This, the left tells us, will free us from the “slavery” of marriage and family,…

“The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.” 

https://mises.org/mises-wire/leftists-still-want-abolish-family?utm_source=MI+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=6bae37b408-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_01_07_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-fb69bb184c-592102341

08/07/2025 • Mises Wire •Ryan McMaken

Early last month, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)sponsored a panel on the family at the organization’s Socialism Conference 2025. The organization described the topic this way: “How should the left relate to the family? Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”

The roundtable featured Olivia Katbi, the co chair of Portland DSA;  Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago; and Katie Gibson, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago. 

Key observations from the panelists included: 

• “When we talk about family abolition, we’re talking about the abolition of the economic unit… all of our material needs taken care of by the collective.”
• “We argue for abolition of the family in general… the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”

Naturally, these leftists partly want to abolish the family because they agree with Marx that the family is a “bourgeois” institution that must be destroyed in order to clear the way for the socialist utopia. Another element of opposition to the family comes from the Left’s bizarre preoccupation with commodifying sex. It is ironic that these “anti-capitalists” seek so vehemently to turn sex into an economic commodity, but this appears to be a key tenet of leftist thinking in recent decades. Thus, they seek to normalize sex work. This is partly because the Left views marriage as a type of sex work itself. After all, the family is “inherently repressive,” and all sex within marriage is essentially rape. It is therefore “progress” to abolish marital sex and replace it with “sex work.” 

A couple of quotations from the roundtable that capture this attitude include: 

• “Sex work and marriage can’t exist without each other—they’re two sides of the same coin.”
• “The only real difference between marriage and prostitution is the price and the duration of the contract.” 

These leftists also believe that the rearing of children ought to be managed and controlled by the state. That is, the raising of children should be collectivized and the parent-child bond replaced with the child-collective relationship. 

This idea is certainly familiar to Sophie Lewis, another presenter at the conference, who has written a book pushing for the widespread use of surrogacy in the birthing of children. Specifically, Lewis contends that surrogacy is a helpful tool in breaking the biological bond between parents and children, and destroying traditional notions of gender and family. 

(Lewis is partly correct. Surrogacy does indeed undermine the family as an institution and widespread surrogacy will prove to be a key building block for the post-humanist dystopian nightmare that people like Elon Musk are trying to build.)  

At the core of all of this is opposition to the family as an independent institution, and the leftist contention that the family must be placed totally under the control of the state. 

Whatever the Left might have to say about the economic mechanisms supposedly underlying the family, the fact is the Left’s hatred for the family mostly stems from the fact that the family is an obstacle to state power. 

As I noted in this lecture last year, the family is an institution that predates all states and which is natural to the human condition and to all human societies. 

Leftists such as those at the DSA conference seek to abolish any remaining vestiges of non-state independent governance. Although they deny it, “democratic socialists” are at the forefront of pushing for untrammeled state power, to be administered by an “enlightened” ruling oligarchy. The democratic socialists, therefore, seek to refocus all human loyalties toward the state, creating a direct state-citizen relationship for all, and setting up the state as the institution that meets all human needs. Unlike every particular family, which is relatively weak in its exercise of power, and is always temporary, the state’s power, in the Left’s vision, is to be overwhelming and permanent.  

This idea of the family as an obstacle was central to advocates of state-building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Marxists, being extreme advocates for state power, also saw the “problem” of the family.

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