Amid lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders
and social distancing from strangers and even friends, the coronavirus pandemic
has been a time, for many of us, of reaffirming the centrality of family in our
lives. For utopians of the radical left, though, the pandemic is an opportunity
to deconstruct flawed, traditional familial bonds and remake the world along
the lines of new-and-improved, collectivist possibilities. As author Sophie
Lewis (pictured above) puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open
Democracy: “We deserve better than the
family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”
The author
of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis’ academic work
“focuses
on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social
reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics,
and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.
Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to
abolish the family,” Lewis
addresses what she calls “the unspoken
and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic:
private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home”
to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home,
and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”
“How can a zone
defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so
gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal
parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone
secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine
is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power
to those with the upper hand over a home.”
Lewis approvingly quotes
feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, who had this to say in a tweet about the shelter-in-place
imperative: “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see
a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse,
molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more.”
But the domestic
violence aspect is just the tip of the iceberg. The family is also apparently a
capitalist plot for churning out – gasp – productive individuals. In an interview
last year with the far-left The Nation titled “Want
to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” Lewis stated, “We know that the nuclear
private household is where the overwhelming majority of abuse can happen. And
then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be
workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially
stratified system, training us not to be queer.” In her Open Democracy article,
Lewis adds that “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct
physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape,
and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction
still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for
productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”
The vision of anti-family
theorists like Lewis is to replace the ideological straightjacket of the family
with a world of communes of “collective social reproduction,” in which
the entire community cares for children and rescues them from “abusive parental
relationships.”
Apparently communes will be free of spouse beating, child abuse, and all the
other dark shadows of human nature. Oh, and no compulsory heterosexuality.
They will also
supposedly be free of homelessness. Calling comfortable housing “a basic human
birthright,” Lewis recommends that we “open all the hotels and private palaces”
for “housing for all,” “[f]ree all prisoners and detainees now, remake the care
facilities as spacious self-led villages, and dismiss all the workers with full
pay so they can leave their bunks forever, move in with their friends, and
pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”
One would be
forgiven for thinking that this kind of talk is Swiftian satire, but sadly,
Lewis and her ilk are deadly serious – and brutally honest about it. Last year,
for example, Lewis dispensed with the left’s usual tortured justifications for
abortion and expressed her view that taking
the life of the unborn is indeed killing, but “a form of killing that we need to be
able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.”
So for Lewis, the current
pandemic is not a time “to acquiesce to ‘family values’ ideology”; on the contrary,
it’s “an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower
survivors of – and refugees from – the nuclear household.” In addition to
hoping “to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this
Plague and the coming Depression,” she looks forward to this crisis ratcheting
up “the dialectic of families against the family, of real homes against the
home.”
The nuclear family
is the most elemental relationship building block of civilization (of course,
civilization as we know it is precisely what the left wants to dismantle.) It is a refuge, a source of strength and support,
of identity and history, of love and forgiveness. It is home. Husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister -- the bonds these incredibly evocative words imply would not be expanded under the system Lewis is proposing; they would be dissolved. Are families
perfect? Of course not. None of them is, because human beings aren’t perfect
and never can be. We are fallen beings in a fallen world – this is the reality
that the far left refuses to accept. There is no insanely totalitarian, collectivist
nightmare that the left will not pursue with an evangelical passion to achieve
their dream of the perfectibility of mankind, of paradise on earth. But that
dream, as has been demonstrated in all places and in all times where it has
been put into practice, is a mass-murdering lie.
And yet as extreme
as Sophie Lewis’ anti-family, anti-capitalist animus sounds, everything she
proposes is simply the end game of mainstream Progressivism: the abolition of
capitalism; the abolition of private property; the abolition of traditional kinship;
the abolition of literally every single tradition and institution of Western
civilization, to be replaced by the enlightened, peaceful, self-regulated structures
of communism – just as Karl Marx envisioned. Family abolitionists like Lewis are mainstream
Progressives; what makes them seem extreme is simply their unabashed openness about
their aims.
From FrontPage Mag, 4/9/20